Abstract

In contemporary debates within psychology, psychoanalysis is often discarded too hastily as a historically dated field of knowledge that would limit itself to promoting the reiteration of social norms, reproducing normative arrangements of gender and sexual orientation. Nevertheless, in this paper, we indicate how psychoanalysis was a subversive pioneer regarding the moral-medical discourse in force at the time of its invention and regarding the contemporary knowledge related to the fields of gender and sexuality. This is done by first acknowledging some of the mistakes made in psychoanalysis due to carrying a series of normativities that should be alien to it, but were heralded from other discourses in a rather uncritical manner. Thus, we investigate how psychoanalysis allows us to think sexuality beyond the matrix of sex/gender/sexual orientation, in order to point to manifestations of pioneering and subversion in Freud and Lacan’s formulations that can contribute to discussion on gender and sexuality via the formulation of the objet petit a and the theory of sexuation.

Keywords:
Gender; Sexuality; Unconscious; Objet petit a; Sexuation