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Sigmund Freud described the repudiation of femininity in both sexes as ‘bedrock’, part of the ‘riddle of sex’. For Jacqueline Schaeffer, the riddle concerns not so much a repudiation of femininity as femininity itself—that is, adult, genital femininity as constituted by the ‘sexual relationship of pleasure’. The author's central thesis, based on ideas developed with Claude Goldstein, is that ‘the more welcoming the ego is to the sexual drive, the more access it will have to sexual pleasure, the richer it will be, the better it will live and love, the more healthy it will be and the better it will think’ (p. 16).
What Schaeffer calls ‘femininity’ (here, that of women)—i.e. woman's psychosexuality—is stated to arise through the action of three ‘feeding invaders’, namely the constant pressure of libido, the difference between the sexes, and the ‘lover in the sexual relationship of pleasure’. These are three major, inevitable and structuring reality tests. Whereas the first two belong to infantile sexuality, only the third permits the constitution of ‘a woman's most perfected femininity’. This third ‘feeding invader’, the way for which is paved by the first two tests, allows all the experiences of
invasion to be elaborated retroactively. This elaboration involves a ‘genital feminine erotic’ masochism derived from the primary erotogenic masochism described by Freud.
Access to sexual pleasure enables a woman to overcome the various pregenital anxieties and the position of penis envy. In the author's view, rather than the fact of having a child, it is the experience of sexual pleasure that enables a woman to give up a possible envious position vis-à-vis the penis. Schaeffer insists that the ‘sexuality of pleasure’ is a genuine psychic creation, a mutative experience of narcissistic and object-related reorganisation that deserves a place in psychoanalysis comparable to that of the Oedipus complex, to whose restructuring it contributes.
This thesis is supported by a personal met