Introduction
 |
AS STRANGE as it might seem, psychology really cannot say
much about human sexuality. It’s true that
psychology can be used to treat sexual dysfunction, and psychologists know
that coerced sex, such as
child
abuse or
rape,
leaves lasting emotional scars on the victims. But psychology really cannot
offer much advice to consenting adults as to what sexual activities are
appropriate or inappropriate. Not much, that is, except this: You can get
into all kinds of trouble if you fail to understand something about the nature
of perversion and love. |
Perversion
|
Perversion. This is a word not heard much in today’s
world. The verb to pervert literally means “to lead astray”
or “to misdirect,” and perversion usually is used in the moral
sense to refer to something that leads a person away from what is good or
right. But I will be using the word in the psychological sense of something
that leads a person away from a psychological
goal.
As an example,
consider the nature of alcohol abuse. Psychologically speaking, alcoholics
drink in order to avoid the pain of facing up to and making amends for all
the times they have failed to take responsibility for their lives. Hence
the
abuse
of alcohol can be called a perversion because it leads a person away
from the true aim of dealing with the
guilt
and into a drunken state of illusory well-being.
To be clever,
we could say, then, that the point of a perversion
is to always miss the point.
With more direct
language, we can say that a perversion leads you away from the true depths
of your emotional pain—and from the psychological healing that could
happen if you were to work therapeutically with that pain—by distracting
you with something apparently pleasurable.
The connection
between sex and perversions is found in love. But when talking about love
we need to be clear what we are really talking about. |
Courtly
Love
|
If you study the history of human sexuality and marriage
through ancient and primitive cultures, you will find that communal sex and
polygamy predominate. Communal sex tends to predominate in matriarchal
societies—that is, societies in which power tends to pass through women,
and property is more or less communal—where women mate with whomever
they want, without any particular, or lasting, emotional
attachment.
In patriarchal
societies, where property passes through the male lineage, knowing a
child’s father is of greatest importance; hence men tend to be promiscuous,
while women are carefully guarded sexually.
And then there
are those curious mixtures of elements, such as in cultures where a man would
offer his wife for the night to a guest, as a token of
hospitality.
Yes, there are
occasional stories, some very poetic—and tragic—about men and women,
each promised in an arranged marriage to another, who became passionately
attracted to each other. But, as with most things in life, these exceptions
only prove the rule: through most of human history, about the only thing
that hardly ever seemed to influence mating was romantic
love.
Yet, when we
think about “finding a mate” we tend to think of romantic love.
And one of the most enduring images of romantic love is the medieval knight
in shining armor, the strong but pure man who rescued the lady in distress
. . . and they lived happily ever after.
In reality, most
medieval knights were anything but pure, and “marriages,” as in
pagan cultures, lasted only as long as convenient. If you read medieval history
carefully, you will find that feudal society, especially under the influence
of the Albigensian heretics in the 11th to 13th centuries, was barbarian
and chaotic, rife with murder, massacre, and cruelty. Knights, if they were
anything, were nothing more than thugs and rapists who preyed upon any
defenseless persons they came across. The knightly sexual ideal was to seduce
a married woman, and, if she refused, to rape her. The literature of this
“age of chivalry” essentially idealized adultery.
“Wait a
minute,” you say. “That’s not what I learned about courtly
love. Courtly love was pure and ideal. So what happened?”
Well, the troubadours
and their Provençal poetry
“happened.”
In the
later middle ages, the troubadours, under the influence of Christianity,
transformed the earlier romantic literature based on hedonism into a new
literature based on the idealization of
love.[1]
Thus the knights went from lusting after their
friends’ wives to swooning in love over a woman’s glove. The literature
idealized “love” to such an extent, and set so many obstacles in
front of it, that this love became almost impossible to attain. And
so romance became a poetic quest for an unattainable ideal of
wholeness.
The aristocracy
upheld this ideal of courtly love on the surface—while doing what it
wanted behind the scenes, of course—and it provided the underlying European
moral influence for the masses, for the last several centuries. Consequently,
bolstered by Hollywood cinema in the 20th century, romantic “love”
became the obsessive secular quest of life. And then, with the collapse of
sexual morality beginning in the 1960s, the final association was made: the
long sought chalice of courtly love is filled with erotic
sexuality.
Notice, however,
that this courtly “love” is not a pagan concept, and, though it
was influenced by Christian morality,
 it has nothing in common with real Christian love either.
Like the famous quest for the Holy Grail, courtly love is a medieval literary
creation.
Which is
why the brilliant French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, declared that courtly
love “is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual
relation by pretending that it is we who put up an obstacle to
it.” [2]
In other
words, the chalice of courtly love—and all the romantic sentiments and
eroticism that fill it—is an
illusion.[3] It’s impossible to find love through sexuality.
It’s impossible to use your body to hide your emotional pain.
It’s impossible to heal your own emotional brokenness through
the body of another person as mortal and broken as you
are. [4]
|
This absence
of a sexual relation, as taught by Lacan in his psychoanalytic concept of
the impossible, can be approximated by the question, “What is
the sound of one hand clapping?”
For example, I have seen both men and women who have tried to seduce a woman
to get from her the nurturing and attention they never received from their
mothers. And I have seen both women and men who have tried to seduce a man
to get from him the protection and attention they never received from their
fathers. And in the end it’s all an impossibility. The moral is simple,
and cuts across the board, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual:
You can never seduce your despair, and you can never
find real love through any form of sexual activity.
