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The history of the human could be related in terms of being first one, a single encompassing/encompassed unit, then two, the child and his mother, but two is three, and then at least four, then one in the midst of a multitude from whom he must differentiate himself as best he can; or, alternatively, it could be seen as an undifferentiated sphere, though one that is already marked by differences, with a perceiving, enjoying and suffering body; or again as an inextricable mixture of everything and nothing.
In France, we readily call the small child “ma puce”; a “flea” is tiny, but it stings and is irritating. Is the human child irritating from the beginning and terribly disappointing in comparison with what we had imagined? He is at once the bearer of expected perfection and of inevitable disappointment, and this will continue to gnaw at him throughout his life.
To complicate matters, he has a body that it will take him his whole life to learn to inhabit; this body is sexual and the two primordial differences will have to be taken into account. There are grown-ups (adults) and children. And one day he (or she) will have to recognize and accept that he is on one side of the difference of the sexes, a boy or a girl, even if he would like to be both or neither. And, however interesting they may be, “gender studies” can also serve as a screen to avoid speaking about sex and the difference between the sexes, an avoidance that Freud fought against
from the beginning of his career. It has to be said that after his studies on eels, whose sex was so difficult to determine, his arrival in the world of mental illness left him no respite – with Charcot in Paris, with hysterics, women mainly, then with his patients, almost all of whom were women, and then with the women at home.
Freud felt the need to have social or human interactions to take him out of his solitude as a researcher. It was around the age of 40 that he wanted to communicate with a man, a scientist like him, and of t