The clinic of sexuation or why gender is not enough : 8th January 2002 : François Sauvagnat

NOTE

15^th June 2026

In clearing boxes of paper from before stuff was available on the internet, I retrieved papers of the English-speaking Diagonal of the EEP.  I have fond memories of this network for its inclusivity, friendship, support and hospitality. The convenor was Jean Pierre Klotz who circulated this working paper from late François Sauvagnat. He died on 15^th May 2020. A quarter of a century later I am grateful to both Jean Pierre and François for the generosity of their invitation into Lacanian practice.  This paper is circulated with thanks to all involved in the network and in memory of François Sauvagnat.

Julia Evans
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THE TEXT

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From:  “Jean Pierre KLOTZ”

To: “Michel ABOULKER” ; “Catherine ADAMS” ; “Bernard BURGOYNE”  ; “Vivien BAR” ; “Reine-Marie BERGERON” ; “Howard BRITTON” ; “Marie-Helene BROUSSE” ; ” Roger et Josiane CASSIN” ; “Vincent DACHY” ; “Francine DANNIAU” ; “Denise DAVID” ; “Troels DEGN-JOHANSSON” ; “Carin FRANZEN” ; “Penny GEORGIOU” ; “Ruth GOLAN” ; “Jesper Visti HANSEN” ; “Victoria WOOLLARD” ; “Suzanne YANG” ;
“Richard KLEIN” ; “Sissel LAGREID” ; “Catherine LAZARUS-MATET” ; “Johanna MARTIN” ; “Michèle MIECH” ; “Jean-Luc MONNIER” ; “Lars NYLANDER” ; “David OLDMAN” ; “Catherine PAUMIER-FESSLER” ; “Jo SESSIONS” ; “Pierre THEVES” ; “Jean-Pierre KLOTZ” ; “Guy TROBAS” ; “Rose-Paule VINCIGUERRA” ; “Rivka WARSHAWSKY” ; ” Bogdan WOLF” ; “Pierre-Gilles GUEGUEN” ; “Jean-Louis GAULT” ; “Heather MENZIES” ; “René RASMUSSEN” ; “X (via RASMUSSEN)” ; “Michael MAY” ; “Y (via RASMUSSEN)” ; “Lene MADSEN” ; “Jean-Daniel MATET” ; ” Kate BRIGGS” ; “Tommy THAMBOUR” ; “Dan COLLINS” ; “Janet LOW (now Janet Haney)’ ; “Patricia TOUTON-VICTOR” ; “Peter ROWBREY-EVANS” ; “Barbara TERRIS” ; “lan PARKER” ; “Julia EVANS (formerly Julia Green)” ; “Eugenie GEORGACA” ; “Kirsten HYLDGAARD” ; “Gabriel DAHAN” ; “Liliana MAUAS” ; “Claudia IDDAN” ; “Shlomo LIEBER” ; “Diana BERGOVOY” ; “Mabel ROSEN” ; “Marco MAUAS” ; “Ernesto PlECHOTKA” ; “Abigail CHEMERINSKY”  “Esti HAREL” ; “Rimona LEHRER” ; “Vered NOTTI” ; “Beata ZYCH” ; “Grazyna SKIBINSKA” ; “Klaudia WEC-PACEK” ; “Tomasz CZUB” ; “Alina HENZEL-KORZENIOWSKA” ; “Jerzy KACZYNSKI” ; “Hanna STEPNIEWSKA-GEBlK” ; ” Ricardo CARRABINO” ; “Barbara GORCZYCA” ; “Marie-Helene DOGUET” ; “Juan Carlos DER-DADJADIAN” ; “Lieven JONCKHEERE” ; “Katrien LIBBRECHT” ; “Sophie MARRET” ; “Eric LAURENT” ; “Jacques-Alain MILLER” ; “Michael KENNEDY” ; “Roger LITTEN” ; “Pat JACOPS” ; “Mary ROBERTS” ; “Russell GRIGG” ; “Francesca POLLOCK” ; “Thelma SOWLEY” ; “Hubert VAN HOORDE” ; “Astrid GESSERT” ; “Nathalie WULFING” ; “Val PARKS” ; “Antoni VICENS” ; “Vicente PALOMERA” ; “François SAUVAGNAT” ; “Alexandre STEVENS” ; “Rik LOOSE” ; “Bruno DE HALLEUX” ; “Martine COUSSOT” ; “Julia CARNE” ; “Véronique VORUZ” ; “Pierre SKRIABINE” ; “Dalita ROGER-HACYAN” ; “Agnieszka CHOJNOWSKA” ; “Elisabeth GURNIKI” ; “Franck ROLLIER” ; “Anne LECROART” ; “Koen VAN PRAET” ; “Philippe GRISAR” ; “Luc et Lieve VANDER VENNET BILLIET” ; “Johan SCHOKKER” ; “Kjell SOLEIM” ; “Adam KACZMARSKl” ; “Leszek CZARNY” ; “Agneszka KUREK” ; “Alan ROWAN” ; “Jarek LlPlEC” ;  “Patrycia OSTASZEWSKA” ; “Danuta HEINRICH” ; ” Dorota WlERZBOWSKA-PARNOWSKA” ; “Julia RICHARDS” ; “Gabriela VAN DEN HOVEN” ; “Herbert WACHSBERGER” ; “Susanne HOMMEL” ; “Susana TILLET” ; “Stefanie JAAX” ; “David BOYLES” ; “Darius H” ; “Liliana RUSANSKY DROB” ; “Dariush MOAVEN DOUST” ; “Veronique EYDOUX” ; “Lucia CORTI” ; “Marcel EYDOUX” ; “Arndt HIMMELREICH” ; “Gwion JONES” ; “Matthew JAMES” ; “Joanna WATTS” ; “Sofie DECONINCK” ; “Rose GALLAGHER” ; “lris DE GROOTE” ; “Joe BRENNAN” ; “Pete OWEN” ; “Noga WINE” ; “Nancy FAIGHT-TARRETE” ; “Jos DE KROON” ; “Bernard CREMNITER” ; “Pierre NAVEAU” ; “Judith MILLER” ; “Yotvat A. OKSMAN” ; “Luisa BOLOVICK” ; “Omri BICHOVSKY” ; “Bina BERMAN” ; “Annette FELD” ; “Anat FRIED” ; “Gil CAROZ” ; “Marisa ALVAREZ” ; “Luis SOLANO” ; “lrina BAGHDASSARIAN” ; “Elena BARTENEVA” ; “Susanna SIMONS” ; Haroula PEPELI” ; “Susana HULER”

