ABSTRACT
The crucial aspect of a psychoanalytic theory of sexuality, in contrast to other theories of sexuality, is that it gives unconscious processes the decisive weight. From this perspective, the cornerstones of our everyday understanding of sexuality—the gender dichotomy and the primacy of heterosexuality—appears by no means self-evident, and actually thwart a psychoanalytic understanding, though they are often found in psychoanalytic theories as well. The concept of infantile sexuality has constitutive significance for the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality. The Freudian thesis of genital primacy has often been criticized as being a conventionalization of psychoanalytic sexual theory. In German since the term "geschlechtlich" designates the sexual in addition to referring to gender. The "suspension" of the difference between the sexes also takes place in sexual experience through the "suspension" of the partial drives, which at the same time are integrated "at a higher level" and thereby preserved.
