Leticia Glocer Fiorini explores the impasses of binary thought and of the essentialist conceptions of women and the feminine. In this trajectory, the author's ongoing dialogue with Freud is connected with one aspect of his way of thinking: multicentered and complex.

The text addresses questions relating to love, sexual desire, maternity, beauty and the passing of time and highlights current debates concerning women, the feminine, and sexual difference as well as some controversial topics that have been discussed throughout the history of the psychoanalytic movement. One of the...

In this book a group of contemporary psychoanalytic authors dedicated to studies on women and the feminine have been assembled with the objective of displaying points of concordance and discordance in relation to Freudian proposals. Discourse on women has changed greatly since Freud's time. It coincides with deep changes experienced by women and the feminine position, at least in most of the Western world. It is common knowledge that contraceptives, assisted fertilization, advances in women's rights, growingly evident sublimational capacities and demonstrations of professional success have...

Now well into the twenty-first century, relevant changes in symbolic codes that organize social bonds are observed. Important modifications regarding the model of the nuclear family in Western society, the vicissitudes of desire and changing identities, as well as advances in biotechnology and informatics, are leading to a re-consideration of previously accepted concepts of the masculine-feminine polarity and the notion of sexual difference.

In this context, new forms of subjectivity--including sexual and gender migrations--open an inquiry regarding the way these presentations...