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.
The author outlines the various interleaving and crosscurrents involved in the analysis of feminine homosexual patients and in “gynecophilic” aspects of the analysis of heterosexual women. He focuses especially on those interweavings of intense emotionality and identificatory vacillations. This is seen in oscillation between love and hate, and between choice of objects outside of analysis or the position in the transference. These crosscurrents are manifest in the pairs love/hate, active/passive, phallic/castrated, and in the various levels of identifications deriving from the positive and negative aspects of the phallic and oedipal phases.
The daughter identifies with the mother's psychic bisexuality, and the gradual lifting of repression in analysis leads to the recognition and acquisition of a whole series of differences: good and bad mother, good and bad objects, and, especially, generational and sex differences. Characteristically, the daughter's filiation remains feminine toward the mother until she perceives the importance of the mother's heterosexual attachment. Then a masculine identification takes place, familiar to us in the caricature that develops in the female child's mimicry of the father, but the child is still masculinizing herself in the hope of claiming the mother's love. Thus, in feminine homosexuality the predominant phallic organization, whether positive or negative, remains fixated upon the primary object.