Sexuality, this unthought for psychoanalysis – which should remain so (2020)

Sexuality, this unthought for psychoanalysis – which should remain so

Internet publication, September 2020.

“Psychoanalysis is not sexology!” The statement is true, but reciting this mantra is not enough, nor does it curb the question at hand here, namely sexuality as it is thought, or unthought, by psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis, which never ceases to activate the endless writing of the conception of “the sexual” (in the sense of the beyond-the-genital that Freud gave it), from this angle of distinction from sexological considerations (in the sense of practices and behaviors), may have believed itself incapable of treating “sexuality” (not defined by the Freudian field), that it did not hold its attention, that it did not have to pronounce upon it or rule on it, except by renouncing its principle of neutrality, as it has nevertheless done throughout its development.

This has paradoxically contributed to the pan-sexualist critique addressed to it elsewhere, serving as a camouflage for the moralism that had affected it just as much, even to the point of puritanism; resistance has its reasons; not as Psychoanalysis as a whole, but rather through the expression of certain practitioners identified by their dubious ideological initiatives. It is enough to remember, for example, the status of the “tacit rule” established in 1921, which sought to exclude homosexual individuals from training for the function of analyst. Non-regulatory, but all the more effective, it only officially disappeared at the turn of this century, without however being “abolished” in the words of E. Roudinesco. Indeed, how can one separate oneself from the effects of an unspoken word, a taboo, a perverse concealment such as this unofficial rule adopted by the Secret Committee, based on obscure motivations?

More recently, the debates in the French Parliament, during the discussions on the bill establishing marriage for all couples, illustrated a certain use of Psychoanalysis and its theories for political ends, by political representatives and many psychoanalysts motivated to support a certain vision of the world, against all expectations of the public or their colleagues. All against psychoanalysis in experience, so far from the psychoanalytic clinic, so close to social and political ideology.

Thus, it is easy to consider that sexuality poses a question to psychoanalysis and its practitioners (analysts and analysands), to the point that the absence of a definition of this notion founded on the support of unconscious knowledge seems to legitimize, or provoke, various conceptual, ideological, and moral positions in the public space, in societal debates. Certainly, Freud had a fine career in the sexual (not in practices), on the one hand, thus distinguishing the field of psychoanalysis from other disciplines, and Lacan was able, on the other hand, to emphasize in the late 1970s that we had not yet begun to say what “sexuality” is in relation to the sexual; it is not a far cry to consider that the experience of psychoanalysis seems incompetent to perform this task.

 

This has not encouraged the idea that sexualities, in their diversity, could be taken into consideration other than through the prism of singularity, of the case, by psychoanalysts and their institutions. At the risk, of course, of setting aside a necessary reflection on non-majority sexualities. Not avoiding certain collective positions on individual, absurd questions. Favoring at the same time that all identity emergences be invited to make themselves heard, whether conservative or modernist, within the psychoanalytic movement and outside of it; where psychoanalysis’s concern for civilization and its malaise can be interpreted as a universalist adherence harmful to the subject, generating subjective emergences, philosophically justified and legitimate, ever further from the subject of the unconscious.

 

At the risk of surprising, I have come to maintain that opposing adoption or marriage for all couples debates the same point as the defense of queer psychoanalysis, namely a position claiming the Phallus — easily confused with phallic stakes. Where quite clearly knowledge thought through the academic or scientific prism serves as a student cap to be seized, so as not to not have it. This is in itself a problem for this gender theory, this “failed feminist theory” that psychoanalysis is for G. Rubin.

Furthermore, do the intelligence of the formations of the unconscious and the knowledge constructed in analysis have time to waste on these deceptions? Where reified identity can block psychoanalysis, in the actuality of its experience, from still being a vector of social, cultural, political, and economic transformations, through the effects of unconscious knowledge and not the reflexive or humanist knowledge so promptly put forward.

Phallic stakes, which are indeed at the center of what agitates these debates here, open up to being surpassed from Freud with castration, to the not-all phallic with Lacan, to name only these two gentlemen. The refusal of the feminine, another way of putting it, whether it takes the form of misogyny, homophobia, or transphobia, never ceases to be at work in the world in general, but also in circles interested in psychoanalysis, at the University as well as in psychoanalytic institutions (associations or schools).

