Sexuality as a narrative genre or dialect in the analyst's consulting room

Psychoanalysis has made an enormous contribution to our knowledge of human sexuality since Freud’s earliest works, and he himself must take the credit for having introduced the concept of psychosexuality (Freud 1905; Green 1995). The notion of ‘sexual states of mind’ (Meltzer 1973) has been equally fundamental. The input of psychoanalysis to theories of infantile sexual development, with the associated fantasies, sexology and the psychogenesis of sexual pathologies has become a shared heritage (Zac de Goldstein 1984; Britton 1989; Eva 1995; McDougall 1995; Sapienza 1995; Rocha Barros 1997; Eizirik 1998; Faria 1998).