Psychosexuality and thinking

Abstract

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.”