ABSTRACT

Sigmund Freud deplored the fact that some people had characterised psychoanalysis as ‘pan-sexualism’ and had blamed psychoanalysts for attributing every human phenomenon to a sexual conflict. Freud had serious doubts that such a normalisation was altogether possible, despite his distinction between a pathological and a normal sexual life, and although he tried to account for the normal development of masculinity and femininity. For Jacques Lacan, castration represents the introduction of sexual difference and of the genealogical order in an undifferentiated condition, through the intervention of the symbolic law, which is the Oedipus complex itself. In many countries, sex offenders are often treated by aversion therapy, in which an existing sexual practice - let us say transvestism - is first unlearnt and subsequently supplemented by the stimulation of genital and preferably heterosexual ‘arousal’.