Woman, for Freud, was a problem he never completely felt he had cracked. Towards the end of his life, he declared, shoulder-shrugging:

‘That is all I have to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly … If you want to know more about femininity, enquire of you own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.’

Freud cannot have believed this would still the voices raging over his analysis of female sexuality, and indeed it did not.

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