I HAVE always considered Sigmund Freud’s theories about sexuality to be deeply unsettling. Not because I fear them in any way, like a moralising prude, but simply because I cannot take them seriously and regard his ideas both as a money-making racket and a misleading exercise in pseudo-scientific fantasy.
I therefore welcome the fact that Jean Baudrillard – whose early work, according to Paul Hegarty, has “phallic, oral, anal connotations everywhere” – finally rejected Freudianism on the basis that sexual liberation has merely taken place in the realm “of signs, not of meaning”. Baudrillard was adamant that whilst man has been “given the right” to his own unconscious, we simply reproduce the symbols that come to us by way of psychoanalysis. This results in the domination of the genuinely symbolic by symbolic function, leading to the “the denial of sexuality as symbolic exchange”. Needless to say, the saturation of Western culture with the ideas of Freud played a big part in this regurgitative process.
Baudrillard insisted that a genuinely symbolic form of sexuality can never be expressed, because “the true fantasy is unrepresentable. If it could be represented, it would be unbearable”. Ironically, the fact that the genuinely symbolic has been replaced by the signifying symbolic means that things have become far less real. Diffused throughout modern civilisation, Freud’s artificial reconstruction of human behaviour has led to the acceptance of a false paradigm that confines sexuality within the bounds of social acceptability. The reality of the organic symbol, something that is especially powerful in the domain of sexuality, has been replaced by the secondhand realism of the signified.
