ABSTRACT
Social science students are often set essays on sex and gender which they dutifully deliver in terms of the naturalness of sex and the constructed nature of gender. The biological and the sociological present little difficulty for social science students; they know what’s what. Sex can be thought of in biological terms; gender can be thought of in sociological terms. To introduce psychoanalytic theory is to complicate things because we have to make room for one more reality, this time psychical reality. If psychoanalysis is dealing with quite another reality, it is not surprising that psychoanalysis seems to have nothing to say about sex and gender. What psychoanalysis speaks about is sexuality. Sexuality can indeed be thought of in biological or sociological terms but in neither case does it coincide with Freud’s concept. For Freud sexuality is a drive which inhabits and determines the space of a psychical reality. There is a chasm between this and the concept of sexuality either as instinct or as something determined by the environment.
