You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
All of us struggle in our own way in our quest for love and satisfaction. Clashes inevitably arise as we attempt to experience, to tame, to control, and yet to know that sometimes wild, primitive, instinctual, exciting and creative inner force. Discord also arises as psychoanalysts continue their struggle to grasp the essence of this force, a force that has been called sexuality. Of all the aspects of human nature that have preoccupied psychoanalysts for over a century, sexuality takes centre stage. That the debate continues is, in part, because of our heritage from Freud, for there is tension within Freud's theories of sexuality—a mind-body tension, a tension among differing hypothetical levels of theory, and a tension caused as different subjects are classified as one.
The mind/body question dates at least as far back as Descartes. Freud's (1905) proposition of an ‘endosomatic’ force, libido, as central to the workings of the mind, brought that debate to the centre of psychoanalysis. While this ‘endosomatic’ force was purely hypothetical, Freud's theory was also a clinical one, as he was convinced that ‘the most significant causes of every case of neurotic illness are to be found in factors arising from sexual life’ (1898, p. 263). Concerns about the effects of erotic excitement, sexual urges and related unconscious conflicts on psychic functioning were central to all models of the mind that Freud proposed. In thinking that ‘anatomy is destiny’ (1924), Freud's interests turned to the concept of self. He ascribed distinctly separate biologically determined destinies to man and to woman. On the other hand, he separated ‘physical sexual characters’ and ‘mental sexual characters’ (1920, p. 170), and exploring ‘the psychical consequences’ of anatomical distinctions (1925), he insisted that psychological sexual features be distinguished from anatomical ones. He noted that contradictions arise as both women and men experience male and female parts of their character; thei