Thus, one does not need a “sex life” to be a good person. Notice,
though, that a good person is not the same as a good citizen.
A good citizen is an empty-headed, insatiable consumer, and, because of the
efforts of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, eroticism has become a prime consumer
activity. So let’s give a round of applause to Madison Avenue and Hollywood.
Ah, can you hear it—the pathetic sound of one hand clapping? |
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|
True
Love
|
Most persons don’t realize this,
but the common, or popular, view of “love” involves an element
of receiving something. “I love chocolate” really means
that “I enjoy getting the experience of the taste of chocolate.”
Similarly, “I love you” commonly implies “I enjoy playing
with your body,” or “I enjoy believing that you will give
me security or protection,” or “I enjoy feeling sexual pleasure
with your body” (or “I want to have sexual pleasure with
your body.” As a result, Lacan, in his teachings about love, described
the typical act of love as “polymorphous
perversion.” [5]
Don’t be
put off by the big words. You already know what perversion means.
Polymorphous simply means “having many forms.” So this amounts
to saying, like the popular song from the 1980s, that we’re looking
for love in all the wrong places. That is, we look for satisfaction in all
the various titillating parts of the body but never find what is truly
sought.
What is “truly
sought” is something we all experience as painfully missing from life:
some comforting sense of absolute belonging and acceptance. Those who are
fortunate get a sense of this feeling as babies, under a parent’s
protection. But the feeling is fractured more often than not by parental
empathic failures, and it is lost entirely from ordinary sensory experience
as children become older and independent and the awareness of our essential
human isolation and mortality sets in.
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Some people skip
from one “partner” to another over the surface of existential pain,
like a stone skipping over water. As long as they stay above the surface
they’re perfectly happy; but when an affair ends, and they come crashing
down, they’re desperate for the next leap, sometimes searching for a
new partner even at the funeral for the old one. Yet sooner or later the
stone loses vitality, and with a final splunk falls into the depths of
tribulation. |
|
Lacan points
out that although “love”—that is, in its common, popular
sense—is, in essence, a futile chasing after something that doesn’t
exist, there is nevertheless a love beyond this “making love,”
a love that exists beyond lack and limitation and that involves a sort of
ecstasy of
being,[6]
as a matter of
soul,[7]
not of the body. The irony is that in the common
act of “making love” we think we know what we want, but
it turns out to be an illusion, while this other love touches on a real
experience of which we know nothing. It’s a mystical sort of
thing, as Lacan
acknowledges.[8]
Now, although
Lacan doesn’t say it this way, the difference between these two kinds
of love—common “love” and true love (or real love)—can
be conceived of as the difference between receiving and giving.
|
Note carefully,
though, that giving does not refer to the mere sharing of material
objects or wealth; it refers to the expression of profound emotional qualities
such as patience, forbearance, compassion, understanding, and
forgiveness.
This all goes to show that it’s easy enough to “love” those
who “love” us: parents who protect us, “partners” who
make us feel received, animals who never threaten us. But can we love those
who annoy us . . . irritate us . . . obstruct
us . . . scorn us . . . hate us? Can we love
our enemies? That’s the real test of real love. |
|
And it was out
of a true understanding of the difference between common “love”
and true love that a man such as St. Francis of Assisi
was led—led right to the point, actually—to pray that he might
seek “not so much to be loved as to
love.” |
Imitations
of
True
Love
|
As shocking as it might
sound, most of us who claim to be loving are not giving selflessly. Instead,
we are addressing a covert psychological desire either to avoid being
abandoned or to feel powerful.
“Love”
as Bribery
Most men who
give flowers to women, for example, are either saying, “I desire to
use your body for my erotic pleasure,” or they are trying to satisfy
the woman’s demand for recognition—and to avoid her
anger and rejection if the recognition is
forgotten—on a birthday or anniversary.
Similarly, many
parents who give excessive money or presents to children or grandchildren
are unconsciously trying to buy allegiance and favor. Unable to accept and
understand the child’s deepest emotional experiences, the parent will
offer an easily procurable object to make the child feel happy. And the child,
unable consciously to express the covert cover-up occurring under his or
her very nose, will accept the present under the assumption that “this
must be love.”
Sad to say,
therefore, the apparent generosity of common “love” is really an
act of bribery.
“Love”
as Power
We commonly believe
that the desire to erotically arouse another person is a sign of love. The
deep psychological truth, however, is that such a desire masks a more hidden
desire: to gain some control over our own
helplessness. That is, because we as children felt
the helplessness and resentment of having our bodies controlled by our parents,
as adults we unconsciously compensate for this helplessness
by seeking out ways to control others. We can do this with wealth, we can
do this with education, we can do this with social status, we can do this
with physical strength, and we can do this with eroticism.
Sad to say,
therefore, the thrill of arousing lust in another person is really an act
of self-serving power over that person.
|
Child abuse,
too, is a form of power over another gained through common “love.”
But whereas most common “love” takes the form of willing manipulation,
child abuse is coercive: the abuser preys
upon a child’s moral and intellectual helplessness. The abuser gets
all the self-satisfaction he or she wants and in the process leaves the child
with a life-long emotional scar of having been exposed to the manipulative
aspects of eroticism well before having developed healthy
defense mechanisms to cope with such psychological
assaults. The abuser walks away smacking his lips, and the child is left
as bones for the garbage. |
|
Summary
Therefore, those
who have the most to gain have the greatest desire to deceive. Those who
have the least to gain—and who want nothing, and who give everything,
like the saints—can love perfectly. And this perfect, true love is no
imitation.
|
Most persons
today will say, “Oh, come on. As long as I love my partner, it’s
OK.” Yet consider all the orphaned children around the world whose
parents—now dead—became infected with AIDS while saying “I
love you.” So does saying I love you make it OK? |
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Fear
of
Love
|
Believe it or not, most of us are brought up in modern
culture to fear love. This is a radical statement, so pause a bit and consider
it.
