The Genital Stage

Western societies have dismantled many of the prohibitions that ring-fenced errant sexual drives in Freud’s time. The psychoanalytic project describes people caught between two fundamental and contradictory principles: on the one hand, a relentless sexual drive, the libido, on the other, our species’ collective need for social order and harmony.

Part of this harmony, for true Freudians, is embedded in the binary mutuality of men’s and women’s bodies, which remains indispensable for society to reproduce itself, even in our sexually liberated age.

In his latest work, Saving Genitality the writer and journalist, Sohrab Ahmari, revisits the idea of ‘genitality’ arguing that perhaps the ‘heteronormative’ orthodox Freudians were right about some things after all. How can we understand the relation between libidinal tension and homeostatic harmony, without falling into chaos or complacency?

This conversation with Sohrab Ahmari will launch Saving Genitality: Toward a Freudian Virtue Ethics, a copy of which is included with admission. The event is organised with Everyday Analysis, which publishes a series of pamphlets on contemporary social and political issues.

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