Psychosexuality and thinking

ABSTRACT

The question is posed of why psychosexuality can still act as a stumbling block to the acceptance of psychoanalysis. The basic idea of the psychoanalytic concept of psychosexuality is important in that it is capable of showing how the sexual identity of the individual underlies all his interactions with the external world, whether sexual in nature or not. Three authors are referred to, each approaching the subject of human psychosexuality from a different perspective: Laplanche with his theory of the ”enigmatic message” that is processed by the adult to the child and by the child to infantile sexuality; reflections by Triest on psychosexuality as the vertex of a pendulum between self-reference and object-reference, which, negating each other in a dialectical movement, form the matrix of subjective experience; and behavioral-biological reflections by Lincke: Biologically predetermined instinctual dispositions, due to a ”rift” between the bodily and the psychic processes of maturation, come into opposition with matching biological inhibitions, and must therefore be transformed into the spiritual dimension of human psychosexuality via introjective processes. Thinking and our physical being-in-the-world are therefore indissolubly linked, and this may account for the continuing resistance to the psychoanalytic theory of psychosexuality, for its ”unthinkability.”

KEYWORDS:

• Psychosexuality
• drive
• third position
• metaphorisation of the corporeal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Notes

1. The concept can be compared with Betty Joseph’s concept of the ‘total situation’. However, Lorenzer’s conceptualisation goes far beyond the clinical scope (cf. Niedecken 2018)

2. The idea of transformation into metaphor is not new. Freud himself, and in particular Melanie Klein (cf.), have often observed how organ sensation transforms into metaphor in a variety of ways and how drive therefore expresses itself in phantasy. Lincke refers closely to Freud, not to Klein. He goes beyond both, however, insofar as he postulates the ‘rift in the human developmental plan’.

3. Those scenes were reported to me by the adults who observed them, the child’s mother in the first two, the aunt in the third example.

4. This scene can of course also be interpreted as a working through of a primal scene.