How often were
your deepest human needs for comfort, protection, and guidance as a child
ignored or stifled by your parents? How often were you, as a child, criticized
and laughed at for expressing your
honest
feelings? How often are you now used, in our culture of merchandising, as
an object to be manipulated in order to satisfy some other person’s
desire for profit and power? How often do you
shape
yourself—with fad diets, implants, cosmetic surgery, workouts, jewelry,
tattoos, makeup, hair dye, and clothing—to meet the expectations of
someone’s desire?
And how often,
in the midst of all this exploitation, has anyone ever done anything for
your own growth and welfare, without thought of what could be had in
return?
So what does
a person learn from such experiences other than that this is a world of
competition, strife, and conflict, geared toward the survival of the
“fittest”—or in today’s world, the
meanest—in which honesty and compassion are foolish
weakness?
Is it any wonder,
then, that when denied the comfort and respect of true love, the fear and
panic can be so blinding that children will blame themselves, believing that
they don’t deserve love, and will fall headlong into self-loathing and
masochism?
In contrast,
true love is an act of will, not something that you “fall” into.
You can fall into desperate desire, and you can fall into fatal attraction,
but you can’t fall into love. Love is a sacrifice of sorts, and it’s
a sacrifice of all the illusions that our culture expects from us. To offer
true love—to will the good of
another [9]—is to stand against the culture—not as a
revolutionary or
terrorist,
but with a humble offering of understanding and compassion, something better
than what others “see” in their
blindness.
True love, therefore,
forsakes the prestige offered by the culture in its illusions. Yet, when
we have been taught from childhood to covet this prestige as our very
identity,
is it any wonder that we fear love?
Far easier—and
safer—isn’t it, to hide behind illusions and games of wealth, power,
violence, intrigue, and seduction? |
The
Love-Hate
Flip-flop
|
One of Freud’s early disciples, Melanie Klein, took
up the task of applying the techniques of psychoanalysis to children. She
considered her work a natural extension of Freud’s theories, rather
than any sort of innovation in psychoanalysis; still, she met considerable
criticism from her psychoanalytic colleagues. And rightly so, for her work
is characterized by speculative and fantastic explanations of, well, infant
fantasy.
 Nevertheless, Klein did
bring to light the “ugly” side of infant development, for she saw
in infants a mass of angry and hostile impulses toward the mother when the
infant did not get its needs met. In essence, the infant constantly flip-flops
between love and hate: love when its needs are met, and hate when its needs
are ignored or frustrated. In her work, Klein tried to explain the process
by which the infant seeks to repair the damage of its hostility to its mother.
In fact, the titles of two of her most significant collections of works,
Envy and Gratitude and Love, Guilt, and Reparation, tell the
story almost as well as the writings themselves.
Ultimately, though,
Klein’s theories—through their influence on the subsequent
psychoanalytic theory called object relations—can lead to a grave
error in psychological treatment, for they tend to make the psychotherapeutic
process a dyadic process between the psychotherapist and client. At its worst,
this makes psychotherapy into a mothering process of caring for the needs
of the client, and it reduces the “therapist” to a paid
friend—or
nanny.
Lacan saw
through these errors and taught that psychoanalysis must involve three
persons: the client, the analyst, and the
unconscious.
Just as healthy emotional development depends on a father coming between
the mother and child, to sever the child’s emotional enmeshment with
the mother, good psychotherapeutic work must let the unconscious come between
the client and psychotherapist. This means that the psychotherapeutic process
must always involve a symbolic
fathering [10] by which clients are led to recognize and overcome the illusions
of their unconscious
identifications
with others and, in the process, to heal the aggression and
hostility that underlie those
identifications.
|
This explains
why “lovers,” friends, and blog readers, with all their personal
needs and desires, cannot function psychotherapeutically. And it explains
philosophically—above and beyond any laws or professional ethics—why
psychotherapists cannot be friends or “lovers” to their clients.
If they try, it will lead to psychological disaster, for without the third
person of the unconscious in the consulting room the psychotherapy can
degenerate into all sorts of perversions. |
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And, of course,
this all explains the ultimate “kink” in human sexuality: the love-hate
flip-flop.
As unpleasant
as it may be to admit it, eroticism is based on infantile needs to be received,
accepted, and satisfied. When a person feels intensely received, accepted,
and satisfied, then he or she is “in love.” But sooner or later
that intensity will be broken. The break doesn’t even have to be the
result of malicious neglect; it can simply be the result of a need to attend
to other obligations in the world, and, in the person feeling neglected,
intense jealousy can flare up.
|
Often people
fear that someone or something they love will be stolen from them by someone
else. But in true love there is no jealousy. When you have nothing to lose,
and nothing to gain, how can you fear a “rival”?
But, because romance is not based in true love, romance is, in technical
psychological terms, a game—and in playing this game, you put yourself
in competition with everyone else playing the same game. This explains the
essence of
jealousy:
in your fear of losing what you desperately want, you hate any person who
might come between you and what you want. |
|
So, regardless
of how it happens, as those primitive needs are not met, then the
“love” flip-flops into hatred and aggression. If you don’t
believe it, take a look at the ugly process of our divorce courts for a perfect
example. The world is cluttered with broken relationships that began in sweet
love and ended in bitter anger and hate.
