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Drawing extensively on case examples, the author examines contemporary psychoanalytic debates about sexuality from a feminist perspective. Although this is not a big book, it requires slow and patient reading, being very compactly written and as full of rich ingredients as a Christmas pudding. Marie Maguire is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in London, a member of the Guild of Psychotherapists Training Committee, and a teacher in psychotherapy training courses. She is the coauthor of Living with the Sphinx.
Looking at psychoanalytic therapists starting with Freud, the author offers a critical examination of psychoanalytic concepts of sexual differences. In modern society, each gender has access to different types of power and control that evoke envy in those who lack them. Psychoanalytic theories have shifted between a focus on the child's envy of paternal authority and an emphasis on the mother as the more powerful and enviable parent.
Maguire points out that every society has ways of distinguishing the sexes culturally, socially, and psychologically. And how a person comes to identify him or herself as belonging to a gender varies greatly. The unconscious meaning of our biological sex depends on a complex interaction of personal and cultural factors; it is never merely the result of anatomical difference.
Gender stereotypes still prevail in our world. Women are expected to live vicariously through idealized others, including men and children, to whom they submit, denying the strength of their emotional needs and aggression. Men are usually encouraged to assume a stance of pseudo-indifference whereby their emotional needs are changed into domination of those on whom they depend. Just as Freud said, femaleness is associated with passivity and maleness with activity. There is as much variation within each sex as between the sexes, however, as we both conform to and resist gender stereotypes. Sexual identity is always fluid and never exactly what it