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.
Louise Kaplan takes issue with the object relations psychoanalytic approach which maintains dichotomies between men and women, suggesting that women also experience desires and anxieties traditionally associated with men, such as those centered around ambition. Kaplan notes how the manifest fear of loss of the object's love may serve as a screen for castration anxiety, and a vivid figuration of absence may be a screen for a threatening presence, or vivid figurations of presence may screen out a threatening absence. A female's fantasy of her genital lack may be a fantasy of absence screening out the presence of her own genital and reproductive organs which arouse anxiety, with a corresponding genital desire which arouses anxiety. Thus, Freud's concept of screen memories bears a close resemblance to fetishism where the strongly figured presence alerts us to the absent figure.
In male perversions the drama of castration is usually in the foreground, whereas in female perversions it is marginalized with other subplots coming to the foreground, such as dramas of abandonment, separation, and object loss. For female psychology, there is a potentially more threatening quality to castration anxiety: the fear of bodily damage that is diffuse and unlocatable that involves a vast and enigmatic inner genital world, and even beyond this, damages her entire being. The female regressive solution of needing a love object keeps unconscious the profound fear of bodily mutilation, as well as the wish for self-assertive independence which would repudiate masculinity. The male regressive solution makes a phallic narcissistic ideal dominate in a way which keeps unconscious the profound need for the love object, repudiating feminine wishes to surrender and be dependent.