Sent: 08 January 2002, 16:30

Subject: From François Sauvagnat to the Diagonal

English-speaking Diagonal of the EEP

Thematic network: The clinic of sexuation or why gender is not enough.

Some historical preliminaries of the clinic of sexuation

 By François Sauvagnat

Although the clinic of sexuation, such as Freud and Lacan have designed it, is sometimes presented as coming out of nowhere around the 1950ies, there is little doubt that it wouldn’t have been possible if a few specific circumstances had not occurred by the end of the XlXth century. Most of these references were implicitly used by S Freud as self-evident, and some of them have kept imposing their own logic far into the XXth century, to be partly ‘rediscovered’ in some recent studies, and heavily misunderstood under the popular heading of dangers the ‘therapists’ abuse of female patients’, ‘gender identity’ issues, and other cultural prejudices. It might be useful to describe them systematically, in order to facilitate the discussions in our network.

1) Forbidden drives and the true nature of the “hand of God”: Bernard de Mandeville and the ‘Amsterdam principle’

A century before Adam Smith proclaimed that Free Exchange, the source of the Wealth of Nations, was mystically supported by the “Hand of God”, Bernard de Mandeville, in his Fable of Bees, promoted an unexpectedly down-to-earth explanation of this interesting phenomenon. He contended that God’s providence was simply implemented by human vices. This, he claimed, was the great mystery of moral philosophy: the very wickedness of humans, their drives, is the usual instrument through which God provides for the general welfare of societies. ln a perfectly anti-Platonic movement, Mandeville showed that the unintentional consequences of actions have usually surprising results for the individuals responsible for them. When it came to practical examples, Mandeville described how the Port of Amsterdam functioned: the local administration ‘tolerated’ a large number of prostitutes, whose activities were nominally repressed, and restricted to a small portion of the city. These agents had the unofficial, but extremely effective task, to empty by their specific skills the financial content of whatever ship anchoring there. A continuous flood of money and commodities was thus diffused into the rest of the country, giving remarkable momentum to the development of the general wealth.

