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Time was when the woman question was very productive within psychoanalysis. Not so today—all too often clinical practice ignores it. Meanwhile its treatment within feminist psychoanalytic theory has tended to be strait-jacketed by Lacanian orthodoxy.
Teresa Brennan's therapy-based introduction to this question and her non-Lacanian theorising are therefore refreshing. She starts with the observation that while women in analysis complain of feeling exhausted and depleted of energy, men's preoccupations are more verbal. It is this gender difference that she seeks to explain. Specifically, she is concerned to resolve Freud's 'riddle of femininity' which, rather idiosyncratically, she equates with the question of why certain drives and affects are turned so disablingly against the self. Its urgency for Freud, she goes on, arose from the occurrence of this untoward feminine trait in men.
The vigour with which the early psychoanalysts debated this issue was hamstrung, Brennan continues, by their overlooking of the quantitative factor involved. This was because, by the 1920s, they had