Main Threads of the Psychoanalytic Debate Accompanying the Creation of Joan Riviere's "Femininity as a Masquerade"

Abstract

The article serves as an introduction to Joan Riviere’s text Womanliness as a Masquerade (1929), aiming to prepare the reader for its study and analysis. It presents key concepts of debate within the early psychoanalytic movement. They constitute the theoretical background for Riviere’s interpretations of clinical cases. The article discusses Sigmund Freud's concepts of the Oedipus complex and castration, Sándor Ferenczi’s division of homosexuality into subject-centered and object-centered homoeroticism, Ernest Jones’s notion of aphanisis and his classification of two types of homosexual women. It also addresses Melanie Klein’s shift of the onset of the Oedipus complex to the pre-genital stage and her perspective on the formation of the superego. The analysis emphasizes how these theoretical threads are crucial for understanding the mechanism of womanliness as a masquerade, which, in Riviere’s interpretation, functions as a defence against anxiety. Furthermore, the article highlights the risk of obscuring the original clinical contexts of psychoanalysis in later feminist and philosophical adaptations of the concept of “masquerade.”