Nevertheless, this did not imply an equivalent depravation of moral standards, Mandeville insisted, as long as prostitution remained formally ‘banned’, repressed, and just ‘tolerated’ in ‘special circumstances’. Whence his ‘draconian’ theory of morals according to which ‘feelings’ could never be taken as a standard of the Good: morals, he contended, implied that the individual should give up most of his passions, an argument which even Kant never stated so bluntly. This special articulation between the regulation of commodities and the regulation of the bodies has been, ever since, the implicit stakes of the following debates: to what extent should private vice be seen as compatible with public virtues, in other words, what sort of existence should drives be officially granted?

2) The French Napoleonic Codes and the protection of sexual privacy

Although puritanism has predominently been a non-Latin tendency, at the end of the XVlll century, French revolutionaries usually promoted puritan standards of life. To such an extent that some of them (St Just) claimed that children should be protected from the vacillating examples of their parents and raised in paramilatary institutions to be inculcated civic virtues. Consequently, at the turn of the XlXth century, in France, puritanism was associated with the horrors of revolutionary massacres, to such a point that any public incursion in private life became regarded as an intolerable abuse. The end of the French revolution coincided with an avid liberalisation of daily behaviours, which was usually seen as the inevitable counterpart of the inalienability of privacy. A famous consequence of this was the following: when Napoleon decided to re-write the Law Codes, he had this done under the direction of a magistrate, Cambacérès, whose liberal, but also paraphilic tastes, were well known. As a result, such terms as homosexuality, sodomy and perversion totally disappeared from the French penal law (as well as from those it inspired), and all unwanted interference into private life of adults became heavily punished. This stood in striking contrast with the other (especially protestant: British, German) European penal codes, in which sexual deviations were heavily prosecuted and blackmailing more or less encouraged.

3) Two sorts of Victorian bodies: the Dandiacal body and the poor men

A short time after G Brummel’s death, and shortly before Queen Victoria was crowned, G Carlysle published in Britain an unexpected pamphlet, ‘Sartor resartus’, in which he described two sorts of bodies that were to dominate the rest of the century and even more.

The ‘Dandiacal body’- Dandies being thus promoted to become a sign of the Zodiac – was a celestial one, perfectly desexualized, totally under control, perfumed with fresh flowers and fed with deodorised food, symbolising the sublime spirit of British expansion and social hierarchy by that time. On the contrary, the ‘Poor men’ or ‘Irishmen’ were unwashed, poorly fed, bare footed, clothed with tatters, consuming lots of spirits and showing little disposition for the British version of sublimation, etc. This striking discontinuity, dramatically confirmed by the Great Famine, found its natural extension in a number of figures of the puritan body, and brilliantly expanded under such varied guises as the measurable standardised sports (whose appearance is contemporary with the discovery of ‘heroic’ chemical substances subsequently described as ‘addictive drugs’: heroin, morphine, cocaine, etc) and, at the beginning of the XXth century, the familiar comic strips superheroes.

There is little doubt that this celestial body has been a major resistance against the psychoanalytic views on the necessary connection between the body and sexual drives. It is also clear that the insistence on the Ego-strength and the concept of moral progress (which usually implies that sexual drives will evaporate if one stops thinking about them for a while) on which a crucial introducer of psychoanalysis in the USA, J Putnam, insisted in his dialogue with S Freud (‘moral superiority’ in contemporary American ideology), have been long-lasting obstacles to the diffusion of the Freudian thought.

4) The rise of the “morally intact pervert” and his confrontation with Victorian purity.

This issue has been raised by a brilliant German jurist and Latinist, Ulrichs, in a series of pamphlets in which he claimed that of the two Venuses described by Plato in his Banquet, the terrestrial and the heavenly one, homosexuals were predominantly representative of the latter. This claim that homosexuals were mostly “uranists”, that they were not more “sodomites” than heterosexuals, and that the majority of them was morally intact became a motto among liberal students of sexology as early as 1870. It influenced most of the research in Germany and in France; the debates on the moral stand of paraphiles oscillated, in liberal scientific circles, between benign considerations on degenerescence [JE, degeneration or degenerates] (this term has been strikingly misunderstood by I Dowbiggin in his recent studies; by that time, it designated an indeterminate lack of balance present in a large proportion of the population, especially artists, and excluded both malign perversity and crazy-ness), mere idealism (this was the case of Binet’s theory of fetishism, which he viewed as ‘a passion for beauty’) and excitability (a neurophysiological version of the degeneration doctrine, implying excessive sensitivity without loss of moral standards). Such benevolent views were supported by a large proportion of mental doctors, to such an extent that the first hypnotic reeducational treatment of homosexuals promoted by Schrenck-Notzing in the 1880s (the first aggressive behaviour therapy of paraphilias) was generally condemned for its inhumanity. The vast ‘Philanthropic movement’ claiming for a reform of British and German penal laws, although it remarkably failed to be applied in Britain, gained numerous supports in Europe in the two last decades of the XlXth century, and was warmly advocated by S Freud himself.

