ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis has exhausted itself for too long in opposing the theory of drives to that of object relations. The sexual continued to be given the closest relation to the essence of the psyche, while its function was rethought within a different framework. The mutual relations of these elements will illuminate the process of psychical organisation and its potentials for disorganisation. These elements are: excitation, fantasy, language. Once post-Freudian psychoanalysis had brought about a partial disjunction of the sexual from the psychical, it was not only psychoanalytic theory which felt the consequences; our idea of the erotic was also muddled up once it was no longer accepted that libido constituted the basis of the psyche. The desire to put psychoanalytic theory back on the rails led Jacques Lacan to propose, in effect, an alternative to S. Freud’s thought. The generalisation of the triangular model for every individual is a fairly widespread assumption in French psychoanalysis, due to Lacan.
