The Overstimulation of Everyday Life: I. New Aspects of Male Homosexuality

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Sidney H. Phillips 49/4
THE OVERSTIMULATION OF
EVERYDAY LIFE: I. NEW ASPECTS
OF MALE HOMOSEXUALITY
Western heterosexual culture surrounds the homosexually inclined
boy in a climate of erotic overstimulation that powerfully affects his
development and adult sexual adaptation. This assertion is illustrated
through a case presentation of a homosexual man who shared a
bed with his brother from childhood into adolescence. Analysis of the
patient’s transference enactment—repeatedly falling asleep on the
couch—gradually revealed the psychic impact of this everyday over-
stimulation: the creation of a tantalized inner world of longing. The
regular occurrence and developmental understanding of adolescent
homosexual boys’ unrequited love affairs with adolescent heterosexual
boys are described and explored. Finally, the overstimulation of
everyday life is proposed as a new model for understanding certain
behavioral aspects of male homosexuality, such as the avoidance of
rough-and-tumble play in childhood and homosexual cruising.
O you whom I often and silently come where you are that I
may be with you,
As I walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same
room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for
your sake is playing within me.
—WALT WHITMAN, Calamus Poems
E veryday life within Western heterosexual culture is over-

stimulating for the homosexual boy. Certain common child-
rearing practices and regular school activities—all based on implicit
Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute for

Psychoanalysis; Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Yale School of Medicine.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to New Directions, Washington, DC,
February 2000; the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, New Haven, June
2000; the Atlanta Psychoanalytic Society, October 2000; the Boston Psychoanalytic
Society and Institute, November 2000; the American Psychoanalytic Association,
Downloaded from apa.sagepub.com at Selcuk Universitesi on February 1, 2015

Sidney H. Phillips
heterosexual norms—surround the homosexually inclined boy in an

atmosphere of sexual overstimulation that affects his development,
symptom formation, and adult sexual adaptation. I discovered this only
when I began to look more carefully at the adolescent longing of some
homosexual boys for heterosexual boys so frequently reported in the
analyses and psychotherapies of gay men. Why was it so common, I
wondered, for my adult gay male patients to describe one or more experi-
ences during midadolescence of falling in love with and pining away for
heterosexual adolescent boys? Though this phenomenon also has other
important psychodynamic and epigenetic influences, the sexual over-
stimulation from earlier in their lives is another powerful and previously
unrecognized determinant of this particular version of adolescent longing.
Throughout what follows, when I refer to a “homosexual boy,” a
boy’s “homosexual inclination,” or to a “homosexually inclined” boy,
my vantage point is retrospective. This view is from the adult gay
male analysand’s perspective of his childhood and alludes to a pattern
of early homosexual attraction and arousal as recalled and (re)con-
structed in the context of psychoanalytic treatment. I acknowledge
1236
something of a paradox in referring to the sexual overstimulation dealt
with here as being “everyday.” On the one hand, the central case
presentation of a gay man who grew up from early childhood into ado-
lescence sharing a family bed with his younger brother is hardly a
universal or “everyday” experience. One might even call it the sexual
overstimulation of overcrowded family life. And yet, on the other hand,
the analytic literature is so accustomed to associating sexual over-
stimulation with the extreme cases of brutal molestation that Shengold
(1967) described in his classic paper on “Rat People” that this case,
which did not involve any molestation, seems quotidian by comparison.
And there is another way in which the sexual overstimulation of
everyday life seems an apt description of my subject matter. Many gay
and lesbian patients report having contended on a daily basis in their
youth with such overstimulation. And although my focus here is on
male homosexuality, the impact of such overstimulation is relevant to
New York, December 2000; the Psychoanalytic Society of New England, East,
January 2001; the Denver Psychoanalytic Society, April 2001; and the Forty-second
Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Nice, France, July 2001.
I am grateful to Rosemary Balsam, Scott Goldsmith, Kimberlyn Leary, Stanley
Leavy, Suzi Naiburg, Ralph Roughton, and Susan Vaughan for their helpful sugges-
tions on earlier drafts. Submitted for publication August 18, 2000.

THE OVERSTIMULATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE
the development of men and women regardless of sexual orientation.

Even if not “everyday,” these experiences are not uncommon and are
reminiscent of Freud’s original observations on infantile sexuality.
FIRST LOVES AND PINING AWAY
All of the clinical vignettes presented here derive from the psycho-
analytic treatment of adult men in their twenties or early thirties.
All patients presented as openly gay and yet also reported various
neurotic or character-related symptoms, including diff iculties in estab-
lishing and sustaining relationships with men. None showed evidence
of severe psychopathology. Three were treated in analysis; one in
psychoanalytic psychotherapy. All described histories of being sexually
attracted to other boys and/or men from the age of four or older.
A striking f inding was that three out of four of these patients did not
masturbate to orgasm until they were in their late teens or early twenties.
I will return later to the signif icance of this delayed masturbation.
During treatment, each man over time told me in rich detail about
1237
his love of midadolescence. The stories were remarkably similar. They
fell head over heels in love with a heterosexual boy. These love affairs
went on for many months.The homosexual boy had to overcome some
reluctance on the heterosexual boy’s part to permit greater and greater
physical intimacy, especially sleeping in the same bed together. The
heterosexual boy’s reservations were invariably overcome by the
homosexual boy’s ingenious rationalizations and energetic persistence.
One patient who was uncircumcised, for example, concocted a story that
he was considering being circumcised and so wanted to see his friend’s
circumcised penis ostensibly to assess—again and again, night after
night—the appearance of the possible surgical outcome. Yielding to
unceasing requests, his heterosexual friend would reluctantly agree.
On occasion the friend was even persuaded to let the homosexual boy
hold and inspect his penis. The heterosexual boy, my patient reported,
alternately regarded these episodes as mildly annoying, embarrassing, or
amusing, tolerable for the sake of the friendship as a necessary nuisance.
Another perplexing clinical f inding was that all of these patients,
despite ample evidence to the contrary that they themselves had
reported, vehemently insisted for years into their treatment that their
heterosexual paramours were in fact “really gay.” They spoke of these
past loves “who got away” with the tortured regrets of “what if I’d done

Sidney H. Phillips
or said this” scenarios that they imagined would have made their friends
realize they were both gay. Any puzzlement or curiosity expressed
by me about this assertion evoked an elaborate explanation of “latent
homosexuality” and a detailed account of many reportedly pathogno-
monic moments. The tone of this protest was variously tinged with
peevish dismissal and/or offended hurt. This illusional conviction
had the hallmarks of unconscious conf lict, since at other times they
seemed tentatively aware of their beloved’s heterosexuality.
What is striking in all of these stories is how both participants
attended to and would not cross what seemed to be a carefully con-
structed boundary against manifest erotic behavior or dialogue. As
long as all proceeded under the “innocent,” permissive guise of
mutual, close friendship, the relationships continued. These strange
love affairs between homosexual and heterosexual adolescent boys
predictably all ended the same way, as the heterosexual boy eventually
turned his attentions to a heterosexual girl. In fact, the homosexual
boy often acted as matchmaker and couples counselor to both parties,
desperately trying to stave off the inevitable. As Mr. D.1 described it,
1238
I’d actually introduce him to girls he was interested in. It was downhill
from there. Both of us wanted him, of course. We’d tear him apart.
In the end, she won. It was over between us. It was so depressing. I felt
I’d lost the love of my life. I had lost the love of my life—only he didn’t
know it. No one knew it but me. I was inconsolable. I’d cry for days
but secretly. It wasn’t just the pain of losing him, of my intense loneliness
over being without him. But it was also having to bear it all by myself.
How could I tell anyone? What would I say? “Oh, gee, I’m devastated
that Joe went with Julie instead of me?” Yeah, right.
When I commented that he was f inally telling someone now, he burst

into raw, wailing sobs for several minutes.
DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY, OLD AND NEW
I return to my earlier questions about these unrequited love affairs so

similarly depicted by all of these patients. Why did these relationships
occur more commonly in midadolescence? How do we understand the
1
Mr. D. was twenty-nine years old and openly gay when he presented for treat-
ment for difficulties in sustaining long-term relationships with other men. He was
treated in four-times-a-week psychoanalysis for a mixed character disorder with
obsessional and depressive-masochistic traits.

