What does a woman want? She wants the truth. In this subtle and highly original comparison of Freud and Lacan, Serge Andre, noted authority on gender and perversion, explains why, and helps us to make sense of what Freud and Lacan were trying to tell us about female sexuality. Embracing as “feminine” that which cannot be signified, Andre shows how psychoanalytic practice allows a subject to confront the lack that constitutes his or her knowledge of femininity. This is how the truth of the (female) being who incarnates that lack can be revealed. -- from the publisher “Finally, this precious book by one of Lacan's best commentators is now available in English. Serge Andre has masterfully achieved a work of erudition that will provide an indispensable resource to psychoanalysts and Lacanian scholars in both cultural and women's studies. What Does a Woman Want? Not only performs a splendidly clear and in-depth reading of Freud with Lacan from the onset of psychoanalysis around the enigma of feminine sexuality, but at the same time provides an excellent clinical illustration of Lacanian theory.” -Andre Patsakides, Ph.D. Serge Andre, a psychoanalyst in Brussels, Belgium since 1975, has written more than one hundred articles on a wide range of topics. In addition to this book, Andre is the author of The Perverse Imposture (L'Imposture Perverse, 1993) already translated into Spanish and Portuguese and forthcoming in English in 2003 from Other Press. Table of Contents: The Lacanian Clinical Field: Series Overview; Foreword; Retroactive Determination: Discovering Late Lacan in Early Freud; Preface 1. What Can I know About It? 2. The Paranoid Science of the Sexual Relation 3. Encountering the Unnamable 4. The First Lie 5. The Hysteric and Femininity: Disgust 6. The Hysteric and Femininity: Conversion 7. The Case of Elisabeth 8. Dream and Desire in Hysteria 9. A Change of Sex 10. A Daughter and Her Mother 11. Becoming a Woman 12. Jouissances 13. Otherness of the Body 14. Love and the Woman 15. From the Masquerade to Poetry References; Index |