Chaboudez provides a rigorous reading of Lacan's work, following his articulations step by step, and demonstrating how, for psychoanalysis, there cannot be any sexual norm.
Chaboudez sets out the Lacanian account of sexual difference as a matter of logic rather than anatomy, tracking how the phallic function organises what Lacan called the formulas of sexuation. Working chapter by chapter through Lacan's articulations, she argues that sexual difference has no natural standard: the difference between the sexes is a position taken up within language, not a fact read off the body.
A recurring theme is the gap Freud named the biological rock, the point where psychical causality meets the drive. Chaboudez holds discourse and biology together rather than treating either as decisive, and reads the loosening of traditional phallic logic against the range of contemporary ways of relating and of finding satisfaction.
For clinicians, the book offers a structural vocabulary for how patients situate themselves in relation to sexual difference and jouissance, keeping the question open where diagnostic and cultural categories tend to close it. Routledge published the English translation in 2022.
About the author
Gisele Chaboudez
Gisele Chaboudez is a French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who practises in Paris. She trained within the Lacanian tradition, working with Serge Leclaire and Jacques Lacan until Lacan's death in 1981, and is associated with Espace analytique, where she has edited the journal Figures de la psychanalyse. Her work reads and extends Lacan's account of sexual difference, the formulas of sexuation and the phallic function, examining how psychoanalysis treats sex, gender and femininity.
Details
- 2022
- 2022
- French
- Routledge
- Routledge
- 150
- 9781032259901