Exploring Core Concepts: Sexuality, Dreams and the Unconscious

2 Are there elements (excluding aggression or destructiveness) that are exclusively non-sexual or is sexuality the unifying idea in your concept of transference? To what extent do you consider transference as sexual or to what extent are there non-sexual factors (excluding aggression)? Is desire an equivalent of sexuality in your clinical conceptualizations?

The concept of sexuality constitutes a pillar of psychoanalytic theory and practice. It is a shibboleth, a fundamental and founding notion that distinguishes psychoanalysis from other disciplines. In the early 20th century, Freud's conceptions and his revolutionary view of sexuality as irreducible to a biological purpose or to predetermined behavioral patterns and dependent, instead, on symbolic power - on the relationship with another speaking, desiring human - opened up a still lively debate. Indeed, by situating sexuality in places unthinkable heretofore - in childhood and the unconscious - Freud asserted the determining effect on human beings of an unconscious libidinal order. Such influence reached not only the establishment and exercise of sexuality in the common sense of the term, but also the various aspects of what he defined as sexual - a set of activities, representations, and symptoms with no relation to sexuality.

Human sexuality develops within imaginary and symbolic intersubjective structures that precede its emergence in the individual. It is regulated by the pleasure/unpleasure pair of opposites, and is manifested through varied modes of desire. Desire differs from need and demand in that it renders satisfaction dependent on fantasized conditions that strictly determine object choice and the organization of activity. According to Freud, the organization and the insistence of unconscious desire are closely tied to the ‘voice of the parents,’ the ‘demands of civilization,’ and symbolic laws (incest and parricide prohibition) that narrow the s