Passion and melancholia, red and black: The vicissitudes of the sexual in an analytic process

The sudden emergence of a foreign language in the course of an analysis is understood as a crossroad between the past and the present: The author links this emergence to Freud's search for the meaning of the uncanny in different languages. She suggests that the uncanny is that which provokes curiosity and is at the same time rejected, as it refers to incestuous desires that are frightening, forbidden, and disgusting. The following question is raised: Is incest at the core of the riddle of anxiety? The author traces the multiocular structure leading to an understanding of what has taken place and the vicissitudes of the sexual and the melancholic in an analysis. It is the force of the repetition compulsion that enables repressed infantile sexuality to find its way in the transference, so that it can, for the first time, be named, in terms of its contradictory and opposing forces: red and black. The author establishes a link between Freud and Laplanche in the understanding that sexuality is only incompletely transformed into psychic reality.