And all of this
proves that true love, which is based in giving, not receiving, is pure and
eternal, is never fleeting, and can never flip-flop into hate.
It’s just
a shame that true love—the only true reparation—is feared by most
families and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults. |
Abusive
“Lovers”
|
A client suffering in an
abusive relationship will often look up
through streaming tears after describing the abuser’s behavior and say
to the psychologist, “But I love him.”
Fair enough,
you might think. Offer love in spite of the abuse. After all,
aren’t we told since childhood to “Do to others as you would have
them do to you”? Isn’t that what love is?
Well, it is true
that many saintly individuals have patiently suffered through difficult
marriages. But saintly individuals do not need psychologists. If the abuse
gets violent, police protection may be needed, but no one who understands
true love will ever have to sit in front of a psychologist offering
excuses.
Excuses serve
to justify repeated behavior. And, as Freud discovered,
repetition
is the return of the repressed. What, then, is this repressed which
keeps getting repeated? It can’t be love because true love can never
be repressed.
The repressed
is desire, and in abusive relationships it is a desire often hidden
in plain sight. It’s the desire to receive what you are futilely trying
to give away. It’s the desire to be wanted. And it’s such
a desperate desire that you will suffer almost anything—from one failed
“lover” to another—to maintain the illusion that someone wants
you.
To bring this
illusion to light, just consider the case of a person “involved”
with (that is, not married to) an abusive alcoholic “lover.” Then
ask this question: If you weren’t having sex with him or receiving monetary
support from him, would you still stick around? If the answer is
“No,” then you have the lie in plain sight. And if the answer is
“Yes,” then why not take in every bum in the neighborhood and be
a real saint?
So there you
have it. “But I love him” really means you don’t understand
love at all. |
Sexual
Addiction
|
If you look in the
DSM-IV,[11]
you can find a Sexual Desire Disorder called
Hypoactive Sexual Desire
Disorder which refers to “deficient
(or absent) sexual fantasies or desire for sexual activity.” The fact
that the DSM-IV does not have a Hyperactive Sexual Desire Disorder
says quite a lot about our culture. Apparently, we seem to believe that
“not enough” is a bad thing, but “too much”—at least,
in regard to sex—is never too much, even if it provides much of the
grease (or perhaps in this context I should say lubrication) on that
proverbial slippery slope to
hell.
Psychologically,
all the
addictions
have roots in some pain or ugliness that a person wants to push out of awareness
with the illusory thrill of intoxication. This intoxication doesn’t
have to be chemical—even gambling can provide quite a “high.”
Why else would we talk about any kind of arousal as getting “turned
on” by something?
|
In the
1950s, psychological researchers began to experiment with the intensely
pleasurable effects of electrical stimulation of the brain on animal
behavior.[12]
One
study [13]
allowed rats to press a lever that stimulated the
pleasure area of the hypothalamus; the rats pressed the lever continuously,
several thousand times per hour, even to the point of collapsing from fatigue.
Another
study [14]
found that female rats would even abandon their
own newly born pups for the sake of the brain
stimulation. |
|
And so it is
with erotic pleasure. The psychological problem with the intoxication by
real or imagined sexual stimulation, therefore, is that the pleasure becomes
an end in itself.
In the clinical
setting, many persons addicted to erotic pleasure will confess that, in their
childhood and adolescence, they lacked a clear sense of what they wanted
to do with their lives. As a way to cope with the frustration of being
overwhelmed by the obligations of a life to which they don’t feel any
commitment in the first place, they turn to a preoccupation with sexual
stimulation divested of any reproductive responsibility or commitment. Thus
they get caught up in the meaningless euphoria of an
impossible quest for a lost
meaning.
Thus pornography
takes on the excitement of the search for a stimulating image. Dating takes
on the excitement of the search for a stimulating body. Masturbation takes
on the excitement of the search for stimulation itself.
|
Now, some persons
might try to justify their unconscious quest by saying that erotic pleasure
is “natural.” That’s the real underlying philosophy to the
Marquis de Sade’s writings, for example. And his name—de Sade—
provides the underlying origin of our word sadism. It all comes down
to saying, “Any body—man, woman, child, or animal—is
as good as any other body. And anything goes—even someone’s
pain—if it serves your pleasure.”
So there’s the “natural” for you.
And so, like all natural disasters, a sexual addiction leaves nothing in
its path but a barren swath of sadistic or masochistic emotional
destruction. |
|
Which is why,
for the sake of human dignity, sexual activity cannot become a recreational
sport but must be contained with strict limits. If you don’t believe
my words, maybe you will believe AIDS.
Then again, maybe
you won’t.
So it is that
in the obsession with erotic pleasure, as in all the other addictions, you
don’t want to see the human destruction it causes. And, as long as
you’re intoxicated, you can’t see it.
|
Speaking of
intoxication, some persons wonder what effect alcohol has on sexual desire.
