ABSTRACT
The critical task for psychoanalytic social theory is not to seek for the glimmerings of human sexuality outside of the social-historical world. The radical mutations brought about through the transition from market to monopoly capitalism have hollowed the emotional core of psychic interiority and instituted new social and ideological determinants of personal identity. Interpreted as a process of 'social incorporation', however, they delineate an approach to ideological consciousness that is far more rigid and inflexible than the internally differentiated social formations that exist in the modern world. Psychoanalysis, as we have seen, shows how gender relations and our sexual world are asymmetrical and unequal by providing a focus on the deep psychic roots of the emergence of separation, differentiation, and the construction of sexual difference. The problem, in brief, is that Lacanian doctrine mistakenly inverts the relationship between the unconscious and object-loss. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
