The Genital Stage: Sohrab Ahmari in conversation with Alfie Bown

Western societies have dismantled many of the prohibitions that ring-fenced errant sexual drives in Freud’s time. The psychoanalytic project describes people caught between two fundamental and contradictory principles: on the one hand, a relentless sexual drive, the libido, on the other, our species’ collective need for social order and harmony.

Part of this harmony, for true Freudians, is embedded in the binary mutuality of men’s and women’s bodies, which remains indispensable for society to reproduce itself, even in our sexually liberated age.

In Saving Genitality the writer and journalist, Sohrab Ahmari, revisits the idea of ‘genitality’ arguing that perhaps the ‘heteronormative’ orthodox Freudians were right about some things after all. How can we understand the relation between libidinal tension and homeostatic harmony, without falling into chaos or complacency?

Sohrab Ahmari is the US editor of UnHerd and the author of From Fire, by Water, a spiritual memoir about his conversion to Catholicism, and the forthcoming The Trimph of the Normal.

Alfie Bown is the founder and editor of Everyday Analysis which publishes pamphlets and essay collections with contemporary social and political issues. 

This conversation was ⁠recoded at Verdurin⁠ in March 2026.

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Get a copy of Saving Genitality : Toward a Freudian Virtue Ethics by Sohrab Ahmari.

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