title: On the vicissitudes of female sexuality: the difficult path from 'anatomical destiny' to psychic representation.
abstract: The author studies female sexuality under six headings: 1) The essential nature of feminine orgastic pleasure in its spreading-out quality in waves of excitement within her body. This experience in itself gives rise to a genital psychic representation that lacks precise limits, and indeed for many women is regarded in addition as potentially overwhelming and uncontrollable. 2) Vaginal erotism is also prone to stir up anxious feelings that are not only difficult to define and delimit corporally but are also impregnated with oral and anal fantasy elements, all of which contribute to a fantasy of the vagina as an 'insatiable hole' that swallows and destroys, and this may mitigate against sexual maturity in the women. 3) The little girl has not met the same type of threats and interdictions that engender the castration complex in the boys. Thus there is a risk that she may continue to think of her sexual excitement and sensations as dangerous to her whole body, not only because she cannot link them to a clearly visible organ, but also because the limits that are set upon her search for pleasure are imprecise. 4) A further consequence is that the sensual attachment to the primitive mother-body is less readily given up than is that of the little boy. In addition the ambivalent attitude of the mother to her girl-child frequently places one more stumbling block in the path to the achievement of adult female sexuality. The effects of these factors upon super-ego structure are also considered. 5) 'Penis-envy' like all stable psychic formations comes to be seen as multidimensional, intimately linked to desires and fears concerning both parents. 6) Finally, since the complex questions concerning feminine sexuality are not limited to women, the unconscious feminine identifications of men are briefly examined.
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001009:Anxiety, Castration / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D006801:Humans; D007062:Identification, Psychological; D007989:Libido; D008297:Male; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009769:Object Attachment; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D012727:Sex Characteristics; D012725:Sexual Behavior; D013475:Superego; D014621:Vagina / Q000502:physiology; D014930:Women / Q000523:psychology*