ABSTRACT
The chapter argues that Anglophone psychoanalysis has departed from Freud’s original focus on unacceptable—and therefore repressed—sexual wishes, to become a theory that describes the nature of infantile experience at the hands of the care-giver. This change has helped psychoanalysis to gain social acceptance, but, in promoting the therapist’s role as a nurturer, it has facilitated a steer away from the disturbing area of erotic feelings in the transference or countertransference.
The ideas of the French analyst, Laplanche, reintroduce sexuality as a potentially disruptive force. This perspective can counteract the normalizing views that have crept into psychoanalysis since Freud, leading to disapproval of sexuality outside stable heterosexual relationships and a designation of homosexuality as perverse. It is argued that therapists must challenge their own feelings of awkwardness and ignorance about variations of sexual practice in order to remain open to understanding patients whose desires are very different from their own.
Some features of contemporary sexual behaviour are considered. In the light of Freud’s binary distinctions between “masculinity and femininity”, it is suggested that a tendency to equate greater openness with the “weaker” “feminine” position can lead to an idealization of “rough” sex at the expense of tenderness.
