“The sexual” is one of the four cornerstones of psychoanalysis as described in another one of my posts. Psychoanalysis approaches the matter of sexuality from the perspective of drive, desire, and libido rather than from the perspective of behavior or mechanics. In other words, psychoanalysis does not take up the matter of sexuality in the way that a behavioral psychologist would, or a medical doctor. Furthermore, the psychoanalytic interest in sexuality is not about the way in which early caregiver interactions, or the patient’s infantile unconscious fantasies, have shaped the adult’s sexual behavior or subjectivity. It may be that the patient’s infantile history had a role in shaping the patient’s adult sexuality, but gaining insight about these dynamics is not the aim of the psychoanalytic process. As discussed throughout this website, psychoanalysis effects change through the method of free association which gives the patient an experience that is energetically and beneficially disruptive of that which can be known representationally. Insights are grounded in the field of the representational while the psychoanalytic process is grounded in that which is repressed from the representational.
Psychoanalysis is grounded in a realm beyond the representational. This realm is sexual in the sense that it is associated with, but not identical to, our sensual embodiment and our erotic possibilities. We are alienated from this sensual embodiment as much as we are mentally shaped by it. The idea that our minds emerge from our bodies is not new in psychology or philosophy, although the questions of how this happens remains extremely controversial and without scientific or philosophical consensus. The bias of most natural scientists and analytical philosophers is that there must be a seamless translation of processes from body to mind that has not been discovered yet. Psychoanalysis posits the opposite idea—that there is an unbridgeable rupture in our psyches due to repression as described in the posts above concerning the unconscious, desire, and the oedipal.