What is sexuality from childhood to adulthood, and what kind of sexuality would we call “adult” (Vanier, 2014)? How can we define it other than by behavior? Besides, what is an adult? Psychoanalysis would have a hard time defining it, without resorting to statements that quickly recall Sartre's spirit of seriousness, which, I'm sure you'll agree, isn't very gratifying. But I also thought of this enigmatic sentence from the Three Essays, which, for Freud, marks the point of articulation between the child and the adolescent: “Finally, it must be added that during the transition period of puberty the processes of somatic and of psychical development continue for a time side by side independently, until the irruption of an intense mental erotic impulse, leading to the innervation of the the genitals, brings about the unity of the erotic function which is necessary for normality” (Freud, 1905). This innervation of the genitals from “an intense mental erotic impulse” is a neurophysiological curiosity, but the appeal to biology is always indicative of something specific in Freud. This strangeness in this text, rewritten several times over a period of almost twenty years, bears witness to a difficulty. This stumbling block reappears in various forms in Freud. Thus, when he takes a position on the sexual explanations to be given to children, he ends up celebrating the teaching of civic education in French schools! Every teenager will have to confront this difficulty, but also the tension between the affirmation of “the infantile character of sexuality” and the definition of a so-called “normal” adult sexuality, oriented towards reproduction. “The infantile character of sexuality” is the title of the last chapter of the first essay in Three Essays on Sexuality. Sexuality is infantile from the child to the adult, and this, it seems to me, is what still causes scandal, as evidenced by the fact that contemporary opponents of psychoanalysis continue to put it forward, the latest avatar being Michel Onfray's sex-obsessed Freud. Recall that the Three Essays show that the sexual drive in man is fundamentally denatured, not instinctual, and “perversions (…) must form a part of what passes as the normal constitution,” even more so as, in any “normal” sexual relationship, many behaviors are primers of those sexual aberrations which are the perversions (touches, looks, kisses, etc.). For Freud, the challenge is to identify sexual organization from the point of view of psychic arrangement, and not, as the sexologists to whom he refers, from deviations from a behavioral norm, coitus and the goal of reproduction. In short, there is a polymorphous sexual disposition that the initial emphasis on the theory of seduction prevented from being spotted by obscuring partial drives. In other words, “a disposition to perversions is an original and universal disposition of the human sexual instinct,” which doesn't stop with the passage to adulthood -on the contrary- it finds refuge, for example, in the symptom that “constitute the sexual activity of the patient.” Freud would define an “enlarged sexuality” without ever abandoning the term sexuality -infantile sexuality is thus one of the shibboleths of psychoanalysis- a sexuality detached from the genitalia, which nonetheless re-innervates them during a motion of intense psychic love, so that -secondarily, therefore- this sexuality is put to the service of reproduction. As we can see, the difficulty is far from over at the end of the Three Essays. * I'm seeing a teenager, 16 at the time of the session I'm about to describe. He's been coming for some time now, for reasons I'll leave to one side. He's a very intelligent boy, who has been able to engage in real analytic work. In this session, he tells me he's in love for the first time. Here's how he describes this young girl: “She's not particularly pretty, she doesn't have the stereotypes... not thin, not blond... not like my mother,” who is indeed thin and blond. As I question him with a “So?”, he says, offended: “We're not animals, it's not all about reproduction!” “I knew,” he adds, ”that I liked her at first sight. Because as soon she smiles, she's beautiful, more than beautiful. But when she's not smiling, she's not really beautiful.” He continues: “We have a lot in common: her general attitude, for example, she doesn't get in the mess in class, she's often serious, she's not a fashion victim.” So, she's like him, his likeness, his image, but the narcissistic, imaginary dimension doesn't explain everything. Indeed, “not like my mother” may have tipped you off, and me too. I remember that a few years ago, talking about his mother, a woman of very changeable moods, he used to say that, as a child, her face was “his weather.” If she arrived with a stern expression on her face, it meant “threat of heavy weather,” but if she was smiling, it meant happiness, the harbinger of a fine day. This isolated feature -the smile- takes on signifying value, a little like that of the Cheshire cat that Alice meets, a cat that had the possibility of disappearing in whole or in part, a cat that smiled and could disappear, leaving only its smile. ”I've often seen a cat without a grin”, thought Alice, “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” . This cat that appears and disappears- this presence/absence cat- embodies the signifier itself. For this young man, his mother's smile had taken on a signifying, symbolic value, and it was this little-known trait, taken from