SEXUALITY AND INTIMACY:

HISTORICAL DEBATES AND CURENT

VIEWS

Louise Gyler

October 2009
 HARDING 1991

That nature as-the-object-of

human-knowledge never
comes to us naked, it
comes only as constituted in
social thought.
 WESTERN THOUGHT
Dualistic structure

Culture / Nature
Mind / Body
Reason / Emotion
Subject /Object
Masculine / Feminine
INFANT OBSERVATION
In its deepest, most basic, primal meaning the
woman is in distress and in need and in
danger; the man is her servant, her
benefactor, and her rescuer. She is in distress
at the plight of internal babies, in need of
supplies to make the milk for her external
babies and in danger from the persecutors her
children have projected into her. She needs
good penises, and good semen, and must be
relieved of all bad excreta. She will be
content, satisfied safe, while he will be
admired, exhausted, exhilarated triumphant
(Meltzer, 1973, p. 84).
 A woman touches herself' constantly without
anyone being able to forbid her to do so for her
sex is composed of two lips which embrace
continually. Thus, within herself she is already
two - but not divisible into ones - who stimulate
each other. Woman has sex organs just about
everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost
everywhere the geography of her pleasure is
much more diversified, more multiple in its
differences, more complex, more subtle than is
imagined - in an imaginary centred a bit too much
on one and the same (Irigaray, 1985, p. 24).
HAS SEXUALITY ANYTHING
TO DO WITH
PSYCHOANALYSIS?
sexuality in general ceases to be a
major concept, a theoretical function of
heuristic value

Green (1995)
HAS SEXUALITY ANYTHING TO DO
WITH IDEAS ABOUT HEALTH
/PSYCHOPATHOLGY?

Do expressions of sexuality give a

privileged view of the psyche?
 PARADIGM SHIFTS
1. Management of drives: fantasy,
erotic longings and desires.

2. Relating via love and hate

3. Capacity for thought (cognitive

stance)
 Freud
Key controversies
Current thinking
Implications for practice
Clinical examples oedipal illusions
and phallic idealizations
 Enter Freud
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)

Popular opinion has quite definite ideas about

the nature and characteristics of this sexual
instinct. It is generally understood to be absent
in childhood, to set in at the time of puberty
.to be revealed in the manifestations of an
irresistible attraction exercised by one sex
upon the otherthese views give a very false
picture of the true situation
 INFANTILE SEXUALITY
Unstable, loose relationship between
libidinal instinct and its aim and object.
Continuity between childhood and adult
sexuality
Infantile sexual development pre-given
stages- polymorphous perverse
disposition
Determines entry into Oedipus Complex
 OEDIPUS COMPLEX
Crisis of sexual desire and jealousy
Predicated on the boys experience
and the significance of the father
Until mid-1920s girls development
seen as corresponding to the boys
Importance of the Castration
Complex
 PSYCHONEUROSES
All my experience shows that these
psychoneuroses are based on sexual
instinctual forces.. expressly to assert
that the contribution is most important and
only constant source of energy of the
neurosis and in consequence the sexual
life of the persons in question is expressed
whether exclusively or principally or only
partly in these symptoms.

Neuroses are the negative of perversions

 1924 onwards
Recognition of the asymmetry of the girls
development
Intensity and duration of the attachment to
the pre-oedipal mother dark continent
anatomy is destiny and the girl comes
off badly
Twofold change required of the girl: change
in erotogenic zone and in the sex of her
primary sexual object (mother)
penis =baby equation
 FREUD 1923

for the young child of both sexes, only

one genital, namely the male one,
comes into account. What is present,
therefore, is not a primacy of the
genitals but a primacy of the
phallus.
 SEXUAL DESIRE AND FLAWED
LOGIC
Libido is active
Masculine equals active
Libido is masculine
 Freud
Inconsistent and contradictory

An assumption re notion of a normative

natural heterosexual attraction

Also claims that the sex drives are

polymorphous in nature, i.e. no natural
object or aim- general disposition to
perversions
 FREUD
all human individuals, as a result of
their bisexual disposition and cross-
inheritance, combine in themselves
both masculine and feminine
characteristics, so that pure
masculinity and femininity remain
theoretical constructions of uncertain
content.
1925
 FEMININITY/ MASCULINITY
BIOLOGICAL primary and secondary
sexual characteristics

