Abstract

This chapter looks at how Beauvoir appropriates Lacan's account of the family complexes in The Second Sex, and in particular how Lacan's conception of infantile prematurity and instinctual (vital) insufficiency illuminates a conceptual conundrum in The Second Sex, namely the tension between the value of independence, autonomy, and active agency and the suspicion of its origin in familial life, an origin that also provides the foundations for hierarchical sexual difference. The complexities of the cultural/biological interplay in Lacan's Family Complexes essay clarify Beauvoir's appropriation of the psychoanalytic concept of narcissism and its implications for the limits of independence and agency. Lacan's essay reveals ambiguities in Beauvoir's thinking about the ambiguity of freedom.