You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The psychoanalytic concept of sexuality continues to be misunderstood and confused as something else. For Freud, sexuality does not offer any firm ground where the subject can stand up, walk steadily, move forward easily and travel comfortably to a given destination. It does not ever represent some “thing” that men and women can conquer and/or possess. As a concept, it cannot be compared to gender, which offers culturally and socially reassuring explanations. In contrast, Freudian sexuality, bisexuality and sexual difference cannot be fitted into any model; they do not constitute a guide or a map full of recognizable signs to follow, like heavenly bodies in the firmament. Just the opposite: they produce confusion, anxieties, uncertainty. Sexuality is problematic and conflicting; unconscious desires will never be fully realized. If anything could be said about sexuality, it would be to characterize it as infantile and polymorphous; perverse and not gender-specific. It is also, in part, an unconsciously remembered event: it belongs to a previous moment in the subject’s infantile life, now repeated, never forgotten: … once upon a time. … Suckling at the breast or playing and experimenting with different orifices of the body, for example, reappear in the foreplay of adult sexuality. This link is necessarily unconscious; paradoxically, the knowledge of this connection is not accepted by our consciousness, because it never existed in the first place – except, rather ironically, nachträglich. This irony can also be understood as a tragic joke: sexual pleasure is possible because the connection was, from the beginning, only there in the negative – completely unknown to the subject.1