Barnaby B. Barratt > Quotes

“The predominant misunderstanding, shared both by lay people and those who claimed expertise in psychoanalysis, is to confuse sexuality or psychosexuality with observable “sex acts,” or erroneously to equate the motives for such acts, which are matters of representation available for textual analysis, with the pervasive drivenness of libidinality as the lifeforce that suffuses our experiential embodiment (rendering the entirety of our bodymind an expression of the erotic). That is, “sexuality” is still taken to be a concept that defines a category of behaviors, as contrasted with psychosexuality or libidinality, which underlies both those behaviors and all others. Psychosexuality or libidinality is thus a wider, and more interior, notion than sexuality (which gets equated with sex acts), and serves to refer to a force that intrudes upon and fuels every aspect of psychic life.”
― Barnaby B. Barratt, Radical Psychoanalysis: An essay on free-associative praxis

“Rather, the notion of “normality” may serve to function primarily as a pivotal aspect of a perniciously oppressive ideology. Although it is supported by deep cultural prejudices, within the professional community it is also perpetuated by means of the refusal to acknowledge the crucial psychoanalytic distinction between sexuality as merely the category of behaviors that are popularly designated as “sex acts” (for example, fucking but not eating or shitting) and sexuality as the pervasiveness of psychosexuality throughout our psychic life.122”
― Barnaby B. Barratt, Radical Psychoanalysis: An essay on free-associative praxis

“The significance of sexuality is thus eclipsed by the emphasis on ego functions, on attachment and object-relations, on the self and its interactions, and on whatever is observable about “sex acts.”
― Barnaby B. Barratt, Radical Psychoanalysis: An essay on free-associative praxis

“is evident that there are major ideological pressures in our culture to keep secure the nonscientific tenet that there is such a thing as sexual normalcy, and thus to reject Freud’s discovery that there is not. The tenet is additionally supported by centuries-old religious orthodoxy in the Abrahamic tradition that upholds the purpose of sex as reproduction and condemns the immorality of its enjoyment in other modes or for other purposes.”
― Barnaby B. Barratt, Radical Psychoanalysis: An essay on free-associative praxis