ABSTRACT
The sexual remains one of the crucial themes in contemporary psychoanalysis; it also remains one of the 'shibboleths' of Freudian psychoanalysis. But its central importance is in fact under threat from certain developments in Anglophone psychoanalysis that, especially under the banner of narcissism and 'self' analysis, are strangely diminishing its impact and scope of reference. In other words, it seems to me that the evolution of psychoanalytic thought leads us to place increasing emphasis on a processual dimension of the sexual, on the sexualisation or desexualisation processes that psychic material is likely to encounter 'in the course of psychic events'. The pivot of this 'sexualisation' is so-called 'phallic' sexuality. One of the key characteristics of the 'phallic' organisation is to generalise sexualisation, to apprehend everything, in a concern for integration and completeness, in terms of the binary phallic-castrated opposition, that is to say to interpret and 'sexualise' everything according to this model.
