ABSTRACT
In deciphering symptoms, S. Freud discovers what he calls sexual meaning, but this is coded in terms of the repressed partial drives: oral, anal, etc. The symptom is thus a sexual substitute: due to repression, it is a paradoxically unpleasant way of enjoying. The sexual non-relation, if one believes Jacques Lacan, is "Freud's saying", never formulated by him in an obvious way, but one that can be inferred from everything said by the unconscious that he knew how to gather. Concerning so-called genitality, Freud was interested in its symptomatic failures: frigidity, impotence, the disjunction between love and jouissance in debasement, masculine insensitivity, etc. Lacan's thesis applies to the sexual act and goes well beyond it. Classical theory saw very clearly that the phantasy was at stake in the creation of erotic links with the counterpart, the object of the phantasy underlying "object relations". There is thus a major disconnection between sex and anatomy.