homosexual adolescent’s choice of a heterosexual as love object? And

what about unrequited love?
Levy-Warren (1996) helps us answer the f irst question with a
cogent description of the sexual upsurge of midadolescence: “The
world of sexuality also dominates the middle adolescent picture. Often
there is an initial separation of physical closeness and emotional close-
ness: there is sexual activity simply for the purpose of gaining experi-
ence; there are crushes on people the adolescent does not even know.
The complexity of sexual life becomes more apparent, while childlike
notions about the nature of sexual activity are revised” (p. 71). The
patients’ portrayals of these love affairs of midadolescence, then, seem
to f it generally within this developmental paradigm, though the unre-
quited nature of the relationships remains problematic and unaccounted
for. An explanation of this latter question requires a brief detour
through some developmental theory of adolescence.
Blos (1979) described adolescence as “the second individuation
process” insofar as the adolescent struggles to separate psychologi-
cally from the parents, this time using peers as substitutes and dis-
1239
placements for the internal parental objects. Blos also viewed adoles-
cence as a reprise of the oedipal drama in which new resolutions are
attempted and integrated. But while offering us a useful developmental
framework, Blos wrote manifestly and primarily about heterosexual
adolescents.
Isay (1989) offered a major theoretical advance for reconsidering
the development of gay men when he proposed a developmental path-
way specif ic to homosexual men that entails an early homosexual
orientation.2 He reported that gay men experience homoerotic fan-
tasies from at least ages four or f ive, a f inding replicated in this study.
He noted that this period of development is “analogous to the Oedipal
2
I am aware of the essentialist / social constructivist debate regarding sexual ori-
entation. Lane (1999) argues that “psychoanalytic theory falls between constructivist
and essentialist theories of sexuality because, despite its historical emphasis, psycho-
analysis is a theory and practice that alters our relationship to history” (p. xviii; for the
ways Michel Foucault, whose thought is seminal to the constructivist point of view, is
“closer to Freudian psychoanalysis than many of his Anglo-American followers
realized or cared to admit,” see Lane 1999, pp. 1–43). Within a particular individual’s
psychoanalytic treatment, I place great value on the exploration of the constructed
meanings of sexual orientation, including the recollected and imagined origins of the
orientation, as well as how fluid and/or immutable the patient regards that orientation.
It is possible to appreciate the clinical utility of Isay’s observations about a commonly
occurring developmental pathway for gay men without accepting uncritically his
essentialist paradigm for male homosexual orientation.

Sidney H. Phillips
stage in heterosexual boys, except that the primary object of homo-

sexual boys is their fathers [sic]” (p. 29). Goldsmith (2001), in a crucial
expansion of Isay’s developmental framework for the homosexual
boy, argued that during this oedipal phase3 not only is the “father the
boy’s primary love object, but his mother becomes the chief rival for
the father’s affection” (p. 1273). Isay (1989) showed persuasively how
resolution of diverse symptomatology during the analyses of gay men
depended on their becoming conscious of, and accepting emotionally,
their homoerotic, incestuous fantasies and desires for their fathers
(p. 46). It is important to recall that Isay’s theoretical revision included
a new understanding of the stereotypical “absent” or “withdrawn”
father of homosexual sons so prominently depicted in earlier, main-
stream psychoanalytic theory. Absent or withdrawn fathers do not
create homosexual sons, he asserted; rather, the homosexually inclined
boy exhibiting oedipal attraction to a conflicted father precipitates the
latter’s withdrawal. Goldsmith argues convincingly, based on clinical
data, that “for a successful resolution of this stage of development, the
homosexual boy must learn to master both his anger and aggression
1240
toward his mother and his fear of reprisal from her” (p. 1273).
Here then is the necessary developmental framework to understand
these unrequited love affairs. The homosexual adolescent boy reworks
a version of his oedipal passions: he falls in love with a heterosexual
adolescent boy as a displacement of his childhood love affair with his
heterosexual father. But I say “reworks” instead of “repeats” because
I agree with Kulish, in “First Loves and Prime Adventures: Adolescent
Expressions in Adult Analyses” (1998), that adolescence is “much
more than a recapitulation of earlier phases, more than a slender bridge
or a mere transition between childhood and adulthood, more than a
reawakening of latent sexual impulses and buried conf licts” (p. 541).
Accordingly, it was of such vital importance to the homosexual adoles-
cent boys in these affairs that the heterosexual boys returned their
passionate love in depth, even though it never encompassed a mani-
festly erotic dimension. An essential feature of these friendships for the
homosexual boy was that they were deeply felt on both sides: the love
was mutual, even if erotic attraction was not. Rizzuto (1991) has
written of the important connection between oedipal issues and shame,
3
To capture more aptly the nature of the conf lict, Goldsmith suggests a shift
in mythological paradigm for the homosexual son from Oedipus to Orestes. In the
Greek drama, Orestes murders his mother to avenge the death of his father.

including fantasies of whether one is lovable, defective, or ugly (p. 25).

These friendships were clearly an effort by the homosexual boy, in this
adolescent version of his oedipal drama, to heal and repair the effects
of the paternal withdrawal and/or repulsion during the original oedipal
passions so poignantly described by Isay.4
Though ultimately not achieving an erotic triumph, since in the
denouement the heterosexual boy always gets his girl, the homosexual
boy, perhaps for the first time in his life, basks in the warmth of another
male’s love—surely a formative experience. Now we can understand
how and why the erotic boundary is so carefully constructed and main-
tained in these affairs: it is an obvious repetition of the incest taboo but
also an effort to avoid the erotic triggers to the original paternal retreat.
Herein is the source of these gay men’s persistent illusion that their
friends were “really gay.” It is not merely a repetition of the wish for
the “full” oedipal triumph, though certainly it is this, too. But it is
also an expression of the homosexual boy’s deepest wish that someday,
somehow, someone can love him wholly and completely without hav-
ing to step lightly around the erotic perimeter.5
1241
A compelling question emerges at this point: What’s in it for the
heterosexual boys? Many things, at many different levels, would seem
to be the answer. The heterosexual boy, of course, is also contending
with a revival of his oedipal passions. For some heterosexual boys,
bodily closeness and emotional intimacy with another boy may be a
welcome retreat—a safe haven or layover (so to speak)—from the
anxieties stirred by newly emerging erotic desire for a girl’s body, as
well as from the atmosphere of macho rivalry with other heterosexual
4
I realize that Isay’s assertion of early homosexual object choice based on consti-
tutional factors (1989, pp. 20–22) in boys who later become homosexual is con-
troversial and unproven. While psychoanalysis may help individuals discover and
explore the meanings they have made of their sexual orientation, the etiologies of
sexual orientation in general seem beyond the domain of psychoanalytic explanation
(see Auchincloss and Vaughan 2001). Whatever the ultimate convergence of scien-
tif ic data from what will likely be a variety of disciplines about the origins of sexual
orientation, Isay’s hypothesis about a common (not the) developmental pathway for
some (not all) homosexual men offers psychoanalytic clinicians powerful ways of
listening to some of our male homosexual patients that prove deeply resonant with
their inner experience.
5
I am grateful to Scott Goldsmith for pointing out my omission of the powerful
social forces that also account for homosexual boys’ falling in love with heterosexual
boys. He reminded me that there are no “gay social norms.” The gay adolescent
may well grow up believing no one else shares his sexual universe. The homosexual
boy, at least initially, does not even know how to discern who among his male
peers is also gay.

Sidney H. Phillips
boys. At a deeper level, the heterosexual boy may have experienced

the friendship as a regressive reawakening of his preoedipal relation-
ship with his father, thus allaying unconscious fears of reprisal for
his eventual involvement with girls. It is hard to imagine, however, that
the heterosexual boy whose circumcised penis was inspected over
and over was not experiencing some measure of erotic, masturbatory
pleasure, even though my patient, who was scrutinizing every iota
of his friend’s response and would have welcomed same, reported no
such reaction. Even if we assume the presence of unconscious erotic
pleasure in the heterosexual boy’s response, without access to his fan-
tasies we would be on shaky ground to infer they were homoerotic.
It seems entirely plausible that they were heteroerotic: perhaps the
heterosexual boy, for example, experienced the requests as much
desired and welcomed phallic admiration. Again, only access to his
fantasies would reveal the gender of the admirer. As reported by my
gay patients, all of their heterosexual paramours became manifestly
heterosexual men. We are left with fascinating questions about them.
The sexual overstimulation of everyday life in heterosexual develop-
1242
ment—its nature, form, and clinical manifestations—is also an under-
recognized phenomenon, a substantive topic in itself that I plan to
address in a separate paper.
CASE PRESENTATION
The protection of this patient’s conf identiality prevents me from pro-

