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As its title would suggest, this book is the fruit of theoretical and clinical research into human psychosexuality. Beyond homosexuality, it is heterosexuality that is said to pose a problem … ‘It is our hypothesis’, André immediately explains, ‘that the kernel of love has some deep affinity with femininity, that femininity is the essence of otherness, or more precisely, of the (loving) openness to this otherness’ (pp. 9-10).
Through a study and comparison of the various Freudian texts on female sexuality, the author affirms Freud's ultimate retreat from a model of femininity that is directly present in his investigations before being eradicated in favour of a masculine model of sexuality that is then applied to both sexes.
In the first chapter, the author discusses ‘Dora’, with a view to the other Freudian approaches to femininity; he observes that ‘there is nothing lacking in the clinical material on Dora that Freud presents as evidence of a repressed primary femininity’ (p. 13) (for example, Dora explores the inside of her purse with her finger). ‘How are we to interpret the fact’, André asks, ‘that nothing (or very little) remains of the hypothesis derived from the treatment in the articles that Freud explicitly devotes to female sexuality?’ (p. 14). With Dora, if Mr K is the current seducer, he merely returns the young girl to the paternal seducer. ‘The danger with which Dora is confronted is not Mr K in the present-day situation but the internal attack of the drives of which he is the arbitrary trigger mechanism’ (p. 15).
Freud had related this ‘excessively economic factor’ for the little girl's elaborative capacities to ‘the early appearance of real genital sensations … whether spontaneous or provoked by seduction and masturbation’. The author's theoretical reference points are those of the French school, in which the object is inconceivable without the drive: the psyche is conceived as a locus for the elaboration and symbolisation of excitations originating fro