In this book, the French Lacanian psychoanalyst, Marie-Christine Hamon, examines the question, posed by Freud, of how and why girls change their love objects from mother to father in the course of psychosexual development. The book does not provide a novel or creative answer to these questions, but rather a careful, well-documented exposition of Freud's thinking on this subject, as well as that of the early psychoanalytic pioneers around him. In addition, Hamon evaluates and reframes this material in terms of her own Lacanian perspectives.