ABSTRACT
The meanings of sex in the Oxford English Dictionary all cluster around division, addressing those terms used to indicate the basic division of organic beings into male and female, and the quality of difference it entails. The definition of sexuality is given as “the quality of being sexual or having sex; the possession of sexual powers or capability of sexual feelings; the recognition of or preoccupation with what is sexual”; this is a rather bland if clear formulation. The Freudian conception of sexuality is extremely comprehensive. It disagrees with common psychological accounts of the sexual instinct as a predetermined behaviour, typifying a species, having a relatively fixed object, and with an obvious aim. Infantile sexuality is significant only after the move from unintegration to integration has been effected. In the extensive historical, sociological and anthropological scholarship on the “family”, families always involve relationships that extend, possibly with different meanings and forms, across the generations and across the sexes.