5) Salons, women of power and Sigisbeos: femininity as culture. Another aspect of the chasm between ‘continental’ and puritan culture is certainly the culture of ‘salons’, a political and literary institution which has predominated mostly in ltaly and France for several centuries, and permeated somewhat into Britain at the beginning of the XlXth century. All salons were organised by women of the higher classes, their influence was by far  superior to that of the numerous associations of men, including academies, and it was usual that crucial political decisions were taken there – Napoleon is said to have been nominated ‘premier Consul’ in Mme Roland’s salon. This usually implied that the lady governing this sort of microcosm was recognized an undisputed authority, even by her husband if there was one, and a great sense of diplomacy. lt also usually implied the presence of Sigisbeos. A more or less official admirer and a confidant who was entrusted to the lady’s private rooms, the Sigisbeo was the other side of the political power, the visible effect of the Lady’s charm and authority, a living proof of her versatility. A classical example of dialogue between a lady and her Sigisbeo is the famous novel by Crebillon fils, ‘Les désarrois du coeur et de l’esprit’, a thorough dissection of the logical complexities of feelings which leaves far behind the Austenian antinomy between sense and sensitivity or the virtuous torments of Richardian heroines.

This sort of relationship became for instance an inevitable ingredient of most of the French versions of the ‘Bildungsroman’, the young Sigisbeo being usually granted a crash course on love, political economy, aesthetics and the art of dressing up. There is little doubt that Lou Andrea Salomé tried to play this sort of role in the psychoanalytic movement, and that the ‘mysteries of femininity’ such as Freud viewed it, had much to do with this general phenomenon, indicative of social settings where educated femininity was the very core of culture. There is also little doubt that if anything justifies the term ‘psychosexuality’, that is, the mental effects of the impossibility of the sexual relationship, this tradition of Sigisbeo’s is a good candidate for that.

6) Sewers, prostitutes, and the outburst of the feminist movement

A constant metaphor of Western civilisations – it can already be found in St Augustine – compares prostitution and sewers as an inevitable means of social control. When sewers of main European cities were reorganised, at the beginning of the XlXth century, as the consequence of the so-called ‘revolution of odours’, two sorts of systems were proposed: one implied that the waste waters should be carried away directly into the sea; another suggestion was that a sufficient transformation should occur on the spot to recycle most of the water and use the residues for chemical or agricultural purposes. When Parent-Duchatelet, who had reorganised the Parisian sewers, applied his model to the local prostitution, not only did he impose a system of identification of the ‘girls’, but he also organised a series of special sites – brothels, prisons, dispensaries, religious charities working for moral rehabilitation – supposed in the long term to ensure a progressive settling and amelioration of the prostitutes. Even if this “system” was gradually exported to a large proportion of the ‘civilised’ territories. Both the controlling and the rehabilitating function were eventually found highly ineffective, and even more the ‘protection of honest women’. What became more and more evident at the end of the century was that the practice of sexual exploitation and harassment of women by men in all sorts of settings attained an unbearable degree, and this became a regular theme of feminist demonstrations at the turn of the century in most of the Western world, and of Freud’s female patients. Much has been said about Freud’s choice to ignore the claims of some of his patients that they had been victimised, but surprisingly enough, little seems to have been done to articulate this with the claims of the feminist movements at the end of the XlXth century. ln fact a first aspect of Freud’s response to the feminist claims lies in his papers on ‘sexual hygiene’ where he contends that girls should be granted the same sort of ‘freedom’ as boys, and such a choice apparently implied, to his mind, a dramatic reduction of prostitutional and abusive practices. What should also be taken more seriously is Freud’s decision NOT to accept victimisation as the core phenomenon of hysteria, but to insist on the hysterical capacity to transmit the content of a desire – a direction in which the art critic Giovanni Morelli had preceded him.

