Sarah Kofman’s The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud’s Writings is a disciplined reconstruction and a deliberately disconcerting defamiliarization of Freud’s scattered and chronologically asymmetrical reflections on “femininity.”
It proceeds by accepting Freud’s declared interest in observation, method, and conceptual economy while patiently exposing the inner duplicities of those same appeals whenever they function as rhetorical shields against the anxieties stirred by the object of analysis.
The book’s wager is double. On the one hand, it offers a synoptic, philologically attentive account of Freud’s terms, their internal rearrangements over time, and the late—almost death-haunted—hastening to publish conclusions about women that Freud had long stalled or hedged. On the other hand, it takes Freud’s own figure of “the riddle” literally, showing how Freud’s solutions repeatedly reconstitute the riddle in new form, most notably by reinstalling a phallic canon at the very point where empirical surprise seemed to have displaced it.
The result is not a simple prosecution brief for the feminist “case” against Freud, nor a confessional for Freud’s alleged contritions, but a materialist reading of psychoanalytic discourse as a system of conceptual delays and accelerations that are formally logical and symptomatically revealing at once. The book is, in Kofman’s exacting sense, both an analysis of text and a diagnosis of doctrine.
Kofman begins from Freud’s own two-edged staging of the problem: to speak on “femininity” before an audience of “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he says, is to enter a dispute already charged by suspicion—namely, that male analysts cannot shed masculine bias when they describe women. Freud’s declared defense is methodological: he is not speculating but reporting observed facts gathered by himself and, pointedly, by “excellent female colleagues,” to whom he attributes decisive observations of girls’ preoedipal ties to their mothers and of specifically feminine configurations that disturbed the earlier symmetry he had presupposed between the sexes. Kofman shows how this display of modest debt functions as strategy, at once enrolling women analysts as guarantors of objectivity and shifting the burden of any “tendency” away from Freud. The gesture is not accidental: it needs to be read alongside Freud’s equally insistent appeals to the model of physics (hypotheses tested until confirmed or broken) and his polemics against Jungian “monism,” which he treats as speculative economy achieved at the cost of observation. In Kofman’s hands the declaration “I do not speculate; I observe” becomes itself an object of analysis, a performative designed to block the suspicion of paranoia precisely where Freud’s own text betrays a fixed idea.
That fixed idea—Freud eventually names it himself as what others will call an idée fixe—is the primacy of penis envy as the specific determinant of feminine development. The force of Kofman’s reading is not to deny that Freud observes a preoedipal tie between daughter and mother, nor to deny that he stresses ambivalences which trouble any naïve parallelism with the boy; rather, it is to track how, once admitted, the new material is bent back into an old gravitational field. Even where Freud appears to grant the mother’s precedence (and with it, the necessity of a historical “Mycenaean” stratum behind the classical Oedipal story), Kofman shows how the preoedipal stage is reinscribed as preliminary to a telos that remains phallic. The Minoan–Mycenaean comparison, intended to mark a surprise and a break, becomes a narrative in which the preface anticipates the book; the logic of the Oedipus complex remains the meta-language in which difference is finally translated. Hence the paradoxical result Kofman underlines: even if the girl first loves her mother, she loves the mother as presumed bearer of the penis, so that the later “change of object” from mother to father signifies not a radical reorientation but a correction of attribution. The supposed discovery therefore dissolves into an accounting maneuver by which female development is subjected again to a single determinant.
Kofman’s reconstruction is both philological and diagnostic. She reads closely the late lecture “Femininity,” hearing the rhetoric of appeal (“observed facts,” “little time remains,” “female colleagues first saw…”) as it intersects with Freud’s repeated acknowledgments of incompleteness and speculation. The rush to publish what “stands in urgent need of confirmation,” she notes, is not an anomaly but part of a pattern: Freud held back the Dora case for years out of scruple and shame yet hurried to put in print the theses on anatomical distinction, saying plainly that he could not wait for verification. Kofman refuses to psychologize in the banal sense; rather, she treats delay and haste alike as conceptual operators—Freud’s own terms—by which the text temporizes before an object it cannot face directly without metamorphosis. The analogy to The Interpretation of Dreams—postponed, then defended by an apotropaic labor of interpretation—is deliberate: talking about women, Kofman argues, involves a similar danger. The unveiling of the “strange things” psychoanalysis has to say discloses a secret whose effects in the economy of the text (horror, fascination, defensive denegation) repeat the effects that Freud, elsewhere, attaches to the first sight of the female genitals. The textual “veil,” then, is not a merely decorative metaphor: it is a structural device that screens and arrests, much as fetishistic displacement “throws a veil” over the castration it cannot admit.