PSYCHOSEXUAL activity and passivity

SOCIOLOGICAL- observable real and

symbolic functions culturally assigned
to men and women
 BISEXUALITY
Cross-sex and cross-gender
identifications

Mental representations of both sets

of genitals

Fluid object choice

 FREUDS FOCUS
The psychical consequences of the
anatomical distinction between the
sexes

Consequences of having or not

having the penis/phallus

Implications for female sexuality

 FREUDIAN ACCOUNT
THE NORMAL PSYCHICAL
CONSEQUENCES OF PENIS ENVY:

1. Life-long sense of inferiority

2. Negative attitude to the mother
3. Identification with male contempt
4. Dominance of jealousy
 PROBLEMATIC FEATURES OF
FREUDS ACCOUNT
1. The male body
2. Sexual phallic monism and
ignorance of the vagina
3. Penis envy
4. Implications of infantile
helplessness
5. Female superego
KEY ASSUMPTIONS IN FREUDS
THEORY OF SEXUALITY
normal or normative is shaky
No natural object of desire
Heterosexuality is natural.
Gender identity and sexual orientation
are conflated
A priori value given to the phallus
(penis) as a sign of sexual difference
Heterosexuality tied to male superiority
 AREAS OF DEBATE
FEMALE SEXUALTIY: 1920s -1930s;
post late 1960s

HETEROSEXUALITY/HOMOSEXUALITY:
1970s

CATEGORIZATION OF GENDER: late

1980s
 FEMININITY AS LACK
Female sexuality is therefore a series of lacks:
the lack of vagina, lack of a penis, lack of a
specific sexuality, lack of adequate erotic
object, and finally the lacks, which are
implied by her being devoid of any intrinsic
feminine qualities which could cathect
directly and by being forced to give up the
clitoris, we can add the relative lack of
superego and the capacity for sublimation.

Chasseguet-Smirgel (1976)
 PRIMARY FEMININTY
THEORISTS
Freud Jones debate 1920s
Ernest Jones, Melanie Klein, Karen
Horney
Infantile attachment to the mother
The role of the female body
Continues unresolved re-emerged
in the late 1960s.
 FEMININITY
However both the experiences of lack
and the experience of a basic positive
femininity seem to come back with
sufficient consistency as central and
determining to warrant thinking of
them as coexistent and conflictual

Breen (1993)
 FOLLOWING FREUD
1. Devaluation of femininity and
debates re female sexuality
2. The normative dominance of
heterosexuality
3. Binary division of gender
4. The role of the body (the role of
object and drive) integrations with
attachment perspectives
 GENDER

Gender is a form of symbolic

elaboration that confers meaning to
bodied acts and relationships

Goldner 2003
 GENDER
Concept de Beauvoir (1949)
a woman is not born but made

It is not nature that defines woman;

it is she who defines herself by
dealing with nature on her own
account in her emotional life.
 EMPIRICAL WORK
John Money (1950s,1960s) study of
children with intersex conditions -
assignment of gender at birth

Robert Stoller (1968) - gender role

subjective sense of maleness and
femaleness influenced by socio-
cultural factors
 STOLLER (1985)

.everyone is erotically aberrant and

most people most of the time are at
least a bit perverse..and
homosexuality like heterosexuality is
a mix of desires, not a symptom, not
a diagnosis.
 DEPATHOLOGIZING
HOMOSEXUALITY
Extra-psychoanalytic influences
Removal from DSM III.
Different sexualities - and
participation in the transference
Debate - range of views
CATEGORIZATION OF GENDER
Gender binary is destiny

Power politics of the gender

hierarchy

Delimits freedom of expression and

representation
 JESSICA BENJAMIN
Critique of the traditional
interpretation of the Oedipus complex
Also contemporary revisions based on
inherent normative heterosexuality
and male bodily imagery
Human beings cannot exist outside
the gender system
Oedipal construction of gender -
privileges differentiation
 OEDIPAL PHASES
1. Pre-oedipal if I want the same as she
wants, I will become her and the narcissistic
blow of one cannot have what the other has
2. Oedipal fear. Eg if one persists in wanting,
one will lose ones organs, identity etc. idea
of mutual exclusivity
3. Post-oedipal flexibility, fluidity and
ambiguity about the meaning of the thing...
the recuperation of identification with the
missing half of the complementarity. Object
love and identification are not distinct
 Categorical positioning of
gender identifications
defensive splitting and might be referred to
as a gendered version of narcissism.
In the narcissistic masculine mode of relating
(hyper-masculinity), dependency needs are
split off.
In the narcissistic feminine mode (hyper-
femininity), need for agency is split off and
submissiveness is often enacted (Layton,
1998).
there is no thirdness from which to
imaginatively take up an alternative position.
 Clinical implications
Critique of so-called phallic styled
interpretations as the gold standard

