ABSTRACT
Despite a seemingly sexually liberated culture, sexuality is still disturbing and puzzling. Freud's original emphasis on the importance of sexuality has largely been lost in much contemporary psychoanalysis, displaced by a focus on ‘attachment’. However, his intuition that sexuality and civilization are in some sense in conflict may have profound implications, throwing light on the nature and function of our linguistic culture and the fetishistic nature of human sexuality. Sexuality, it is argued here, is the paradigmatic object of shame and repression, tending to incorporate all else that is repressed and in opposition to the quasi-linguistic structure of culture. Human beings may tend to long for experience that is unmediated by the linguistic — and this is the promise and the terror of sexuality.
