ABSTRACT
When adolescents prolong the difficulties of childhood into the pubertal age, they are confronted by another difficulty they are not ready to face—sexuality and sexual identity. In such situations, the teenager is forced to subjugate sexuality to the omnipotent defensive purposes organised in childhood, rather than expressing it and using it to enrich identity. Since genuine sexual desire signals that successful separation has occurred, if an omnipotent state of non-separation must be defended this most frequently gives rise to frigidity in women and impotence in men. Anorexia and bulimia, for example, are pathologies that mainly concern the feminine and are closely connected with the difficulty of accepting a defined sexual identity. The duality of the couple, the author think, permits each partner to occupy a pole of the sadism–masochism spectrum, and, thus, avoid taking responsibility for the other.
