6/11/2018 “Was It Good for You?

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“Was It Good for You?”: Reply to Commentaries

Authors: Aron, Lewis; Starr, Karen, E.

Source: Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2011; v. 21 (4), p409, 5p

ISSN: 10481885

Document Type: Commentary

Language: English

Abstract: In many ways, psychoanalysis revolutionized attitudes about sexuality. Yet by

undertheorizing female erotic passion and downplaying the role of the clitoris,
psychoanalysis perpetuated a long historical tradition of denying essential aspects of
women's sexual experience. Psychoanalysis has at times contributed to women
perceiving their own bodily erotic excitement as frightening, dangerous, and out of control.
In this reply to the commentaries, the authors continue to explore the ways in which
women and women's experience, especially their embodied sexual experience, are so
often rendered invisible.

Accession Number: PD.021.0409A

“Was It Good for You?”: Reply to Commentaries

Listen American Accent

Lewis Aron, Ph.D., author, Lewis Aron, Ph.D., is the Director, New York University, Postdoctoral Program in
Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. He was the founding president of the International Association for Relational
Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) and was President of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the
American Psychological Association. He is author of A Meeting of Minds and is coauthor with Karen Starr of the
forthcoming book Defining Psychoanalysis: The Surprising Relevance of Racism, Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, and
Homophobia. With Adrienne Harris, he is coeditor of the Relational Perspectives Book Series (Routledge).
Karen E. Starr, Psy.D., author, Karen E. Starr, Psy.D., is a candidate at the New York University Postdoctoral
Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Adjunct Faculty and Clinical Supervisor at the Clinical
Psychology Doctoral Program, Long Island University at C.W. Post. Dr. Starr is the author of Repair of the Soul:
Metaphors of Transformation in Jewish Mysticism and Psychoanalysis and is coauthor, with Lewis Aron, of the
forthcoming book Defining Psychoanalysis: The Surprising Relevance of Racism, Anti-Semitism, Misogyny, and
Homophobia. She is in private practice in New York City.
In many ways, psychoanalysis revolutionized attitudes about sexuality. Yet by undertheorizing female
erotic passion and downplaying the role of the clitoris, psychoanalysis perpetuated a long historical
tradition of denying essential aspects of women's sexual experience. Psychoanalysis has at times
contributed to women perceiving their own bodily erotic excitement as frightening, dangerous, and out of
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control. In this reply to the commentaries, the authors continue to explore the ways in which women and
women's experience, especially their embodied sexual experience, are so often rendered invisible.

Our thanks to Ann D'Ercole, Muriel Dimen, and Andre Haynal for their thoughtful, intelligent, and
insightful discussions of our paper. As we were preparing this reply, the most recent issue of the
American Psychologist featured an article on “Understanding Orgasm” (Dingfelder, 2011). While modern
scientists still do not have a good understanding of the biological purpose of female orgasm, disagreeing
about whether it facilitates control of fertility or is simply a side effect of other evolutionary adaptations,
we do know that 67% of heterosexual women acknowledge “faking” orgasms and that most of this
simulation of orgasm occurs during penile–vaginal intercourse. Of the women who acknowledged faking
an orgasm, 55% reported doing so during sexual intercourse, as compared with 8% during oral sex and
4% during manual stimulation. These statistics have been interpreted to confirm the continued reign of
the cultural script in which women are expected to be orgasmic through intercourse without external
clitoral stimulation. It appears that even in 2011, this belief is prevalent among both men and women.

The fact is that even now, anything other than heterosexual intercourse involving penile penetration of
the vagina is culturally deemed as not being “real” sex—hence the grain of truth in the emphatic denial,
“I did not have sex with that woman!” For centuries, the medical practice of clitoral stimulation to orgasm
without penile involvement or penetration led to a “paroxysm” that was not regarded as sexual orgasm.
Freud's distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasm is related to and deeply resonant with this
distinction between “real” sex and something other that is less than the real thing.

There are important lessons to be learned from studying history, in particular, the history of sexuality,
psychiatry, technology, women and the women's movement, and private practice. Our contemporary
beliefs and practices and the structure of our treatments are deeply embedded in our cultural and
professional histories. Astutely noting the short shrift traditionally given by psychoanalysis to subjective
experience of the body, Muriel Dimen calls on us as psychoanalysts to “wake from our disembodied
dream” and attend not only to our patients' bodily experience and affect but also to our own. She
compellingly urges us to consider our own embodiment, sexuality, and desires; in doing so, especially
with knowledge of historical context, we may be able to more effectively self-reflect on the issues of
sexual transgression and boundary violations.

