ABSTRACT
The vicissitudes of intimacy have claimed psychoanalysts' psychoanalytic attention from a deeper perspective, owing to their increased knowledge of the more primitive areas of psychic functioning. More freedom, and decrease of sexual inhibition, has implications both in the cases of men who tend to make split object choices and in those who fear intimacy and merging experiences with the object. Feminine sexuality has been considered the obscure area of psychoanalytic theorisations, as though everything regarding masculine sexuality had, instead, been totally clarified. During the years in which transformations in sexual habits were developing, "unisex"—if the author uses a more or less wild analogy—seemed to have become equivalent to "egalite, liberte, fraternite". She returns to the point from which her reflections started, namely to the attempt to understand the underlying vicissitudes of male sexuality. Sexuality in its more mature, genital expressions includes sensuality as the earliest phases of "affection", but entails the emergence of object-directed libidinal and aggressive drives.
