Sexual Difference

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SEXUAL DIFFERENCE

Sexual difference refers to recognition by the child of the difference of the sexes. This recognition is related to the Oedipus complex and the castration complex.

In 1908 (1908c) Sigmund Freud presented for the first time the notion of the castration complex, centered on fantasies of castration and closely linked to the drives. Through this complex, whose framework is the "theory of infantile sexuality," the child is able to acknowledge sexual difference. In the same text Freud indicated that before the question of castration becomes important for the child, the child is capable, through the use of external signs, of making a (gender) distinction between men and women. Of its own initiative, the child will develop a sense of gender identity—male or female. This distinction is not dependent on the drives or the genitals. It is only with the "primacy of the phallus" (1923e) that the genital organ will be taken into account for both sexes, based on the presence or absence of the male genital organ. It is this awareness that leads to the question of castration. Moreover, it is through identification with the father and mother during the oedipal period that the child acquires the symbolic cues for masculine and feminine, whose dynamic will not be completed until adolescence. At that time, the material reality of the penis-vagina duality will replace the apparent reality of the phallus-missing phallus duality.

By separating penis and phallus and emphasizing symbolic castration, an operation though which the subject is formed, Jacques Lacan provides a very different interpretation for the castration complex, which now becomes dependent on phallic logic. If human sexuality is immediately subverted by language and if "the imaginary function of the phallus completes the challenge to sexuality through the castration complex in both sexes" (1958), then understanding what differentiates the sexes becomes problematic. Lacan then developed his idea of sexuation—a term borrowed from biology—to show the subject's modes of inscription in the phallic function. This refers to the way in which both sexes recognize and differentiate themselves in the unconscious.

Since Freud recognized that his description related only to boys and for Lacan the relation to the phallus "was established without regard for the anatomical difference of the sexes," we are led to the conclusion that psychoanalytic theory on sexual difference and, in particular, on what a woman is, remains highly incomplete.

Finally, it is important to point out that sexual difference, which enables the subject to relate to its own anatomical sex and position itself as man or woman, introduces important questions in psychoanalysis, as important as the problematic of identification/identity.

Paulo R. Ceccarelli

See also: Gender identity; Oedipus complex; Phallus; Sexuality.