On the sense of absence: a perspective on womanly issues

Many women express complaints about their mental capacities which are discordant with objective indicators of superior intelligence and functioning. They find their memories unreliable, for example, despite intense efforts to retain facts or ideas. Using clinical material, the author attempts to elucidate how psychic representation of the vagina can contribute to a sense of mental defectiveness, experienced by certain women as peculiarly feminine. The role of such a psychic representation tends to go unrecognized, given that the female genital is usually conceptualized as an "absence" rather than a presence in its own right.