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It has become commonplace in discussions of the relation of psychoanalysis to women to refer to the fact that it was not until late in his career, in 1925, that Freud got around to writing about the “psychical consequences” of sexual difference — about the ways in which female sexuality might differ from the model of “human” sexuality he had generated from the little boy's history. Like Freud, Jacques Lacan, in the beginning, talked about subject, language, and desire without specifying the sexual differentiation of his schemes. Only two of the texts in Ecrits (the monumental collection of Lacan's major statements from 1936 to 1966) are directed to questions of sexual difference, of the specificity of female sexuality. Both of these texts — “The Signification of the Phallus” and “Directive Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality”1—were written in 1958.
In Lacan's (1966) book, these two écrits, of special interest for feminism, are separated by one essay. The arrangement is not strictly determined by the chronology of writing or public presentation; rather, it creates its own chronology for reading. The essay in between the two 1958 writings is a memorial to