ABSTRACT
A brief recapitulation might help us situate where we are today in relation to our point of departure. In his discovery of sexual aetiology, Freud brought together various currents:
The making-visible of something not previously known about: the role of sexuality in symptoms.
The discovery of the function of the dream as the realisation of a desire whose origins lie in childhood, transposed to the present. Hidden desire was also discovered in what was named the ‘formations of the unconscious’. Here, the effects of control and censorship are relaxed, desire emerges governed by the pleasure/unpleasure principle which is linked to infantile sexuality.
The discovery of infantile sexuality, the description of libidinal development and of the conclusion to that first flowering of sexuality: the Oedipus complex. Perversion is elevated to the rank of a paradigm: it is the positive form of which neurosis is the negative. It is traced back to infantile sexuality as the norm which accounts for its polymorphous nature, in relation to which the various perversions found in the adult are failures of evolution, fixations.
The (deferred) recognition of transference love.
The conceptualisation of sexuality as in conflict, as something always opposed by forces of equal strength, which take over from one another. This constitutes repression and the unconscious, and forms an imperfect protection for the ego (thus occasioning anxiety).
Here, let us leave aside what later happens to these theoretical foundations, to underline simply that sexuality is the basis 9on which the psyche is built; the sexual drive is what supports the psyche. It can only emerge from a situation of conflict. Although the sexual drives are always in an antagonistic relation with another group of drives—the identification of which will prove more laborious and will undergo several transformations along the way—there will always be a tendency to confuse drive and sexuality, the latter appearing to complete the model of drives and thus often raising a question regarding the pertinence of using the same term, ‘drive’, to nominate the group situated by Freud at the opposite pole of sexuality (thus, the case of the so-called death drive).
6. A set of factors affecting consciousness—amnesia, repression, censorship—has the continual effect of minimising the influence of the sexual to the point of denying it, or at least relativising it in relation to other factors.
7. The particularity of what is human makes it necessary to speak, in more than one sense, of psycho-sexuality. While this term has not yet been given sufficient clarification, it accounts for a group of characteristics:
Its role as the driving force of psychical development, which thus attributes to pleasure an importance unprecedented in any theoretical system which takes man as its object. One of the criteria differentiating man from the animals is the constant pressure of the sexual drive throughout human life, punctuated by critical moments, in contrast to the periodicity, within pre-established time limits, in higher mammals. Psycho-sexuality follows the model of pre-established development, with its characteristic diphasic evolution, and likewise is subject to physiological re-reinforcement. The biological fact of sexual difference becomes the expression of a psychical bisexuality in every individual (cf. the work of Christian David—David 1992). Infantile sexuality assumes its first definitive form with the Oedipal organisation which structures bisexuality.
The transformation produced by the intervention of the imaginary in man changes the nature of psycho-sexuality, opening 10onto the constitution of desire, which relates as much to the absence of the object as to its investment in the encounter.
The combination of the two previous kinds of elements may lead to veritable ‘causal’ systems, which will furnish children with intellectually-argued explanations of the ‘facts of life’; it will produce infantile sexual theories.
Repression (which functions to preserve things) and the unconscious (which ignores time) allow the resurgence or the re-activation of infantile conflicts, undoing temporary resolutions.
It is not hard to see that we have deliberately left aside the more problematic aspects of the Freudian architecture in order to highlight its more striking features.
Let us conclude this chapter with two remarks:
Right through the development of his work, Freud encountered problems linked to the theorisation of those aspects of the psyche which seemed not to be based in sexuality, aspects which were most often envisaged as in competition with it. He always established the part played by the sexualisation which affected these formations or structures before he was able to set out the antagonism which characterised their relation to sexuality (that of self-preservation, the ego, the moral conscience, aggression, sublimation, etc). One can thus, indeed, speak of a theory of sexuality generalised from its specific mode of action to its human characteristic, of its de-territorialisation—linked to the temporal de-synchronisation which is a function of its prematuration—and its potential for combination and transformation.
Freud’s growing preoccupation in the later stages of his work with psychosis (to which one could add narcissistic neurosis represented by melancholia), and the awakening of his interest in social phenomena (from 1921) which expands relentlessly, in no way lead him to distance himself from the sexual, although its pre-eminence seems compromised by the role of destructivity. Freud seems more concerned to find the conceptual bridges which would assure the continuity of the role of the sexual: masochism (conceived as originary) and fetishistic splitting (which obliquely illuminates psychotic fragmentation) bear witness to this.
