Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne [Paperback]

Jacques Lacan (Author), Juliet Mitchell (Editor), Jacqueline Rose (Editor)

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Product Description

Jacques Lacan is arguably the most controversial psychoanalyst of our time. Psychoanalysis is certainly one of the most contested areas of debate within feminism. This book presents articles on feminine sexuality by Lacan and members of the école freudienne, the school of psychoanalysis that Lacan directed in Paris from 1964 to 1980.

The question of feminine sexuality has divided the psychoanalytic movement since the 1920s. Despite their opposition to each other, contemporary psychoanalysis and feminism both reject Freud's phallocentrism. This book forcefully reasserts the importance of the castration complex in Freud's work and of the phallus in the work of Lacan, offering them not as a reflection of a theory based on male supremacy and privilege but as the terms through which any such privilege is exposed as a fraud. Lacan's rereading of Freud is seen here to reveal, in a way that no other account has been able to do, the arbitrary and fictional nature of both male and female sexual identity and, specifically, the fantasy behind the category "woman" as the dominant fetish of our culture. These texts reveal that women constantly exceed the barriers of the definition to which they are confined.

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 200 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (March 17, 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393302113
• ISBN-13: 978-0393302110
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #383,395 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent introduction texts, December 11, 1999

By	Karen Batres (Garza Garcia, Nuevo León Mexico) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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This review is from: Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (Paperback)

The introduction articles for this book are worth the price of the book; they are clear, intelligent, and balanced. Other contributing writers vary from clear and didactic to veritable models of French obscuritanism, but for the reader interested in Lacanian theory and the debate about feminine sexuality, this book is well worth reading. Some of the points made in the introduction are key.

7 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars (M)other may I?, April 20, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne (Paperback)

Ah, Lacan...While the postmodern generation, driven to digital scriptololia and hiding beneath their cyber-covers dreaming of Hale-Bopp, continues to feed the yet burgeoning X-philes kitsch and cannabis industry, Lacan stands ready, armed with a bastion of certitude decked out in quagmire of tangled, crabbed, needling, Gallic, galling prose: beneath it all, the phallus, the objet a, the name-of-the-father, the Other of the Other, and jouissance, it all goes back to mom. Oh, the laughter--that none may deny--EVERYBODY's parents @*&#-ed them up