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This will be a welcome book for those who have wondered why Lacan's work has been of such interest within feminist-intellectual circles. Here, for the first time, his writings relevant specifically to feminine sexuality have been collected and most texts are original translations.
This does not mean that the papers will be easy to understand for those not already versed in Lacan's work, in spite of the editors' notes. Indeed Lacan's writings are obscure if not incomprehensible to the novice, increasingly so with the more recent papers which rely more and more on cross-references, double entendre, play on words, sarcasm. His style is self-consciously elusive and allusive in an attempt to reproduce the quality of the unconscious, as did the surrealists in their work, a movement with which Lacan was closely associated in the '30s.
'Feminine Sexuality' is made up of a substantial introduction by each of the two editors, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (taking up in all one third of the book) and of seven papers published between 1952 and 1975 by Lacan or by members of his school. In addition each text is introduced and situated.
The editors describe their aim as a wish to show the importance of Lacan for psychoanalysis and of psychoanalysis for feminism.
Juliet Mitchell in her introduction situates the work from within psychoanalysis. She traces the main points of the debate around feminine sexuality and suggests that the terms of the debate can be seen in a contradiction within Freud's own early writings: the idea of a natural heterosexual attraction on the one hand and the notion that the sexual drive has no natural object or fixed aim on the other. All theorists besides Freud (be it Abraham, Helène Deutsch or Melanie Klein) have taken the first line, that of a sexual identity which is first given biologically. It is however, she says, the latter position which Freud goes on to develop in his later writings, showing in particular how it is the threat of castra