Heterosexual presumptiom

Many years ago, long before I became a psychoanalyst, a friend of mine, Fabian, told me the following story.

During his university years, Fabian befriended Alain whom he loved very passionately, although very platonically since Alain was not sexually interested in men. They became inseparable and remained so even when Alain fell in love with Isabelle. Fabien suffered but he coped with the situation the best he could. He tried to pursue a few affairs with university girls, soon to realize that he was almost exclusively attracted by men and that the jouissance he could get with them was far more superior to the pleasure he could get with a girl. He then began to lead a homosexual life which was quite active for some time.

Meanwhile he had almost become part of Alain's family. He would be invited quite often either by Alain's mother, Suzanne, whom he called tante Zette, or by Alain's father, Henri, who had divorced Suzanne when their children were still very young. Alain had a sister, Anne-Marie, who also became a good friend of Fabian's. Henri - who was extremely rich and adventurous - used to entertain a lot and his sumptuous parties where quite famous in Paris among the rich and famous. He would invite magnificent women and a crowd of free spirits who liked to fuck, to hunt and to make money by all possible means. Henri was a great hunter both of wild beasts in Africa and of women everywhere else.

When Anne-Marie decided to get married with a young German, Frank, Fabian was invited to the wedding which was to take place in Munich. He was to be Anne Marie's best man. When everybody arrived in Munich where Frank was living, they discovered that Frank had prepared strictly nothing for the wedding : the banns had not been published, he had no job, not even a flat where to install his wife. Undoubtedly, Frank was severely neurotic, but it also appeared that the whole wedding project had been organized manu militari by tante Zette who was eager to get rid of her ageing daughter (Anne Marie was already 25), without Frank having much to say unable as he was to withstand tante Zette's overbearing character.

The wedding was canceled and everybody returned to Paris leaving Frank both desolate and probably very relieved. Fabian was supposed to drive back with tante Zette and Anne Marie, but as he was taking his leave, Henri took him aside and asked him if he wanted to drive back with him :" Leave the women to themselves and come back with me, we will have fun!" Fabian was far from being naïve and he immediately grasped the meaning of Henri's proposal and what kind of fun he was thinking of. But Henri was in his fifties and Fabian was not attracted to him nor to men of his age. He declined politely the invitation without showing his utter amazement. "Too bad," said Henri with a thunderous laugh, "you don't know what you are missing!"

At first, Fabian began to doubt his immediate interpretation of Henri's proposal, then he thought that perhaps Henri wanted to know whether Fabian was having an affair with his son Alain, although he never seemed to have cared much about the sexual life of his children. Finally, a few weeks later, Fabian was able to verify that his first intuition had been the correct one. Rio, a dancer at the Folies Bergères who was having an affair with Alain and whom Fabian liked very much, told him she had just met Henri at the Folies carrying on with two of the most magnificent transvestites of the time : Ashley April and Bambi. When she told Alain, he did not seem very surprised or shocked, so Fabian decided to tell him what had happened in Munich as well. To his utter stupefaction Alain answered in a highly emotional tone : "Ah, ça par exemple! ça aurait été le comble que le père y passe avant le fils!" (for the son to get second after the father, that takes the cake!)

Both Alain's and Henri's attitude toward a young man, Fabian, whom they suspected of being gay, is what I call heterosexual presumption. I have heard many similar stories ever since both in real life and from the couch. On the verge of leaving the psychoanalytic field after 25 years of practice in order to do something else, these stories came back to my mind and made me speculate. Here are my speculations.

What can cause a heterosexual man who has always been sexually attracted to women, and never before to boys or men - except perhaps during his chilhood like everybody else - to suddenly turn his attention or his lust (even for a brief encounter) toward young males or transvestites or - but much less often - transsexuals; or even colleagues he had known for many years? This situation, I insist, is far from being rare and it occurs in all classes of society although more frequently in the middle and upper classes than in the working class, and I have encountered it most of the time among men in their late forties and early fifties and whose children were adults and who did not seem to have problems in their heterosexual lives.

