Lacanian Press

As women assert themselves on the world stage and sexual categories multiply, psychoanalysis reveals that the feminine cannot be reduced to biological or cultural data. This book explores the feminine outside of gender and beyond fantasy. From the words of analysands, it extracts some experiences of jouissance.

Female sexuality – the “dark continent” of Freudian psychoanalysis – is a mystery. Brousse makes effects of knowledge emerge from this black hole. The void situates an eroticism proper to the feminine, and the author pinpoints Lacan’s move to isolate a jouissance other than phallic: non-localized, unspeakable, infinitely refined.

The feminine is a mode of jouissance that always surprises speaking beings when they experience it, a jouissance out of meaning, out of law, but not outside of body.

Marie-Hélène Brousse is a psychoanalyst practicing in Paris, France. She is a member of the École de la Cause freudienne, the New Lacanian School and the World Association of Psychoanalysis.

Text first published in French as Mode de jouir au féminin, Navarin éditeur, Paris 6e, 2020. Translated into English for this edition by Janet Rachel.