Why are women socialised to suppress their desires at all costs?

For the past fifteen years, I have worked as a psychotherapist, choosing a method of practice in which my passion for civic life and social justice takes its rightful place beside work and love in the consulting room.

During this time, I have had the important task of listening, learning, teaching and writing about psychotherapy, and my fascination for what women want has been at the centre of my enquiry.

Sigmund Freud once said: ‘The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”’ 

A psychotherapist-in-training at the time, I was puzzled by Freud’s declaration. Why the founding father of psychoanalysis – a genius yet equally bewildering to me, still – couldn’t answer this fundamental question was a mystery. 

“Ask yourself what will happen if you choose to live with your creative desire empowered. How will it feel?”

Perhaps psychoanalysis was not as I’d imagined after all, and concerned itself instead, as Freud had, with the wranglings of detective work; patients’ life stories shoe-horned into neat theories. Did Freud and his cranky Viennese disciples know something I did not? Was the question, though primarily aimed at women of the Victorian era, still an enigma?

Are we still perplexed by the windows opened in researching women’s desire?

Since learning of Freud’s confusion I have flung open other windows into new worlds, new theories and new understandings of psychotherapy, with each patient bringing their own unique shape, essence and energy to therapy. Perhaps Freud’s classical and remote approach of analysing through the gaze of his male, heteronormative and white privilege didn’t allow him to enter their worlds. How could it? And was he even listening?

That snipe perhaps made you smile, but really, when we listen through ears attuned to race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class and age, we can hear women and how they claim their wanting. Women are not a mystery and neither are our wants and needs. But there is complexity attached to our desire. What I want to understand more deeply is what it is that keeps us in denial, loveless, in a constant state of longing.

As I have seen in my clinical work, women’s forbidden desires foster feelings of shame, depression, self-harm, low self-esteem, emotional starvation and anorexic love. These are longings that are equally heart-breaking and infuriating to bear witness to as a therapist.

To want is to connect with ourselves and with others. It ignites hope, greenlights desire and opens up healing in the dark and dire times when we are warned: Do not want, it’s not safe. Ask yourself what will happen if you choose to live with your creative desire empowered. How will it feel? What will it change? What is possible? And then ask yourself if the feared longing inside yourself is worth challenging.

Extracted from What Women Want: Conversations on Desire, Power, Love and Growth by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung, out today (available from good bookshops, published by Hutchinson Heinemann, £18.99).