When this situation occurred while these subjects were in analysis, it always appeared to me as the result of a loosening up not so much of the superego - the obscene censor - but of the ego apparatus (including both the ideal ego and the ego ideal). A loosening up which would allow the unconscious sexual desires to be re-activated, and the libido to re-invest to some extent the whole body of the subject. It is not a regression to pre-genital sexuality, but rather the resurgence of the polymorphous perversion usually attributed to children (Freud), which I have named "polysexuality". It is the eternal basis of human sexuality; whether it is repressed or not it never ceases to exist even though it may remain dormant until...

I see the events I am speculating about as an attempt to let a more authentic and more pleasurable sexuality (closer to jouissance than to pleasure) reappear, the true polysexuality of the subject of the unconscious, as opposed to what was progressively felt to be more or less a fake, hypocritical and alienated sexuality which one usually considers as "normal" sexuality and/or heterosexual genitality. Is "heterosexual genitality" the "normal" and ultimate goal to be reached by the psycho-sexual development of the human being? How - if ever - does one get there? Under what kind of pressure? What is the role of the ego apparatus in this so-called devlopment or maturation? And last but not least what is the ego apparatus constructed of, if I may say so?

When Freud published his Three Esaays on Sexuality, the scandal - according to a somewhat complacent Strachey - was immense. What was the scandal all about? In simple words (far from the psychiatric mumbo-jumbo of Havelock Ellis or Kraft-Ebbing), Freud brought together a certain number of well-known facts which were not supposed to be openly and publicly discussed outside of specialized scientific milieux : adult sexuality is infantile, the child is a polymorphous pervert (which implies that the adult is also a pervert - I prefer to say that he is polysexual). Body holes and surfaces, whatever gets into the body or out, contents and envelopes, oneself and the other... everything and anything is sexually used and abused by children : it is their way of loving. The purest love leads to deviations of all kind, the purest kiss is only the contact between two mucous membranes. Sucking the mother's milk is sexual and so is the progression of the intestinal content : they are masturbatory manners. The child masturbates constantly, from babyhood until much later when sexual excitation resumes as a zentral bedingter Kitzelreis, which is to say as something which has a central origin and which is as exciting as a Kitzel, a tickling, an itching, the adjectival form of which means ticklish as well as gross and which also gives its anatomical name to the clitoris, Kitzler. The rocking chair is a sexual apparatus. The sometimes stupefying and pitiless cruelty of the little man (or the little woman for that matter) is also sexual. Masochism, sadism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, coprophilia... nothing in particular satisfies him, he stops at nothing. He will be, in turn, homosexual, cannibal, bestial (I think of Sartre fucking a duck when he was four...) and incestuous. Anything at all arouses his lust : moving, talking, thinking, writing, working, sleeping, playing or being terrified (as it appears in the memory traces of the children who have witnessed and survived political mass murders whether in Nazi Germany but also in Vietnam, in Panama or in Irak).

"It is quite possible," said Freud in the Three Essays, "that anything which may occur within the organism contributes to arouse the child's libido." Finally, Freud insisted on the fact that sexuality had nothing to do with procreation. Human sexuality is against nature. This among other things is probably what brought Heidegger to define the essence of man as monstruous. Man is a monster.

But in Freud's time all these facts were very well known. Writers like Montaigne, Rousseau, Shakespeare or Sade had already written extensively about children and/or adullt polysexuality. So what was all the fuss about? It was probably caused by the fact that in simple, clear and everyday language, the book was a fierce and explicit attack against those biological, moralistic and religious discourses on sexuality which reduced sexuality to procreation, and mostly because it was an attack on the general hypocrisy of the doxa (popular opinion) : "Popular opinion has quite definite ideas about the nature and characteristics of the sexual instinct. It is generally understood to be absent in childhood, to set in at the time of puberty in connection with the process of coming to maturity and to be revealed in the manifestations of an irresistible attraction exercised by one sex upon the other; while its aim is presumed to be sexual union, or at all events actions leading in that direction."

