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From the outset the prologue of Comment la féminité vient aux femmes poses what are considered by its author to be the essential questions addressed by her investigation into femininity.
In the course of this theoretical study, which is nevertheless centred throughout on the analytic treatment of women by a woman analyst very attentive to the effects of her own countertransference on the transference situation, Jacqueline Godfrind-Haber examines the feminine narcissistic foundations of the oedipal organisation. ‘How is a feminine identity to be conceived of upon which the construction and expression of femininity is based?’ ‘Does the archaic have a gender?’ These are the kinds of questions which give direction to this fundamentally clinical inquiry. Homosexuality, both primary and secondary, is the guiding thread of this book, which includes and extends articles that were published between 1988 and 1996 in the Revue française de psychanalyse and the Revue belge de psychanalyse.
In her research Jacqueline Godfrind-Haber, who is a member of the editorial committee for the Revue belge de psychanalyse and a titular member of the Belgian Psychoanalytic Society, as well as one of the latter's former presidents, successfully illustrates the richness of the constant exchange, both clinical and theoretical, between the different societies which meet at the French-speaking Congress. A point they clearly have in common is the inescapable reference to infantile sexuality, culminating in the oedipal organisation.
In this latest book the author sets out to explore issues such as the archaic, narcissistic vulnerabilities and difficulties in constructing identity, without, however, at any point losing sight of the difference between the sexes and infantile sexuality. This concern was already tangible in her earlier book Les deux courants du transfert (1993), in which she distinguished between the different levels of transference in terms of the relative predominance of narcissistic