Well, actually, it has no effect. Alcohol simply deadens the inhibitory function
of the frontal lobe of the brain. So while the frontal lobe is trying to
tell you, “Stop! This isn’t right!” the intoxicating effect
of alcohol intercepts that message and substitutes its own subversive message:
“Hey, if it feels good, do it.” |
|
|
“Victimless”
Sex
|
I have seen parents who say to their children, “If
you are going to smoke, I don’t want you smoking in the house. If you
are going to drink alcohol, I don’t want you to bring alcohol into the
house. If you are going to have sex, I want you to use protection. If you
are going to have your boyfriend stay overnight, I want to see him sleeping
on the couch in the living room when I get up in the morning. If you have
a car accident, I want you to get it fixed yourself.” And then they
turn to me and say, “See? We’re teaching our children
responsibility.”
The parents glow
with an air of self-satisfied serenity.
In reality,
they’re like the eye of a hurricane, calm and peaceful, blind to the
storm spreading moral chaos all around them.
And this
“serenity” is the attitude behind a tolerance for
“victimless” sex.
“What’s
wrong with pornography or prostitution? As long as no one gets hurt, no harm
is done,” we say.
But is it true
that no harm is done? Maybe, like the parents in the example above, we just
don’t want to see it. Maybe we don’t want to see the corruption,
the fraud, the theft, the abuse, the murders even, that support our habits.
Conveniently out of our sight, “no harm” is done.
And maybe you
don’t want to see the children who have to suffer the agony of their
parents’ adultery and divorce. Maybe you don’t want to see the
children who have to see their parents’ alcoholism and drug abuse. Maybe
you don’t want to see the children who have to see their parents prostitute
themselves for affection, money, or drugs. Maybe you don’t want to see
the children who are physically, sexually, and emotionally
abused
by their parents’ “lovers.”
“I just
want to have fun. I don’t see any harm in that,” you
say. |
Sexual
Fantasies
|
Just about everyone has had some sort of sexual fantasy.
Some persons find their fantasies—spontaneous mental images that evoke
certain emotional reactions or thought processes, often called daydreams—to
be quite enjoyable. Many persons, however, find their fantasies to be quite
troubling; fantasies can lead to repetitive acts of masturbation (genital
self-excitation) that ultimately become more frustrating than satisfying,
and, if the fantasies have a criminal or anti-social trend, they can trap
a person in feelings of shame, guilt, and fear of
discovery.
So why should
a person be troubled with a desire for something he or she really doesn’t
want? Well, the answer begins with the fact that fantasies are
intellectual products, not acts of will.
OK. Maybe that
statement needs some explanation. Consider for a moment that criminologists,
for example, often speak about a hypothetically “elegant” crime.
By this they mean that the crime is so brilliantly designed (as in a detective
story) that one can actually admire it intellectually. But still it’s
a crime, and no one in his or her right mind would actually want to carry
it out. Or so we would hope.
|
Fantasies occur
simply because it is intellectually possible to conceive of them. If you
walk past a bank and think of how it could be robbed, you are thinking only
of a
possibility.
The fact that a fantasy occurs does not necessarily say anything about who
or what you are as a person. |
|
Now, at the stage
of hypothetical contemplation, the crime is nothing but an intellectual product.
But to carry it out a person would have to will its execution, and
even deliberately overcome any moral qualms about doing so. So you can see
that there is a big difference between the intellectual product and
the willful act itself.
And this
difference between the intellect and the will leads us to another
radical concept: sexual fantasies usually
have an unconscious intent that isn’t even
sexual.
We can understand
this fact through reference to Freud’s concept of infantile
sexuality. Actually, Freud
 missed the point by claiming that all adult
unconscious
conflicts derive from repressed infantile sexual impulses, because they
don’t. But still, in missing the point, Freud points to the right thing:
infantile experience.
Think about this
for a moment. What experience must every infant encounter? Well, it’s
the experience of lying naked and helpless during dressing, feeding, bathing,
etc. And in this experience are complex emotions of both pleasure and violation.
Part of the infant enjoys the attention and stimulation resulting from its
helplessness, while part of the infant wants nothing but the ability to put
an end to its helplessness and start taking command
of its own life. In fact, making the transition from total helplessness
as a mere object to total responsibility in subjective being defines
the psychological task of child development.
This “total
responsibility” is also a profound spiritual task that few of us actually
negotiate fully. Yes, we stumble through the psychological transition from
infancy to adulthood, but still some
part
of us balks at the idea of taking full adult responsibility to understand
and commit ourselves to meaningful life. And so we have fantasies that keep
trying to pull us back into that infantile helplessness. The crucial point
to grasp here is that as adults we experience these infantile emotional yearnings
as adult sexual scenes. It’s as if a profound
unconscious “short-circuit” connects our
reproductive biology with our infantile need to be seen and
accepted.
Many of
our adult sexual fantasies depict an experience of being totally and
unconditionally accepted, as when we were helpless infants. These sorts of
fantasies reveal a deep yearning to gain access to the
unknown and to transcend a profound existential
lack, a hunger for the ecstasy of a closeness to others and to the divine
that is sadly missing in our limited, bodily reality. Thus the fantasies
intoxicate us with a euphoric and expansive imaginary fulfillment of the
physical senses—as with the “hunger of the
eyes” in lust. Sometimes the fantasies become
so euphoric that they can even seem to be “spiritual.”
