Introduction

Throughout his work Sigmund Freud repeatedly declared his ignorance of female sexuality. At first inclined to regard this ignorance as being due to social factors, he increasingly came to view it as arising from the psychology of women and the nature of femininity itself. However, when the explanation given for why the sexual life of women is '"a dark continent" for psychology' is that the 'nature of femininity' is itself a riddle, Freud adopts a new caution regarding the applicability of the Oedipal model to the little girl. In a letter of September 1930 to Viereck, Freud writes that he is working on a version of femininity that will be 'as distant from the poetical as from the pseudo-science of Hirschfeld'. Owing to the deteriorating situation in Europe it was the only one, and so it became the last major contribution to the debate to be made during Freud's lifetime.