the mother, that triggered this motion of intense psychic love. But for all that, the girl remained enigmatic for him. He doesn't dare approach her, and wonders about her interests and desires. What does she want? What does she love? He preserves what she holds that's impossible to identify. So he keeps his distance, glancing at the bodices of other girls in the class rather than at her own. She's a face that can light up with a smile. On the one hand, love, on the other, sexual interest. This disjunction is particularly evident in male sexual life, which is spontaneously bigamous, that is, divided between the woman of love and the woman of sexual desire, between the idealized mother with whom sexual commerce can be difficult and the whore, that belittled woman described by Freud, with whom sexuality becomes possible. Literature is full of such examples, as is the history of our analysands. Whether we're thinking of Félix in Balzac's Le Lys dans la Vallée, torn between Madame de Mortsauf and Lady Dudley, or Don José caught between Micaela and Carmen in Mérimée's Carmen or Bizet's opera, and so on. Moreover, this disjunction, localized by Freud to a belittling of the love life in certain men, is generalized by Lacan. In the best cases, the same woman can occupy both positions. In any case, the male's neurosis cannot be reduced to a position described as pathological, but rather points us in the direction of the difficulty already mentioned, that of the disjunction between love and sexual jouissance.  Lacan defined this stop, this Real, with the formula: “There is no sexual relationship,” i.e., no relationship based on the sexual act, with each person encountering the other within the framework of his or her own phantasm. This is the masculine side, but we also find this division in women between husband and lover, between the forbidden man, the priest, the director of conscience, the doctor, the forbidden and idealized man, loved with a platonic love, and the sexual partner. If love addresses the face, sexual desire addresses body fragments, a little like Dali's Venus with Drawers. On the one hand, love as narcissistic, aiming for fusion, unification, two becoming one, and on the other, these body parts, having taken on phallic value- take the breasts away from a hysteric!- body parts that give rise to desire, and with which man must deal in the sexual act. So, this transition to adult, genital and heterosexual sexuality, known as “normal,” is based on the repression, from which this bigamy originates. And yet, there is a norm for psychoanalysis, as indicated by the Oedipus complex as the mythical shaping of this norm. It is at the heart of this matter, and it is the substance of this complex that constitutes the only norm in psychoanalysis: the prohibition of “enjoying the mother,” to be understood in both senses of the genitive. This lack-of-jouissance is constitutive, but the articulation of this norm, its value as a prohibition, actually covers up, masks, a fundamental impossibility- a Real. Just think of little Hans, and the derision of his organ in front of his mother. This is the source of anguish: to be the object of the Other's jouissance. The neurotic concedes an object, making small sacrifices so as not to be the object of this jouissance. This impossible, this Real, to which he gives the status of a ban, and therefore the value of a norm, thus enabling a revival of desire that can then be directed towards other women. But this normativizing and non-normalizing function of the prohibition of incest does not define the fate of the drive, nor the “normal” in the sense of behavior, except to say, as Lacan put it, that for subjects, the normal, as normalization, is the “male-norm,” in the sense that what manifests itself in the symptoms of neurosis revolves around oedipal issues, the phallic question, being and having. Maintaining a certain imaginary dimension of the phallus leads the obsessive to make it the object of anal donation, with all its defensive avatars, and the hysteric to a certain disgust. For, in fact, the norm is rather correlative to the idea of lack. But, in any case, there is no “normal,” and, even better, no sexual norm, since there is no representation of the difference between the sexes in the unconscious, which leads to the construction of social semblances to determine this male/female distinction. And precisely, first love is the moment when the subject is called upon to inscribe himself in a masculine or feminine position, in this semblant man or semblant woman or whatever, because as Lacan might have said, this system is in the process of being revised. Clinically, we need to distinguish between gender identification and object choice, which are a sensitive issue in adolescence. “There are social norms, in the absence of any sexual norm”, as Lacan might have said, meaning no sexual norms at the level of the unconscious, just a need for discourse. This can be seen in yesterday's debate on gay marriage in France, or today's debate on gender identity. Every society defines a system of norms, and ours is changing. This is not to say that we're heading for a system without social norms; they're simply shifting, organizing new obligatory modes of behavior, and defining new morals. That everyone, to the extent of their prejudices, can have an opinion on gay marriage and homoparentality, on transidentity, no doubt, and even wishes to defend it, why not. But what are some of our colleagues going to do