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Notes from the editor
Love expresses the longing for a paradisiacal state of childhood, for harmony and oneness with the world as well as initial attachment figures, usually the mother (cf. Sigusch, 2019, Willi, 2019 [1975]). The reality, however, tends to be that this state can never be achieved again, even though a great deal of poets and thinkers have devoted themselves to this very subject.
Psychoanalysis - and this is precisely Freud's great achievement - assumes that a person's sexual experience begins at birth, if not some time before. Psychoanalysis is thus constantly striving to relate the here and now to precisely the early - pregenital - phases of life (i.e., the oral, anal and Oedipal phases) in order to promote understanding and to achieve healing. Those who are considered healthy are the ones who have successfully passed through these phases and, as a result, have reached the phase of genital sexuality, the so-called genital primacy.
However, genital sexuality has increasingly fallen behind since the 1968 movement, including the Berlin Sexpol groups (cf. Gente, 1970, 1972) and the sexual revolution. In psychoanalysis, there has been a volatilization of the sexual (Quindeau, 2014). The notion that one would offend someone by making genital sexuality an issue is highly political, for multiple legislative advances indicate quite admirably that the state knows how to interfere in the sexual lives of its citizens and that it promotes, protects, and thus sets as a norm the bourgeois nuclear family. It is not long ago (until 1991) that homo- and bisexuality were pathologized and that they lasted as ICD diagnoses, and transgender or non-binary people were still pathologized (called "sick") until 2019.
Nevertheless: society experiences waves of enlightenment at regular intervals. The only thing is that this continues to marginalize and further marginalize people with non-heterosexual identities. In Berlin, much is different than in the rest of the country, but even here, processes of exclusion are constantly reproduced, people are defamed, and their sexual identity is shaken.
Following on from the work of Volkmar Sigusch and a critical sexuality studies (grounded in German critical theory), I would like to use the Magazine for Sexuality and Politics to take up fresh new ideas that have so far received little attention in psychoanalysis and society. Even though Freud struggled throughout his life for the recognition of psychoanalysis as a science, I understand it not only as such, but equally as art and political action.
The magazine is meant to enlighten, to make heads spin, and to spread love to the world. The idea of the magazine is to bring together people with different sexualities under a pansexual umbrella and to generate socio-critical debates that go beyond psychoanalysis and bring into focus those who have hardly been visible so far.
With the magazine, I oppose all forms of racism, classism and sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, misogyny and devaluation of alternative - not bourgeois - ways of life. I oppose a pathologization of different sexualities that do not need treatment (Sigusch, 2003).
The aim is to make conditions dance and to promote solidarity and respect for one another. Together with the authors of the magazine, I would like to reflect, uncover social processes of alienation, name power structures as such, and promote political agency.
The first issue on the topic of Body Politics is a prelude in collaboration with friends from different milieus and countries of the world: from art, politics, film, social movements and psychoanalysis. My warmest thanks go to them.
Bibliography:
Gente, H.-P. (1970). Marxismus, Psychoanalyse, Sexpol, 1. Fischer Verlag.
Gente, H.-P. (1972). Marxismus, Psychoanalyse, Sexpol, 2. Fischer Verlag.
Sigusch, V. (2003). Leitsymptome süchtig-perverser Entwicklungen. Deutsches Ärzteblatt, 1: 37-40.
Sigusch, V. (2019). Kritische Sexualwissenschaft – Ein Fazit. Campus Verlag.
Quindeau, I. (2014). Sexualität. Psychosozial Verlag.
Willi, J. (2019[1975]). Die Zweierbeziehung. Rowohlt Verlag.
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