Besides the scandal of pedophilia in the church, French society is shaken by debates with often sharply divided arguments about equality between women and men, particularly sexual and gender equality. Often, these discussions are reduced to the single theme of human sexuality.
Hence our questions to the psychoanalyst Jean-Luc Vannier, Lecturer at the University of Côte d’Azur, Edhec, and Ipag in Nice and Paris.
Nice-Premium: What do you think of the debates related to human sexuality that are agitating French society?
Jean-Luc Vannier: Psychoanalysis, in the confidential conduct of sessions, deals daily with all these subjects. With the significant difference that patients experience them or have experienced them personally, often with great suffering. The mystery and paradox of the psyche: real or, sometimes, merely imagined, these experiences related to sexuality are never theoretical in their consequences or virtual in their effects. It is indeed striking to note how, in what is called an analysis, the torments of human sexuality, the “sexual aberrations” to borrow the chapter title of one of Freud’s most controversial books, remain the key focus of the work. Rarely at the beginning of sessions, due obviously to resistance, but certainly eventually. As soon as we address the unconscious, we grapple, along the way, with sexuality.
Nice-Premium: But why is human sexuality so difficult to live with?
Jean-Luc Vannier: What psychoanalysis has uncovered, despite a whole analytical current – ego psychology – that has tried to sweep sexual dust under the carpet or to label it “pregenital” to soften its most subversive aspects, is that human sexuality is diphasic: contrary to widespread belief, surprisingly persistent to this day, there is an infantile sexuality that precedes genital adult sexuality intended for reproduction. When the latter emerges at puberty, it is already contended by the former, which persistently overflows and relishes in sabotaging the adult’s sexuality.
Nice-Premium: What relevance does admitting the existence of this infantile sexuality have for the issues that concern us (pedophilia, equality of the sexes and genders…)?
Jean-Luc Vannier: It is essential. Let’s be clear: when psychoanalysis refers to infantile sexuality, it is not, contrary to common perception, about pedophilia, or even incest. Although for this second term, the boundary is significantly more problematic. Let me explain: every adult caring for a child (and I intentionally say adult and not parent to emphasize its most generic form, thus possibly open to same-sex couples) in feeding, care, play, or toilet training, every adult, I say, implants in the child’s universe messages compromised by their own repressed infantile sexuality.
Nice-Premium: In what forms do these messages appear?
Jean-Luc Vannier: Breastfeeding or bathing are in this respect the most revealing in the clinic: they engage many unconscious fantasies. Much like the commotion emanating from the parents’ room is likely to provoke quite strange hypotheses in the child. Thus, questioning pedophilia amounts to examining the failures of this infantile sexuality: for a pedophile, their infantile sexual urge, powerfully reactivated in the presence of any child, overwhelms them completely, regardless of age, adult sexuality, and even the nature of their parental status. Let us recall that one of the major characteristics of this drive is the constant, never-satisfied search for direct satisfaction. In this sense, perversion, as a psychic structure and not in the moral sense where popularization has fraudulently confined the notion, denotes anyone who has not entered – psychically – into adult genitality.
Nice-Premium: How could this infantile sexuality also shed light on debates regarding the issue of gender and sex equality?
Jean-Luc Vannier: The error is too often made in debates to confuse “sex” and “gender”. Let it be said clearly: the distinction of genders precedes the difference of sexes. The former relates to the characteristics of male and female roles. The latter concerns sexual function and sexual pleasure. It is not the same at all! In human psycho-sexual development, gender is attributed from the outside, often by parents and sometimes even before the child’s birth, during an ultrasound for example. Once the anatomical sex of the fetus is known, parents will fantasize about the child’s future career, or even their name: the selection of the latter – its unconscious part – sometimes hides real skeletons in the closet!
Nice-Premium: And what about the difference of sexes?
Jean-Luc Vannier: The difference of sexes is observed, experienced, well or poorly lived, integrated or rejected during the various stages of the long process of sexuation: that is, all that a human being will make, firstly, of their anatomy – is it still their “destiny” to paraphrase Freud? – and then, how they will live, therefore, their maternal and paternal identifications, heterosexual and homosexual, in their entire oedipal journey? Not to mention castration, which remains, now and always, the molten core of all the vicissitudes in this uncertain construction of identity. All this falls within the contingencies of infantile sexuality.
Nice-Premium: So does infantile sexuality mark forever the sexual destiny of every human being?
Jean-Luc Vannier: In a posthumous note, Freud states: “infantile sexuality is the prototype of all sexuality.” This “trademark”, to use your question’s terms, determines a large part of our life. Ultimately, humans must account for a sexuality that remains broader, of pleasure, and forever irreducible to merely species reproduction. An illustration: in any seduction maneuver – and seduction is an inherently asymmetric mechanism – what are conventionally called preliminaries are ultimately only the remnants of this infantile sexuality: protean, fragmentary, and characterized by extreme mobility of erogenous zones. In the adventure of the meeting, it is nevertheless the moment where “everything changes”: such is its importance!
