Secret Identity: Routes of Contemporary Femininity: Emma Piccioli and Giangaetano Bartolomei. Pp. 9-32

Beginning with their clinical experience with female patients, the authors observe a distance between the woman emerging from Freudian theory and the one visiting the analyst today. It is necessary not to lose contact with the social transformations, including a different idea of woman and different routes leading her to reach an identity. The fundamental question is: “What is it, for a genetically and anatomically female individual, to have a feminine psyche? And how does it get reproduced?” They begin their considerations by summarizing Freud's position, and then move on to more recent observations. In particular, they refer to the studies of Chasseguet-Smirgel and Stoller with their notion of “nuclear gender identity.” One particular clinical case clarifies the painful and difficult journey of a woman, closed in between the expectations of society which wants her to be autonomous and the interiorized expectations of parents, which produce a feeling of anguish, both in the sense of poverty and sorrow. The authors consider the subject of woman's guilt, then conclude their considerations with the importance of gender identity. The study of the psychoanalytical theory of femininity can supply the material for a deeper consciousness of historical changes in psychoanalytical thought and its connections with other social processes.