viding the richly layered clinical detail that would permit the reader
greater access to the historical and analytic material. Accordingly,
I offer a sketch suff icient to exemplify my argument. Mr. E., thirty-two
years old when he presented for treatment, underwent four-times-a-
week psychoanalysis for an obsessional character disorder with depres-
sive-masochistic traits. Though well-established and successful in his
career, he was unhappy in his love life. He had been aware of a sexual
excitement and arousal for other boys and men since the age of f ive
years, and had felt “different” in that regard from other boys. Puberty
had only conf irmed his early recognition of sexual attraction for other
boys, and his precocious and substantial intellect discovered its name
and definition in the dictionary. His classmates enriched this startlingly
apt denotation with all of the familiar connotations of obloquy. He thus
resolved to hide his “deviant” orientation by dutifully showing up with

girls at school social events, though he felt no sexual or romantic

interest in them.
When Mr. E.’s two-years-younger brother became old enough, he
was removed from the crib and placed into a double bed with the
patient. They continued this sleeping arrangement until the patient left
home for college. Mr. E. revealed, only with great embarrassment, his
sexual excitement for his brother. He recalled many nights lying in bed
surreptitiously watching his brother fall asleep and feeling an intense
longing to “touch his chest.” Unable to contain the impulse any longer,
one night he gently placed his hand on top of his sleeping brother’s bare
chest. The brother almost instantly roused from sleep long enough
to knock the hand away and roll over onto his side. In the morning,
Mr. E.’s brother said to him, “Jeez, what got into you last night? You
were all over me.” This remark, to which the patient could not manage
to utter a reply, continued to be a nidus of the most strongly felt shame.
The raw intensity of the patient’s affect as he haltingly told me about
this incident made it seem as though it had happened yesterday rather
than some sixteen years earlier.
1243
Mr. E. went off to college, where within a few days he met and
began to fall in love with Sam. This friendship developed along the
lines I have described earlier. The two became “best friends.” Since
Mr. E. had gone to college only a short distance away, he regularly
invited Sam, who was from a distant part of the country, home for the
holidays. Though reluctant at f irst, Sam eventually agreed to sleep in
the same bed with Mr. E. on these home visits. “Oh, come on, what’s
the problem? My brothers and I did it all the time,” Mr. E. wheedled,
while simultaneously trying to relieve Sam’s apprehension.
The same pattern developed in bed between Mr. E. and Sam that
had occurred earlier between Mr. E. and his brother. The two lay in
bed dressed only in their underpants and talked late into the night.
Mr. E. waited until Sam had fallen asleep and then would gaze uninter-
ruptedly at his friend’s body, longing to touch and caress him. Though
Mr. E. had begun to masturbate at college—now with explicit sexual
fantasies about Sam or other young men on campus to whom he
was attracted—the masturbation never occurred while in bed with
Sam. The old pattern with his brother predominated. The relationship
continued this way throughout college. Despite Sam’s explicit and
extensive romantic and sexual involvements with women, Mr. E.’s
love for him went undeterred.

Sidney H. Phillips
Upon graduation, Mr. E. and Sam attended different professional

schools. Mr. E. had dreaded Sam’s departure for weeks. He had agreed
to accompany Sam on the cross-country trip to his new school. On the
hot summer night before they left, the two young men lay sweaty and
exhausted in their underpants on a mattress on the f loor of Sam’s room.
As they lay there in the dark, Mr. E. “heard some noises coming from
Sam’s side of the mattress, and I thought he was masturbating.” Not
able to contain any longer his passionate desire for his friend who
was leaving the next morning, Mr. E. said, “Sam, if you’re horny,
I’ll be glad to give you a blow job.” Sam instantly sat bolt upright and
exclaimed in a shocked and irritated tone, “What!?” Nothing further
was said. Both men spent the night clutching their respective edges
of the mattress. In the morning they arose, got into the car, and drove
across country. Not another word was spoken by either man about
what had happened the night before.
COURSE OF THE ANALYSIS

1244
Mr. E. had been referred for analysis and had been told by the referring
analyst that I was openly gay. Manifestly, Mr. E. welcomed this news
and felt my being homosexual would make talking about sexual mat-
ters and relationships easier. Within a few weeks of beginning analysis,
he became involved with Ben, a man who, like Mr. E. himself, was
somewhat conf licted about his homosexuality.This involvement, occur-
ring under the auspices of the permissive transference, seemed like a
f light from more direct emergence in the analysis of his wishes and
fears of being close with me. The f irst several months—indeed, the
f irst few years—of analytic sessions were f illed with detailed accounts
of his frustrations at work and with his new lover. In his new love life,
his partner had initially seemed interested and excited by sexual rela-
tions, but this changed once they began to live together. To Mr. E.’s
growing disappointment and frustration, Ben was often not as interested
in lovemaking as he was.
Circumstances beyond Mr. E.’s control often restricted their time
together to occasional long weekends. There was never any indication
that Ben was cheating on Mr. E. while he was away, nor was there any
suggestion that Mr. E. deviated from his commitment to remain
loyal to and involved with Ben. Instead, as I began to interpret to
Mr. E., it seemed that he had chosen a lover, though this time ostensibly

homosexual, who was cast in a mold of unavailability reminiscent of

his two great loves, his brother and Sam. Though he struggled against
this idea initially, gradually he began to accept it, and the f irst window
of curiosity in the analysis began to open.
With this opening, more direct expressions of curiosity and feelings
of closeness for me began to emerge in the work. At times these feel-
ings tilted subtly in a sexual direction. For example, he said how grate-
ful he was that I had stayed with him in the treatment despite how
frustrating he knew he could be. He spoke directly of feeling close to
me, but then the subject would change to another person of whom
he was also fond and for whom he expressed explicitly sexual feelings.
I shared this observation with him: “Did you notice that what began
as an expression of warmth and affection for me ended up with your
speaking about your sexual feelings for [person X]?” A characteristic
pattern would then ensue. He would fall silent and eventually report
that he had “hit a wall” or “gone blank.” I would then invite him to
see what came to mind about “the wall” or the “blank,” and strikingly
he responded the same way each time. He would compliantly and some-
1245
what obsessively take up the invitation and say: “Okay, let me see
what comes to mind. I’ll just relax. I’ll just let my thoughts go. I’m
drifting off. I’m feeling so relaxed. I’m getting kind of sleepy. I feel
like drifting off and falling asleep.” All of this was said in a singsong
and progressively dreamier manner culminating in his actually falling
asleep on the couch. He would awaken himself a few minutes later
with his own snoring.
When this f irst happened, I was perplexed. I did not know what
to do other than analyze his falling asleep as a resistance—a kind of
dramatic, somatic changing the subject. Several such attempts led us
nowhere. Gradually, as I paid more attention to the pattern itself,
I came to recognize the trancelike prelude to falling asleep as auto-
hypnosis. That made me think of Shengold’s classic paper on the
ef fects of overstimulation, since his patients in the aftermath of
brutally traumatic and repeated molestations employed autohypnosis
as a way of contending with chronic states of overstimulation. “But
Shengold?” I thought skeptically to myself; “That doesn’t make sense.
I know my patient’s childhood history well enough by now. He was
never brutally molested. There was no chronic overstim—” and
I stopped myself midthought. “Overstimulation?” I thought. “Of course,
there was! There were years of overstimulation when he slept with his

Sidney H. Phillips
brother during childhood and adolescence.” I share my “aha! experience”

with the reader as it occurred to me that day sitting behind the couch.
This revelation enabled me to see that the falling asleep on the
couch was not only a resistance to the burgeoning erotic transference;
it was also an indulgence of it. He was enacting with me what must
have happened in bed with his brother night after night. There he was,
f illed with sexual excitement and arousal for his nearly naked but
forbidden brother lying next to him. What could he do with this unbear-
ably intense buildup of sexual stimulation with no available outlet
for discharge? He became ingenious at obsessively thinking about
other things—things that would help calm the tension, that would
assist him in relaxing, that would promote drifting of f, which after
all was the only substantive solution available that would bring some
temporary relief—sleep! Falling asleep on the couch, then, represented
both a transference resistance against the developing sexual arousal
within a session and a transference reenactment of how he had dealt
with the arousal in bed with his brother.
We could understand his resorting to autohypnosis when his
1246
sheer obsessional efforts to think about other things failed. This is
what had occurred when I had interpreted the defensive shift away
from the emerging erotic feelings in his associations. But it is crucially
important to realize, and I did not fully at the time, that we were
dealing neither with repression as the primary defense nor with the
usual repressed contents (wishes and fears with their accompanying
affects). We were dealing rather with powerful, unbearably intense
affects (feelings) of the overstimulated state that, though largely con-
scious, are split off f irst by sheer obsessional-like efforts to think
about something else, and, failing that, by dissociative symptoms (the
autohypnosis and falling asleep).
How then was I to begin to share these interpretive revelations with
my patient? At about this time in our work, the patient reported his
f irst explicitly erotic dream about me in a session:
We were lying next to one another on the couch. Or maybe we were

both in sleeping bags. I was lying here on the couch, and you were lying
right next to me on the f loor. Then the scene changes and we are in the
room next door. We are in bed together. I’m taking your shirt off. We’re
kissing, and it’s very passionate. We are interrupted by a knock on the
door. The cleaning people are coming in. Then we are back in this room,
and you are going through a big pile of papers, and we aren’t talking.