Nevertheless, by distracting us from our true limitations, the fantasies
really cause us to miss the whole point about spiritual responsibility. The
governing drive of all these fantasies can be represented as an arrow that,
in its deepest unconscious sense, does not seek out
another but returns narcissistically to itself, in a desire to make itself
seen in the presence of another, and thereby to make itself into an object
for its own
satisfaction.[15a]
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The allure of
erotic pleasure therefore resides in immediate, tangible gratification. For
a man, it can be the thrill of just reaching out and taking what you want,
whether it be the body of another person or your own body. For a woman, it
can be physical pleasure, or it can be the satisfaction of feeling wanted
and protected, or it can be the satisfaction of
defying the father who
abused her. But, however it’s experienced,
male or female, this “common love” is just an immediate way of
getting something that you
want. |
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Moreover,
fantasies such as bondage, rape, and anal penetration betray the dark side
of “getting what you want.” These fantasies pull us away from spiritual
responsibility into a realm of anger and self-loathing, reflecting—or
even compulsively re-enacting—those times when we weren’t
unconditionally accepted as infants or children. The erotic element of such
fantasies is directed to “getting” the feeling of defiling the
other, or being defiled yourself, and it derives from the anger of having
been made into an object—indeed, a piece of garbage—as a child,
in which all human dignity was surrendered and defiled. Which is why these
fantasies, in their trend toward the anti-spiritual, lead you right into
the psychological dead-end of
sado-masochism.[16]
|
Pornography,
in its own way, derives from the urge to defile an other. On the surface,
it may seem that pornography is simply about erotic pleasure. But when the
human body is made into a biological toy, it is stripped of all human dignity,
and this defilement is an act of aggression. The hostility may be
unconscious or it may be openly violent, but, either
way, it has its basis in resentment. And to whom is the resentment directed?
Well, as in all things psychological, the resentment goes back to the parents.
Deep down, under all the apparent excitement, and despite the attraction
to what is seen, lurks the dark urge to hurt and
insult—to “get back at”—what is behind the
scenes: a mother who devoured, rejected, or abandoned, rather than nurtured,
or a father who failed to teach, guide, and protect. |
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Thus, in all
erotic fantasies you take from the “other” some sort of
satisfaction that unconsciously compensates for the love you did not receive
from your parents. That missing love—that lack—is a wound
that drives you to fill its emptiness. None of this drive has anything to
do with true love, except for the fact that, in all the arousal, true love
is missing.
And with this,
then, we return to the opening question. If you willfully act out the fantasy
with masturbation or in reality, rather than explore it psychotherapeutically,
all healing capacity is lost, and you are left with nothing but a perversion
that endlessly misses the point. |
About
Sexual
Orientation
|
Even as a psychologist working in San Francisco, I take
the position that existential human issues, not one’s
erotic desires per se, should
govern the course of psychotherapy. Let’s be honest here and admit that
the unconscious is far from being “politically
correct,” and so from my own clinical practice I have learned that many
aspects of life commonly seen in the homosexual community—unconscious
hostility and anger;
fear of conflict; life dissatisfaction and
depression;
fear
of love; risky self-destructive behavior;
promiscuity; the “buying” of friendship with sexual services; problems
with gender identity; even discomfort with non-sexual
same-sex emotional closeness (often called homophobia)—are residual
effects of childhood emotional wounds and can be better healed in psychotherapy
than normalized in a radical political arena.
For all its research
and theoretical speculation, psychology finds itself in the place of having
to admit that the origin of homosexuality in any person is a complex issue;
that is, there are so many factors (genetics, family dynamics, and social
conditioning) so intertwined that no single explanation can fit all cases.
For the most part, homosexual feelings, like all feelings, are not
something an individual necessarily chooses consciously, because they derive
from subtle conflicts in childhood resulting from parental empathic failures.
Moreover, especially in the modern world, homosexual desires can be a product
of the prevailing culture through the influence of entertainment, advertising,
and political advocacy in education. And homosexual feelings are frequently
planted directly in a person through an experience of
childhood abuse or seduction as an
adult.
Nevertheless,
one’s sexual lifestyle—that is, the sexual activity one
pursues, regardless of sexual preferences—is fully a matter of personal
choice and personal responsibility. And, like any other form of
identity, such a lifestyle—and the unconscious
psychological defenses that lie behind it—must
be open to psychological examination. For, as I said above, it’s impossible
to heal your own emotional brokenness through the body of another person
as mortal and broken as you are. |
An
Example
from
Aviation
|
Here is a fictitious story, derived from aviation, that
illustrates a real-life difference between common love and true love. It
shows how peer pressure cannot dissuade true love from its concern for the
good, and how true love persists even in the face of hatred. And how sad
that so many lives are stained with tragedy because common love is so often
our only reason for living—and dying.
Common
Love
A woman, preoccupied
with plans for her friend’s wedding the next day, arrives at the small
airport three hours late; she says to her husband, a new pilot, “What
do you mean, ‘We’re already late and it’s getting dark’?
We have to get there tonight, honey. If you love me you’ll get this
plane in the air right now.”
True
Love
Her husband replies,
“Look. We’ll be flying over dark water, and there could be clouds.
I’m not instrument rated. It’s just not safe. It’s because
I love you that I won’t risk our lives over this.”
The Love-hate
Flip-flop
“But we
have to get there tonight! I have to get my hair done tomorrow morning before
the wedding, and there’s the ultimate salon there. If this gets
messed up, it will be a disaster. You wimp! And you call yourself a
pilot!”
True Love
Affirmed
“I understand
how important it all seems to you, but it’s foolhardy to risk our lives
for something as frivolous as a hair style.”
Hatred as
Revenge
“‘It
all seems to me?’ ‘Frivolous?’ Listen, if we don’t
leave right now, you can sleep on the couch tonight!”
True Love
Re-affirmed
“Well, so
be it. But I’m not flying tonight. I’m not going to get us killed.