This popular conceptiom - which may seem somewhat obsolete nowadays - has reappeared in fact very strongly in the recent attempts to reduce sexuality to an instinct, a biological need, or to certain specific aspects of neuro-anatomy (Le Vay and his explanations regarding a brain formation which would cause male homosexuality), neurophysiology or neuro-hormonal determinations. I won't discuss here the "natural" conceptions of sexuality but will stick to the Freudian definition, for if sexuality were indeed a natural instinct, there is no way Henri could have switched from female sexual objects to male ones and end up by enjoying both, as he did at the age of fifty

As opposed to the classical theory of libido which defines sexuality as being constructed on several successive pregenital phases, each one being characterised by a certain mode of organisation of sexual activities, and finally subsumed by the primacy of the genital phase, Laplanche and Pontalis pointed out in their Vocabulary , that the notion of the primacy of an erogenous zone does not fully explain both the structuration and normative aspect inherent as a stage concept : the latter is based solely on a certain type of activity - linked, it is true, to an erogenous zone - but which is recognizable at different levels of object relation.

According to these different points of view, two modes of sexual organisation have been described : the first one according to the object : narcissistic, auto-erogenous, homosexual and heterosexual, the other according to the erogenous zones : oral, anal, urethral and genital. Both organisations being, of course, interrelated. I won't discuss these different aspects of the libidinal phases, nor what makes them appear and then disappear at this or that period of our childhood in order to finally impose genital heterosexuality on the child.

Can it be attributed to a so-called biological maturation? Is it - as Ferenczi tried to demonstrate - a natural evolution which leads from the primacy of the pleasure principle to the predominance of the reality principle? Or is it solely understandable in terms of the formation of the ego which would allow the differenciation between the self and the outside world, the postponement of satisfaction, the relative control over the stimulations of the drives, etc.

Let's consider this third possibility, namely that the sexual development is linked to, if not dominated by, the development of the ego. Incidentally, Freud never really tried to link these two developments or to provide us with a kind of time-table of childhood maturation. It was the doing of two famous compulsive obsessionals : Karl Abraham and Robert Fliess, in spite of Melanie Klein's definitive discreditation of this kind of attempt.

The basic problem with the notion of ego is that there is a basic contradiction in the way it has been conceptualized, a contradiction which, for logic's sake, imposes a choice between the two possibilities :

- on the one hand, it has been said (O. Fenichel, A. Freud) that only the ego can be known, that we can talk only with the ego, that communication only takes place between egos, that the ego is the principle of synthesis par excellence;

-on the other hand, and sometimes by the same authors (A. Freud), it has been said that the ego is a symptom within the subject, a priviledged symptom, the human symptom; that it is the mental illness par excellence of mankind.

In his latest book, Retelling a Life, Roy Schafer presents us with a remarkable summary of the notion of self (which I consider to be an extension of the American notion of ego) in contemporary American analytic thought. Let me quote it at some length : "Usually the self is presented as an active agency : it is the source of motivation and initiative; it is a self-starter, the originator of action; it is the first person, singular, indicative subject, that is, the "I" of "I come" (sic!), "I go", "I will", "I won't", "I know", "I wonder", and "I do declare". This is the self that exhibits itself and hides itself and can love or loathe its own reflection...But there is more, it is the subject of experience : It constructs and participates in an experiential world; it is the self of taste and value, impression and emotional direction; it is the sexual self, the private self, the fragile self, and the bodily self.

Furthermore, this featured active self is the central organized and organizing constituent of the person considered as a structured psychological entity. In this aspect, the self is the unity, the essence, the existential core, the gestalt and the mastermind of a person's life".