His associations went immediately to the explicit sexuality between

us in the dream, and he acknowledged how hard it had been for him
to talk about his sexual feelings for me during the analysis:
I was aware of being sexually attracted to you from the f irst day I
walked into your off ice. I remember thinking then maybe I’d rather
have a relationship with you than be in treatment with you, but I felt
too embarrassed to tell you that. I’ve continued to f ind it hard to talk
about my sexual feelings for you though I am aware of them. I mean,
what if I were telling you about my attraction to you, and I started to
get aroused in here. That would be really embarrassing. I mean, I guess
I even know that it would be okay, but I would feel terribly ashamed.
I don’t know why.
We analyzed many different aspects of this dream off and on for

the ensuing years of the analysis, including certain preoedipal elements
involving body narcissism that commonly emerge in the analyses of
homosexual men. In the erotic dream that Mr. E. reported, for example,
the reference to our being “both in sleeping bags” derived from a fan-
tasy of intrauterine life as twins that at times was manifested in a twin 1247
transference. This transference often took the form of a devaluation of
self and an idealization of the analyst (or other transference f igures).
Leavy (1985) wrote of the body narcissism typical of many homosexual
men who search for partners in whom they discover “the reproduced
image of the[ir own] body, the doubling” (p. 166). He noted that the
“homosexual man has chosen as the object of his love and desire his
own specular image” (p. 165). While denoting the doubling or mirror-
ing of the body as the “constitutive, elementary, and unconscious
nucleus of [male] homosexuality” (p. 164), Leavy is clear and explicit
that he is not referring to the psychopathology of narcissistic charac-
ter disorder: “The narcissism of male homosexuals is not, then, a
dif fusely characterological universal. Absorption of sexual desire in
the contemplation of the physical self mirrored in another does not
bespeak the absence or loss of object love. The capacity for the love
of another person does not depend on the sexual orientation” (p. 167).
Mr. E.’s dream and his associations to it offered an ideal opportu-
nity to address my new understanding of the pattern I had observed
in the analysis. I said to him:
Your falling asleep on the couch hasn’t only been a way of trying
to avoid your sexual feelings for me. It’s also been a way of expressing

Sidney H. Phillips
them. You’ve been trying to show me the dilemma you feel in here: what
if you have sexual feelings for me and get aroused in our session? It
would be just like it was so many nights with Sam and with your brother.
You’ve been trying to show me this old dilemma: what do you do with
such intense sexual feelings when they occur here? And you’ve been
worried that if you tell me about these sexual feelings, I might make
you feel ashamed and humiliated the way Sam and your brother did.
This proved to be a pivotal interpretation in the analysis, and it

led to an opening up of many new pathways for exploration. Since
he knew that I was gay, what if he became aroused in the session, and
instead of shaming him, I became aroused, too? Would I seduce or
exploit him? Would I be able to contain the excitement? Without
having to feel so ashamed of his excitement, what would stop him
from seducing me? And so on. This work opened up to analytic scrutiny
the oedipal longing, rivalry, and disappointment that lay behind the
overstimulated relationship with his brother, freed him to engage
more deeply and passionately in his relationship with Ben, and made
possible a planned and successful termination of the analysis.
1248
DISCLOSURE OR DISCOVERY OF
THE ANALYST’S HOMOSEXUALITY
Because of the long-standing antihomosexual bias within the psycho-

analytic community, it would be natural enough for gay and lesbian
patients to seek out openly gay and lesbian analysts for treatment.
These patients want to avoid having to contend with the prejudice that
their sexual orientation is, in and of itself, psychopathological.6 What
effect does knowledge of the analyst’s homosexuality have on psycho-
6
Lewes (1989) wrote that the suspicion and distrust that the homosexual commu-
nity has of psychoanalysis is well founded and derived from two sources: “The first
is the way too many analysts have violated basic norms of decency in their treatment
of homosexuals. The enmity between homosexuals and psychoanalysis is extremely
unfortunate, but the blame for its emergence rests squarely on the analytic establish-
ment alone. Second, it need hardly be argued that homosexuals have been and con-
tinue to be the victims of prejudice and discrimination both subtle and blatant. While
the deepest roots of this animus lie in intrapsychic fears and defensiveness, the intel-
lectual rationalizations that have been invoked to justify such unreasoning hatred and
fear have frequently been psychoanalytic in nature” (p. 21). It does not necessarily
follow that homosexual patients could only receive competent and compassionate
treatment from openly homosexual analysts, but the history of prejudice within
psychoanalysis (e.g., the so-called “reparative therapies”) is well known in the gay
and lesbian community and serves as a cautionary tale.

analytic treatment? How should the analyst handle the issue of dis-
closing one’s sexual orientation? (For a discussion of the vicissitudes
of a heterosexual analysand’s discovery of his analyst’s homosexuality,
see Phillips 1998.)
Despite recent sociopolitical shifts toward more positive attitudes
regarding gay men and lesbian women, the position of homosexuality
within the individual unconscious in modern Western culture remains
one of debasement and degradation (see Moss 1997). For the homo-
sexual patient, then, to know of the analyst’s homosexuality in advance,
or to discover it in the course of analytic treatment, poses for the patient
a powerful conf lict: how does the patient speak freely from a virtually
universal reservoir of obloquy and invective—about homosexuality in
general or the analyst’s in particular—while simultaneously trying to
maintain the analyst’s approval and regard? I realize that there is noth-
ing new in this dilemma. I have just described a common version of
resistance to free association: projection and externalization of antici-
pated superego condemnation onto the analyst (“I can’t say that; my
analyst won’t like me”). However mundane a description of resistance
1249
analysis this may be, that is precisely my point. The novelty of the
homosexual analyst may obscure the everyday analytic approach to
this dilemma: analyze the transference and the defenses against it.
Failure to pursue these resistances analytically permits the unspeakable
and unthinkable to accrue under a defensive umbrella that prevents
analysis of this material.
The patient’s learning of the analyst’s homosexuality seems to
have a magnetizing effect on conf licts from virtually all developmental
periods and thus may act as an organizing principle of transference
wishes and defenses. As these conf licts realign in reaction to this dis-
covery, some things—as Mr. E. noted—become easier to talk about and
some things harder, pointing the way to resistance analysis. Analysis of
the patient’s conscious resistance to speak about the analyst’s homo-
sexuality often reveals the patient’s fear of divulging old prejudices
against homosexuality that might offend the analyst. Such material may
also lead to discovery of a wellspring of unconscious internalized
homophobia that presents an opportunity for superego analysis that can
yield far-reaching therapeutic effect, either neurotic symptom relief
or a freeing-up of the analytic process itself for deeper work, or both.
If we take the patient’s knowledge or discovery of the analyst’s
homosexuality as a “point of entry to transference reactions,” then how