in this mess who take positions, unfounded by experience, in the name of psychoanalysis, and- and this is the whole problem- predicting, for example, disasters in future generations resulting from homoparentality? It's not certain that psychoanalysts benefit from occupying this very modern position of expert, in which they merely defend their prejudices rather than what they learn from the singularity of those they listen to. Lacan emphasized that a psychoanalyst cannot authorize himself to speak of the normal, nor of the abnormal. Norms are social norms, valid as norms for arranging what is normless, the sexual. For example, there are many social arrangements that differ from our own and are entirely operative: the Na in China, a society without fathers or husbands, or the possibility in sub-Saharan Africa for a widowed, post-menopausal woman to marry a young woman, and so on. On the other hand, psychoanalysts should remember- as far as predictivity is concerned- the debate between Anna Freud and Ernst Kris, the latter denying any possible predictivity to psychoanalysis, but also to all psychology, and appealing to her father's name to urge Kris to be cautious. * But let's get back to our love stories. What's repeated in everyone's life is a certain way of jouissance, a certain type of phantasm that surrounds, organizes and supports sexual life, and these stereotypes are specific to each person. Would psychoanalysis then simply consist in rectifying the Oedipus, allowing it to come to fruition, thereby liberating a certain relationship to jouissance? You might say that this would not be a bad thing. But it's undoubtedly also a question of going beyond that, which is not without consequences. If psychoanalysis hasn't invented a new perversion, can it open the door to another kind of love, a love that isn't just narcissistic or merely the aim of an object to be consumed, a love that doesn't negate the radical otherness of the Other, a love that gives this Real its place? Isn't one of the challenges of psychoanalysis regarding love? In a book published some ten years ago, Paul Audi (2011) examines Alfred Jarry's novel Le Surmâle to come on to this impossible conjunction between love and sexual jouissance. Love presupposes a certain feminization, which is particularly distressing for men in our culture. To Lacan's formula: “When we love, it's not about sex,” Paul Audi adds that “it may be about... poetry.” And, since language is the cause of this Real, perhaps it is precisely by bringing it to its limit that something can perhaps be identified and sketched out... Poetry is certainly what is best done at certain privileged moments of the analysis session, poetry as a way of bringing language to its limit, of making it appear what it is beyond this reduction to communication, a late reduction for the subject, as an effect of repression. As Benjamin wrote: Man does not communicate, they communicate themselves in language. Regarding our approach to love, and the mutations of the discourse of love, Winnicott (1969), in a lecture on the pill at the time this contraceptive was first put into circulation- the upheavals it caused at the time can no longer be imagined today- began by asserting that he himself  had never taken the pill. It's not my place to comment on Winnicott's identifications, I'd just like to pause at the end of this lecture. After discussing the pill and the phantasmatic dimension of murder involved in contraception, leading to the idea that there is no good solution for everyone, but only singular solutions, he goes on to talk about the moon, which he sometimes contemplates at night. It's 1969, and he suddenly remarks: “Oh damn there's an American flag on it,” which he immediately associates with menstruation and the words of a woman, a patient, saying in a session that for the sexual relationship she was talking about, she had “to go to back and use menstruation again” for lack of a pill. Winnicott immediately noticed a play on the signifier flag, meaning both the flag and the period in the expression “to fly the flag.” Winnicott asks: “can we, as poets, ever recover from the American landing on the moon?” “The Pill might look like the moon,” he concludes. Indeed, “if we can get back to the poetry(...) we might feel that there’s some hope for civilization,” and he ends his lecture with a poem. I would add: this is the challenge of the advancement of science and technology in our world, and it is also a small hope to unravel the impasses of love, or rather to make these impasses the vivid and crucial point of love.

Bibliography

Audi, P. (2011) Le théorème du surmâle, Jarry lecteur de Lacan. Verdier. Freud, S. (1905). Three essays on sexuality. SE VII. Hogarth. Vanier, A. (2014). Normes et sexualités. In A. Braconnier & B. Golse (ed.) Sexe, sexuel, sexualité. Du bébé à l’adolescent. Érès. Winnicott, D. W. (1969) The Pill and the moon. In home is where we start from. Penguin Books.

Bio

Alain Vanier is a Psychoanalyst, member of Espace analytique (A.F.P.R.F.); Professor Emeritus of the Universities, former Director of the Centre de Recherches psychanalyse, Médecine et Société (CRPMS), IHSS, Université de Paris Cité; former Hospital Psychiatrist; author of numerous publications (over 300 articles in French and international journals and collective works; 3 books translated into over a dozen languages; 7 editors of collective works, 1 translation of an English work into French).

Publication Date

September 20, 2024