The Psychological Nature of Sex

Sex is that which, in the most final way we can discover, constitutes man a man and not a woman, and vice versa. However, this innocuous approach turns out all the sooner to require psychologically more penetrating, as well as embracing, concepts than those heretofore borrowed from biological science. The chances are that they will be more like that which has been regarded as philosophical. Why this is so may appear in the following development.

An adequate conception of sex is important, not only in its own right, but also in virtue of its mid-level position in the psychic structure as the system linking specifically personal with the impersonal systems. That is to say, in its representation of one-half of life vis-a-vis the other, it links the apical system by which one is a single social entity, whether man or woman, with the basal system by which he still more elementally participates in all nature. For this reason detours around one's sexuality are perhaps particularly damaging to the integrity of the total individuality.

If the emphasis of the psychology which most dwells on sex were addressed to this vital position rather than to the supposed ubiquity of sex in the psyche, it would be justified. However, a more fundamental inconsistency in the Freudian understanding of sexuality points to the necessity of a quite new approach.

In one way psychoanalytic sex conception is sweeping. Practically everything seems to mean sexually, as if there were no other equally vital symbol. In the Freudian lexicon, Eros is the symbol not only of sex but of life itself. On the other hand, the apparent assumption throughout psychoanalytic writing and practice is that the real sexual fact is physical copulation. Everything else is taken actually for ersatz, whether as a defensive substitute or as a socially valuable but, nevertheless, sexually denatured sublimation.

Thus the dissatisfaction which many have felt with the psychoanalytic conceptions of sexuality and its place in life ca