Ann D'Ercole, citing Adrienne Rich, describes “the erasure of women's political and historic past,” a past
drenched in “lies, secrets and silences” (p. 399). In our paper, we indicated how little we know of the
experience of the women involved in these procedures. D'Ercole raises good questions. Did the women
who were stimulated to orgasm through genital massage believe they had to keep it a secret? How did
their husbands feel about this aspect of their lives? Was jealousy an issue? D'Ercole argues that even in
our own, mostly desexualized, clinical practices, a spouse will often feel excluded from or jealous of the
intimacy between patient and doctor. Following an earlier presentation of our paper, Anton Hart
(personal communication, 2011) similarly suggested that psychoanalysis is a deeply intimate,
emotionally gratifying, even erotic, relationship. He wondered how often, if at all, analysands report to
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their partners about this aspect of their analysis, and to what extent we as analysts dissociate, disguise,
and keep hidden our own sexual arousal as well as the degree of intimacy and personal exposure we
encounter in our work.

Unfortunately, we lack data about the experience of women. But we need not allow our lack of
information to justify sustained silence about women's experience, nor should we permit it to render
women invisible. As Ann Pellegrini (1997) has persuasively argued, one of the insistent effects of the
homology Jew = woman was to omit any consideration of the embodied experience of living, breathing
Jewish women. In this equation, “all Jews were womanly but no women are Jews” (p. 18); women were
“disappeared”—made invisible. We can see this dynamic at work in the anti-Semitic tracts and
“scientific” texts of Freud's day, but it is also repeated in much of the contemporary scholarship on
Freud's “Jewish question.” In contrast, in our paper, we sought to make central precisely these questions
about women's embodiment: What was the impact on women of the medicalization of female sexual
pleasure and of Freud's focus on vaginal orgasm as the end game of female sexual maturation? When
Freud transformed a medical discourse about masculinity and “race” (where “race” = Jewishness) into a
discourse about femininity and “sex,” he did so by displacing negative stereotypes of Jewish men onto
Jewish women. But for this to work—for him to be able to successfully conceal the hypervisible body of
the “queer” Jewish “male”—he also had to cover up the Jewish female body as such. The female body
that emerges as the central problem or “riddle” for psychoanalysis and for the psychic life of a
universalized male subject is thus a deracinated Jewess (Pellegrini, 1997).

Freud presents the normal development of female sexuality as the movement of excitation from the
“active” and “masculine” clitoris to the “passive” and “feminine” vaginal orifice. Pellegrini (1997) noted
that while Eastern Jewish women were historically dominant figures in their households, Victorian
Christian women were encouraged to model themselves after the feminine ideal of the “angel in the
house.” She astutely asks,
    Is it possible to see in Freud's insistence on the transition from active masculinity to passive femininity
not only his own ambivalence about Eastern Jewry but the ambivalentposition occupied by Jewish
women as they and their families moved from East to West? (p. 29)

Pelligrini suggests that Freud incorporated into his theory of female psychology—that is, “embodied” and
universalized—the cultural shift from one ideal of femininity to another while perpetuating his racial
denigration of Eastern Jews, which included his own heritage, his own mother, disguised and displaced
onto the “inferior” clitoris, known in Viennese slang as “the Jew.” Pellegrini (1997) wrote, “When Freud
describes the difficult and risky passage whose final destination is femininity, he is describing a
developmental trajectory that demands of its subjectassimilation to gendered, racialized, and class-
stratified norms” (p. 31). As an example of how these issues in the early history of psychoanalysis
continue to be relevant, Saketopoulou (2011) presented a deeply moving clinical case illustration that
demonstrates how race and class continue to play a role in the constitution of gender, and how these
identity categories intersect and reciprocally modify one another.

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When Freud censored the history of genital stimulation, he simultaneously negotiated, invoked, and
concealed another aspect of Jewish female stereotyping in his era, namely, the Jewish female as “the
belle Juive.” In mid-19th-century France, Jewish women had a near-monopoly on modeling and were
regarded by the larger culture both as ideal beauties and as shameless. This romantic portrayal of the
Jewish woman as the ideal beauty, courtesan, model, and mother, and later as the hypersexual
seductress and femme fatale, changed as the century progressed, until Jewish women were regarded
as essentially, unchangeably, morally, racially, and genetically flawed (Lathers, 2000).

André Haynal connects this history to Freud's “joke” (“Rp. Penis normalis dosim repetatur,” Freud, 1914,
p. 15), that is, prescription for a repeated dose of normal penis. Haynal suggests that this remark may be
seen in a new light: Instead of artificial (“medical”) genital stimulation, husbands were exhorted to fulfill
their marital role with their spouses. Of course, from our perspective, the joke was on the men, who had
no clue that “penis normalis dosim repetatur” would not bring most women to orgasm or paroxysm and
that manual or technologically enhanced manipulation would be required.

In her recent reexamination of the Oedipal complex and obstacles to Oedipal passion, Kulish (2011) has
provided compelling clinical material illuminating the price we have paid as analysts for our lack of
theoretical concepts for passion, particularly for female passion, this despite the fact that psychoanalysis
encouraged women to recognize their sexual desire. We have words for a renunciation of conjectured
inborn masculine sexuality, but we have not yet developed a way to articulate the intense and positive
feelings of girls and women involving erotic and Oedipal passion. Prohibitions against female passion,
she noted, have a long history; women remain uncomfortable, shameful, and guilty in owning and
expressing their sexuality, perceiving their own bodily erotic excitement as frightening, dangerous, and
out of control. Even in 2011, she argued, “A passionate woman is perceived as “flamboyant, phallic,
‘loose’ and dangerous” (p. 7).