That’s final.” |
Psychological
and
Spiritual
Conclusions
|
And so here is the psychological lesson: As long as you
pursue sexuality out of a need to be loved—as a form of something
you want—you will be led right behind illusions straight into
perversion. As long as you try to fill your inner, psychological and spiritual
emptiness with another person—that is, through common love—you
will remain unconsciously broken and empty. Even marriage, in the true religious
sense of Holy Matrimony, does not depend on a romantic attraction to hold
it together; instead it derives its meaning as an unbreakable act of family
and societal service between a man and a woman to a mutual divine
love. Therefore, only a renunciation of what you think you want and
a dedication to loving—giving true love rather than desperately
searching to be loved—can lead to anything psychologically and
spiritually productive, and it’s the only attitude that can begin to
carry you through the agony of human limitation and
mortality.
I’ll be
honest here and say that this view is not at all popular in the U.S., and
especially not in San Francisco.
|
WARNING
Some material on this website may be banned in California schools.
For the approved California version,
click here. |
|
|
|
|
But see for yourself
if you don’t find anything, in the end, but the
emptiness of lies, betrayal, and death in your desperate
seeking to be “loved.”
|
It is interesting
to note that a religious perspective can be even more focused than the
psychological perspective. It has long been understood that chastity is a
core aspect of religious experience. Sexuality, after all, is not a recreational
sport. It is grounded in the concept of a man and a woman joining their lives
together in order to conceive and nurture a family. Only heterosexual couples
are capable of engaging in the conjugal act which communicates not just conjugal
love but also life itself. Severed from responsibility to the family,
the erotic desire for “recognition” in another person—supported
by the contemporary social pressure for every individual to be in a
“relationship”—amounts to nothing but a
narcissistic [15b]
renunciation of love itself.
Think about that. Are you tired of AIDS, sexual diseases, prostitution,
pornography, unwanted pregnancies, abortion, adultery, divorce, and using
others and being used? All great religious mystics have discovered for themselves
the same secret: until you stop being obsessed with eroticism you
will never be able to find true spirituality; until you stop insisting that
God accept your sexual perversions before you can accept God, you
will never truly know God; until you stop looking for yourself in
the desire of others, you will never find God;
until you die to yourself—and your selfish
desires—you will never have
life.
|
|
But regardless
of whether you approach the matter from moral theology or from the psychology
of the unconscious, you will discover that the final
choice in regard to sexuality is really between glorifying yourself and
glorifying something greater than yourself. So take consolation and
remember—if you only partially apply this principle to your life you
will still experience great psychological
benefits.[17] |
Summary
|
So what does all this discussion of sexuality—and
perversion—have to do with psychotherapy in general? Well, there’s
an interesting parallel here between how you treat others and how you treat
yourself.
True healing involves two things: (a) to see clearly what is wrong
and (b) to have the compassion to call it to change. This means, first
of all, that unconditional acceptance of anything gets you nowhere.
If you take no responsibility for the world around you, and if you’re
unwilling to call error for what it is—that is, if you’re always
missing the point—then you contribute nothing of any healing value to
the world. And that’s not love. On the other hand, if you treat error
with hatred, condemning it to hell, the bitter poison
in your own heart will end up condemning you to hell. And that’s
not love either.
And so it is
with your own mental health. First you have to recognize your life for what
it is, being honest about your emotional pain and all the mistakes and errors
you’ve committed trying to hide from your despair. And then you have
to listen to that despair with compassion and let it tell its whole story,
so that the very core of your heart will be transformed—rather than
push your despair into some dark corner of your
unconscious to be seduced
with . . . perversion. |
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
|
|
 
Notes:
1.
Robert Briffault, The Mothers (abridged by G. R. Taylor). (New York:
Atheneum, 1977). See chapters 27 and 28, “Romance (I)” and
“Romance (II).”
2. Jacques Lacan,
“God and the Jouissance of
Woman.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1985). Quotation from p. 141.
[That’s right—the The
of The Woman is crossed through, signifying that having been created
in the fantasy of phallic sexuality, “Woman” as an essence
does not exist, and that oneness with her is impossible. That’s what
Lacan means when he speaks of the absence of a sexual relation. No other
person can make your psychologically broken life into something whole and
complete. See also:
Jacques Lacan, “The signification of the phallus.”
In Écrits: A selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.
W. Norton, 1977), p. 287:
“In any case, man cannot aim at
being whole (the ‘total personality’ is another of the deviant
premises of modern psychotherapy), while ever the play of displacement and
condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks
his relation as subject to the signifier.”
3. To say that something
is an illusion does not mean that it is not “real”—it means
that it functions as a psychological defense.
4. Jacques Lacan,
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1981). See “The Presence of the Analyst,”
p. 133:
“In persuading the other that he
has that which may complement us, we assure ourselves of being able to continue
to misunderstand precisely what we lack.”
5. Jacques Lacan,
“God and the Jouissance of
Woman.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1985). See p. 143:
“The act of love is the polymorphous
perversion of the male, in the case of the speaking being.”
6. Jacques Lacan,
“God and the Jouissance of
Woman.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1985). See p. 144-145:
“. . . she has, in relation to what
the phallic function designates of jouissance, a supplementary
jouissance. . . . a jouissance proper to her, and of which
she herself may know nothing, except that she experiences it—that much
she does know.”
7. Jacques Lacan,
“God and the Jouissance of
Woman.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1985). See p. 155:
“In effect, as long as soul souls
for soul there is no sex in the affair.”
