Prologue

Female Sexuality has been The Topic of Much Theoretical and clinical questioning in recent decades. Psychoanalytic literature for a number of years had accepted early positions viewing female sexuality as secondary to that of the male and governed primarily by the wish for the child. Throughout historical times, the largest percentage of women themselves had considered female sexuality to be predominantly in the service of procreation.

In the last half century, however, the subject of female sexuality has received a great deal of attention in the psychoanalytic and nonanalytic literature—that is, the biological and social sciences, the feminist literature, and so forth. In this issue we propose to focus on certain views and questions of particular interest in this area.

Generally speaking, female homosexuality until recently had received far less attention than male homosexuality in analytic writings. In “The Nature and Nurture of Gender,” Martha Kirkpatrick deals with basic assumptions and recent research findings on the subject of gender, the subject that probably more than any other has opened new areas of study and research on the subject of sexuality. Kirkpatrick elaborates on the bridges between psychoanalytic concepts and recent findings from the neurosciences. During her work at Stoller's clinic, Kirkpatrick had observed that gender dysphoria is more common in men than in women, an observation made repeatedly by several other investigators in recent years. It has been proposed that the central nervous system of boys develops more slowly than that of girls due to the fact that “testosterone in inhibiting apoptosis, the preprogrammed neuronal death, … prunes the neural system and allows the formation of neural circuitry.”

According to Kirkpatrick, “the most exciting and robust sexual dimorph structures in the brain are the four interstitial nuclei of the anterior hypothalamus,” larger in men than in women but increasing in size