The rhetoric of the veil returns as motif and method. Kofman follows Freud into his own excursus on shame and weaving—his conjecture that women invented weaving in unconscious imitation of pubic hair, as a technique to conceal genital “deficiency.” It is here, near the end of an already extended text, that Freud anticipates the charge and speaks of an idée fixe. Kofman neither lampoons nor absolves; instead, she reads the “rhapsodic supplement” on modesty, narcissism, and the taboo of virginity as an emergency buttress that both props up and gives away the architecture of the whole. The addendum, placed at the end as if to overwhelm with a cascade of traits supposedly derived from penis envy, exposes the fragility of the discourse that needs such a supplement. It is a fetishistic column “filling the holes,” she writes, the very measure of a construction that insists too emphatically on being “logical.” The more method insists on observation, the more the text—through its additions and self-exculpations—discloses the defensive labor that protects a doctrinal kernel.
At the center of Kofman’s account stands the question of bisexuality. Freud routinely presents it as an empirical thesis (every subject combines masculine and feminine characteristics) and a diplomatic instrument (a way to answer female critics without “impoliteness”: you are the exception; here you are more masculine than feminine). Kofman treats this doubleness not as oversight but as tactic. The universal thesis reassures by leveling difference into degree—yet the very exceptions it licenses reintroduce a hierarchy, since the masculine term is the standard by which the feminine is measured. More subtly, the declared universality of bisexuality never quite rebounds upon the speaking subject: Freud is quick to put female analysts in their place under the rubric of “exception,” less quick to exhibit his own “femininity” as counterweight to paranoia. Thus bisexuality both relativizes sexual categories and silently preserves masculine privilege as norm. Kofman’s point is not that Freud says this, but that his uses of the thesis—when he fends off charges of “masculine prejudice,” when he treats male libidinal scripts as the readable ones—show how a principle of symmetry can be converted back into an instrument of asymmetry.
From method Kofman proceeds to structure: what is the overall logic of Freud’s late sequence once the preoedipal mother is admitted into the system? The answer, she shows, is mapped onto a triad of shifts that in principle could have relativized the phallic paradigm but in practice end by reconfirming it. First, the observational surprise—the “Mycenaean” discovery that the girl’s earliest libidinal cathexis is maternal, with active and even aggressive components—should have destabilized the simple opposition active/passive, masculine/feminine. Second, the historical recoding of development as a series (preoedipal to oedipal to pubertal) should have made the Oedipus complex a local, not a sovereign, operator. Third, the appeal to women’s own analytic work should have distributed authority and diluted the “I of Truth” that Freud sometimes theatrically inhabits. Each, however, is recollected under the gravitational pull of the “specific factor”: the discovery of anatomical “lack” which, once seen, reinterprets the mother retroactively and enhances the hatred that was already present in preoedipal ambivalence. Penis envy, then, becomes not merely a later addition but the prism through which even the earlier tie is reread: the mother was loved as potential bearer; once recognized as lacking, she is repudiated, with the father substituting as the correct object of the same libidinal demand. What promised to diversify feminine experience collapses into a single vector again.
This is not to say that Kofman recites a deterministic indictment. Her method is to keep in play the various lines of force that Freud’s texts themselves develop, even when they cross. She notes, for instance, that Freud’s strong formulations on the “feminine superego” and intellectual “inferiority” appear in the very contexts where he also admits theoretical constructs (“pure masculinity,” “pure femininity”) to be schematic. The insistence on bedrock biological fact cohabits with the confession of fragmentary knowledge, and Freud’s caution about social convention (e.g., shame as culturally variable) coexists with speculative analogies (weaving as masking of anatomic lack). Kofman neither harmonizes nor ridicules these dissonances. She takes them as evidence of a discourse pressed between two obligations: to produce a science of sexuality through a rhetoric of observation, and to defend the coherence of that science against the destabilizing effect of its own discoveries. Her analysis is thus a case study in how a system survives by incorporating what might have negated it, performing a series of conceptual translations by which surprise is preserved as proof.