7) Johann Nestroy and the influence of the Parisian vaudeville, between the Viennese Zauberspiel and the Schnitzlerian tragedy

Among the numerous aesthetic models that were promoted during the XlXth century, the vaudeville has had a secret, yet extremely significant role in inspiring Freud’s views on the specificities of the unconscious. The German romantic type of wit had soon opposed itself to the French aristocratic ‘bon mot’ and to the superegoistic British humour. ln the views of the Schlegel brothers, a good ‘Witz’ uttered by an educated German young bourgeois scholar was necessarily ‘politically incorrect’ and it should always provoke some sort of scandal in the gatherings of provincial nobility. If Freud considered that the introspective Jewish wit was especially demonstrative of the inner mechanisms of Witz as opposed to the comic, he also insisted on the ‘tendentious’ aspect of it. Here, his main reference was the Viennese version of Vaudeville, and especially Johann Nestroy’s plays. Nestroy first produced ‘Zauberspiele’, plays in which a magic happy end resolved uneasy love affairs. But after 1830, he turned to the more bitter French Vaudeville repertoire, which he adapted into the Viennese dialect, giving it a radical twist. Typically, an absurd piece of speech became the solution of a socially and sexually entangled plot, referring directly to hot political events, via complicated allusions designed to outsmart the Imperial censure. The autonomy of signifiers divides the subject in any of Nestroy’s plays; it divides it to such a point that in several of his pieces, the scene is divided in two parts (two floors, or two compartments) commanded by the same unspeakable object, that is made unattainable by castration. One of the most striking moments appears in the final scene of Nestroy’s Judith und Holophernes, in which Judith is a transvestite and Holophernes hands out a false head when he is about to be beheaded, just to find that he has been declared dead by his own army, that they have already surrendered and that his protestations are of no avail. This inspiration was to be extended through abundant references to another Viennese, Alfred Schnitzler, who specialized in local forms of Schicksaltragddie with uncanny sexual themes, and whose popularity was assured among students of Freud by the fact that, unlike Nestroy, he mostly wrote in standard German and avoided the Viennese dialect.

8) Physiological and mental sexuation:

It has been repetitively claimed, in certain milieux, that the ‘decade of the brain’ had produced outstanding discoveries that annihilated the ‘old’ views concerning the central role of psychosexuality. Closer investigation shows, on the contrary, that the ‘predestination view on genetics’, a doctrine that has been predominant in psychological circles since the 1980s and promoted an ‘all genetics’ and mechanistic concept of development, has in fact, once the human genome was deciphered, undergone a bankruptcy whose intensity has had very few equivalents in the past centuries. With the confirmation of the strong influence of the milieu in the earliest phases of DNA coding, research on the complexities of human mind, a domain which Freud and Lacan have long investigated, is meeting growing enthusiasm.

Let’s have a look at the various biological theories of the body Freud was confronted with, and let’s ask the question: why did he insist on the importance of psychosexuality as a core element of the body, and what were the alternatives? At least six sorts of medical theories of the body are usually recognized. Aristotle claimed that the soul (psyche) was the prerequisite condition of the body seen as a globalisation of organs; Galen insisted on the finalising forces which were at work in every organ, introducing the ‘adaptive’ point of view (3rd century AD); Descartes introduced the concept of the body as a machine, posing the question of the limits of this mechanicity through the attributes of God’s mind. On the contrary, Leibnitz introduced vitalism, a doctrine which was to dominate the French Enlightenment and German Naturphilosophie, and held it that perception was present at various degrees in all elements of nature, including minerals. Bichat’s concept that life could not be defined otherwise than ‘the sum total of forces that fight against death’, and Claude Bernard’s doctrine of the independence of vital functioning ensured by the ‘inner milieu’ had been somewhat modifying this influential paradigm.

Freud was directly confronted with a distant version of vitalism when he used Beard’s concept of neurasthenia, which supposed that some individuals were ‘proletarians of mental energy’; he also experimented some of the drugs that were promoted to combat such conditions. But eventually, he ended up with the theory of discharge, which was antinomic to most of these doctrines, and considered as a central phenomenon what could be termed a ‘loss of jouissance’, permitted by the presence of the Other. Another surprising point is that while the theory of bisexuality was extremely popular at the end of the XlXth century (Fliess, Swoboda, etc) and immediately adopted by Freud in his first concept of hysteria, he soon renounced to use it – he had already given it up in his treatment of the Dora case, a choice he deplored in his 1923 footnote on Dora’s hidden homosexual tendencies. [Footnote 1, SE VII p120 see below]