Sidney H. Phillips
does the analyst handle the discovery? (For a discussion of comparable

ways to approach issues of race in the transference, see Holmes 1992,
p. 8.) Ideally, the analyst responds in a way that maximally facilitates
hearing what the patient is thinking and feeling about this information
and noting the patient’s reactions. If the material f irst emerges in fan-
tasy (“I wonder if you’re gay”) the approach would be the usual
analytic one: to explore the origin and timing of the question and the
fantasies behind it. The analyst might even inquire into the ambiguity
“What if I am and what if I’m not?”
But what if the idea comes up more directly? Someone who knows
both analyst and patient, for example, tells the patient his analyst is
gay. The patient returns to the next session with this information and
asks the analyst about it. Clearly the patient is putting the analyst on
the spot; some might say he pushes for a response outside the analytic
frame. Even if the analyst does not acknowledge directly the truth
of the discovery, there is still the linguistic problem of addressing the
news and its impact, which in the long run may be what is more
important for the analysis. Awkward phrases like “what you heard
1250
about me” or “your thought that I am gay” bespeak an indirectness
and lack of candor regarding this material that may well have been
dif f icult for the patient to mention in the f irst place. Imagine the
absurd analogy of addressing the patient’s f irst comment about the
analyst’s race with, “Now what about your thoughts that I’m black?”
If the patient senses that the analyst is uncomfortable in hearing or
responding to the question, we can predict a collusion of silence on
this important topic.
So what about answering the question directly? As long as the
analyst has thought through the complexities of such a reply, a direct
answer could be facilitative of the process: “Yes, you’ve asked some-
thing that’s public knowledge about me in our community, and it’s true.
Tell me more of your reaction to this news.” By thinking through the
complexities of the reply I mean imagining, based on knowledge from
the analysis, how the patient will react to this news. If there is reason
to think that a slower approach might be more clinically appropriate
for a particular patient, one might reply, “Could we hold that question
for the moment, though I’d be glad to answer it at some point. Tell
me your reaction to this news.” This might give analyst and patient
time to consider and digest the reactions thus far to this information.
The opposite situation also occurs where, despite the available ambi-

guities (no wedding band, no spouse listed in a university directory,

and so on) and despite the information being public knowledge, the
patient never refers to or asks about the analyst’s marital status or
sexual orientation. The analyst may begin wondering just how it
is that the patient doesn’t know. This might well be the f irst scent
to follow down an important analytic trail—the patient’s inhi-
bition of curiosity, the tenacious hanging on to a lack of knowledge
about the analyst and, ultimately, about the patient’s own self and
past life.
Some analysts will prefer a less revealing reply altogether (e.g.,
“I’ll leave the answer to that question to your imagination”), recogniz-
ing the risk that any of these responses may shut down the patient’s
imagination and associations, the relative openness and f luidity of
which are ultimately how we judge the impact of our interventions
(see Kris 1982, pp. 31–38). We continually need to remind ourselves
that silence in reply to a direct question may not always be experi-
enced as the analyst would like—as an invitation to speak freely what-
ever is on the patient’s mind. Too often the painful, shame-ridden
1251
silences of the patient’s past inf iltrate the analyst’s silence so that
it becomes a punitive condemnation, a humiliation, or a withdrawal.
Unconscious repetitions of such old and deep pain, silently endured
then and now, may not for quite some time yield to analysis of the
transference and might require the analyst’s wading into the silence
to prevent the analysis itself from becoming a mere repetition of old
deprivations.
Though Mr. E. never asked me directly if I was gay, he assumed
the referring analyst’s information was accurate. I never questioned
its accuracy and used phrases like “your knowing that I’m gay” and
“the way my homosexuality troubles you” as a way of welcoming such
material into the analysis and also as a way of meeting his growing
candor about his own homosexuality with an analytic version of my
own. I do not argue for self-disclosure here as much as for the analyst’s
being open to new moments of psychic openness in the patient. The
analyst must be alert to the possibility that such an approach risks
the activation of permissive, approving transferences that subtly serve
resistance; here they relieve the patient of the task analyzing more
deeply his homosexual conf licts, which have now been validated extra-
analytically through presumption of the analyst’s homosexuality. The
use of emissaries (e.g., the referring analyst who told him I was gay)

Sidney H. Phillips
as a defensive def lection away from speaking directly his own concern
and curiosity also deserves exploration. One of my central points here
is that when a gay patient is aware of the analyst’s homosexuality, the
patient may experience a conscious fear of sexual attraction and
arousal in the session itself—that is, the reenactment in the analysis
of the everyday overstimulation of childhood with its attendant shame
and need to hide.
OVERSTIMULATION, THE DYNAMICS OF SHAME,

AND THE “CLOSET”
Gillman (1990) wrote that “shame is f irst and foremost body shame.”
Drawing on Yorke (1990), he continued: “shame results from exposure
of the body, body part, or body products. . . . Early childhood memories
involve body exposure and loss of control leading to shame and humili-
ation” (p. 358). The same experiences that lead to the overstimulation of
everyday life, then, would also tend to evoke shame: exposure of the
sexually aroused state.7 Yorke noted that shame “carries with it a strong
1252
sense . . . of bodily or psychological nakedness, in which innermost
secrets and what are felt to be the mental equivalents of body content
are bared to view” (p. 380). For homosexually inclined children, this
everyday overstimulation creates a double vulnerability to shame: they
not only fear exposure of their sexual arousal but also dread exposure
of the homoerotic source of their arousal. The intensity of the fear of
exposure may be greater in boys than in girls, since male arousal is
more anatomically apparent than female arousal.
Precisely for these reasons, homosexual adolescent boys live in
fear of school athletic locker rooms. Mr. F.8 described this vignette
from his f irst experience of physical education class in junior high
school. He explained that when he was eleven years old, he had never
seen anyone else’s erection but his own. Only in retrospect did he
realize that his erection pointed more vertically than the more com-
mon horizontal orientation. At the end of class, he undressed in the
company of other naked boys and became aroused. Through a combi-
nation of stalling and hiding behind a towel, he delayed long enough
7
Susan Vaughan alerted me to the relation between overstimulation and shame.
8
Mr. F. was twenty-five years old when he presented for treatment for conflicts
regarding his sexual orientation. He was treated in psychoanalysis four times weekly
for a mixed character disorder with hysterical, depressive-masochistic traits.

that his initially full, vertical erection had diminished to what he did
not recognize to be a partial, though now horizontally pointing erec-
tion. With a hint of pride, he thought that his now partial erection
would be mistaken by the other boys as a bigger, f laccid penis, and
he walked unabashedly to the showers. The next day a friend stand-
ing next to him in class playfully remarked that he had noticed the
patient’s erection the day before on his way to the showers. The
patient recalled feeling instantly exposed and ashamed. Fearing that
the homoerotic origin of the arousal was suspected, the patient tried
to “cover himself” by claiming he had seen a particular girl through
the locker room window. The girl, he told me, was a well-known,
voluptuous, sexy, senior high school girl, the object of seemingly
ubiquitous fantasy by heterosexual junior high school boys.
Here then is an account of the complex interplay between shame
and overstimulation. The patient’s vignette demonstrates the “usual
horror” for the homosexual adolescent boy of the overstimulation
of everyday life. These adolescents live in daily fear of exposure of
their sexually aroused state. This story also illustrates well Yorke’s
1253
point that the “awareness of an observer is a ref lection of the link
between shame, pride, and exhibitionism/voyeurism and the defenses
against them that underlie the need to hide” (p. 381). Several authors
(e.g., Yorke 1990; Spero 1984) have commented on how powerful,
painful, and potentially overwhelming the af fect of shame is.
Mr. E., for example, in telling me about the incidents of touching
his brother’s chest and of fering to fellate Sam, conf irmed Yorke’s
statements that “shameful experiences are not easily forgotten,
and when recalled the af fect itself may be strongly reexperi-
enced” (p. 380). Yorke further noted that shame regulates social
conduct and personal relationships (p. 381). He asserted that “there
is . . . no defense against shame. One can only take measures to
avoid the situations that give rise to it—to restrict, for example,
social exposure” (p. 406). Thus, when the overstimulation of everyday
life evokes these dynamics of shame—the need to hide, the lack of
internal defense against shame, avoidance of social exposure being
the sole protection—the uncannily apt convergence is a description,
indeed, a def inition, of the homosexual closet.

