Symposium on Gender: Introduction

The papers and commentaries in this symposium constitute a new line of development in the debates about gender that have been evolving in and around psychoanalysis. Freud's famous remark “What does woman want?” initiates what is by now a long and often heated conversation. To introduce these papers and commentaries on the problems of gender, I want to provide a brief review of their historical context, to give a narrative of the conversation thus far. The articles in this symposium are informed by feminism, by the studies of infancy and early development, by postmodern debates on the nature of subjectivity, and by relational models within psychoanalysis. Presenting this symposium in the inaugural year of this journal seems timely and appropriate because the questions raised here—the paradox of gender as fixed and fluid, the boundaries of biology, culture, and psyche, the interdependence of intrapsychic and social, the meaning of gender in relationships—address, in the realm of gender studies, the central concerns and philosophy of Psychoanalytic Dialogues.

To begin, I am going to conjure up one of the most unsettling of Freud's images of the relations of men and women. Offering a psychoanalytic reading of the mythological tale of the warrior who freezes in fear at the sight of the head of Medusa, Freud proposes that the “terror of Medusa is the terror of castration” (Freud, 1953). This image of horror, a woman's head ringed with snakes, Freud promotes as a mythical metaphor of the terrible sight of the female genital. “The sight of Medusa's head makes the spectator stiff with terror, turns him to stone.” This stiffness signifies an erection and thus a confirmation that “he is still in possession of a penis and the stiffening reassures him of the fact.” I will add one narrative detail, missing from Freud's reading. The Medusa is killed by Perseus, who defeats her dread power by gazing at her image reflected in a mirror.

Contempt and danger, power and damage,