who is doing what to whom

emphasis on the recognition of
separteness
 IDEAL OF MUTUAL
RECOGNITION
Valuable corrective project
The pre-oedipal mother
Developmentally integrated
subjectivity
Aggression
Radical otherness
Deconstruct into opposite direction
hegemonic femininity
 HOW DOES SEXUALITY
FUNCTION?
Primary organizer of experience
object used to express sexual drive

Sexuality a vehicle to express object

relations
No adequate theory of sexual desire
novelty of the other and the
otherness of the self
 Object relations: states of
mind
Freedom of thought
Sexualisation/ erotisation as opposed
to sexuality
Sexualisation as defence against
real relating and separateness from
the object
Erotisation of thinking
Focus on destructiveness
 DEVELOPMENTAL VIEWS
Jean Laplanche
Ruth Stein
enigmatic message transmitted by
the mother while satisfying the infants
ego needs that establishes the infants
unconscious and sexuality
primal seduction by the mother is not
primarily a fantasy but a real situation
although not an event-based realism
 CAPACITY TO FORM
TRIANGULAR SPACE
Both object and subject position of
observation and participation

Structured upon heterosexual

complementary
 BIRKSTED-BREEN
Phallus, Penis and Mental Space,
1996

Symbolizes 2 different aspects of

experience
 THE PHALLUS
The phallus represents the state of
completeness and of being without
need - beyond the human condition -
and exists in the unconscious as a basic
position. This does not exclude other
configurations in which the vagina is
known and involving the phantasies
described by Klein in relation to inside
of the mothers body (1996, p.650).
 PENIS AS LINK
Linking and structuring function
This structuring aspect of the penis is
a reference to more than just the
actual father, of course, since the
mothers bisexual mental functioning
can encompass a structuring function
alongside her maternal function of
being with
Paternal function observing and
linking
 PHALLUS / PENIS AS LINK
Different mode of relating to self &
others
Penis-as-link integrates maternal
&paternal, presence & absence,
masculinity & femininity
WHY THIS TERM?
Binary tradition: masculine, men,
thinking and rationality
MALE SEXUAL METAPHOR

Unfortunately, in Breens
formulation, although the
penis (symbolized as the
linking function) may not be
or have everything (unlike the
phallus), it still gets to do
everything (Elise, 1998).
 Clinically useful description
Reinscribe normative social
evaluations
Oppositional equations:
female=mother=maternal function
male=father=paternal function
Phallic idealizations
My point is that to arbitrarily link a particular
trait with one gender is to engage in a form
of splitting. To believe that emphasizing is
feminine or that to be intellectually
penetrating is masculine is to split off each
of our complex and multiple capacities.
Terms like toilet-breast analyst or phallic-
penetrating interpretations should be used
to capture metaphorically the way in which
certain functions are experienced
unconsciously; they should not be taken to
imply that we believe that these functions
are intrinsically male or female (Aron,1995)
 CULTURAL, HISTORICAL AND
SUBJECTIVE PREJUDICE AND BIAS IN
PSYCHOANLYTIC THINKING ABOUT
SEXUALITY AND GENDER

SOCIETAL NORMS MASK AS

PSYCHOANALYTIC KNOWLEDGE
 How do the debates
reverberate in the consulting
room?
Values, assumptions

Countertransference, enactments,
disclosures and boundary
transgressions and violations
 ANALYSTS PARTICIPATION
Programmatic intent general
theoretical propositions

Analysts unconscious/preconscious
biases, preferences, implicit judgments

Sense of analytic process various

types of analytic authority
Mitchell (1996)
 CONTEMPORARY
PSYCHOANALYSIS

INTERGENERATIONAL TRANSMISSION

OR

TRANSMISSION GAP?