Has Sexuality Anything to Do with Relationality?

Abstract

This paper discusses sexuality in the framework of relational psychoanalysis. Contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, turning away from drive theory, often abandoned sexuality altogether. This paper calls for a return to the centrality of sexuality in understanding the mind, development, and interpersonal/object relations. The author emphasizes a relational approach that highlights dialectical thinking, the third, and that positions sex and sexuality as the link between the intersubjective and the intrapsychic, highlighting the private, internal, enigmatic, and fantastic realm along with the pragmatic, bidirectional, two-person exchange. The paper discusses how our way of thinking and working clinically with sexuality has shifted accordingly.

Notes

¹ Laplanche’s theory on sexuality is an example of one that doesn’t only conceptualize the enigmatic but can be seen as an enigmatic theory in its essence.

² For example, they (2013) added that research indicates infants’ ability to imitate gestures of the experimenter as early as 42 minutes after birth (Meltzoff, 1990, 2007; Meltzoff & Moore, 1997, for a review).

³ Here, Stein adds to Laplanche’s narrower focus on excess as a result of the immaturity of the human psyche in reaction to unconscious transmission of the sexual message, a frame on excess as a function of the Otherness of sexuality.

⁴ I perceive the relational writing style as less intellectualized and more experience near. Therefore, we can locate parallel processes of patterns of arousal and regulation throughout the writing itself (see more in Atlas, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Galit Atlas

Galit Atlas, Ph.D., is Faculty at NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and Faculty at the Four-Year Adult and National Training Programs at NIP. She is the author of The Enigma of Desire: Sex, Longing and Belonging in Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2015) and of Dramatic Dialogue: Contemporary Clinical Practice (coauthored with Lewis Aron; Routledge, 2017). Atlas is the author of articles and book chapters that focus primarily on gender and sexuality. Her New York Times article “A Tale of Two Twins” was the winner of a 2016 Gradiva award. Atlas is a psychoanalyst and clinical supervisor in private practice in New York City.