Alenka Zupančič: Is sex passé?

There is a lot going on around sex lately. Le sex bouge, the French would say, and it’s a real international movement. Psychoanalysis seems to be mostly caught between, on the one hand, conservative tendencies to resist this movement, to find and point out its faults and misconceptions, to reassert its own classical doctrinal claims, and, on the other hand, to try to keep up with “progress,” to keep up with the movement, and to attempt to adapt psychoanalytic teaching (and practice) accordingly. But it’s safe to say that psychoanalysis is by no means the avant-garde or a key player in this movement. And this is very different from the times when Freud developed his theory of sexuality, when he spoke about it in quite new and surprising ways, and also pointed out how it, sexuality, spoke in surprising ways. The lecture will focus on the question of what psychoanalysis…