Chapter 4 Sexuality in the Consulting Room

Freud first viewed sexuality as disorganising, a threat to the individual and to society in that it took no account of reality and thus had to be repressed:

The concept of ‘sexuality’, and at the same time of the sexual instinct, had … to be extended so as to cover many things which could not be classed under the reproductive function; and this caused no little hubbub in an austere, respectable or merely hypocritical world.

He moved to a view of sexuality which was less anarchic when he put together sexual instincts and ego instincts. Sexuality, in his later theory, became Eros, “the preserver of all things” (1920, p. 52); it “seeks to force together and hold together the portions of living substance” (1920, p. 60 footnote) and “holds together everything in the world” (1921, p. 92). It cannot be thought of without its opposite, the death instinct, which aims at the dissolution of what is living; “Eros and the death instinct [are] the motivating powers whose interplay dominates all the riddles of life” (1922, p. 340).

French psychoanalysts tend to retain the centrality of sexuality, some putting an emphasis on the early view, others on the late view. Laplanche retained both, giving them different names. Brigitte Eoche-Duval (2009) writes: “Laplanche invokes sexuality in its full demoniacal power to ‘unbind’; for this he uses the French

neologism ‘sexual’ (as distinct from ‘sexual’), contrasting it with the binding tendency of Eros.”

For Laplanche it is the unconscious ‘enigmatic’ messages of the parents that introduce sexuality to the child. He uses the term ‘sexual’ to refer to infantile sexuality which he defines as “what is condemned by the adult” (2007, p. 204). He writes: “what is lacking in both Freud and Lacan is a consideration of the enigmatic dimension, otherness, on the part of the child's adult protagonists: the others of the primal scene” (1995, p. 667). This contrasts with Green for whom “the drive is the matrix of the subject” (1997,