Its elaboration is not closed; we can continue to nourish it. Thus, we are justified in saying how psychoanalysis thinks about sexuality, if not saying what it thinks of it, if only by engaging in the treatment of this question through the outcome of an analysis, at the end of which various modifications are expected, of which it would be curious not to be able to identify some capable of accounting for the effects of the cure on sexuality.

Which invites us, more interestingly, to state the goal of analysis and its stake in terms of subjective positionings in the sexual landscape, based on the situations of man or woman or others that present themselves in language, confirming in passing that neither culture nor anatomy is intended to instruct a subject’s choices, except by wallowing in politics.

 

Before the years 2005-2010, few psychoanalysts in France engaged in discussion with the notions of gender or queer. Almost fifteen years later, at least three generations of psychology university students have been introduced to some considerations of gender, feminist questions, or LGBTQIAPK+…

Psychoanalytic institutions or schools, outside the University, have welcomed this question, often leaving traces of this encounter in internal publications or monographs, and university theses now defended. Sexual questions are once again highly coveted in the psychoanalytic field at the beginning of this 21st century, stakes of theoretical knowledge against a backdrop of clinical considerations. For or against, according to a usual bi-polarization of debates, imposes itself as a dual distribution where identity positions are erected, supposed to account for completed and incompatible conceptions. Closure on one side against openness on the other, the consideration of subjectivity on one hand, against the barred subject on the other. The apparent war between modernists and classists does not well hide the inconsistency of their two approaches. The unconscious remains politically incorrect , this against majorities and against minorities, regardless of the value of their respective claims, however legitimate they may be in denouncing or claiming or expressing this or that.

 

The discourses nourished by these impulses make complaints heard; they interest the analytic ear in this respect, where distress founds ethics. But being a minority is the only way to speak on the couch, alone in saying what will liberate from the yoke of the Other, when separation has taken place instead of the initial alienation. A minority, protest, analysand discourse. Such is the possibility of the Psychoanalytic discourse which cannot be confused with that of the University, the Hysteric, or the Master.

There is no need to hesitate when it is appropriate to criticize moralistic conservatisms, without needing to summon the theory of psychoanalysis for all that, especially if we are sure of its avant-garde scope and its perpetual questioning of the established, of semblants. But it is no more useful today than yesterday to submit unconscious knowledge to cultural, political, or economic appreciation: no compatibility is to be expected on this side, because there is no continuity between psychoanalysis in intension (the cure of the one) and psychoanalysis in extension (what it does to others). Of this we can be sure now; the Freudian and Lacanian experiences, both at the level of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and the experience of the “passe” in psychoanalytic schools with and after Lacan, have proven it. There too, the quantity and quality of written traces are sufficient to support this.

It would be better if the uses of gender in the cure, its handling in the transference, were more rigorously explored and documented, to say with the words of psychoanalysis what it allows to be constructed, undone, and dealt with in the unconscious.

The psychoanalytic world has commented extensively on gender theorizations, viewing them like dubious door-to-door salesmen. Sometimes, it has been able to affirm openings. Most of the time, it has remained silent regarding the possibility of theorizing within itself what gender, queer, or LGBTQIAPK+ questions have submitted to it, not leaving it unscathed. It should, however, be deepened, because for example, saying what gender is in psychoanalysis has made it possible to rule on “sexual orientation”, another delicate notion, where the experience of analysis determines that it cannot have meaning, thanks to the use of gender in the cure. And other things still that only the deepening of clinical experience allows to enrich through its delicate theoretical elaboration and its passage to the public outside of political or institutional stakes. Relaunching the unfinished definition of sex, through the trouble that gender induces, has made it possible to account for the creation of the new sex as a possible construction of the cure. This is no small thing, if it is of interest, to consider that every cure leads to a new sex for each analysand, and to imagine what we can deduce from this about the sex of the analyst in function, or rather what does not exist of the analyst’s sex when they function as an analyst for another. The theoretical and ideological consequences are still very little explored in this direction, even though we have much to say and formulate about the effects of this return of knowledge on the sexual that gender signals, a return of knowledge put into circulation by psychoanalysis which returns to it from the social (so to speak) with some knowledge and some truths in its baggage about the initial propositions that the Freudian experience began to make known to the greatest number, who do not fail to react and come to speak in the offices to move the Schmilblick forward.

