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1 What are your implicit or explicit thoughts about sexuality and how do these thoughts enter the psychoanalytic situation? In other terms how primary is sexuality in your thoughts about the clinical situation?
To answer the question we must separate two sexualities; the adult and the infantile. This division was mandatory to Freud's theorizing. As for adult sexuality, I do not think it is primary or omnipresent in the psychoanalytic situation. Simply put, I do not think my patients are constantly fantasizing about having sexual intercourse with me. Such misconceptions belong to the world of cartoons, not to daily psychoanalytic practice.
On the other hand, I regard infantile sexuality as an undercurrent in every analytic situation. It constantly fuels the analytic process - and it may obstruct it as well. Helping the patient to find ways of negotiating her infantile sexuality within the constraints of reality is one essential goal of psychoanalysis. Three major experiences have led me to increasingly recognize the impact of infantile sexuality in analysands of whatever age: re-readings of Freud's Three Essays of Sexuality, working with mothers and babies in psychoanalytic treatments, and studying Jean Laplanche's theories.
I used to feel bewildered by the cumbersome language of the Three Essays and Freud's efforts at anchoring drive theory within a pseudo-medical theory. Today, I manage to see through these obstacles to discern the book's main message. Already the thumb-sucking infant is in conflict. The child's survival is inextricably linked with becoming a sexual being. This would be no problem were it not for the fact that the nursing mother cannot but partly satisfy her child's sexual drives. Thus, sexuality throws the baby into conflicts with himself and with the mother. Freud depicts survival, pleasure and conflict as the three corners of the triangle of human life. This triangle becomes personified by the protagonists of the Oedipus complex.
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