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.
Cournut-Janin examines the box or container, vividly exemplified in the Dora case, as a metaphor for the female body, rich in an interior, transposable (penis, feces, baby, blood) content. She develops the familiar theme that hair styling, cosmetics, all that is meant to make a woman beautiful, is in an unconscious sense a distraction of the masculine gaze from that which would cause him anxiety and flight and avoids calling attention to the female genitalia. Femininity then can be seen to have the unconscious organization of a lure and is comparable to the masculine defense of a fetish.
The author suggests that this defensive stance begins early in the mother- daughter relationship. The mother, struggling with the complexity of her own oedipal impulses, her own wishes to incorporate the penis of her father and fear of destroying it, conveys an unconscious message to her daughter, repressing her own sexuality in what has been termed the primary repression of the vagina. Femininity is transmitted from mother to daughter as a protective phallic lure. The little girl is seductive and a seductress, but is complete, that is, her whole body is cathected and she is entirely phallic. So also is the father's investment of his daughter, of her intact body and intact hymen. This precautionary attempt to ward off castration anxiety in men becomes the central aspect of femininity. The girl is to be seductive toward the father, but her vagina remains forbidden and off limits. The author believes that penis envy might be explained as an aspect of this defensive collusion between mother and daughter, serving to reinforce the countercathexis against recognition of the vagina. The onset of menses, when the girl “becomes a woman,” or “is grown up,” as mothers sometimes say, engenders a crisis, a complex medley of disgust and pleasure and enrichment, of promise of