In her clinical case example, Kulish tells of Agnes, a depressed, phobic, and sexually inhibited woman
who presented with feelings of inferiority and who openly and literally talked of her own penis envy.
Kulish helped her to recognize that her fear and feelings of inadequacy protected her from the
frightening intensity of her sexual desires, with their Oedipal and incestuous implications. Childhood
experiences of her father calling her a slut when she tried on her mother's makeup had provided the
background for viewing her own sexuality as unacceptable. Kulish demonstrates that the patient's
manifest presentation was all too similar to our mainstream psychoanalytic ideas of female masochism,
genital inferiority, and penis envy and that these ideas had been used by the patient to feed her
unconscious guilt and need for self-punishment. She wisely points to our collusion with our patients, our
mutual resistances, in our joining with them in accepting these assumptions.

We believe that Kulish's clinical illustrations and theoretical arguments are directly connected to the
history of medicine and psychotherapy that we have addressed, although this aspect of our history has
been thoroughly repressed until now. Women's sexuality was denied to such an extent that even
orgasms could be recognized not as sexual or as desired but as having to be stimulated by medical

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experts and their ancillaries, while women were pathologized and made to feel there was something
wrong with them. Doctor and patient colluded in denying and pathologizing female desire even while
meeting the need for orgiastic release.

In her brilliant examination of transgender subjectivity and its implications for our thinking about gender
and sexuality, Goldner (2011) questioned our long-standing need to have “our gender straight up” (p.
159). She pointed to the continued tendency in our culture to polarize masculinity and femininity into
categorical binary opposites, a definitional rubric that began in the 18th century and in which gender,
genitals, and genital experience were inextricably self-defining. Calling for a paradigm shift in our
theorizing, Goldner proposed that we think more fluidly about the relationship between gender and
sexuality, suggesting that we think in terms of processes or continuums rather than categories. She
wrote,
    As an FtM, I know that binary gender requires a penis to go with my newly fashioned masculinity. But I
may prefer the charge of a testosterone-enlarged clitoris, since a phalloplastic penis may look
convincing, but it doesn't deliver much sensation. Why should I sacrifice sexual pleasure for gender
coherence? (p. 167)

Here, in a nutshell, is a vividly compelling and convincing contemporary challenge to Freud's phallic
monism.

In a recent book, Rentoul (2010) has added to the growing literature reexamining the contributions of
Sandor Ferenczi and elaborating on the deep connections between Ferenczi's legacy and contemporary
relational and Independent group contributions. We agree with San Martino's (2011) point that, whatever
the merits and limitations of Rentoul's book, he has done the field a great service by highlighting the
controversial issue of physical contact between patient and analyst. Rentoul argued that, especially for
patients who have been deprived of bodily contact and the comforts of human touch, bodily contact with
the therapist may prove useful, and he gave examples of his own clinical work, inspired by Ferenczi, in
which touch seemed helpful. While this is not the place for us to debate the merits or dangers of clinical
touch, we do want to assert that these clinical questions require a great deal more discussion. In over a
century of psychoanalysis, this issue has never received the attention it deserves because of a taboo on
the topic. Of course, this prohibition may be explained in terms of the frequent incidents of sexual
boundary violations in the field. But we believe that it can also be usefully traced to the repressed history
of sexual touch within the history of psychotherapy and the treatment of female hysteria.

REFERENCES
1  Dingfelder , S. F. (2011) Understanding orgasm American Psychologist 42 : 4 42-45

2
  Freud , S. (1914) On the history of the psycho-analytic movement Standard Edition 14 :1-66
(SE.014.0001A)

3  Goldner , V. (2011) Trans: Gender in free fall Psychoanalytic Dialogues 21 :159-171 (PD.021.0159A)

http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.liucat.lib.liu.edu/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=56020fca-ad0c-419e-9637-d2c9f1623888%40pdc-v-sessmgr01&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZz
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4  Kulish , N. (2011) Obstacles to Oedipal passion Psychoanalytic Quarterly 80 :3-32 (PAQ.080.0003A)

5
  Lathers , M. (2000) Posing the “Belle Juive”: Jewish models in 19th-century Paris Woman's Art Journal
21 :27-32

6  Pellegrini , A. (1997) Performance anxieties: Staging psychoanalysis, staging raceNew York, NY:
Routledge

7  Rentoul , R. W. (2010) Ferenczi's language of tendernessLanham, MD: Aronson/Rowan and Littlefield

8
  Saketopoulou , A. (2011) Minding the gap: Intersections between gender, race and class in work with
gender variant children Psychoanalytic Dialogues 21 :192-209 (PD.021.0192A)

9  San Martino , M. (2011) Book review: R. W. Rantoul, Ferenczi's language of tenderness

Psychoanalytic Quarterly 80 :189-196 (PAQ.080.0189A)

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Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2011; v.21 (4), p409 (5pp.)
PD.021.0409A

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