Sigmund Freud considered the difficulty in defining masculinity and femininity from a psychic point of view as a hiatus in psychoanalytic theory. I propose to consider that the masculinity pertains to the centrifugal (to that which goes out, and ultimately to that which one loses), and the femininity pertains to the centripetal (to the appetency for taking the object into one's own internal space), whether one is considering their archaic roots or their genitalized culmination. The masculine/feminine pair draws support from the body (and through anaclisis, the subjective space), identified with a container that is liable already in the first psychic stages of life to empty itself of its own content and to be filled by a foreign content: the content is subjective in the masculine and object-related in the feminine. The conflicts of ambivalence related to these two movements (active and passive penetration desire/anxieties) lead to the setting-up of the rigid and labile poles of the personality, and they are liable to give rise to obsessional and hysterical solutions respectively. My hypotheses will be examined in the light of the two key cases of hysteria and obsessional neurosis in Freud's work: Dora (1905) and the Rat Man .