One must admit that the concept of ‘bisexual component’ was not sufficient to be directly integrated inside what Freud termed ‘psychosexuality’, which on the contrary came to include a fair amount of symptom-construction mechanisms and resistances, as Freud acknowledged (Traumdeutung) that ‘the difference of sexes does not exist in the unconscious’. [SE V p259, see below for text] Psychosexuality became then an issue which was mainly dealt with in negative terms – a more complete articulation was only to be given by Lacan in the 1970ies. This may be why the theory of the ‘excitation/discharge’, which was so prevalent in Freud’s texts, was so early desexualized by Freud’s contemporaries. Given the social pressures we have previously mentioned, couldn’t it be interpreted ion terms of ‘psychodynamics’ between competing (non-sexual!) biological forces? And even better, couldn’t this be reduced to some innocuous version of non-conflictuality or predestination?
Co F Sauvagnat 2001

`Next issue: Freud’s psychosexuality’ and how it has disappeared from the IPA theories

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Notes & References
added by Julia Evans, 19^th June 2026
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Sauvagnat, A short time after G Brummel’s death,

AI, George Bryan “Beau” Brummell (1778–1840) was a legendary English dandy and fashion icon who practically invented the modern men’s suit. He revolutionised Regency-era menswear by rejecting flamboyant, aristocratic styles in favour of impeccable tailoring, starched cravats, dark fabrics, and pristine personal hygiene. As a close friend of the Prince Regent (later King George IV), Brummell ruled London high society and dictated the dress codes of the era. His core fashion philosophies continue to define menswear today.

***

Sauvagnat, G Carlysle published in Britain an unexpected pamphlet, ‘Sartor resartus’, in which he described two sorts of bodies that were to dominate the rest of the century and even more. The ‘Dandiacal body’- Dandies being thus promoted to become a sign of the Zodiac …

AI, The term “Dandiacal body” originates from Thomas Carlyle’s 1833-1834 satirical philosophical novel, Sartor Resartus. It refers to the collective group of dandies—men obsessed with fashion, personal grooming, and the meticulous construction of their public image.

In the novel, Carlyle treats dandyism as a pseudo-religion where the “office and existence [of the dandy] consists in the wearing of Clothes”. It mocks this subculture as an elite class that elevates the shallow art of dressing to a heroic pursuit, functioning entirely to maintain a highly stylized and artificial physical presence.

***

Sauvagnat, It is also clear that the insistence on the Ego-strength and the concept of moral progress (which usually implies that sexual drives will evaporate if one stops thinking about them for a while) on which a crucial introducer of psychoanalysis in the USA, J Putnam, insisted in his dialogue with S Freud (‘moral superiority’ in contemporary American ideology), have been long-lasting obstacles to the diffusion of the Freudian thought.

AI, James Jackson Putnam was a pioneering American neurologist who served as the foremost champion and legitimizer of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic movement in the United States. Their deep intellectual collaboration spanned years of extensive correspondence, blending Freud’s clinical discoveries with Putnam’s philosophical idealism.

Key Elements of Their Collaboration

• American Champion: As the first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Putnam used his impeccable medical reputation to secure a foothold for Freud’s theories in America.
• Philosophy vs. Desire: While Putnam fiercely advocated for psychoanalysis, the two had profound intellectual disagreements. Putnam believed that unconscious drives should be utilized to cultivate the spiritual and ethical aspirations of the individual, whereas Freud’s approach focused largely on the vicissitudes of sexual desire and the unconscious.
• Historical Letters: Their intense, 89-letter dialogue provides a window into their clashing worldviews—Freud’s disillusioned stoicism vs. Putnam’s philosophical idealism.
• Key Literature: Putnam published foundational works like Human Motives (1915), which Freud read and praised, and posthumous collections like Addresses on Psycho-Analysis (featuring a preface by Freud).

***

Reference to Plato

Sauvagnat, in which he claimed that of the two Venuses described by Plato in his Banquet, the terrestrial and the heavenly one, homosexuals were predominantly representative of the latter. This claim that homosexuals were mostly “uranists”, that they were not more “sodomites” than heterosexuals, and that the majority of them was morally intact became a motto among liberal students of sexology as early as 1870.

