Masturbation: an approach from psychoanalysis and sexuality device

Abstract

This paper seeks to refer two things: on the one hand, the place of masturbation practices within psychoanalytic theory from the infancy to adolescence and puberty; on the other hand, it analyzes the mechanisms that articulate masturbation within the contemporary sexuality. Both processes are presented as heterogeneous practices that need to be analyzed from a critical position against the onslaught of the psi technologies that promote a normative knowledge about sexuality and raise a regulation of the sexuality methods in the human subject. Such processes attempt to canalize and standardize sexuality by limiting sexual behaviors in the human subject and his own body. These subject positions are also a junction between the mechanisms of power-knowledge that not only produce prohibition, but also originate a permission-punishment discourse between human subjects, their behaviors and their capacity to resist the adequacy of their sexuality. Different approaches from psychoanalysis and sexuality allow us problematize the knowledge of subjects about their sexuality within a critique about their own sexual practices in contemporary sexuality.