what now ‘irrupts’ into the analytic situation is reality itself, a reality that is totally out of place: ‘There is a complete change of scene; it is as though some piece of make-believe had been stopped by the sudden irruption of reality’.41 The patient insists therefore on repeating ‘in real life’ what should only have been reproduced as ‘psychical material’ — thus the relationship to the real has been reversed. What this indicates for this discussion is that Freud himself was forced to correct or to revise the concept of transference to which he ascribed the failure of the case of Dora, and this in a way that is not satisfactorily or exhaustively defined by reference to the countertransference (Freud’s implication in the case). For what is at stake is transference as an impossible demand for recognition (a return of love in ‘Observations on the Transference-Love’), a demand that has to be displaced onto another register, indicated here by the corresponding emphasis on the concepts of fantasy (‘make-believe’), representation, psychical material (the only meaning of material that has any value here). Note the proximity of these terms to the query, image, Bild, of Dora’s second dream, sexuality precisely not as demand (the demand for love) but as question.
In the discussion of the case itself, I suggested that Freud’s concept of the transference as the retrieval of an event corresponded to the concept of a pregiven normal feminine sexuality, neurosis being defined as the failure to meet a ‘real erotic demand’. Thus if the concept of reality has to go in relation to the notion of transference, we can reasonably assume that it also goes in relation to that of sexuality itself. I have already suggested briefly that it does, in what Freud says about the pleasure principle. What is important to grasp is that, while it is undoubtedly correct to state that Freud’s analysis of Dora failed because of the theory of feminine sexuality to which he then held, this concept cannot be corrected by a simple reference to his later theses on feminine sexuality (preoedipality, etc.), crucial as these may be, since that is simply to.replace one content with another, whereas what must be seen in Freud’s work on femininity is exactly the same movement we have just seen in the concept of transference, which is nothing less than the collapse of the category of sexuality as content altogether.
Freud starts both his papers on femininity (‘Female Sexuality’ and ‘Femininity’) with recognition of the girl’s preoedipal attachment to the mother, its strength and duration, as it had been overlooked within psychoanalytic theory, thus feminine sexuality as an earlier stage, a more repressed content, something archaic. Yet although the two papers in one sense say the same thing, their logic or sequence is different, and the difference has important effects on the level of theory.
‘Female Sexuality’ (1931) starts with the preoedipal factor and its necessary relinquishment, which is then discussed in terms of the castration complex and penis envy. But this does not exhaust the question of the girl’s renunciation of her mother, a question that then persists in a series of references to ‘premature’ weaning, the advent of a rival, the necessary frustration and final ambivalence of the child’s demand for love. None of these factors, however, constitute a sufficient explanation: ‘All these motives seem nevertheless insufficient to justify the girl’s final hostility’,42 which cannot be attributed to the ambivalence of the infantile relation to the object, since this would be true of the boy child too. Thus a question persists that reveals itself as the question, hanging over from that of a demand that has been frustrated and a renunciation that still has not been explained: ‘A further question arises: “What does the little girl require of her mother?”’.43
Freud can only answer this question by reference to the nature of the infantile sexual aim — its activity (rejection of a male/female biological chemistry, a single libido with both active and passive aims), an activity that is not only a corrective to the idea of a naturally passive femininity but functions as repetition (the child repeats a distressing experience through play). Correlating this with the definition of infantile sexuality given earlier in the paper (‘It has, in point of fact, no aim, and is incapable of obtaining complete satisfaction; and principally for that reason is doomed to end in disappointment’.44) it emerges that what specifies the little girl’s aim, and her demand, is that she does not have one. The question persists, or is repeated, therefore, as the impossibility of satisfaction.
In ‘Femininity’ (1933), the sequence is in a sense reversed. The paper starts with the caution against the biological definition of sexual difference and then reposes the question of the girl’s relinquishment of the preoedipal attachment to the mother. The motives for renunciation are listed again — oral frustration, jealousy, prohibition, ambivalence — but in this case the question of how these can explain such renunciation when they apply equally to the boy is answered with the concept of penis envy, with which the question is in a sense closed (the discussion moves on to a consideration of adult modes of feminine sexuality). Thus the question is answered here, and it is as answer that the concept of penis envy has produced, rightly, the anger against Freud. For looking at the paper again, it is clear that nothing has been answered at all, since Freud characterizes each of the earlier motives specifically in terms of its impossibility (see above): oral demand as ‘insatiable’, ‘a child’s demands for love are immoderate’ (rivalry), ‘multifarious sexual wishes … which cannot for the most part be satisfied’, ‘the immoderate charater of the demand for love and the impossibility of fulfilling their sexual wishes’.45 Now, if what characterizes all these demands is the impossibility of their satisfaction, then the fact that there is another impossible demand (‘the wish to get the longed-for penis’)46 cannot strictly explain anything at all, other than the persistence of the demand itself — the question, therefore, of the earlier paper, ‘What does the little girl require of her mother?’47
The question persists, therefore, only insofar as it cannot be answered, and what I want to suggest here is that what we see opening up in the gap between the demand and its impossibility is desire itself, what Lacan calls the effect of the articulation of need as demand, ‘desire endlessly impossible to speak as such’. This is why the demand for love in the transference blocks the passage of the treatment insofar as it insists precisely on its own reality (the possibility of satisfaction). What Freud’s papers on femininity reveal, therefore, is nothing less than the emergence of this concept of desire as the question of sexual difference: how does the little girl become a woman, or does she?
To return to dreams and hysteria, isn’t this exactly the question that reveals itself in the dream of the hysteric analyzed in The Interpretation of Dreams48 who dreamt that her own wish was not fulfilled, through an identification with the woman she posited as her sexual rival? Her desire, therefore, is the desire for an unsatisfied desire: ‘She likes caviar,’ writes Lacan, ‘but she doesn’t want any. It is in that that she desires it.’49 And behind that wish (and that identification) can be seen the question of the woman as object of desire, of how her husband could desire a woman who was incapable of giving him satisfaction (she knows he does not want her), the identification being, therefore, with the question itself: ‘This being the question put forward, which is very generally that of hysterical identification … whereby the woman identifies herself with the man.’50 This can be referred directly back to the case of Dora, woman as object and subject of desire — the impossibility of either position, for if object of desire then whose desire, and if subject of desire then its own impossibility, the impossibility of subject and desire (the one implying the fading of the other). Thus Dora rejects Herr K. at the exact moment when he states that he does not desire his own wife, the very woman through whom the whole question for Dora was posed (the scene at the lake).
Thus what feminine sexuality reveals in these examples is the persistence of the question of desire as a question (exactly the opposite of the feminine as sexual content, substance, or whatever). Finally, to return to the hysterical symptom itself:
It is to the extent that a need gets caught up in the function of desire that the psychosomatic can be conceived of as something more than the idle commonplace which consists in saying that there is a psychic
