​In his 2014 orientation text, “The Unconscious and the Speaking Body,” Jacques-Alain Miller says that, “not everything is semblance, there is a real.” He then goes on to identify the inexistence of the sexual relation as the real of the social bond, and the speaking body as the real of the unconscious.

In this clinical seminar, we will approach these two reals—inexistence of the sexual relation and the speaking body—from the perspective of a series of three terms: sex, sexuality, and sexuation. To orient our work, we will examine some of the less studied Freudian and Lacanian cases that touch on the sexual life of speaking beings: the case of Little Hans, Leonardo da Vinci, the Young Homosexual Woman, Hamlet, and Gide. We will read these cases against the backdrop of the two cases of neurosis that Freud elaborates, that of Dora and the Rat Man.