THE FEMININE AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: FREUD’S COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP WITH FEMININITY

Abstract

The young doctor Sigmund Freud, intrigued by the new way hysterics became ill, became interested in listening to these women who denounced the limitations of existence that were imposed on them. This listening made it possible to formulate an enigma that permeated all of Freud’s writings about the feminine: “what is a woman?” Throughout his work, the psychoanalyst tries to describe how the girl, through crossing the Oedipus Complex, becomes a woman. At the end of his life, he asserts his inability to answer this question, leaving it to science and art, transforming it into an enigma, a complex and obscure part of his theory that he was unable to develop. Even though much escaped Freud, psychoanalysis provided an inquiry into the issue of the sexuation of subjects and gender ideals and made it possible to open the question: what it means to be a woman can only be answered through history and narrative construction. of each subject, in their vicissitudes and singularities.