Six Essays on Sexuality: An Introduction

One hundred years ago it was crystal clear: “Sexuality … provides the motive power for every single symptom, and for every single manifestation of a symptom. The symptoms of the disease are nothing else than the patient's sexual activity. … I never find it otherwise—that sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general” (Freud 1905a [“Dora”], p. 115).

Then these were invariant laws of nature: every neurotic symptom is actuated by sexuality and every symptom represents compromised sexuality. In today's world we assume that no laws are invariant and question whether there is such a thing as “Nature.” In recent years the leading edge of psychoanalytic thought has not been focused on sexuality. In the plenary address that leads off this issue of JAPA, Peter Fonagy refers to our neglect of the subject as long an “open secret.” Yet psychoanalysis, despite this hiatus of recent decades, has hardly given up on its quest to understand sexuality.

In Three Essays Freud (1905b) described the movement of the libido with the metaphor of a waterway whose main channel is impeded (p. 170). The blocked waters first back up, then proceed forward in multiple more or less parallel streams. Progress is achieved, to varying degrees, by flow in the collateral channels. These actions may themselves describe the mode of advance of recent psychoanalytic theory: there is no longer a clearly defined mainstream. While our energies are divided, our present theoretical complexity may be better suited to the objects of our investigations. Sexuality may more readily reveal its remaining mysteries to gentle insinuations from multiple sources than to a continued frontal assault.

In addition to Fonagy's plenary, we have gathered in the pages to follow five new essays on the theory of sexuality that approach our subject from varying psychoanalytic points of view. We have in Fonagy's essay an approach from the angle of attachment, informed and inspired as it is also b