"It is in the register of the symbolic that femininity comes to acquire its meaning as only its difference from masculinity; and it is not something with a content." This is Juliet Mitchell in 1982 in an interview with the editors of m/f.¹ It is a position that I, as one of those editors, shared at the time. More recently, reflecting on the implications of Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen's questioning of the relation between object choice and identification in Freud's texts,² I began to see that a number of feminine characteristics, passivity in particular, did emerge from Freud's account of the Oedipus complex.