Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and psychosexuality - a reminder

ABSTRACT Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, who would have turned 90 this year, had a passion for truth that placed her work at the very heart of psychoanalysis. Never leaving the field of Freudian analysis she explored the inevitable difficulties, due to our premature birth, to become moral subjects. Psychoanalysis was to her, as it was to Freud, a psychology of conflict. She was suspicious of seemingly optimistic views which saw conflict as created between the potentially free subject and one repressive external system or another. Freedom is always limited in psychoanalysis. In an attempt to follow the line of thought in her vast production the article touches upon her critique of Freud’s so called phallic monism, the significance of both parents’place in the psyche, the question of “Falsehood”, perversion as a dimension of the human psyche, and her concerned view on the situation of Western thought today. The author suggests that we might benefit from her radical Freudian stance in a time when the view on truth is undergoing many unfathomable transformations. Perhaps Chasseguet-Smirgels thought can also be an important reminder about the foundations of our work; not just sexuality, not just mental acts but their specific relationship to each other