What happened to the unconscious, the specific object of psychoanalysis in this over-development of the notion of self? No one knows. It seems to have recoiled in a dark corner of the omnipresent self, never to be mentioned again.

But the self is still more than solely an agent since it can also be an "object rather than the subject of action and experience. And often, as in reflexive locutions, the self appears as the object of his own action and experience, as when we speak of self-observation and self-esteem. Moreover the self as object is not just a reactive agency or an observed agency; it is also the ensemble of self-representations. That is, it is the core content of all of a person's ideas about him - or herself, the self-concept or self-image".

And the author concludes this overview with the following remark : "in the mixing together of agency and content, there is, I believe, some serious overloading of the conceptualisation of self and possibly some theoretical incoherence as well". That is the least one can say. Let's add that this conception of the self almost completely discards the unconscious as well as it ignores the other and its formative function.

After having briefly criticized these almost chaotic and incoherent conceptions of the self, Roy Schafer introduces a rather new and interesting concept which has immediate implications by focusing on speech and language : the self narratives. "The experiential self may be seen as a set of varied narratives that seem to be told by and about a cast of varied selves. And yet, like the dream which has one dreamer, the entire tale is told by one narrator" . Perhaps, yes, but it is also told in a language which pre-exists the narrator and which the so-called narrator had to learn from another who taught him to speak and gave him his basic sense of self by providing him with an image of himself. "O! the nice little baby-boy of his dear mother!" said the mother to her child. Who speaks then when many years later the grown-up baby-boy says on the couch : "I was the little baby-boy of his dear mother" ?

By emphasizing the narratives in analytical work, Roy Schafer discards the common illusion that "there is a single self-entity that each person has and experiences, a self entity that is, so to speak, out there in Nature where it can be objectively observed, clinically analyzed, and then summarized and bound in technical definition."

I don't want to criticize Roy Schafer's conception of language which underlies his concept of "narratives" here, but let us suggest that it undermines a conception of the subject which could have been infinitely closer to truth and to the extent of our experience of the subject of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. Although Ferdinand de Saussure, who invented structural linguistics, showed, at the same time Freud was writing the Three Essays, that the laws of language are the laws which command its material structure, the signifier, and not the signified - or content, which remains ungraspable, fluctuating and is always dependant on the immediate context as well as on the ideological context of its enunciation; Roy Schafer seems to be solely interested in the content of the narrative - not in its material structure - as well as by the sole narrator as if a narrator could be isolated from the other he speaks to or has been spoken of by. The other, inherent to any act of speech whether the signifiers are words, phonemes, gestures, bodily noises or whatever, can be used in order to speak.

By emphasizing the content in his conception of the self narratives - as useful as they may appear to be - I believe that Roy Schafer did not recognize fully the absolute heterogeneity of the unconscious, although the unconscious is also constructed, or structured as a language but not as a narration or a narrative discourse; the unconscious has no narrative content but, nevertheless, it speaks.

As early as 1936 , Lacan showed that wherever there is a subject who speaks, there is another with whom the subject has identified through speech. A speech which originates - at first - from the other, a speech made of language the laws of which are not the laws of the other, but the laws of the Other : the locus of signifiers. This is what Lacan called the mirror stage, the first stage of the structuration of the subject, of a fundamentally divided subject whose ego is structured by the mirroring images of himself which he percieves in the discourse of the other and whose unconscious is structured by the structural laws (not the semantic ones) of the material structure of language, i.e. the laws of the signifiers.

I have shown elsewhere how bilabial phonemes are linked to the erogeneity of the mouth, the occlusives to anal erogeneity, the fricatives to urethral pleasure and the apical or erectile to the genital phase, and all of this independently of the semantic content of whatever is being said. I won't go into it now.