At the level of case-structure and symptomatic economy, Kofman traces a related logic in Freud’s treatment of narcissism. The famous contrast—man’s “sexual overvaluation” of the object versus woman’s narcissistic need to be loved—does not simply distribute two psychologies; it inscribes a deficit-and-compensation scheme in which female narcissism becomes the afterimage of anatomical lack. Earlier, Freud could wrestle with the fascination aroused by the “self-sufficiency” he attributes to narcissistic women, a libidinal position he sometimes portrays as enviable and dangerous; later, in the rhapsodic supplement to “Femininity,” the same trait is routed back to penis envy as root cause. In Kofman’s reading the effect is to cancel the ambiguity of earlier formulations: the theme of men’s envy of feminine invulnerability yields to a final settlement in which the woman’s very “need to be loved” evidences an original wound. That conversion matters, because it is paradigmatic of Kofman’s larger point: Freud’s text tends to reconsolidate, at the end, what it had allowed to oscillate in the middle.
Kofman’s book is at its most incisive when it reconstructs Freud’s micro-shifts as consequences of the macro-structure of his defense of scientificity. “Observation” is not merely an epistemic warrant; it is a polemical alibi. Freud mobilizes it against Jung’s speculative libido theory and against the suspicion that he himself is “tendentious.” But it is precisely at the moment of his strongest claims to observation—girls’ phallic activity toward their mothers, the mother as primary object, the non-symmetry of the girl’s Oedipus complex—that Freud moves to displace the meaning of what has been seen. The consequence is a differentiated textual economy of delay (long reluctance to write on women; admissions that are “products of the very last few years”) and of haste (publishing “in urgent need of confirmation”), an economy Kofman reads through the figure of danger. Writing on women is exposing a secret whose apotropaic handling resembles, in the dream-work, the partial exposure of a body part (Freud’s dream of the pelvis; the Medusa essay’s grim pairing of fascination and horror). In such scenes the veil is not a moral cover but a structural instrument that allows seeing as if one could see; it is the condition of a looking that does not turn to stone.
Within this economy Kofman reexamines some of Freud’s “anthropological” and cultural gestures. The analogy to the Mycenaean discovery signals both a historiographic ambition (psychoanalysis as archaeology) and a formal risk (the preface swallowed by the book). The weaving conjecture, however eccentric, exhibits the same oscillation between nature and convention that structures the theory of fetishism: a spontaneous “veiling” on the part of the child, a cultural technique of concealment on the part of women. Kofman refuses to rescue or to deride; she tracks how the text negotiates its own embarrassment. The very idea that shame is “more a matter of convention than supposed” sits alongside the proposal that it masks an anatomical deficiency—a conjunction that exposes the pressure to naturalize at the moment one is explaining away. The explanatory surplus, appearing as a string of aphorisms at the end of the lecture, is testimony to the labor of stitching: what is supposed to be bedrock (biology) is patched by a cultural analogy (weaving), and the patch announces itself by its placement as supplement.
This is why Kofman’s critique of Freud’s “strategic bisexuality” is not a denunciation from outside but an immanent reading. When Freud invokes bisexuality to ward off the charge that he devalues women, he both undermines and reinstates sexual dimorphism. The “politely” offered escape hatch—you, madam, are more masculine here—does not escape the normativity it denies; it makes the masculine the very measure of exception. More crucially, as Kofman notes, Freud’s application of bisexuality is asymmetrical: it appears to explain away female protests but is not allowed to trouble the discursivity of the speaker. Thus, a thesis that could have reoriented the theory (by pluralizing determinants) ends up as a diplomatic instrument that calms controversy and preserves the canon.
