You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Monique Cournut-Janin had already published a large number of contributions on female psychosexuality before writing this book. The majority of the threads of her research are here drawn together in a rich and clearly presented volume. With particular reference to Freud's texts and on the basis of her many years of clinical experience, the author sets out her views on the development of the female psyche: ‘The model of neurosis, with the Oedipus and castration complexes as its referents, is the preferential organiser of the issues addressed’(p. 14).
Cournut-Janin points out that a man who writes about women is placing himself ‘on the other side of his sex’(p. 24). This was the case when Freud developed his ideas on female psychosexuality. She acknowledges that her own reading of Freud's texts on this subject was also undertaken from a vantage-point ‘on the other side of her sex’.
The author reminds us that fantasy activity—the infantile theory of sexuality—underlay the entry of the castration complex into Freudian theory. Starting from the phallic organisation of the little boy, Freud extended the organising fantasy to both sexes. The attribution of a penis to all human beings and its absence in women would be the nuclei for the development of castration anxiety and its oedipal effects in both girls and boys. The entirety of Cournut-Janin's interesting project is directed towards demonstrating the differences aroused by castration anxiety in both sexes. In a rigorously argued exposition, she guides us along the pathways of femininity, discussing each of the stumbling blocks that punctuate them. In her view, ‘certain mechanisms involved in the organisation of femininity are a response to the paternal fantasy’(p. 17).
In explanation, she adduces the image of the mother as the ‘messenger of castration’, but with a distinctly personal note. Upon the birth of a child, the mother, whose psychic life is organised by her own castration complex, finds her oedipal guilt reactiva