Beauty and femininity: a psychoanalytic view

This article refers to a study on the themes of ideal beauty and femininity in order to investigate what is the possible psychic function that the ideals of beauty in culture have served in the constitution of the feminine. As a historical and conceptual study, it was carried out a literature search on the structuring of femininity in psychoanalysis and the relation of women to the ideals of beauty since the Middle Ages until the present. From the reflections aroused, we can say that the function the ideal of beauty has on the structuring of femininity is related to the singular experience of the psychic constitution, determining the relationship that women set up with that ideal. If fruitful, beauty can be conceived as one of the ways femininity elaborates castration. However, if enslaving, beauty seems to be an attempt to cover the absence, a refusal to castration. It is assumed in this case the existence of an unconscious conflict related to a flaw in the constitution of the ideal ego and, from an idealized image, women seek to attract the gaze of another, which is represented by the maternal gaze.

Personality traits; Castration; Femininity; Psychoanalysis