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The Sexual and psychical reality
1Université de Montréal, Montréal, Canada; Canadian Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, Montréal, Canada.
Abstract:
Not everything is sexual in the psychoanalytic conception of the human condition, but the Sexual is at the core of the central conceptual cluster of psychoanalysis, along with translation/repression, resistance, transference and the après-coup time structure (Nachträglichkeit). For all its importance, the Sexual should not be used by psychoanalysts as their single interpretive key. Laplanche's Generalized Seduction Theory, with the translational model of the mind at its core, rather suggests that the Sexual, with its enigmatic presentation to the infant's psyche, is the "Question" to which psychopathology is the non-evolutive, arrested and problematic set of "Answers." In their clinical practice, psychoanalysts should look for the Sexual in the many forms espoused by the repetition compulsion, aiming at undoing (i.e. analysing) those arrested forms so as to open the way to new and more satisfactory solutions to the sexual enigma of the other.
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