***

Sauvagnat, the debates on the moral stand of paraphiles oscillated, in liberal scientific circles, between benign considerations on degenerescence…

AI, A paraphilia is an intense, persistent sexual arousal or urge involving atypical objects, situations, fantasies, or nonconsenting individuals. These interests are only classified as a diagnosable paraphilic disorder if they cause the individual significant personal distress, functional impairment, or harm to others.

AI, Dégénérescence is the French term for “degeneration”. It refers to the process of deteriorating, declining, or moving from a higher to a lower, less functional state. The word is heavily used in medicine, biology, and general contexts.

***

Sauvagnat,  (this term has been strikingly misunderstood by I Dowbiggin in his recent studies; by that time, it designated an indeterminate lack of balance present in a large proportion of the population, especially artists, and excluded both malign perversity and crazy-ness),

AI, Historian Ian Dowbiggin’s work on the history of psychiatry explores how 19th-century French physicians used “degeneracy theory” as a defensive ideology. Facing a crisis in asylum overcrowding and an inability to cure mental illness, these doctors embraced hereditarian concepts to justify their professional status and cultural authority.

Dowbiggin’s Core Arguments

• Professionalization over Science: In his book Inheriting Madness, Dowbiggin argues that the adoption of degeneracy was less about objective biological breakthroughs and more about a desperate need to expand medical jurisdiction and explain away the clinical failures of asylum psychiatry.

IAN DOWBIGGIN, Inheriting madness: professionalization and psychiatric knowledge in nineteenth-century France, Medicine and Society 4, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London,  University of California Press, 1991

• Historical Connection to Eugenics: Dowbiggin points out that 19th-century theories of degeneracy directly paved the way for 20th-century eugenics and psychiatry’s role in advocating for sterilization, immigration restrictions, and institutional segregation.
• Medicalization of Morality: His research underscores how psychiatry historically rebranded societal anxieties, vices, and immigrant behaviours as signs of biological defect and evolutionary decline, labelling entire classes of people as “degenerates” or “defectives”.

***

Sauvagnat, the famous novel by Crebillon fils, ‘Les désarrois du coeur et de l’esprit’, a thorough dissection of the logical complexities of feelings which leaves far behind the Austenian antinomy between sense and sensitivity or the virtuous torments of Richardsonian heroines.

AI, Les Égarements du cœur et de l’esprit is the libertine and analytical masterpiece of Claude Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon fils (published between 1736 and 1738).

AI, Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen was published on 30^th October 1811. It was her debut novel and was originally published anonymously under the pseudonym “A Lady”

AI, The “virtuous torments” of Samuel Richardson’s heroines define 18th-century sentimental literature, exploring the psychological and physical agony of women forced to defend their chastity and moral integrity against predatory, coercive male authority. For example,

– Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady, by Samuel Richardson, was originally published in instalments between December 1747 and December 1748.

– Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded was first published on November 6, 1740.

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Mention of Lou Andrea Salomé

There is little doubt that Lou Andrea Salomé tried to play this sort of role in the psychoanalytic movement,

***

Mention of St Augustine

A constant metaphor of Western civilisations – it can already be found in St Augustine – compares prostitution and sewers as an inevitable means of social control.

***

Sauvagnat, The autonomy of signifiers divides the subject in any of Nestroy’s plays; it divides it to such a point that in several of his pieces, the scene is divided in two parts (two floors, or two compartments) commanded by the same unspeakable object, that is made unattainable by castration.

AI, Johann Nestroy (1801–1862) was a leading Austrian playwright, actor, and satirist. He wrote over 80 farces and comedies, famed for biting social critique, clever puns, and the Viennese dialect. His most globally recognised work is Einen Jux will er sich machen, translated into English as On the Razzle by Tom Stoppard, this farce of two clerks seeking adventure in Vienna also served as the basis for Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker and the hit musical Hello, Dolly!.

***

Sauvagnat, Let’s have a look at the various biological theories of the body Freud was confronted with, and let’s ask the question: why did he insist on the importance of psychosexuality as a core element of the body, and what were the alternatives?

Note,  See this site  / i) The/A Body (1 A Lacanian Clinic/ C Cartel or Group Work) for further texts.

***

Sauvagnat, At least six sorts of medical theories of the body are usually recognized.

Mentions Aristotle, Galen (3rd century AD); Descartes, Leibnitz, Bichat’s, Claude Bernard’s

***

Sauvagnat, Another surprising point is that while the theory of bisexuality was extremely popular at the end of the XIXth century (Fliess, Swoboda, etc) and immediately adopted by Freud in his first concept pf hysteria, he soon renounced to use it – he had already given it up in his treatment of the Dora case, a choice he deplored in his 1923 footnote on Dora’s hidden homosexual tendencies.

Fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria (‘Dora’) : 1901 [1905] : Sigmund Freud,

SE VII p7-114, translated by James Strachey, see www.LacanianWorks.org   /3 Sigmund Freud (19010101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

SE VII p119-120

The treatment, she had thought, was too long for her; she would never have the patience to wait so long. And yet in the first few weeks she had had discernment enough to listen without making any such objections when I informed her that her complete recovery would require perhaps a year. Her refusing in the dream to be accompanied, and preferring to go alone, also originated from her visit to the gallery at Dresden, and I was myself to experience them on the appointed day. What they meant was, no  doubt: ‘Men are all so detestable that I would rather not marry. This is my revenge. [1]

Footnote 1, SE VII p120, Sigmund Freud 1923

The longer the interval of time that separates me from the end of this analysis, the more probable it seems to me that the fault in my technique lay in this omission: I failed to discover in time and to inform the patient that her homosexual (gynaecophilic) love for Frau K. was the strongest unconscious current in her mental life. I ought to have guessed that the main source of her knowledge of sexual matters could have been no one but Frau K.-the very person who later on charged her with being interested in those same subjects. Her knowing all about such things and, at the same time, her always pretending not to know where her knowledge came from was really too remarkable. [Cf. p. 31.] I ought to have attacked this riddle and looked for the motive of such an extraordinary piece of repression. If I had done this, the second dream would have given me my answer. The remorseless craving for revenge expressed in that dream was suited as nothing else was to conceal the current of feeling that ran contrary to it-the magnanimity with which she forgave the treachery of the friend she loved and concealed from every one the fact that it was this friend who had herself accusations against her. Before I had learnt the importance of the homosexual current of feeling in psychoneurotics, I was often brought to a standstill in the treatment of my cases or found myself in complete perplexity.

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Sauvagnat, One must admit that the concept of ‘bisexual component’ was not sufficient to be directly integrated inside what Freud termed ‘psychosexuality’, which on the contrary came to include a fair amount of symptom-construction mechanisms and resistances, as Freud acknowledged (Traumdeutung) that ‘the difference of sexes does not exist in the unconscious’.

Ch VI The Dream-Work, (E) Representation by Symbols in Dreams – Some Further Typical Dreams,  SE V p259, translated by James Strachey, see Chapter VI The Dream-Work– Interpretation of Dreams : 6^th November 1899 : Sigmund Freud, at www.LacanianWorks.org  /3 Sigmund Freud  (18991106 or 19000101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts)

SE V p259, It is true that the tendency of dreams and of unconscious phantasies to employ sexual symbols bisexually betrays an archaic characteristic; for in childhood the distinction between the genitals of the two sexes is unknown and the same kind of genitals are attributed to both of them. [1911.] But it is possible, too, to be misled into wrongly supposing that a sexual symbol is bisexual, if one forgets that in some dreams there is a general inversion of sex, so that what is male is represented as female and vice versa. Dreams of this kind may, for instance, express a woman’s wish to be a man. [1925.]

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Sauvagnat, Psychosexuality became then an issue which was mainly dealt with in negative terms – a more complete articulation was only to be given by Lacan in the 1970s.

Suggested texts,

Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960] : Jacques Lacan. See this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19580101 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

Seminar XX Encore (1972–1973) : From 21^st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

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Related texts

Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960] : Jacques Lacan. See this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19600905 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

Seminar XX Encore (1972–1973) : From 21^st November 1972 : Jacques Lacan. See this site /4 Jacques Lacan, See this site  /4 Jacques Lacan (19721121 or Index of Jacques Lacan’s texts)

Juliet Mitchell : Introduction I to ‘Jacques Lacan & the École Freudienne – Feminine Sexuality’ : 1982. See this site  /5 Other Authors A-Z (Mitchell)

Jacqueline Rose: Introduction II to ‘Jacques Lacan & the École Freudienne – Feminine Sexuality’ : 1982. See this site  /5 Other Authors A-Z (Rose or Index of Authors’ texts)

Russell Grigg, Dominique Hecq & Craig Smith : Introduction to Female Sexuality – The early psychoanalytic controversies : 1999. See this site  /5 Other Authors A-Z (Grigg, Hecq or Smith or Index of Authors’ texts)

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