 

Stating the goal of analysis, and the way to appreciate it when it is reached, remains a challenge as productive as it is impossible; approaching it through the question of the end of analysis does not relieve it. Goal and end do not merge, nor do they even draw closer; they outline an interval where answers are attempted.

What the cure aims for and how this is constituted into knowledge has not finished being interrogated, in each of the cures conducted, for each analysand, and therefore questioning analysts and their analytic institutions. This applies just as much to cures leading to analytic practice as to all others, because if the notion of passage to the analyst — which does not coincide with the end of the analysis — has not finished putting psychoanalytic schools and institutions to work, it allows no decisive progress on the term of the cure — its construction —, whether it be finite or infinite.

The history of the psychoanalytic movement bears witness to the weight of this matter, nourished by theoretical and clinical ruptures and cleavages for more than a century on this subject, where dozens of rather irreconcilable conceptions have clashed. This colossal, omnipresent project has overshadowed other questions relating to the cure, its goal, its term, notably on the side of the sexed being that is the analysand and what they can carry, by way of changes, at the end of their analytic journey — whether they have become an analyst or not.

Thus, the question of the analysand’s sexuality can be posed by moving slightly away from the goal and the end of the cure to prefer the stake of the cure, more likely to keep the debate open rather than seeing it close under the weight of criteria or norms that would have to be defined and accepted. What is the stake of a cure for a man? For a woman? What changes would be hoped for from the cure of one, from that of the other? What modifications regarding sex, sexuality? Is the analysand a sexed being? The possible answers do not flow naturally.

 

In the light of my analytic experience, I find for the time being only to add to my definition of gender in psychoanalysis these two formulations: To be a Man like a woman is the stake of every man’s cure. To be a Woman without a Man that of every woman’s cure. How did I get here?

With gender, it has become possible to lift sex from where it blocked our access to the sexuation of the subject, yet illuminated by Lacan in the 1970s. This could not be as well identified and supported in the cure before. The blocked view, largely reinforced by a signifier conception of sexuation where most analysts want to read what it is for the man and the woman in their relationship to the phallic function and to jouissance. Ignoring the detachment of the anatomical flesh from this or that signifier, this or that jouissance. Lacan did not know how to make it heard that his formulas of sexuation were even more queer than he looked like an eccentric. To help understand, and it is still an impasse in our practice, a man side and a woman side have been maintained in the reading of the table of said formulas, somewhat in the same mode as the official formulation of the Oedipus Complex leaving as the only alternative that of the exception, of the minority taking a path “inverse” to the norm. Also, jouissances, phallic or not-all, as well as the relationship to the phallic function rather than to the Phallus itself, the subject in analysis before considering gender had little access to an analytic function (in their analyst) capable of opening to the identity beyond of the identity passed through the sieve of identifications. Deprived of this identity field, not defined by psychoanalysis, the analysand subject could not bring to the horizon of their analysis the opportunity for a beautiful escape from identities linked to sex or gender, where the profusion of signifiers opens up as a sign of creations, not dilutions. Neither man nor woman in sexuation, not even as signifiers, is a necessary basis for anyone who wants to read and use the formulas, so as not to lose sight, even before getting to work, that bodies sexed by biology are only situated by sexuation as psychoanalysis can think it, the signifier only ensuring to represent the subject for another signifier and not for the account of truth or the cause of desire.

