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Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Vol. 50, No. 1, 171-198 (2002)
DOI: 10.1177/00030651020500010701

Sexuality and Textuality

Bonnie E. Litowitz

180 North Michigan Avenue Suite 2220 Chicago, IL 60601, Belitowitz{at}aol.com, Faculty, Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, Department of Psychiatry, Rush Medical School, Chicago

Post-Freudian theories have been criticized for abandoning what is basic to psychoanalysis: the biological body and sexuality as the source of intrapsychic motivation. Arguably, however, they are more present than ever before—for example, in explanations by theorists who propose therapeutic actions beyond interpretation, presymbolic enactments of procedural memories, or disclosures of the analyst's bodily states as an aspect of intersubjectivity. By contrast, the Freudian body was always a text whose mediated meanings require interpretation, for which Freud provided eloquent guides. It is this textuality, and not sexuality, that distinguishes a psychoanalytic approach: a psycho-logic constructed according to a grammar of desire that mediates experience and creates interpretable behavior, both in action and in speech. Theoretical changes in psychoanalysis are traced historically along the dimension of textuality, the example of perversion is invoked, and the conclusion drawn that any theoretical approach, traditional or post-Freudian, that expands an understanding of textuality contributes to the science of psychoanalysis.


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