In ‘Civilization and its Discontents’ Freud went so far as to suggest a disturbance of human sexuality, not of a contingent, but of an essential kind, and one of his last articles concerns the irreducibility in any finite analysis of the sequellae resulting from the castration complex in the masculine unconscious and from penisneid in the unconscious of women. It is only on the basis of the clinical facts that any discussion can be fruitful. These facts reveal a relation of the subject to the phallus that is established without regard to the anatomical difference of the sexes, and which, by this very fact, makes any interpretation of this relation especially difficult in the case of women. One might add here that male homosexuality, in accordance with the phallic mark that constitutes desire, is constituted on the side of desire, while female homosexuality is orientated on a disappointment that reinforces the side of the demand for love.