The universal refusal

Sigmund Freud regarded the rejection of femininity as a foundation of human sexuality, a hard core lying at the heart of its puzzle. Jacqueline Schaeffer's study looks at that puzzle more closely. For her, the difficulty lies less in turning away from the feminine as such than in refusing its erotic and bodily dimensions, and the feminine that emerges through sexual ecstasy.

Schaeffer argues that equality between men and women is a fair demand in public, social and economic life. A romantic and sexual bond between a man and a woman, however, is something the mind builds, and it depends on recognising the otherness that marks the difference between the sexes. She locates an inner split in women, where the drive toward surrender collides with an ego that resists it, and she claims that the feminine itself grows out of this tension.

In Schaeffer's account, a man's masculinity, which opposes the phallic, awakens the feminine in a woman by dismantling her defences and producing sexual ecstasy. The quality of the sexual, emotional and social ties between a man and a woman, she suggests, reflects the wider work of civilisation, what Freud called Kulturarbeit. The book suits readers of psychoanalysis and anyone curious about how psychoanalytic theory understands femininity and desire.