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On the occasion of his new book, Jean-Louis Baldacci continues his reflections following the thread of his work on sublimation, interpretation and clinical practice. He takes up these themes and articulates them with the issue of sexuality in all its paradoxicality. Indeed, the sexual is paradoxical in its very essence, since it “separates and unites, and is as uncomfortable with chaos as with any excessive arrangements likely to oppose its flexibility” (1).
The author relies on a wide-ranging clinical practice in a most precise and lively way, emanating from different frames in order to illustrate the emergence from splitting and the overcoming of the paradox. The hurdles characteristic of borderline situations in psychoanalysis
can be overcome by a play at the same time transgressive and respectful of the frame, in a space always maintained or rediscovered between seduction and prohibition: going beyond the boundaries to explore the problematic of limits in which conditions and with what risks …
The book is organized in six parts. The first three parts chart the stages of the vicissitudes of the drives, to which the psychoanalytic work of verbalizing provides a progressive opening. In the fourth part, narcissistic deviations of the sexual in borderline situations are discussed, a cause of confinement within a binary functioning of splitting, a source of complications or even the failure of psychoanalytic treatment. Then different modalities of emergence from splitting are studied, using methods derived from classical treatments. Finally, the author questions the figure of the murder of the mother, a fading necessary for giving psychic meaning to the sexual.
By examining the paradox of the sexual, the author takes up Freud’s journey, from the Three Essays to Negation by way of On Narcissism . From the question of the double-face of the economy of the sexual, both the tension of arousal and the discharge of satisfaction, he examines Freud’s efforts to avoid drive