Sidney H. Phillips
THE OVERSTIMULATION OF EVERYDAY

LIFE: A DEFINITION
In 1967 Shengold published a paper, “The Effects of Overstimulation:

Rat People,” in which he reported on the psychoanalytic treatment
of several patients who had suffered traumatic overstimulation during
childhood. These patients had been seduced and beaten as children by
psychotic, alcoholic, and/or sociopathic parents. Shengold emphasized
the central pathogenic role of overstimulation in their subsequent
psychopathology. By overstimulation, he referred to the repeated and
prolonged sexual stimulation and arousal of the child who, because of
physiological and sexual immaturity, was incapable of discharging the
often unbearably intense and prolonged sexual tension.
I propose a milder variant of Shengold’s depiction of overstimula-
tion to account for the symptomatic picture of the group of patients
I have presented. It may be that what explains the intense psycho-
pathology of Shengold’s “rat people” is primarily the catastrophic
trauma, including unrelenting and massive overstimulation—that is, the
1254
effects of being brutalized and sadistically tortured by mentally ill
parents or adults. In his incisive and brilliant clinical acumen, he may
well have discovered a syndrome of overstimulation that can be clini-
cally separated from the syndrome of catastrophic trauma also experi-
enced by his patients.
By the overstimulation of everyday life I refer to the frequent
experiences, for example, of homosexually inclined children and
adolescents who are placed again and again in the company of same-
gender parents, siblings, and peers in various degrees of undress or
nakedness and the subjective states generated by those experiences.
It is a wholly different experience for a homosexually inclined boy to
take a shower with his father or to sleep in the same bed with his
brother than it is for a heterosexually inclined boy to do so. The homo-
sexually inclined child or adolescent may be repeatedly overstimulated
by gender pairings that paradoxically were meant to protect against
just such a risk.
The overstimulation I refer to is not only everyday but also unin-
tentional: the adults involved inadvertently overstimulate the child
through subscription to heterosexual societal norms. It seems quite
plausible that a well-meaning father who fails to recognize the signif i-
cantly different impact of showering with his homosexually inclined

son does not cause the same damage as a sexually abusive parent.
This would be the case both because there is no overt physical or
sexual contact and because the father does not intend to violate the
son’s trust and boundaries. The lack of intent might further explain the
difference between the patients described here and Shengold’s patients.
What is the nature of the subjective state ref lected by the descrip-
tive phrase “the overstimulation of everyday life,” a phrase that
refers to external phenomena but at the same time is steeped in the
language of drive theory? What constitutes overstimulation, as opposed
to average expectable stimulation? How much sexual stimulation in
everyday life is necessary to help the sexual drive develop? How would
we distinguish everyday stimulation from everyday overstimulation?
I would argue that average expectable stimulation is distinguishable
from everyday overstimulation only in retrospect. The vicissitudes of
everyday sexual stimulation are well known to psychoanalysts and run
the gamut from relatively healthy, unconf licted expressions of sexual
desire to neurotic reactions against it that result in symptom formation.
Everyday overstimulation, on the other hand, implies a failure of
1255
defense and almost invariably leads to symptomatic reactions (often
compulsive or dissociative in form) to the frequent states of sexual
arousal. I will elaborate on this idea in a later section.
Another diff iculty is in def ining the over of overstimulation. Does
the excess refer solely to the “hydraulics” of drive theory? Is there
“too much” sexual stimulation only if there is no “outlet for” or
“release of ” the “mounting” sexual “tension” in the form of orgasmic
“discharge”? While repetition, frequency, and intensity of the sexual
arousal do describe one aspect of these boys’ inner experience, drive
theory alone seems inadequate to capture the complexity of their sub-
jective state. Their internal landscape is best described as a tantalized
inner world of longing.9 It is relentless cycles of attraction, hope, excite-
ment, and arousal alternating with states of disappointment, loss,
despair, and grief that give their inner world a unique form and content.
A TANTALIZED INNER WORLD OF LONGING
I arrived at the concept of the overstimulation of everyday life through

an initial consideration of the longing of some homosexual boys for
9
I am grateful to Rosemary Balsam for the phrase tantalized inner world.

Sidney H. Phillips
heterosexual boys, which is why I began with that theme. In our

turning next to the concept of overstimulation, important new ques-
tions arise. Is there any normal sexual stimulation in family life? Or
does any unrequited love affair deriving from unconscious incestuous
fantasy risk being regarded as “overstimulation”? How is longing
dif ferent from desire that is merely frustrated? I will take up the last
question f irst.
Webster’s Third def ines longing as “an eager desire especially for
something remote or unattainable (synonyms: craving, pining away).”
So how is it that the outcome of some unmet desire is frustration, while
other unmet desires result in longing? When desire meets an obstacle
(a “no,” for example), there are two possible outcomes. If the “no” is
accepted, the result is frustration followed by grief. Grief is a process
that integrates the frustration (or loss) with the desire (i.e., the idea that
“I cannot have this now” is emotionally accepted and integrated). If
the grief process is “successful” at integrating the initial desire with the
loss, the result will be some adaptation to the loss—for example, the
person might wait, hoping that the desire can be gratif ied later, or seek
1256
a displacement or substitute gratif ication.
But what if the “no” is not accepted? The “no” or unavailability of
what is desired may be repudiated or may be denied and magically
undone in fantasy. There is a quality of longing or yearning—distinct
from mere frustration—that holds “I still want it; I must have it;
I will have it.” The repudiation of the “no” by magical undoing and
denial would thereby create an expectation, a renewed hope for gratifi-
cation. In this scenario desire, rather than being extinguished or quieted,
would be heightened and intensif ied.
Is longing, then, a closed emotional loop of failed grief and un-
integrated loss? Figure 1 illustrates this schema. It is the oscillation
between the “yes” in fantasy and the “no” in reality noted in the f igure
that gives longing its peculiar quality of “delicious pain.” Thus a new
psychoanalytic def inition of longing emerges: an affective state that
stems from repudiation, disavowal, and magical undoing of the loss
of the unavailable object and the lack of integration of the pain, disap-
pointment, and sadness accompanying that loss, resulting in a repetitive
but derailed and incomplete process of grief. The defenses of magical
undoing and disavowal operate against the integration of the pain of
the loss. Note how these defenses are within the same dissociative
continuum (denial, disavowal, dissociation, vertical splits in the ego)

frustration grief adaptation wait

“No” accepted Course of Frustrated Desire
(Not Leading to Longing)
desire "No"
"I want that"
substitute
“No” rejected
gratification
Threat of
loss or pain undoing the "no"
"no"
in reality Cycle of Longing
Figure 1:The Cycle of Longing
heightened "yes" in fantasy

desire
1257
that I pointed to in Mr. E.’s treatment when he was attempting to
stave of f the reenactment of his tantalized inner world within the
transference.
I return to the more general questions about longing and overstim-
ulation.10 Is the longing of the homosexual adolescent boy pining away
for the heterosexual adolescent boy in any way different from anyone
longing for someone else? I contend that it is. How? As I showed in the
earlier section on development, homosexually inclined adolescent boys
who seek out heterosexual adolescent boys as displacements for their
oedipal fathers are already operating from within their long-standing
tantalized inner worlds. They seek to undo and reverse the shame and
fear of exposure of the paternal rejection and withdrawal. The crucial
distinction may reside in the basis of the paternal rejection. In hetero-
sexual oedipal disappointment and anxiety, the father declares this
particular woman taboo, while wittingly or unwittingly approving the
boy’s generic desire for a woman. The dominant heterosexual culture
makes the social approval of generic heterosexual desire abundantly
10
Though I focus here on the problems of longing in homosexual adolescents, the
phenomenon, of course, has its heterosexual versions that are abundantly represented
in romantic literature (see Leavy 1990).

Sidney H. Phillips
clear, even when particular family environments discourage or con-

sciously disapprove of it.
In homosexual oedipal disappointment, the boy’s desire itself is
often attacked root and stem: desire not just for this particular man (the
father) but for any man is taboo. This fact is powerfully reinforced by
social and cultural pressures to conform to heterosexual “norms.” At
best the sociocultural milieu ignores homosexual youth. At worst the
climate tolerates their humiliation and dramatizes their extermination
in accounts of their suicides and murders.
CLINICAL MANIFESTATIONS
OF EVERYDAY OVERSTIMULATION
The symptomatic sequelae of such overstimulation often f ind expres-

sion, broadly speaking, in two different directions: inhibition or com-
pulsion. The two poles are rarely found in pure culture. While Mr. E.
manifested symptomatically mainly at the inhibited end of the spec-
trum, others clearly contend with more compulsive versions of adult
1258
sexuality. The intertwining complexities of constitution, maturation,
gender, trauma, family environment, social norms, and cultural forces
that tilt an individual toward one end of the spectrum or that result in
more f luid oscillations of sexual adaptation require a developmental
calculus beyond the scope of this paper.
Mr. E., as mentioned, presents us with some intriguing questions
about inhibition. The lack of outlet for discharge of sexual tension in
children has usually been explained on physiological grounds: many
children are reportedly incapable of orgasm. But how do we explain
the lack of an outlet for sexual discharge in postpubescent adoles-
cents? The delayed masturbation seems an especially puzzling f inding
in overstimulated adolescents, since masturbation would seem the
obvious and welcomed solution. In many cases, however, the repeated
experience of overstimulation has long antedated puberty and the
possibility of orgasmic discharge. Genital self-manipulation before
puberty only intensif ies the experience of overstimulation. By the time
these children become pubescent adolescents, they have long since
learned to avoid masturbation, since their earlier experience has taught
them that it only brings on or worsens the overstimulated state. Several
of my patients with a history of delayed masturbation—both hetero-
and homosexual—have described childhood experiences of this milder

