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Sexuality Beyond Consent is a very timely book for psychoanalysis (Saketopoulou, 2023). Published in Routledge's Sexual Cultures series, it returns to the topic some would consider to be psychoanalysis's true innovation—the focus on the centrality of sexuality in human subjective formation, conscious and unconscious. Since Mitchell and Greenberg and Mitchell (1983) work, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, relational modes of psychoanalytic clinical and theoretical practice in the United States have moved further away from a psychoanalysis of the drive. One might even say that in our contemporary field, Freud's “demonic” sexual (Saketopoulou, 2023, p. 72) has become somewhat antithetical to the “relational.”
Saketopoulou (2023) forces us to ask, what are we missing for having done this? Indebted to a Laplanchean framework for understanding the unconscious, in Sexuality Beyond Consent, she returns us to Laplanche's vision of the drive as an “anarchic and intractable force” (p. 73), an “enigmatic message” passed from adult to child, which then becomes a “repressed,” “untranslated residue” that constitutes, in the child, their unconscious. This “remainder” is “constantly pressing for translation”—hence Saketopoulou states more fully:
The sexual drive can never be observed in unmediated form; it only makes itself known derivatively, that is, by borrowing a representational form from elsewhere that will vestigially bind it. More like a force than a carrier of cloistered meanings, the unconscious has an impact rather than a concealed signification—and, as such, it has the density of opacity. (p. 71)
In a description clarifying its succinctness, she makes an important psychoanalytic distinction between the sexual and one's sexuality or sexual identity. The ego “unifies the sexual drives,” she states, placing sexuality in a much more “docile terrain” than “Freud's original emphasis on the infantile sexual … as a force radically contrary and hostile to the ego” (pp. 71-