Editorial

Freud complained he was accused of being too “one-sided in our estimation of the sexual impulses” . But has it gone the other way? Has sexuality virtually disappeared from contemporary psychoanalytic thinking and literature?

What psychoanalysis means by ‘sexual’ and ‘sexuality’ is far from straightforward. It is often forgotten that Freud insisted psychoanalysis should speak of psychosexuality, stressing that the mental factor in sexual life should not be overlooked or underestimated. The body is always mediated by the psychical. For this reason, nothing about sexuality is simple or as it appears. It might be easier to say what sexuality is not. Sexuality, from a psychoanalytic point of view, is not simply about behavior and the manifest. It is also not about biology. Freud writes, “from the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature” (footnote p 144 added in to the Three Essays 1905). It is clear from Freud's final idea about the fundamental refusal of the feminine in both sexes that we cannot speak of a simple dichotomy between male and female. Sexuality goes beyond issues of gender and identity and beyond the choice of object. It has to do, as Blass writes (this issue footnote to her paper) with ‘the person in so far as he is a sexual, instinctual, desiring, psychological being’.

Psychoanalytic developments also moved away from sexuality as that which needs to be uncovered, to sexuality as serving defensive purposes, used to avoid psychic pain and to deal with anxieties of a psychotic nature. Sometimes in the literature the topic of sexuality is reduced to questions of gender identity. Other times, trauma is seen to displace phantasy, or a focus on attachment replaces a focus on drive. Certainly the non-neurotic pathologies (borderline, psycho-somatic etc.), which make up a large proporti