Neo-Sexuality

While it is well known to readers of Joyce McDougall, this strange term may seem hermetic to many others. If she introduced it in the context of her research into sexualities, it was because she was unsatisfied with the terms “perversion” or “deviation”, which both have pejorative connotations. She wanted to be able to reflect and work on the different forms of sexuality which, while deviating from dominant norms, are practised between free and consenting adults, and thus sought to re-establish the possibility of neutral and benevolent listening by warning against the widespread tendency to take refuge in normative attitudes. She affirms, on the contrary, that clinically it is indispensable to preserve the patient from the possible value judgements of his analyst. On the theoretical level, this new expression also places emphasis on the creativity at work in the forms of sexualities. The term “neo-sexuality” is, as it were, for the analyst an invitation to engage in research, in other words to reconstruct with the patient the meaning of a sexual scenario rather than confining him from the outset to a pre-established category.

A young woman sought help in connection with difficulties in her love life linked to what she called a “disturbance of sexuality”. Much sought after by men, she had a few adventures in order to put on a good show socially, but was, as it were, absent from herself. In these situations, she did not participate actively in the sexual relationship, but remained inert. Here sexuality was reduced in reality to solitary practices: images ran through her mind that she found unbearable, but which were the only vector that could bring her pleasure. It took her a long time to be able to speak about her favourite scenario, a sort of inversion of the biblical story of Susanna and the elders: she needed to be alone and to imagine that she was giving herself to very old, disgusting and dirty men. The more the scenario disgusted her, the more exciting it was.

Al