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Reckoning with sexuality

ABSTRACT A review of Freud’s ideas about the sexual drive and sexuality reveals reoccurring questions: What is the relation between the sexual drive and its somatic underpinnings? Can we integrate formulations couched in terms of meaning with those couched in terms of energy? What is the relation of the sexual drive to other drives, psychic structures and affects? The author focuses on two further questions: what can we understand about the experience of sexual passion, and why is there so much anxiety, regulation, and opposition in regard to sexuality, both individually and generally, even within psychoanalysis itself? The author argues that the discomfort with and repudiation of sexuality are related to the nature of the sexual drive itself and to its origins in early childhood and are tied to many of the issues that have marked its history in psychoanalysis. The author discusses a clinical case of a man who tried to isolate and eradicate his sexual drive. His felt absence of sexual drive is an individual instance of the larger discomfort and unease with the truths about human sexuality around which Freud built his theories of development and mind.