variant of overstimulation.11 I take as axiomatic that the usual

dynamics of guilt and shame related to adolescent sexuality may rein-
force the earlier avoidance of masturbation and add symptomatic inhi-
bition (based on unconscious conf lict) to this picture. In individuals in
whom masturbation to climax is avoided, the risks of overstimulation
and its symptomatic sequelae are extended throughout the formative
stage of adolescence into young adulthood.
How might these experiences of overstimulation of everyday life
manifest in psychoanalytic treatment? Insistent obsessional and com-
pulsive character traits that fail to yield at all to traditional interpreta-
tion may represent not simply entrenched character armor against
unconscious conf lict; they may also be defending against conscious but
disavowed states of overstimulation. In my case presentation, for
example, Mr. E.’s obsessional character defenses were, to be sure,
directed at underlying unconscious conf lict, but they also served to
avoid consciously thinking about and experiencing the developing
overstimulated state within an analytic session. The shame associated
with overstimulation may reinforce the conscious avoidance of the
1259
overstimulated state during a session. Yorke (1990), for example, noted
that “it has been rightly said that guilt brings material into an analysis
while shame keeps it out” (p. 381).
A recurrent reaction to explicit invitations to free associate—with
evidence of trancelike states, autohypnosis, or falling asleep on the
couch—may turn out to be a pathognomonic signal of an active struggle
against overstimulation. My observations coincide with Inderbitzin’s
in his illuminating paper “Patient’s Sleep on the Analytic Couch” (1988):
his patient’s sleep on the couch f irst occurred in relation to sexual
thoughts and feelings about the analyst (p. 681); denial, disavowal,
and dissociation were prominent defenses (pp. 681, 684); and the sleep
on the couch came to be seen less as resistance than as reenactment
(p. 692). The patient’s complex reenactments were related to repeated
and prolonged early childhood exposure to the primal scene: she had
11
Both Mr. E. and Mr. F. had this history. Mr. G., a twenty-seven-year-old openly
gay man when he presented for treatment (in twice-weekly psychotherapy) for dif-
f iculties sustaining relationships with other men, also had this history. Mr. A., a
twenty-seven-year-old heterosexual man, who complained of diff iculties sustaining
relationships with women and was treated in psychoanalysis four times weekly for
obsessional character disorder, also had a history of delayed masturbation. Mr. A.
described overstimulating baths during latency, during which his mother sat in the
bathroom and conversed with him (see Phillips 1998, p. 1202).

Sidney H. Phillips
slept in her parents’ bedroom until the age of f ive (p. 687). This con-
vergence of f indings and conclusions is all the more striking since I
came upon Inderbitzen’s paper only as I reviewed the literature in
preparing this paper for publication.
When a patient struggling against a state of overstimulation is
invited to say whatever comes to mind, the patient immediately seeks
the very opposite of “free association.” Recall that this is precisely the
situation in which Mr. E. would begin to hypnotize himself and fall
asleep. The patient fending off such a state wants “carefully controlled”
associations to avoid having to acknowledge the “elephant in the room.”
Mr. E., for example, lying in bed with his brother, was trying to think
of anything else except how aroused he felt. That is exactly what
hypnosis tries to do: to focus and concentrate attention so intensely
and so narrowly that extraneous thoughts and sensations are excluded
from the focused consciousness. Hypnosis is used in contemporary
psychiatry and medicine to assist patients who are contending with
mental and physical states quite similar to the overstimulated state—
for example, to assuage the craving of an addiction (cigaret smoking)
1260
or to help control and modulate the inevitable pain of childbirth.
COUNTERTRANSFERENCE
AND EVERYDAY OVERSTIMULATION
Broadly speaking, analysts may react in two different ways to their

patients’ reexperiencing this type of everyday overstimulation in the
transference (see Phillips in press). The analyst may unwittingly collude
with patients in their dissociative defenses against the overstimulation
by developing countertransferential reactions along the dissociative
continuum. For example, after interpreting Mr. E.’s defensive shift
away from the emerging erotic transference, I felt stultif ied by his
mind-numbing, meticulous descriptions of the view from a favorite hill
in Europe that he had visited on vacation. Sometimes he even depicted
the cloud formations he saw there. Note the effort to “float above it all,”
of which I was unaware until I noticed the hypnotic, dissociative pattern.
In reaction to a patient’s conscious and determined efforts not to address
his arousal here and now within the hour, the analyst may feel distracted,
bored, and/or sleepy in the face of such tedious detail. When only par-
tially recognized, this type of reaction in the analyst is likely to give
rise to interpretive efforts to address the patient’s resistance: looking

for the moment that his associations defensively derailed and bringing
this to the patient’s attention, as I initially tried to do with Mr. E.
In my experience, this type of intervention is almost never productive,
since the defenses at work in the patient are not unconscious, obses-
sional displacement and isolation but rather a conscious disavowal of
current affective experience. The analyst misses and fails to address
a transference-countertransference enactment—the expressive rather
than resistant side of the interchange.
The other broad category of countertransference reaction the ana-
lyst may experience is a version of the sexual overstimulation itself.
The analyst may experience mild sexual arousal in the session, accom-
panied by explicitly erotic fantasies about the patient or a displacement
f igure. Analysts may react to such fantasies with shame and guilt, as
if such reactions were evidence of moral and professional failures,
dangers to be warded off at all cost.12 When recognized and brought
into self-analytic scrutiny by the analyst, these reactions—the mild
arousal and associated fantasies, as well as the shame and/or guilt in
response to them—can prove extremely illuminating with regard to the
1261
patient’s early, warded-off experiences of everyday overstimulation.
With Mr. E., for example, my initial reaction to his more explicit
expressions of erotic desire toward me was to feel slightly aroused and
then promptly to feel ashamed. Since sexual attraction to a patient, or
even mild arousal, had on previous occasions served as an important
clue to the transference-countertransference matrix, I was perplexed by
my shame response. It slowly dawned on me that this reaction to feel-
ing aroused might well be resonant with a similar response in Mr. E.
My countertransference proved to be a crucial determinant to the
pivotal interpretation I made to Mr. E. about his arousal and shame
within our sessions.
Because violations of sexual boundaries between analyst and
patient are a regrettable but well-recognized part of the history of
psychoanalysis (Apfel and Simon 1985; Simon 1992; Gabbard and
Lester 1995), as well as a real and documented danger in the contem-
porary practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy
12
Scott Goldsmith pointed out the reciprocity between the analyst’s fantasy of
“professional destruction” (e.g., “I could lose my license if I yield to these erotic
desires”) and the fantasies of shame and destruction with which many homosexual
adolescents contend (e.g., “I could be humiliated or physically hurt if I publicly
divulge my homosexuality”). That there is a kernel of reality in these fantasies for
both analyst and patient only adds to the complexity.

Sidney H. Phillips
(Gabbard and Lester 1995), analysts may have been overcautious

in reporting the occurrence of such relatively common—perhaps even
“everyday”?—countertransference reactions. Let me be clear that I am
not referring here to situations in which an impaired analyst, suffering
from any of the psychopathological states so ably detailed by Gabbard
and Lester (1995, pp. 87–121), experiences sexual fantasies about a
patient and then feels impelled or compelled to take action that
would exploit the patient sexually. These situations are invariably
betrayals of the patient’s trust by the analyst. By contrast, I am refer-
ring here to sexual feelings and fantasies silently experienced in reac-
tion to everyday analytic discourse, feelings and fantasies the analyst
is in no danger of acting on with the patient and can with relative ease
become curious about and begin to mine for clues to the transference-
countertransference matrix.
A NEW MODEL FOR SOME BEHAVIORAL

