ABSTRACT
Jacques Lacan posited that Anna Freud created a new discourse, that of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis of the child, after Freud, has also been subject to these very same normalising and pathologising tendencies. The discursive effects upon sex also pervade the manner in which names that refer to sexual anatomy—in English, but also in other European languages—have been lent Latin terms. When a child presents with sexual symptoms—or symptoms that evoke sex in the mind of the clinician—an external cause of sexuality is often sought through cries of sexual abuse. The glorious time of shameless sexuality smacks to us, from another angle, of an ideal of sexual liberation that is propagated by M. Foucault. Foucault asserts that medicine made a forceful entry into the pleasures of the couple and created a pathology of what it considered to be incomplete sexual practices, that is, those not destined for the supposedly natural end of reproduction.
