Ebook: Freud and the Sexual: Essays 2000-2006

Freud and the Sexual is the translation of Laplanche’s Sexual: La sexualité élargie au sens freudien, his work from 2000 to 2006.

The present volume includes most of my writings from the period 2000 to 2006. Certain essays have an innovatory aim in the field of theory (that is, metapsychology), such as "Three meanings of the Term 'Unconscious'" and "Gender, Sex, and the Sexual." The latter term leads me to justify the volume's overall title: what I call the 'sexual' [using Freud's German rather than the French spelling 'sexuel'] is everything that emerges from the Freudian theory of an enlarged sexuality, and chiefly what is called 'polymorphous perverse' infantile sexuality. Once we have understood the way in which Freud enlarges the notion of sexuality -- beyond the simple union of the two sexes (such that the sexual may often be auto-erotic) -- we can only smile at the ubiquitous claim that there exists a modern 'sexual freedom,' triumphant at last, and possibly even thanks to Freud himself.


In short, the sexual is not exactly what we think. It is much more complex and even more repressed, sometimes buried within barely formulated fantasies.