Danièle Brun is a psychoanalyst, member of Espace Analytique, and professor emeritus at Paris-Diderot University. She is president of the Société Médecine et Psychanalyse. She is the author of best-selling books such as La Passion dans l’amitié [Passion in Friendship], Les Enfants perturbateurs [Disruptive Children], and Une part de soi dans la vie des autres [A Part of Oneself in the Lives of Others].

If one need only say the word ‘femininity’ for everyone to apparently know what it means, the power it exercises or that which is bestowed on it continues to exude a sense of danger.

For a long time associated with that which makes a woman even more of a woman, often wrongly confused with the feminine, femininity is not an easily graspable notion.

In this book, Danièle Brun, a psychoanalyst, aims to understand the reasons for the relegation to which femininity has been subjected both by feminists and in Freudianism.

Where does this tension vis-à-vis femininity, a notion considered “dangerous,” come from, when Freud was the first to listen to women and to develop his theory from his interpretation of their symptoms? Why does femininity seem so difficult to ponder, even by feminist movements, when it encompasses a promise of self-fulfillment, regardless of one’s gender?

Its manifestation in language, whether in the writing of Marguerite Duras or in the words of patients in psychoanalysis, is a privileged path of access, highlighting this notion, recognizing its qualities, and returning it to its rightful place.