I'd rather examine the nature of the discourse which is used by the other when he speaks to an infans, the discourse on which the ego is slowly constructed in a mirroring relationship with this other, in order to repress unconscious drives and their representations, the signifiers of desire. In this sense confronted with the contradictory definitions of the ego, I choose - for we must choose - the second one : the ego is a symptom, the human symptom par excellence, the malady of man. Whether we call it self or ego or person, it is entirely made up of discourse. On this particular point I agree with Roy Schafer, but the question remains : what kind of discourse, and to this, Roy Schafer has nothing to say.

I say that the ego is entirely made up of an ideological discourse; in other words, the ego is entirely alienated by the ideology provided by all the significant others of his early years who may have been the primary objects of his drives, but who also were the agents of ideological apparatuses. Let me explain, now, this somewhat obscure statement, and especially what I mean here by ideology, ideological apparatuses, etc.

Whether we talk about the ego as an aspect of personality which emerges in contact with "reality" and whose function is to control, domesticate, organize the pleasure principle; or as the social aspect of the subject whose socialization has been constructed upon and by the discourses of his others; little attention has been given by psychoanalysts to what this "reality" or this socializing and normative discourse might be, and probably because they don't have the conceptual tools to do so, or perhaps because they find tremendous secondary benefits in being submissive agents of the psychoanalytic Power Apparatus within psychoanalytic institutions. Whatever the case may be, they would probably all agree on the fact that this so-called reality as well as the discourse of the other refer to the social context in which the subject (as a subject) was born - not, of course, its natural environment, which has nothing to do with what we are discussing.

Psychoanalysis is the product of a certain type of society : namely the capitalistic one. The people who become psychoanalysts and those who come to psychoanalysis are members of this capitalistic society whether they are its victims, its masters or its agents. Freud was very much aware of this fact but although he was deeply interested in the revolution which took place in Russia at the beginning of the century, he thought that mankind could not reach happiness through communism. He also believed that the structure of human personality was universal and not necessarily linked to the kind of society people were living in, although he did not discard it completely. His interests lay elsewhere. They did not include the construction of a theory of the ego - whether it would be understood as the social dimension of the subject or as a symptom. It is quite regrettable since this lack in Freud's theory allowed his followers to produce an ideological conception of the ego (or of the self) rather than to understand the ego as a construct, and a manifestation of ideology.

Now, what do I call "ideology" within the context of a capitalistic society? I maintain that the sole exhaustive, comprehensive and complete description of capitalistic society remains the Marxist one In order to answer my question and to give a precise definition of rhe marxist concept of ideology which is central in this text and which is totally different from the popular notion of the same term, I'll have to make a somewhat lengthy detour throuh marxist theory since I can't extract a concept from its theoretical context without placing it among the main concepts of the theory I took it from. I will also have to assert a certain number of theses which I won't be able to develop or discuss. Let's add that in order to be accepted by the reader, they presuppose a good knowledge of marxism and its recent developments with Louis Althusser's work.

In simplistic terms, capitalistic society is based on the division between two classes which constantly struggle with the other although in a totally dissymetrical way. It is also a society characterised by an exhorbitant disparity between the access to wealth and the economic means of both classes. In 1978, a survey by the sociology department of the University of Toronto showed that 45% of the global income in Canada was shared by 4% of the population, 6% was shared by 21% of the population and 49% by 75% of the rest of the population. It also showed that these proportions were rapidly changing. By the year 1990, the richest 4% of the population would share nearly 55% of the global income, while the perrcentage of those who only shared 6% of it would increase and the perrcentage of those sharing 39% of the global income would decrease. In other words in a capitalistic society like Canada, which is not unlike the USA, the inequality increases between the very rich who become constantly and steadily richer while the rest of the population tends quite rapidly toward general poverty. This is probably what one calls "recession". It must be noted that in capitalistic societies, although the working class have a much better life than the working population in the third world, the inequality of wealth between the two main classes is infinitely greater than it ever was in feudal societies or in dictaturships. Marcos's stolen fortune was ridiculously insignificant compared to the Rockfeller's or the wealth of the Queen of England.

