Editorial

On the face of it, it looks as if the central place of sexuality in psychoanalytic theory has been eroded away together with the shift from phallocentrism to matrocentrism over the course of the century. It is startling to think that a theory firmly founded on biology, the libido and psychosexual stages leading to genitality could evolve into something apparently so different, focused on the infant-mother relation and a life and death drive. What has happened to infant sexuality, or adolescent and adult sexuality for that matter, as major factors in psychopathology? Can sex have become, in our liberated culture, something we take for granted, or so peripheral as to be marginalized out of the picture of psychoanalytic concerns, giving precedence, perhaps, to issues around aggression?

From a number of viewpoints within psychoanalysis sexuality remains central, notably seen as essential in theories about hysteria and perversion. For the BJP 1995 Annual Lecture last October, Juliet Mitchell and Estela Welldon teamed up to speak about these areas, locating the source of symptoms and personality disturbance in sexual conflict and anxiety. It seems to me that further effort to develop and enrich our understanding of mature sexuality needs to be made, in order to round out and articulate a fully fledged object relations theory, perhaps following the lead of Ethel Spector Person on romantic love and Otto Kernberg on the erotic.

In the first paper in this issue, Alan Lidmila writes about the term ‘psychodynamic’, employed so ambiguously and often politically. He suggests a more precise reformulation of the term that recognizes the diversity of analytic practice. The next paper looks at how psychoanalytic concepts have permeated our language to create clusters of meaning. Moving into the area of discourse analysis, Ian Parker relates the way in which psychoanalysis has entered postmodern culture and language in the form of ‘discursive complexes’, organized systems of meaning tha