Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel – författare

This book examines the theories of female sexuality, using the Freudian and non-Freudian approach to the unconscious. It emphasise on what in the psychoanalytic image of man matters most. The book helps fill a long-apparent need for authoritative analyses in feminine psychology and sexual identity.

This book examines the role of the Oedipus complex in the psyche and relates it to urgent issues of social life, historical and current. It discusses the theory of sexual phallic monism and its most important consequences, and some essential points of Freud's work on female sexuality.

Female Sexuality represents a distinct contribution to the psychoanalytic study of feminine psychology and sexual identity. First published in France as Recherches psychanalytiques nouvelles sur la sexualite feminine, the book consists of six major essays and a comprehensive introduction which reviews the various approaches to the subject. Freudian and non-Freudian views on female sexuality are carefully examined, thus providing a valuable perspective from which to view the authors' subsequent discussions."The present authors," writes Dr J. Chasseguet-Smirgel in her introduction, "have attempted as far as possible to free their theoretical ideas and their clinical interpretations from the unconscious fantasies which distort scientific objectivity."Christian David thus uses a clinical history to study masculine myths about femininity; Catherine Luquet-Parat attributes an important role to female masochism in the young girl's "change of object"; Bela Grunberger examines the origins of female narcissism; Joyce McDougall shows that female homosexuality must be integrated to achieve a harmonious feminine nature; and Maria Torok gives masculinity wishes and penis-envy a new role and meaning.In the last essay in this significant work, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel - a training analyst of the French Psychoanalytic Association - describes the young girl's relationship with her father and discusses the aspects of this relationship which contribute an important dimension to female guilt.Female Sexuality: New Psychoanalytic Views helps fill a long-apparent need for authorative analyses in this area of growing interest.Contributors: Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Catherine Luquet-Parat, Bela Grunberger, Joyce McDougall, Maria Torok, and Christian David

This book examine the role of the Oedipus complex in the psyche and relate it to urgent issues of social and cultural life, historical and current."Freud and Female Sexuality" (1975), the first paper included in the present collection, resulted from the debate which followed on the publication of Female Sexuality. The subsequent articles, written after 1983 and, for the most part, unpublished at the time when the author was invited to prepare this volume, cover a wide range of subjects, but are linked to each other and to the opening paper by an underlying theme: The role of the Father and the Mother in the Psyche.

Once the ego-ideal is distinguished from the super-ego, it becomes possible to make sense of much that formerly remained obscure in psychoanalytic theory. Chasseguet-Smirgel illuminates not only the psychology of narcissism in individuals but many of the connections between psychic life and society.

Is today's thinking conditioned by body-mind dualism? A rebellion against the biological order seems to have silently infiltrated our world view. Suicide bombers appear to share the fascination with destruction, of writers such as Mishima, Pasolini and Foucault. A liberation from the body to reestablish a - possibly mystical - union of soul and cosmos and an assertion of the mind's omnipotence appear to be common features of forms of behaviour that seem to be taken for granted in contemporary thought. Is the new misogyny, which rejects motherhood in the name of feminism, contributing in any way to these trends? This review of our society by a woman psychoanalyst - a non-medic and graduate of the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris - presents a sharp and rigorous analysis of the strange and violent mechanisms that are erupting in the world today.