Marx named these two classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These terms may seem somewhat obsolete, but we shall nevertheless continue to use them. By bourgeoisie we mean the very small percentage of the population which controls the means of production, while the proletariat is the productive force, the exploitation of which provides the bourgeoisie with its wealth.

I won't go into an exposé on the way these two classes struggle with each other. I won't go into an analysis of the modes of production and reproduction in capitalistic society (conditions of production, reproduction of the conditions of production, reproduction of the means of production, etc.>. Within the reproduction of the conditions of production we find the reproduction of the working force which is assured by their salaries, but we also find the reproduction of the quality of the working force. This last form of reproduction does not take place where the workers work, but at school or in universities. In these educational systems, the future worker does not only learm technical skills, he also learns something which is absolutely essential in order to maintain the conditions of production. He learns socio-professional behaviors; how he must behave if he wants to keep his job; he learns the rules of submissiveness, of his subjection to social division and to the prodigiously unequal hierarchy in our society. In a word, he learns not only to submit to but to identify with the dominant ideology constantly produced and reproduced by the bourgeoisie and its power apparatuses.

In other words, the educational system is not only a place to acquire specific knowledge and technical skills; it is above all a place where everybody is subjected to capitalistic ideology. The dimension of the educational system which teaches knowledge and skills, I call : "institution"; the other register I call "power apparatus". The functioning of the institution is explicit and clearly defined by written rules. The functioning of the power apparatus is implicit and its rules remain unwritten.

Our capitalistic society functions at two different levels : an infrastructure, the economic base, which is the level of production proper, and a suprastructure which is the level of the reproduction. For the French marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, it is the level of the "instances" : i.e. yhe legal-political register (law and the State) and ideology. Although ultimately determined by the infrastructure, the suprastructure is relatively autonomous and in certain circumstances it can act upon the infrastructure, as in revolutions for instance.

I describe the suprastructure in a slightly different way. Although I admit that it can only be described in terms of reproduction of the conditions of production, but instead of making a distinction between "instances" and ideology, I make a distinction between institutions and power apparatuses, the task of the latter being to produce and manipulate ideology and/or to brutally repress.

The State is an ensemble of public and private institutions carefully hierarchized which on the one hand have specific tasks to accomplsh but which on the other hand and at the same time are also centered by a specific power apparatus whose function is essentially repressive. The aim of the power apparatuses is to maintain the working class in a passive state of alienation : blind to its exploitation - mostly the extortion of the plus-value - and as subserviant as possible; in other words the task of the power apparatuses is to prevent a social revolution by all possible means, whether by force (army, police, judicial system) or by ideological indoctrination. In order to summarize the above I might say that the State is made of private and public institutions whose power apparatuses are repressive (when they use force), formative (when they use ideology) or mixed (when they use both, such as the psychiatric power apparatus, for instance). But this structure would not function properly without the participation of the agents of the power apparatuses.

On the one hand, for instance, a school teacher teaches scientific skills, (this is his institutional function), but while doing so and at the same time, whether he knows it or not, whether he likes it or not, whether he approves or disapproves of it, he instils in his students, by all kind of practices, the respect of authority, all types of behaviors and self or social representations which have absolutely nothing to do with the discipline he teaches and which will mold the student so that he will fit into the productive system without disrupting it, without even giving a thought to protesting or fighting for his rights or for equality as a human being à part entière.

What is this ideology I have been talking about at some length? It is not - as the doxa would have it - a diversified ensemble of general opinions, the world of ideas even lass so. Five theses will help us to define what the concept of ideology is.

I'll present them without explaining what they mean or what their implications may be.

Thesis 1. Ideology has no history, but it is consubstantial to History, understood here as the narrative of the struggle between classes.

Thesis 2. Ideology represents the Imaginary (in a Lacanian sense) relation between individuals and their real conditions of existence (i.e. the way they are exploited by the capitalistic system, their status in the system and their relation with the conditions of production which they usually fail to recognize.)

