ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the political potential of sexuality and the way psychoanalysis may help realize it. Psychoanalysis conceives of sexuality as based on both libidinal and destructive drives. The drives are blind forces that soon encounter objects, along with the social norms and constraints that envelop those objects. Psychoanalysis describes the tension between drives and norms and seeks to heal the symptoms provoked by it. However, psychoanalysis takes a rather descriptive posture that implicitly accepts the current norms as they are without suggesting that they be changed. This position has provoked various criticisms against psychoanalysis, which is considered as either too conservative or too revolutionary. It is conservative since it accepts social norms as they are, but it is also revolutionary since it describes how the drives transgress and transform these norms and thus provides the means to social change. Moreover, this tension within psychoanalysis echoes the duality of two drives: Thanatos and Eros. These always work collaboratively, and a utopian vision of society tends to overlook the inherent place of destruction within human life. To understand and realize psychoanalysis’s political potential, we need to understand the complex array constituted by the drives and the diverse mechanisms that they use. Finally, the example of the #MeToo movement shows us how the psychoanalytical understanding of sexual traumas not only exposes the forces behind social norms but also enables this movement to transform them.
