The Feminine and the Pubertarian: The Pubertarian Novelty According to Freud and Lacan

Countless authors have attempted to theorize the passage from the infantile to the juvenile. This passage is not without consequence, as shown by the changes in the semiological and nosological fields, corroborated by the infantile amnesia subsequent to this phase. We propose to approach this question through a re-reading of Freud’s texts. We shall highlight how Freud’s attempt at qualifying infantile sexuality led him to define more and more clearly what distinguishes it from juvenile sexuality; nevertheless he failed to define the threshold that separates them. Thus, on the one hand he reached the threshold of the impossible whilst on the other, and despite himself, he indicated viable clues to its potential theorization. To Freud, this impossibility constituted an impasse at the time. Contributions from linguistics and structuralism allowed for a theoretical opening towards it. To Lacan, it characterizes the Real, the Other jouissance (specific to woman) and the Other’s lack signifier S (Ⱥ). We shall conclude that the pubertarian novelty is the effect - brought by the Real - of the body’s physiological change when it becomes pubertarian. Our hypothesis is in accordance with what Freud had identified as proper to puberty, namely “the displacement of erogenous zones from the clitoris to the vagina”. We may call this effect the advent of the Feminine, vector of the Other sex, which cannot be inscribed in the infantile, phallocentric world. In other words, it is a bodily experience that has no equivalent in the Symbolic realm. Lacan translated this experience into “there is no signifier to woman’s sex”. This Feminine (the capital F indicates its non-inscription in the Symbolic realm) will, during the time of adolescence, find a formalization - not via a signifier which is defaulted but via an object present in reality (which can be the Other sex’s other as much as any addictive, source of jouissance object).