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This book follows Freud's path in the inquiry into the neurotic symptom. Even after having entered a new century, psychoanalysts must still unravel this symptom in view
of so many attempts to set aside the analytic encounter as old-fashioned and to reject the route of the decipherment of unconscious jouissance, which causes suffering. In Michelena's words, ‘human beings are the only animals with sexual dysfunctions because they are the only ones that stumble once and again upon incest prohibition. This uniqueness transforms the natural into cultural, and instinctive sexuality into enigmatic sexuality’ (p. 41). Sexuality and the enigma about difference as a cause suffuse the pages of this text.
In this book, which reads like a story, the author tells us that what has remained unchanged 100 years after ‘On the sexual theories of children’ (Freud, 1908) is the symptom's questioning value, despite changes in its form linked to the signifying processes of present-day culture. That is how we come across the story of Juan, who was born through in vitro fertilization. The latter symptomizes the belief that couples can conceive a child—and even more than one—just by looking at each other, a phantasy that the author shrewdly detects in the parents' discourse. Hence the popularity of Harry Potter, a modern hero who retains the enigmatic parental origin of Moses, Oedipus, King Arthur, and Superman, updating the neurotic's family romance discovered by Freud.
Psychoanalytic listening and intervention are not recorded here as a remnant of the Freudian past. They come to life through Pablo, Rita, and Marina, who, rather than case histories, are little men and women who suffer and who engage through their suffering the analyst's desire in the process of the cure. For the author wagers on the cure, on leaving behind neurotic tragedies, and on the victory of Eros over Thanatos in her everyday practice. That is why this text differs from other bureaucratized