For 25 centuries of its existence, philosophical science has thought very little about sex. But psychoanalysis, whose history spans a little over a hundred years, filled this gap.
By observing my patients, I learned that any person, as soon as he has the opportunity to speak freely, speaks only about sex: about love and about choosing a partner, about desire and pleasure. In truth, the patient lying on the analyst’s couch can talk about anything: about mathematics or painting, about astrology or philosophy. But no matter what he says, the analyst always asks himself: “What is behind this reasoning?” And it turns out that three main questions are always hidden behind the words of the patient, to which he seeks to find an answer. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? And what does it mean to be a man for a woman or a woman for a man?
The only formula of relations between the sexes that is true for all people in our psyche simply does not exist.
So why does the main question come down to sexuality? Because in our psyche there is no single formula of love and relations between the sexes that is true for all people. We all have only a biological «formula of procreation»: the spermatozoon is in a certain relationship with the egg, as a result of which something third arises (the woman becomes pregnant). However, it is easy to see that a man is not a sperm, and a woman is not an egg.
The difference is that a woman and a man think, feel, speak. In other words, they have a psyche. Thanks to Freud and the Oedipus complex he discovered, we know that the relationship between parents is a model for our future sexuality. But only as a model, and not a program given once and for all. Therefore, growing up, we experience confusion, not knowing what to do with our sexual side.
Sometimes men and women seem to me plunged into chaos, because they do not have a formula for love and sexual relations. And that is why, as psychoanalysis shows, when the burden of all the rules that limit him falls off the patient, when the oppression of conformism and the need to observe decorum disappears, when his speech gets the opportunity to flow freely, he begins to think about the most important and most incomprehensible: about sex, about love, about desire, about pleasure. About how they are woven into relationships with a person of a different sex. And so he invents his own relationships, deduces his own formula of love.
*Based on a lecture given at the Faculty of Philosophy of St. Petersburg State University in May 2009.