Thesis 3. Ideology has a material existence. It is constituted by a certain number of practices.

Thesis 4. Ideology belongs to the order of discourse. It is its connotative level. Speech always functions at two levels : denotative and connotative. For example, if I had used the word "Jap" in the fifties, it would have denoted a Japanese, but at the same time it would have connoted, at least for most Americans, evil, danger and sheer viciousness. If a sign of denotation can be best described as the conjunction of a signifier (Ser) and a signified (Sed) : Ser Sed, the sign of connotation can be defined as a sign whose signifier is a sign of denotation.

Ser Sed : denotation Ser Sec : connotation

There is no speech whatsoever, even the scientific discourse, which does not denote some meaning and, at the same time does not connote connote a completely different signification which reflects the ideological context and transmits or imposes ideological values. These connotation signifieds can't be found in the dictionary; they are part of the common knowledge of the doxa, and they constantly change according to the fluctuations of history. "Jap" does not connote nowadays the viciousness and cruelty it did in the fifties, even though it still connotes a certain type of economic threat.

Thesis 5. Ideology makes individuals into subjects by inducing the formation of an imaginary system of self and social representation which I call the ego.

Traditional family, as it appears in a capitalistic society, is far from being a universal structure. The family system in India is completely different from ours. Family is an institution and, as such, it has two functions. One is to produce and raise children to insure the reproduction of the working force : this is its institutional task. As an institution it has to teach the child to renounce the primacy of the pleasure principle along with the primordial dual relationship with the mother and his own narcissistic magalomania by accepting the "law of the father" which introduces him to the Symbolic order (Lacan). In other words, the child must speak, and mediate his relation with his Umwelt and with his inner drives through speech and language. This is the institutional and structural version of the Oedipus complex; this is the basic aspect of the formation of a subject. But at the same time, and without being fully aware of what they do, the parents construct the ego of their children by providing them constantly with the ideological representations of what a boy or a girl should be (ego ideals) in order to fit into the capitalistic system as a good enough tool. This is the mythical aspect of the Oedipus complex which is based on the organisation and the integration of the child's polysexuality toward the primacy of heterosexual genitality. This has nothing to do with the child's own desires as a polysexual subject, but - for reasons we won't develop here - capitalistic society imposes a certain type of sexuality on its human tools. The situation, once again, is totally different in a country like India for instance, where the opposition between homosexuality and heterosexuality has almost no meaning and does not constitute a pertinent distinction. Philosophers like Herbert Marcuse, in the States and Deleuze and Guattari in France have analyzed extensively why it is so in the occidental world.

The immediate result is that most people are torn between the ideological necessity of presenting publicly a certain image of their sexual behavior which, at the level of the ego, is purely imaginary, while repressing - more or less successfully - their real sexuality of polysexual subjects. It leads to this kind of surprising situation where a very well-known American psychoanalyst who advocates in all his writings heterosexual genitality and oblative love, acts with his mistresses in a completely different way since he can only get have orgasm if he puts a cucumber up his ass while having sex. Guess who?

I am also thinking of the infamous Roy Cohn who was some kind of legal adviser to Senator McCarthy, and who has become famous for his virulent homophobic discourses but who meanwhile would screw young male prostitutes in his limousine as he was being driven to political meetings.

I have nothing against a cucumber up the ass or fucking a young boy in a limo, but I find the discrepancy between the polysexuality of the subject and the alienated sexuality of the ego with the hypocrisy it implies, particularly abject. I see heterosexual presumption as a typical trait of this kind of imaginary and ideological sexuality of the ego. In this respect, the ego ought not to be strengthened in analysis, but carefully deconstructed. This and only this would allow the sublimation of the polysexual tendencies of the subject of the unconscious and, eventually, open the doors to free creativity.

François Peraldi