Kofman is equally attentive to the internal tensions of Freud’s account of doll play, masturbation, and the sequencing of desire. If, as Freud insists, the girl’s early play with dolls is not originally “feminine” but an identification with the mother oriented toward substituting activity for passivity, then the strong claim that the decisive “feminine” wish emerges only with the wish for a penis—which converts the doll into “the father’s baby”—must answer to a puzzle: how, if the preoedipal phase trains activity and phallic identification, does the girl come to acquire precisely those “qualities” needed for the later sexual and social role tied to passivity and the predominance of the vaginal zone? Kofman shows how Freud manages the transition by letting the “specific factor” (penis envy) retroactively reorganize memories and meanings. The earlier material is thus not discarded; it is translated, and in translation its vector is reversed. The theory gains continuity at the price of reinstating the very hierarchy it had threatened to suspend.
The same logic appears in Freud’s handling of ambivalence and hatred. Kofman emphasizes that for Freud the girl’s hostility to her mother does not merely arise as rationalization after the discovery of lack; it has preoedipal roots in the rigors and intimacies of care (toilet, cleanliness) and the girl’s accusation that the mother “seduced” her. Yet, when penis envy becomes central, that hostility shifts from periphery to center, from background to principle, and Kofman suggests that the late theory of the “specific factor” allows hatred—previously one pole in a dynamic—to triumph provisionally. Here she reads Freud against Empedocles (his own preferred analogist in later metapsychology): love and strife alternate in dominance without eliminating one another. The text, however, when aligned to defend the decisive role of anatomical lack, lets strife take the shape of doctrine. That, too, is symptomatic: an “idée fixe” organises the field not by erasing the other force but by making every other force a dependent variable.
What follows from this reconstruction is not an edict to “overthrow” Freud but a challenge to psychoanalysis to regard its own methodological self-descriptions skeptically. For Kofman, what is at stake is the limit of a science that must always negotiate with what it calls “myth,” “speculation,” and “observation.” Where Freud is most anxious to separate himself from Jung—refusing monism, insisting on the dualisms of drive (Eros and death) and of libido (ego/object)—he is also compelled to occupy a rhetorical position that is structurally monistic about the feminine, that is, one in which a single difference (lack) threatens to absorb the multiplicity of feminine experience. Kofman’s question is whether psychoanalysis can avoid reinstalling its object as the same, whether it can hold on to the very surprises its clinical material produces without translating them back into an old language. This is not a foreign demand; it is the demand that Freud himself intermittently recognizes when he admits that “pure” masculine and feminine are theoretical constructs and that what makes for sexual position eludes anatomical description. The path Kofman opens is to take those recognitions seriously as methodological constraints rather than as rhetorical ornaments.
Against that backdrop Kofman situates the cultural and historical horizon in which Freud’s assertions about women are made. She does not reduce argument to milieu; rather, she notes that the internal economy of Freud’s text—its need to assert scientific sobriety, its recourse to the authority of observation, its last-minute supplements—arises in an environment in which the “battle of the sexes” is also a battle over the authority to speak as neutral, impersonal, and lawgiving. Freud’s occasional theatrics—the “I, Truth, speak” tone that Kofman hears in places—are not accidents of style; they are functional in a discourse that knows its claims are contestable and therefore doubles down on the air of impersonal necessity. It is telling, then, that when Freud offers his most “sociological” contentions (e.g., on shame, on the scarcity of women’s inventions), he simultaneously invokes the possibility that what is taken to be nature is mediated by convention. Kofman’s point is not to show contradiction as such, but to make visible the double bind of a theory that knows that its generalities are built from one sex’s available evidence yet seeks to describe what is supposedly for both.
The book’s account of Freud’s own temporality—the delays, the hurries, the shame at self-exposure, the fantasy of immortality secured by publication—converges in a final analogy: to write on women is to risk what Freud associates with forbidden seeing, the Grauen that turns hair gray, the horror of Medusa’s head. Kofman allows this parallel to illuminate without collapsing domains. Her point is not that Freud is terrified of women in a banal way, but that his text manages an approach to an object it renders both indispensable and perilous by erecting conceptual screens (observation; colleague testimony; last-minute addendum) that are formally akin to those screens by which desire veils the unbearable. The theory, then, is also a defense; and the density of Kofman’s reading lies in holding this without reduction: the defense produces knowledge even as it limits it; the knowledge requires defense even as it loosens it.
