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This article summarizes sexual development as conceptualized by classical psychoanalysis. The issue of bisexuality and the identifications formed among child and parents is then raised. This broaches the question of "perversion. " That examination leads to the notion of neosexualities, the various sexual solutions to traumatic events linked to sexual excitement and fear, which demands a reassessment of the concept of "perversion."
I would like first of all to reflect upon the place of human sexuality in the psychoanalytic theories of today. For certain schools of thought it is a theory of inter- and intrasubjective relationships with significant objects of the external world; for others it is the concept of an internal psychic world populated by relationships between internal objects; others conceive of sexuality as being comprised of theories of core gender and sexual role identity, and of the relations between the two; for others it appears even to be a theory of analytic practice itself within the transference-countertransference relationship.
Whatever value one may give to these different perspectives, these concepts all tend to occlude the place of sexuality as a somatopsychic universe: the libidinal basis of all sublimations and of the life and death impulses, whether this is manifest in the handling of the psychoanalytic process or in the Freudian metapsychology.
In my book The Many Faces of Eros (McDougall, 1995) 1 was not seeking to add a new theoretical approach to the above perspectives, but simply to emphasize the universality of libidinal impulses and to explore the thousand and one disguises through which our psychosexuality is expressed. Following this line of thought, I proposed in the opening lines of that book that human sexuality is inherently traumatic and forces humankind to an eternal quest for solutions. I shall briefly resume some of the leading notions in this book.
Early Sexuality
In taking as my starting point the dawn of psychic life, I underlined that the first sensual encounter of the baby with the mother's body already gives rise to a multitude of psychic conflicts that arise from the inevitable clash between the infant's internal impulses and the constraints of external reality. As we all know, at this phase of the baby's psychic existence erotic impulses are indistinguishable from sadistic ones; we...