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Based on Freud's conception that accords a wider meaning to impotence and frigidity based on their sexual nature, the authors focus their work on the potency/impotence conflict in the mother/child, loving and analytic couple relationships. They formulate the hypothesis that the intensity of this conflict is directly linked with an inadequate differentiation of the psychic topography, which explains the threat represented by the drive expression and accounts for the function of impotence. The objectives of the treatment are inferred from this, illustrated by the account of two treatments, one of a couple and the other of an individual analysis.