8. Jacques Lacan,
“God and the Jouissance of
Woman.” In Mitchell, J. & Rose, J. (Eds.), Feminine Sexuality:
Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. (New York: W. W. Norton,
1985). See pp. 146-147:
“The mystical . . . is something
serious, which a few people teach us about, and most often women or highly
gifted people like St. John of the Cross — since when you are male you
don’t have to put yourself on the side of [lack and limitation]. . .
. they sense that there must be a jouissance which goes beyond. That
is what we call a mystic. . . . It is clear that the essential testimony
of the mystics is that they are experiencing it but know nothing about
it.”
9. Thomas Aquinas,
Summa
Theologica I-II, 26, 4.
10. Technically,
Lacan speaks of the symbolic “phallus,” and all it signifies in
the symbolic realm of the psyche, in contrast to all interpersonal
identifications in the imaginary realm. See “The signification
of the phallus,” in Écrits: A selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977).
11. American
Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, Fourth Edition. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association,
1994).
12. Olds,
J., & Milner, P. (1954). Positive reinforcement produced by electrical
stimulation of the septal area and other regions of the rat brain. Journal
of comparative and physiological psychology, 47, 419–428.
13. Olds,
J. (1958). Satiation effects in self-stimulation of the brain. Journal
of comparative and physiological psychology, 51, 675–678.
14. Sonderegger,
T. B. (1970). Intracranial stimulation and maternal behavior. APA convention
proceedings, 78th meeting, 245–246.
15a,b. Jacques Lacan, “The Partial Drive and
its Circuit” and “From Love to the Libido.” In The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981).
“Strictly speaking, [the structure
of perversion] is an inverted effect of the phantasy. It is the subject who
determines himself as object, in his encounter with the division of
subjectivity” (p. 185).
“. . . The root of the scopic drive
is to be found entirely in the subject, in the fact that the subject sees
himself. . . . in his sexual member. . . .
Whereas making oneself seen is indicated by an arrow that really comes
back towards the subject, making oneself heard goes towards the
other” (pp. 194–195).
16. See, for example,
Novick, K. & Novick, J. (1987). The Essence of Masochism. In The
Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, ed. A. Solnit, & P. Neubauer.
New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 353–384.
17. See, for example,
Finger R, Thelen T, Vessey JT, Mohn JK, & Mann JR. Association of Virginity
at Age 18 With Educational, Economic, Social, and Health Outcomes in Middle
Adulthood. Adolescent and Family Health 2005; vol. 3, no. 4:
“. . . men and women who were virgins
at age 18, when evaluated approximately 20 years later, had about half the
risk of divorce, had completed about an additional year of education and
had annual incomes nearly 20 percent higher than those who were not virgins
at 18. . . . these better outcomes were not merely the result of avoiding
teenage pregnancy or fatherhood. . . . The outcomes are inherent to remaining
abstinent [through adolescence].”
Additional
Resources
Addiction:
Sexual
Addiction and Sexual Compulsivity Treatment Resources
Chastity:
Bryce’s
Chastity Page
Chastity
—find out what religious tradition has to say about chastity.
Chastity:
A Guide for Teens and Young Adults
Chastity SF
— psychological healing and spiritual direction in the Roman
Catholic mystic tradition.
Courage Apostolate
is “an apostolate of the Roman Catholic church whose purpose is
to minister to those with same-sex attractions.”
God of Desire
“is built around an essay outlining twelve principles to bring
us from dating to courtship to paradise.”
Grapevine
Publications Home Page - Chastity Materials
Out
of the Closet and into Chastity covers many aspects of homosexuality
and chastity from a personal perspective.
Contact
WhatsChastity@familink.com
for information about chastity seminars and events in the San Francisco Bay
Area.
Domestic Violence:
Domestic
Violence - International Resources
Domestic violence: Ways to get help from the Mayo
Clinic.
Family Violence Prevention
Fund
Marital
Rape
National
Clearinghouse on Family Violence (NCFV), Health Canada
National Coalition Against
Domestic Violence
On-line Domestic
Violence Survival Kit
The
White Ribbon Campaign —Educational Materials: Men working
to end men’s violence against women.
Lacan:
Lacan Related Papers provides links to numerous
Lacan-related papers.
The Lacanian School
of Psychoanalysis in the San Francisco Bay area, offers training
in Lacanian psychoanalysis.
The San Francisco
Society for Lacanian Studies provides lectures and information
about Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Marriage, Family, and
Sexuality:
Life Issues:
Abortion, Contraception, & Euthanasia provides an abundant
source of articles, religious and secular, which discuss and debate these
issues.
Marital, Family,
Sexual, & Gender Issues provides an abundant source of articles,
religious and secular, which discuss and debate these issues.
Sexual
Orientation:
NARTH
“NARTH’s function is to provide psychological understanding
of the cause, treatment and behavior patterns associated with homosexuality,
within the boundaries of a civil public dialogue.” The organization
comprises a wide variety of men and women who “have witnessed the intense
suffering caused by homosexuality” and who “defend the right to
pursue change of sexual orientation.”
Related pages within A Guide to Psychology
and its Practice:
Anger: Insult,
Revenge, and Forgiveness
Catholic
Links
Death—and the Seduction
of Despair
Fear
Forgiveness
Identity and
Loneliness
Questions and Answers
about Psychotherapy
Spiritual
Healing
Spirituality and
Psychology
The Unconscious
CONTACT ME
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on this website
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