Sexual addiction: insights from psychoanalysis and functional neuroimaging

Sexual motivation is a fundamental behavior in human. For a long time, this behavior has been somehow ignored from psychological and neuroscientific research. In this article – reflecting the collaboration of a clinical psychologist and a neuroscientist – we show that in the current period, sexual affiliation is one of the most promising affiliation context to articulate a debate, a dialog and convergence points between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Recent data on healthy sexual behavior and its compulsive variant are discussed under the prism of neuroscience and psychoanalysis.