Colette Soler
Was Freud wrong about women?
at this level there is a difference, which would not stem
on what happens in bed. One cannot say that analysands
from culture, from discourse.
are excessively talkative on this subject.
It has to be said that Freud elaborated only a little bit on this
Essentially, in psychoanalysis since Freud we decipher the
difference. He was essentially interested in sexual failures,
unconscious. To decipher means to proceed word by word
in symptoms of failures — basically impotence on the one
and what we discover is that the unconscious does not say
hand with its different forms and frigidity on the other. But
all. The unconscious says about the desire and the phallic
Freud questioned little the enjoyment of the sexual act as
enjoyment, which led Freud to assert that there is only one
if it was something obvious.
libido for both sexes, what seems to be somewhat odd, as there are two sexes. On the level of enjoyment, there are
In the 1970s, Lacan came to the question of there being
words for solely the phallic enjoyment, the one illustrated
different types of enjoyment or not. There exists
by the penis, for the one connected with the drives. What
a famous and easy formula, even if you have never heard
we know of it, is its briefness, its fall announced in the act
of psychoanalysis, and which proclaims that the success
with, for instance, the anxiety of the interruptus, described
of the act, not the failure, not the symptom but the
by Freud. The other enjoyment, the non-phallic one, is the
success of the act, brings about the failure of the
one of which the unconscious, structured like a language,
“sexual relationship”.
does not speak. And it’s at this level that Lacan situates the difference specific to women. A woman has a relation
In short, this formula says that there are two types of
to the phallus, Freud was right, but she is not fully all in
enjoyment, which are heterogenous and which don’t meet:
the relation to the phallus, she has a different, non-phallic
what he called “phallic enjoyment”; this is not the phallus as
enjoyment, of which she doesn’t speak, even if, as Lacan
the signifier of desire, its prototype, it is the male enjoyment;
says, she were begged on the knees. Thus you can see
and the “other enjoyment” which is not the phallic enjoyment
how the construction presents itself. A sole signifier of
and which would be specific to a woman. You might be asking
desire — the phallus as the signifier of lack. A sole signifier
yourselves how psychoanalysis can bear witness to it since
of jouissance — the Phallus written with a capital letter.
as a practice, as I like to say, it doesn’t hold the candle at
But two enjoyments, a supplementary one with regard to
the feet of the bed and everything that psychoanalysts are
the phallic enjoyment on the side of the woman. It is what
able to say comes from what they hear from their patients.
Tiresias seemed to know. These of Lacan from the 1970s
Psychoanalysis cannot attest to anything which doesn’t
bedazzled the feminists. Lacan’s texts were spread at
pass through what is said in a psychoanalysis, sometimes
American universities in the cultural studies departments.
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