The dark continent and its enigmas.

The author quotes at length from Freud's lecture on femininity of 1933 as a starting point to his paper. The female, in his opinion, is not precisely the 'victim' of the imaginary encounter of the man with his wife or sister, but, on the contrary, she functions as the promoting 'lure'. This lure alludes to desire, and the desire to the object petit a of Lacan. The object petit a is present in the normal fetishes of human sexuality, and becomes a perversion only when it fixates on a particular fetish. The function of 'lure' defines the female, in addition to a double identification characteristic of each sex. The lack for the female must be recognized to be the otherness of the primitive love object. Both the masculine and the feminine models of the reaction to the discovery of this loss constitute the key subject of this paper--the sexualization process.