If there is a verdict here, it is more exacting than exculpation or condemnation. Kofman neither invites us to leave Freud behind nor prescribes a pious fidelity. She insists instead that what Freud’s text calls “feminine” is not a fixed anthropology but a mobile cluster of positions, some of which Freud himself briefly glimpses when he lets bisexuality unsettle identity, when he allows preoedipal attachments to complicate universals, when he acknowledges that his knowledge is fragmentary and that poetry, not science alone, might be needed. The trouble, in Kofman’s reconstruction, is that the very mechanisms by which psychoanalysis produces novelty—surprise, aporia, analytic listening to what “children show if one knows how to look”—are again subjugated to the necessity of a single determinant. Her demand is to hold the aporia open as aporia, to resist the conversion of surprise into proof by a logic that wants too much unity. It is a demand internal to psychoanalysis if psychoanalysis is to be more than a metaphysics performed in the voice of empiricism.
The implications for feminist theory and for psychoanalytic self-critique are significant. If penis envy functions in Freud’s late writing as the fixed star around which descriptive constellations are made to rotate, then any feminist psychoanalysis that would not simply invert hierarchy must interrogate the gravitational field itself. Kofman’s path is exemplary: she does not seek to replace “lack” with “fullness,” nor to deny the empirical materials psychoanalysis has gathered, but to reanalyze the translations by which those materials are made to say what the theory already “knew.” A psychoanalysis that would free itself from the constraints of its patriarchal origins, in Kofman’s sense, must practice upon its own concepts the same interpretive suspicion it once reserved for patients’ narratives and culture’s myths. It must be willing to let the preoedipal remain other to Oedipus, to let bisexuality be more than a courtesy, to let the veil be more than a cover for deficiency—perhaps an index of a relation to truth that is neither exposure nor lie. That is not the abandonment of science; it is its maturity: a recognition that what cannot be “laid hold of by anatomy” may still be thinkable without being reduced.
What makes Kofman’s book indispensable is therefore not simply that it catalogues Freud’s contradictions, nor that it champions an alternative lineage (Klein against Freud, say), but that it models a way of reading psychoanalytic texts that is neither devotional nor iconoclastic. It is rigorous about citation and context, attentive to the tactical functions of method-claims, and alive to the stylistic indices of anxiety and defense. Above all, it honors the negativity that Freud’s own best work compels: the refusal to let a riddle collapse into a solution too quickly. To ask after “woman” as an enigma is, in Kofman’s hands, to discover the structure of the veil “suspended between contraries”—not an obstacle to truth, but truth’s mode of address in a field where exposure petrifies and concealment excites. Her book is therefore a philosophical contribution in the strict sense: it presses psychoanalysis to own the speculative dimension it disavows and to distinguish speculation from systematization by the courage to let surprise stand. The broader consequence is ethical and political. To the extent that Freud’s discourse installs male experience as canon while offering women the status of exceptions, Kofman asks that psychoanalysis take responsibility for its normativity and risk re-founding its universals under the discipline of what its objects say when one knows how to look.
The final effect of Kofman’s study is a difficult clarity. One leaves it convinced that Freud’s texts on women are not reducible to chauvinist prejudice—precisely because their power derives from the interplay of observation and defense, discovery and regression, that Kofman so precisely describes. But one also leaves with a sharpened sense of how a theory can subdue its own astonishment, how an idée fixe can install itself as “scientific necessity,” how even a thesis as potentially liberating as bisexuality can be converted into a stratagem of hierarchy. The challenge Kofman passes on, then, is neither to enthrone nor to abolish Freud’s “femininity,” but to continue the analysis at the point where the text insists that analysis should end. If the enigma persists, it is not because women are unknowable; it is because the forms of knowing that would do justice to their difference have not yet renounced the comforts of a canon. Kofman’s work teaches how to read toward that renunciation without surrendering rigor. It is a demanding lesson, and it leaves psychoanalysis—and its readers—without the alibis on which they have long relied. That, for Kofman, is exactly as it should be.
Simon Gros 
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