ABSTRACT
The purpose of sexuality is inseparable from the questions surrounding it. As Jean-Claude Rolland remarks, after others, psychoanalysts have to bring about the coexistence of sexual excitation ‘in a raw, traumatic state’ and on another level, language, ‘the privileged tool of that drive-elaboration’. Sexuality seems especially suited to occupying the central role, because it alone of all psychical functions belongs justifiably to a mechanism of disappearance and return. Analytic intuition, based most firmly on experience, leads psychoanalysts to note here at once the irreducible conjunction of incompatibles, and the impossibility of overcoming the contradiction by getting rid of one of the two orders—the biological and the psychical—suffering from the proximity of its troublesome neighbour. By Trieb is provisionally to be understood the psychical representative of an endosomatic, continuously flowing source of stimulation, as contrasted with a ‘stimulus’, which is set up by single excitations coming from without.
