Uses and ABuseS of the sexual

sexuality, still, between disorders and singularities

Abstract

The term “generalized child” can be used to talk about the place of ignorance and segregation of bodies objectified by the culture of diagnoses and medications, which ultimately aim to modulate the organism and its behavior. This process is influenced by the so-called medicalization of life, which transforms human phenomena and contingencies into health issues (from a biomedical perspective). This list includes the topic of sexuality, which the article discusses based on some clinical questions when listening to subjects involved in experiences called sexual abuse. The text addresses the specificity of psychoanalysis and the challenge of working with actors crossed by medicalizing logic. This notion also cuts across the conduct of education, justice and social assistance, when they transform the discovery of a masturbatory act in a child into a medical problem, for example. The “generalized child” is also the adult made mass by the indulgences offered in the face of accommodation to the knowledge printed by the dominant discourse. The infantile, a fact of structure, and attributed to sexuality by Freud, is inherent to the being of speech, a cut that humanizes the surface of the body. But the conditions of time and of the body, and of the body in each person’s time, must also be considered. Thus, a child and an adult are subjects in different conditions and moments in relation to their own bodies on the path of life, which is why “a child is not a mother,” and psychoanalysis knows this.