The Femininity of the Analyst in Professional Practice

The author puts forward the hypothesis that the wishes concerning genitality are present from the beginning, and especially the wish to make or to have a child. From this follows that pregenital sexual satisfactions would be mainly substitutes for genital satisfactions, which are not available because of the human fundamental prematurity. Woman's maternal aptitude enables her to fulfil, in displacing it, her dual incestuous wish, i.e. to keep her father's penis inside her during pregnancy, to recover the stage of merging with her mother by means of the fusion with the foetus. This would explain why women are less often murderers than men: an archaic matrix of the Oedipus complex would exist which aims at finding an access to the mother's belly, which means to make it perfectly smooth after getting rid of all its contents, that is of all obstacles. This need leads to a destruction of reality. The disposition to maternity is common to both sexes (through identification to the mother). The author wants to describe the disposition to maternity of the analyst in the treatment. The analytic situation would correspond to the triangle schema of the Oedipus complex: it favours the regression to the foetal stage, but, at the same time, the psychoanalytic framework constitutes a limit which cuts the child from the mother.