Psychoanalysis and Sexuality‪.‬

OF WHAT USE IS psychoanalysis for the study of sexuality? By this question, one could mean the following. Of what use is psychoanalysis for uncovering the historically specific legal and theological categories of norms and deviations by which individuals experienced themselves as sexed, gendered beings and their pleasures as sexual pleasure? If that is the question, then the answer is easy to give. Psychoanalysis is of almost no use whatsoever. The kind of psychoanalysis read, studied, and defended by current literary studies (e.g., Freud and Lacan) is burdened by a specialized vocabulary and a tricky logic, so that the insights it tends to produce are legitimately difficult for others to understand. Among psychoanalysts sexuality is at best an inconsistent concept. At worst, the concept is incomprehensible. Throughout his career, Freud unwaveringly insisted that sexuality must accompany the theory of the unconscious. While the unconscious works according to specifiable laws (such as condensation and displacement), it always expresses a wish that is fundamentally sexual. However, it is quite clear that Freud also had a very difficult time explaining what he actually meant. It seems entirely appropriate, in fact most likely necessary, that when in the late 1980s the history of sexuality was instituted as a field of academic study, the main practitioners within this field defined themselves against Freud, Lacan, and that version of psychoanalysis. Anyone who is working on the historical construction of sexuality--on the legal, ethical, theological, scientific, and social organizations of erotic pleasures and especially the ways in which those organizations change over time, across a variety of groups--and is also searching for theoretical support would do better to follow Foucault, who accepted the radical nature of the unconscious but worked very hard to dissociate it from sexuality, or--if inclined to use psychoanalysis--to follow Jung, who argued that the libido is a nonsexualized psychical intensity, akin to Nietzsche's will to power, and that sexuality is to be found in individuals' relations to culturally constructed archetypes. (1) If instead, in asking about the usefulness of psychoanalysis, one means to ask about the value of the study of sexuality itself, then psychoanalysis is of use. However, this assertion needs qualification. Psychoanalysis is not particularly useful because its assertions about sexuality are obviously true. While Freud and Lacan are both very sure of what sexuality is not, neither is very sure at all of what it is. What makes psychoanalysis of great interest to the study of sexuality is this uncertainty. Freud tends to attribute his uncertainty to the newness of psychoanalysis. Ever the scientist, he believes that further concrete research will produce firmer concepts that better grasp reality. Positing language as the site of that uncertainty, and not incomplete research, Lacan attributes Freud's uncertainty to his not developing fully enough the implications of his insights about speaking and representation. By focusing on language, Lacan can describe both uncertainty and sexuality in some detail. But when sexuality concerns the historical and political, Lacan falters as much as Freud. The fact of this faltering says as much about the limits of sexuality as a topic of study as it does about the limits of psychoanalysis. That is, the difficulty that psychoanalytic thought has with sexuality is symptomatic of sexuality itself as an object of critical knowledge and historical analysis.