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Freud places sexuality at the centre of psychic structuring and hence of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The defence mechanisms that reveal the presence of the drives are part of this concept of sexuality. I shall discuss one mechanism, disavowal, in terms of both its structuring function in shaping the subject and its pathogenic dimension. On the basis of changes in the imaginary social being (Castoriadis, 1983) and their implications for pathology, I draw a parallel between a prominent feature of today’s society, namely a degree of flexible correspondence between antinomies (Lipovetsky, 1983, p. 11), and the important pathology of disavowal, the metapsychological and dynamic facets of which I shall describe with a clinical vignette.
The concept of sexuality, which Freud (1915, p. 117f.) describes as fundamental, includes but goes beyond genitality. Involving the most radical expression1 of the structuring symbolic level of the psyche, sexuality maintains the essential division between conscious and unconscious aspects in the psychic subject by drive repression and emergence of the unconscious wish.
The roots of psychic conflict lie in driverelated functioning, whose field, between wish and defence, constitutes the singularity of each subject and is simultaneously moulded by the parents’ wish. Libido, sexuality and psychic organisation therefore all partake of the same substance. An indispensable other always manufactures symbolic regulations that bind the subject into civilisation. Every threat to the subject is sexual, because sexuality is constitutive of the psyche and the unconscious. Furthermore, we constitute ourselves with reference to the other, who wishes us to live.
Genitality is an effect of structuring, which takes account of the unconscious configuration of the wish. In the social sphere, we recognise it in the ethics and aesthetics of the link between men and women. Acceptance of the difference between the sexes is