The Pathways of Sex: A Psychoanalytic Cartography of Sexuality as Structure

ABRAFP
5 de fev.
5 min de leitura

Introduction: Why Sexuality Still Escapes Understanding

Few domains of human experience are as extensively discussed and yet as persistently misunderstood as sexuality. In contemporary culture, sexuality is everywhere: in discourse, in politics, in identity claims, in media representation, and in moral controversy. It is explained, defended, exhibited, classified, and regulated. And yet, despite this apparent saturation of speech, something essential about sexuality continues to escape understanding.

The difficulty does not lie in a lack of information, but in the framework through which sexuality is approached. Dominant perspectives tend to reduce sexuality to one of three axes: behavior, identity, or morality. Sexuality is treated as what one does, who one is, or how one should act. What is lost in this reduction is the structural dimension of sexuality as it operates within the psychic economy of the subject.

Psychoanalysis, since its inception, has insisted on a radically different proposition: sexuality is not primarily a matter of choice, expression, or normativity, but a structural organization of desire, repetition, and enjoyment. It is not governed by consciousness, but by the logic of the unconscious. It does not follow intention, but insistence.

It is precisely from this theoretical position that The Pathways of Sex emerges.

Sexuality Beyond Behavior, Identity, and Morality

Sigmund Freud’s most unsettling discovery was not that sexuality plays a role in psychic life, but that it does so independently of conscious will and moral intention. Sexuality, for Freud, is driven by the pulsion—a concept that already disrupts any simplistic understanding of pleasure or choice. The drive does not seek an ideal object; it seeks a circuit. It moves, discharges, returns.

Jacques Lacan radicalized this insight by demonstrating that sexuality is inseparable from language, fantasy, and symbolic inscription. Desire is not biological instinct, nor emotional preference; it is structured by signifiers, lack, and repetition. Enjoyment (jouissance) does not obey the pleasure principle alone; it often persists precisely where pleasure fails.

From this perspective, sexuality cannot be evaluated in terms of healthy versus unhealthy, liberated versus repressed, or normal versus deviant. These categories belong to moral or sociological discourse, not to psychoanalytic reading. What matters clinically and theoretically is not whether a sexual configuration conforms to a norm, but how it is structured, how it repeats, and what psychic cost it carries.

The Pathways of Sex proposes a systematic way of reading sexuality from this structural standpoint.

A Cartography of Sexuality: The Concept of Pathways

Rather than offering a typology of sexual identities or behaviors, the series introduces the concept of pathways: distinct structural organizations through which sexuality may take shape in psychic life.

A pathway is not a category into which individuals are classified. It is a logic—a mode of organizing desire, satisfaction, fantasy, attachment, defense, and repetition. A subject may traverse different pathways across time, or remain fixated within one. What defines a pathway is not preference, but structure.

Across six volumes, the series maps six fundamental pathways:

Sexuality organized around discharge and relief
Sexuality structured by affective bond and idealization
Sexuality sustained by embodied fantasy
Sexuality functioning as defense and protection
Sexuality marked by ambiguity and transition
Sexuality crystallized as symptom and repetition

Each pathway is examined not in terms of moral judgment, but in terms of its internal logic, its stabilizing function, and its inherent risks.

The Six Volumes: A Unified Theoretical System

Volume I — The Empty Sex

The first volume establishes the foundational distinction of the entire series: satisfaction is not synonymous with symbolic inscription. In what Ferreira terms Empty Sex, sexuality is organized around tension and discharge, producing relief without leaving a trace. Pleasure occurs, but nothing remains.

This pathway is characterized by urgency, substitutability of partners, and the absence of subjective transformation. The act satisfies the drive, but fails to inscribe meaning. Repetition is inevitable, not because pleasure was insufficient, but because nothing was symbolically registered.

Volume II — The Loving Sex

Here, sexuality becomes intertwined with affective bond and idealization. Desire seeks continuity, recognition, and permanence. The other is no longer interchangeable, but singular. Sexuality becomes a bridge toward attachment.

Yet this pathway introduces its own risks: fusion, jealousy, dependency, and the transformation of desire into demand. Love stabilizes sexuality, but may also constrain it.

Volume III — The Fantasmatic Sex

Situated between emptiness and love, this volume articulates sexuality as structured by fantasy rather than discharge or attachment. Fantasy here is not illusion, but a symbolic frame that sustains desire.

Erotic intensity persists without romantic demand. Limits are not deficits, but structural conditions. This pathway clarifies why certain sexual bonds remain intense precisely because they are not named as love.

Volume IV — The Defensive Sex

In this pathway, sexuality functions as protection. Control, distance, and regulation are not obstacles to desire, but its very conditions. Intimacy is managed, vulnerability avoided, and eroticism emerges through restraint.

Defense becomes eroticized. What protects desire also limits it. Stability is achieved at the cost of symbolic expansion.

Volume V — The Transitional Sex

This volume examines sexuality in an in-between zone, where pleasure intensifies without symbolic naming. Ambiguity sustains desire temporarily, but generates confusion.

Transitional sexuality often functions as a passage—toward attachment, defense, or symptom. The absence of naming preserves intensity, but postpones structure.

Volume VI — The Symptomatic Sex

The final volume articulates sexuality as symptom: repetition beyond pleasure, persistence despite suffering. Here, enjoyment is entangled with pain, and the subject returns to the same configuration regardless of cost.

Sexuality is no longer organized by relief, love, fantasy, defense, or transition, but by fixation and repetition compulsion. This volume retroactively illuminates the entire series, revealing sexuality as structure rather than choice.

From Written Work to Pedagogical Transmission: The Online Course

While the six volumes constitute a complete written theoretical system, The Pathways of Sex — An Online Psychoanalytic Course was developed to transmit this framework pedagogically.

The course unfolds the same structural logic across seven modules, beginning with foundational concepts—drive, repetition, jouissance, symbolic inscription—and progressing through each pathway in a coherent sequence.

All classes are delivered as dense theoretical monologues, grounded in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. The format privileges conceptual rigor over didactic simplification. This is not a course designed for quick consumption, but for sustained engagement.

The course does not summarize the books, nor do the books merely supplement the course. They belong to the same work. One speaks; the other inscribes. One transmits; the other elaborates.

Authorship and Theoretical Unity

Both the book series and the course are authored by Deivede Eder Ferreira, whose work has reached an international readership interested in contemporary psychoanalytic theory.

Ferreira’s contribution lies not in proposing a new moral stance on sexuality, but in articulating a coherent psychoanalytic cartography capable of reading sexual experience beyond reductionist binaries. His work does not promise solutions or prescriptions. It offers language—precise, structural, and clinically oriented.

Why This Framework Matters Today

In an era marked by proliferating identities and intensifying moral discourse around sexuality, psychoanalysis risks being either diluted into self-help language or dismissed as obsolete. The Pathways of Sex resists both tendencies.

By returning to the structural logic of desire, repetition, and enjoyment, the framework offers a way to think sexuality without moral panic or ideological simplification. It reminds us that sexuality is not what we claim, defend, or display, but what insists—often against our intentions.

Understanding structure does not eliminate suffering. But it makes suffering readable.

Conclusion: Thinking Sexuality Otherwise

The Pathways of Sex does not offer comfort. Psychoanalysis never has. It offers something more demanding and more valuable: the possibility of reading what repeats, of situating desire where it escapes mastery, and of recognizing sexuality as one of the privileged sites where the unconscious speaks.

For clinicians, students, researchers, and intellectually engaged readers, the series and the course together constitute a unified psychoanalytic work—one that invites us to think sexuality otherwise, beyond appearances, beyond norms, and beyond the illusion of choice.