For the analyst does not think. Where they function, in their chair, they are not. How could they think about sexuality? The unthought of sexuality, which the analyst embodies, through psychoanalysis is perhaps not avoidable, nor even to be resolved, in view of these considerations. Sexuality seems too well caught up with reality, reality in general and psychic reality in particular, to be reliable or useful in the analytic colloquy. Especially since the sexual non-relationship is maintained, and with it that the real of sex is no less impossible and unthinkable than it was previously. If edges to this real are confirmed, such as gender supports the creation of, it is a notable progress, perhaps sufficient currently: the new sex is one, identifying the dimensional movements of sex and gender in the real, the imaginary, and the symbolic constitutes another of importance. To this, in 2018, I thought it good to add a proposal for identifying the identity-based vis-à-vis identity and identification , so as not to pass over in silence this discovery made possible by the use of gender: the identity-based, in the real, belongs to the object cause of desire, as elusive to the phenomenal world as sexuation is; differently, sex, gender, identity, and identification remain objects identifiable in reality, in the body, and in knowledge, as we encounter them there and with which we deal when it comes to public speech; more nuanced is the fact that the movements of the cure hold their consistency from an invisible fabric, a material capable of nourishing an originally created form. Identity, a crisis among crises, no longer has to be defended or undone; the truth of its structure speaks for it.

 

We can then reconsider the opportunity of an identity qualification of the analysand, the analyst, and psychoanalysis itself which, of sex or gender, could only be qualified by assuming the deception necessary for this production well beyond the function of the semblant that the analyst must assume elsewhere. It would be an ersatz, not even a substitution, of an identity as a function even though we know the thing is impossible: identity is not a process or else it is an impossible process, psychoanalysis is neither Freudian, nor Lacanian, nor queer, nor Jewish, etc.; it was Jewish for the Nazis, it is Freudian for the Lacanians and Lacanian for orthodox Freudians, it is queer for sexists, let us not forget that.

The identity-based can, if the analyst consents, support the elaboration of the sexual by not rejecting the impossible of sexuation as an object. This operation is possible, if the identity-based becomes the place for it for the analyst, if it is recognized as this place which is not a subjective position: there is no analytic or therapeutic interest in subjectivizing the place of trauma (source of the identity-based), other creations are required from it, including any work aiming at the qualification of segregations and the lifting of disavowals. It is indeed a currently very important fundamental stake, in the clinic of gender in psychoanalysis, the fate reserved for the observation that sexuation is still not an occasion for the subject to challenge the biological, although gender is an occasion for a resumption of the status of anatomy.

 

Thinking about sexuality would undoubtedly require, for psychoanalysis or the analyst, not to take into account what we have just explained. A definition itself could be considered, if necessary. But it would also be necessary to put forward some characteristics, qualities, or distinctions capable of defining what sexuality can be after an analysis. And to question further what the sexuality of the analyst should or should not be at the end of the cure, for example before or after they have started or not to receive analysands, of whom we have not yet said whether or not they are sexed beings on the couch?

This project would be a huge false lead. Wide enough to get lost in forever. Psychoanalysis does not have to think about sexuality. Perhaps it can think sexuality from its very experience, but never without remembering that the subject who speaks is not, on the surface of their statement which can be confused with the side of being, the one who interests us most in relation to the subject of the enunciation that the signifiers betray. If we do not forget this, we cannot lose ourselves unnecessarily, even if getting lost is often conducive to making some finds. Sexuality remains an unthought for psychoanalysis; the psychoanalyst must support a consistent elaboration on this subject by staying away from an identity positioning that would purely and simply prevent them from functioning as an analyst for another.

Sexuality must remain an unthought for psychoanalysis, and for psychoanalysts who otherwise tell nonsense bigger than themselves. This guarantees that possible practices with the impossible that is the real of sex are described, thought, technically supported in the cure, where useful, profitable, interesting arrangements have to be created for the analysand in their love, professional, social life, etc. And that these personal discoveries and inventions can question the theories of psychoanalysis, contributing in fact to its reinvention, without succumbing to the temptation of joining the public space, where authority is exercised, with an individual complaint. If psychoanalysis influences, sometimes too much according to some, contemporary thought, it is from the couch that its effects unfold, not from the discourse supported by analysts in the public sphere. If we respond to the expectation of thoughts on sexuality so demanded by all the surrounding discourses, from sexual liberation to its liberalization, we run the risk of literally disavowing the knowledge linked to the real of sex.