ASPECTS OF HOMOSEXUALITY
1262
Let us take as a starting point the fact that children with a pattern of
early homosexual attraction and arousal may suffer signif icant over-
stimulation because of repeated experiences in childhood and adoles-
cence of being with same-gender parents, siblings, and peers in various
states of undress and nakedness. The overstimulation, depending on its
degree and duration, as well as on the emotional limitations and/or
resilience of the particular child, has predictable effects on subsequent
development and symptom/character formation.
Rough-and-Tumble Play
The overstimulation of everyday life may afford a new model for
understanding some behavioral or descriptive aspects of homosexuality.
For example, investigations into the childhoods of homosexual men—
both patients and nonpatients—have frequently revealed an avoidance
of “rough-and-tumble play” (Zuger 1984; Saghir and Robins 1973;
Friedman and Stern 1980). According to Friedman (1988), this “may
be the most common childhood trait of prehomosexual boys” (p. 18).
Linking this behavior psychologically to a fear of aggression, both
self- and other-directed, he then related this f inding biologically to a
“prenatal androgen def iciency hypothesis for the etiology of homo-
sexuality” (p. 21); “It seems possible,” he suggested, “to read the data

about rough-and-tumble play as indirect evidence supporting the

hypothesis of partial female brain differentiation in such individuals”
(p. 18).
Friedman def ined “rough-and-tumble play” as involving “body
contact, throwing the body through space, vigorous exercise of the
muscular-skeletal system, pushing, running, jumping [and]. . . wrestling,
tackling” (p. 17). A common prelude, of course, to such body contact
sports is getting undressed and suited up in a same-gender locker room
where a “prehomosexual” boy would both view other boys naked and
be viewed naked by them. This experience is then compounded by
what follows: the “prehomosexual boy,” naked himself, is surrounded
yet again by his naked companions, with whom he then proceeds
to take a shower. Prenatal androgen def iciency or not, is it surprising
that the homosexually inclined child or adolescent would try to avoid
such overstimulating experiences of bodily contact and nakedness
with other same-gender children?
Since less intense “rough-and-tumble play” is indulged in by chil-
dren prior to exposure to athletic locker rooms (and by primates, in
1263
whom locker-room psychology is obviously absent), everyday over-
stimulation of that sort may not account fully for this phenomenon. It
seems plausible to posit a biological substrate that can later be signif i-
cantly amplif ied by the psychodynamic, overstimulating experiences of
the locker room. That a substantive component of the avoidance of
aggressive play derives from the psychodynamic effect of everyday
overstimulation f its with the clinical observation that many gay men in
the course of treatment become more comfortable in athletic pursuits
than they were before treatment. This suggests that analysis and reso-
lution of conf lict might well free them up in this area.
Homosexual Cruising
Like the avoidance of rough-and-tumble play, homosexual cruising
is another aspect of male homosexual behavior that the scientif ic
literature has catalogued and attempted to explain. All of the psycho-
analytic researchers who have written papers on homosexual cruising
(Calef and Weinshel 1984; Willick 1988; Rich 1991; Bollas 1992)
described cases in which their patients had had childhood and adoles-
cent experiences of a sexually overstimulating nature, and yet the
authors failed to appreciate the relation between the overstimulation
and the subsequent symptomatology.

Sidney H. Phillips
Bollas’s contribution is typical of the psychoanalytic literature

on homosexual cruising that has ascribed the most ominously psycho-
pathological formulations to its participants. Here is a brief sample
from a chapter titled “Cruising in the Homosexual Arena”:
The place of this act can be a world of profound impersonality, of an

eroticized estrangement, where the stranger’s un-identity is the very
source of excitement. . . . Hunting his objects like the master of instinct,
the cruiser scans the object world to f ind a thing best suited to dis-
charge the instinct’s energy. . . . the arena may be a theater of breakdown
where some homosexuals release the true self to a drama of fragmented
part objects (penis, buttocks, anus) that objectify a self fractured by
desire. . . . the killing off of the other parts of the self, the coldness
occasions a grief that metamorphoses to terrif ied anticipation of sex
death [pp. 149, 156, 160].
A surprising error in psychoanalytic logic is repeatedly revealed here:

manifest, descriptive aspects of behavior or discourse are taken at face
value as though, in and of themselves, they demonstrate latent mean-
ings and deep structures. As troublesome as this faulty logic is, Bollas’s
1264
clinical formulations of his homosexual male patients are no less
problematic. In particular, they seemed uninformed by Isay’s revision
of psychoanalytic developmental theory of male homosexuality. Isay’s
observation that the often noted paternal absence or withdrawal from the
homosexually inclined boy is a reaction to the boy’s erotic attraction to
his father seems strikingly relevant to understanding the manifestly
impersonal atmosphere of the gay male cruising arena. Is the gay man’s
cruising for so-called anonymous sexual encounters repeating what
must have felt like the “impersonal” reaction of the father’s withdrawal
during childhood? Is the anonymity a ref lection of the homosexual
boy’s feeling that his father acted as though he did not know him? Is the
anonymity a defensive reversal of unconsciously knowing all too well
the aim and identity of the unattainable object of his incestuous desire,
thereby endowing the unknown lover with the allure of mystery?13
And how do the effects of overstimulation relate to homosexual
cruising? The quick, compulsive, frequent sexual arousals and dis-
charges of male homosexual cruising are the symptomatic essence of
13
That the unattainability of the early desired one(s) contributes to the nucleus of
the repetitious quest for the imaginary perfect lover seems indisputable. My empha-
sis on the overstimulation of everyday life is an effort to add a new dimension to our
previous understanding of such compulsions.

the overstimulated state. Note also the most common locales of cruis-
ing: restrooms, gyms, saunas, steam rooms, locker rooms, and bath
houses. Gay bath houses are striking evocations of athletic locker
rooms—replete with a plethora of men clad only in towels cinched
around their waists. I suggest that this is not coincidental but rather
a return to the childhood and adolescent sites of the original over-
stimulation—family bath- and bedrooms and school locker rooms.14
CONCLUSION
I have focused here on the impact of the sexual overstimulation of

everyday life on development, symptom formation, adult sexual adap-
tation, and psychoanalytic treatment with some homosexual men. I
have described the everyday nature of this overstimulation during the
childhood and adolescence of some gay men, both as a way of empha-
sizing its common and cumulative effects in the lives of these individ-
uals and to alert clinicians that this phenomenon has gone unrecognized
and remained hidden by and embedded within the normative assump-
1265
tions of heterosexual culture. The overstimulation gains some of its
pathogenic power by being both everyday and unseen, a relentless force
in the lives of these individuals that goes unnoticed, unspoken, unartic-
ulated. The clear and direct implications for similar effects in the lives
of homosexual women have gone unaddressed. And what of the impact
of this overstimulation for heterosexual individuals? Although the
effects of actual and repeated exposure to the primal scene were promi-
nently described early in the history of psychoanalysis, innumerable
other clinical experiences occur to me that also suggest the central
yet unrecognized impact of the overstimulation of everyday life in
heterosexual development, too.
14
At the December 2000 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association,
R. Dennis Shelby presented a paper titled “About Cruising and Being Cruised,”
in which he offered a new and brilliant explication of cruising. Based on Anna
Freud’s paper “About Losing and Being Lost” (1967) and conceptualized from a
self psychology point of view, his thesis is that cruising represents a destabilization of
the self in which the person feels lost and acutely needs to connect with (and be found
by) another: “The clinician must strive to understand the specific need that is being
searched for, as well as the self structure that is prone to cruising, the event and the
meaning of the event that resulted in the need to desperately search” (p. 25). The paper,
to be published in the Annual of Psychoanalysis, struck me as a decisive advance in
our understanding of cruising.

Sidney H. Phillips
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New Haven, CT 06511–2316
Fax: 203–865–8311
E-mail: Sidney.phillips@yale.edu

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Sidney H. Phillips 49/4

E veryday life within Western heterosexual culture is over-

Training and Supervising Analyst, Western New England Institute for

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heterosexual norms—surround the homosexually inclined boy in an

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the development of men and women regardless of sexual orientation.

FIRST LOVES AND PINING AWAY

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When I commented that he was f inally telling someone now, he burst

DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY, OLD AND NEW

I return to my earlier questions about these unrequited love affairs so

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homosexual adolescent’s choice of a heterosexual as love object? And

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stage in heterosexual boys, except that the primary object of homo-

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including fantasies of whether one is lovable, defective, or ugly (p. 25).

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boys. At a deeper level, the heterosexual boy may have experienced

The protection of this patient’s conf identiality prevents me from pro-

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girls at school social events, though he felt no sexual or romantic

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Upon graduation, Mr. E. and Sam attended different professional

COURSE OF THE ANALYSIS

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homosexual, who was cast in a mold of unavailability reminiscent of

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brother during childhood and adolescence.” I share my “aha! experience”

We were lying next to one another on the couch. Or maybe we were

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His associations went immediately to the explicit sexuality between

We analyzed many different aspects of this dream off and on for

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This proved to be a pivotal interpretation in the analysis, and it

Because of the long-standing antihomosexual bias within the psycho-

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does the analyst handle the discovery? (For a discussion of comparable

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guities (no wedding band, no spouse listed in a university directory,

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OVERSTIMULATION, THE DYNAMICS OF SHAME,

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