Which many exhausted practitioners of psychoanalysis have already committed, accomplices to the discrimination and other harassment of which all people from minorities can be victims in the face of official holders of the authority of a discourse. When Foucault elaborates around the “psy-function” in 1973, it is indeed to highlight the senseless and authoritative use that “psys” make of reality used as a standard of normativity; it would not be progress to multiply the specificities of the plural realities to be taken into account where the aim remains to bring about what was for a subject, no more (sic). The authentic abuse of power by the normative cannot be replaced by the diversity of the marginalized.

In doing so, we would expose ourselves to seeing this refused knowledge reappear in reality, precisely in the imaginary, in the body in particular, with all the return effects that would be linked to it, such as for example a broadening of the critique of psychoanalysis on the grounds of its supposed conservatism regarding sexual questions, or even in these movements of exclusion or sidelining of psychoanalysis by various specialists in science or medicine. No doubt we would also have to fear a kind of identity sticking of the analyst, mired in the public imaginary of their identity situation where the sex in question would immediately find an answer in the form of a promise, a sexual connivance that leaves one perplexed if one thinks of what deserves to be denounced, or condemned in terms of transgression of this order.

How to understand, for example, that a list of analysts — and other practitioners — can offer contacts with “safe and inclusive” professionals? The categorical, discriminating exclusions suffered by many people from sexual minorities with health professionals (doctor, psychoanalyst, etc.) cannot find a fruitful analytic outcome when it promises hospitality through the acceptance of sexual specificities. How better to answer in advance questions that must first find the space to be said. They cannot be said just anywhere, and for that, word of mouth constitutes the most effective option for orientation, but they cannot be validated or guaranteed by the mark of the identity-based promoted as a label. Further on, we might fear the erection of a list of sexualities compatible with the analytic function since the analyst’s sex could be denounced or claimed (a gay psy, a cisgender heterosexual misogynist and yet “feminist” psy, a trans psy specialist in MtF transitions exclusively, etc.)

 

The psychoanalytic specificity lies in the fact that the impossible of sex is held as an aim, not as a problem to be solved or as a point to be surpassed (which can be the aim of a queer discourse, or of a sociological analysis of life paths, for example). An aim that directs the gaze toward the object that never allows itself to be recognized there, the object a cause of desire, but whose vain quest, session after session, constitutes the decisive material of an analysis that the analysand can lead to its term, beyond the unconscious determinants of their fantasy and their desire. Taking into account sexual diversity, which should be cherished, is not joining the subjectivity of individuals but rather the subjectivity of the era, as Lacan was able to formulate it, provided one does not renounce this beautiful proposition that makes the collective the subject of the individual of 1945, where a new relationship to the private/public dimension opens up, or to sex and gender as expressions of the intimate in the social and vice versa. Also, neither minor nor major, psychoanalysis has something else to do than get involved in the matter that agitates the social, nor comment on it; it must welcome the social by joining it, there lies its social practice, it is not merging with it, nor busying itself, otherwise how would it make an opening once melted or distorted in a discourse that is not its own? It must also recognize what is expressed from other fields other than with the support of the unconscious, which is not everyone’s hypothesis. Thus it can clash, or die by its theoretical sublimation (in particular philosophical) or its political vaporization (in particular sociological), far from the clinical experience in progress (always subversive, and terribly disturbing). For the fact remains that life escapes the living, and of this alone the psychoanalytic discourse declares it hopes for lessons, unlike discourses taking sexuality as an object, or those that have to take sexuality as an object, whether they be militant or critical, lay or academic.

Paris, September 2020.

VB

 

Appendices to follow on the next page…

 

Definition of gender (2013)

Gender is the limit situated both outside and inside sex, the shoreline or margin of sex capable of revealing its depth of field. Gender appears under the effect of the sexual; it questions the unconscious knowledges of sexual difference, and makes identifications waver until they are renewed. Thus, gender undoes sex and creates sex in the in-between of its intermittent disturbance, at the instant of stability in which it is felt.

 

Mapping of gender, sex, sexuation (2013)

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Gender	object	process	impossible instance
Sex	instance	object	impossible process
Sexuation	process	instance	impossible object

 

Mapping of the identitarian, identity, identification (2018)

	Imaginary	Symbolic	Real
Identity	Object	Instance	Impossible process
Identification	Process	Object	Impossible instance
Identity-based	Instance	Process	Impossible object (object a)