Tag Archives: psychoanalysis

December 14, 2025 · 10:05 pm

Goodbye Columbus

You saved your panic for the last act, didn’t you? Roth, I’m talking to you. You had Neil, your stand-in, your man—your young Jewish protagonist—clutching for answers, calling on Brenda, the girlfriend from the other side of the tracks, to come clean and admit to all that would fit his projections: he’s unwanted, an outsider who never really had a chance. It’s unfair what just happened, by the way—that thought that just disappeared due to an errant stroke of a finger. What happened? Words just left, retrievable only by the technically adept. Anyway, it’s like what happened to Neil. His confidence: it just left him in the end. His sense of assurance, of being loved and having a future of his choosing, because that’s what was owed to him, had just vanished.

           Brenda wouldn’t cop to it, of course, the ulterior motive he assigned to her. She was in denial, like she had been from the outset, playing it cool, pretending to not remember Neil when he first called, full of chutzpah—there, that’s the word that got away. She sorta came clean in the first few passages, saying she liked him, wanted to sleep with him, steal away from under the noses of affluent parents, find herself in Short Hills, New Jersey, not Connecticut, where school and high society beckoned. In the middle act, they slip and slide, playing at love, making love, discreetly and with reticent suggestion, fifties style. Neil was pre-sexual revolution, all from the boys’ side of things: do it for me, he said, regarding the diaphragm that became the point of contention, the fly in the ointment for a silent class war. It would increase his pleasure, was his argument to her. Would it? They’d know it already, the kids today. Nothing new anymore about carnal knowledge, the defeat of sexual guilt. But this was a post-war, fifties neurosis being navigated, with sex as the battleground. Naivete aside, you’re made to wonder as a sympathetic reader where the story was headed had it not been for the sexual mishap. What’s the future of a young aspirant couple heading into the sixties, scratching at their pants, but with much to look forward to, it seemed.

           It all blows up like a sudden cold war crisis. Neil’s panic seems to have him looking backward to a fear that has sat dormant thus far, squeezed into the subtext of an otherwise bland coming of age tale. What happened? Did something disappear, like words from a screen in our digitally cloudy age? No, a discovery of a physical object was the problem: discovery of the diaphragm by a priggish parent whose attachment to decorum and probity is at once ignited, only that’s not the true crisis from Neil’s point of view. What’s on his mind is what’s on Roth’s mind having been in psychoanalysis and then decided to make the Freudian arts a motif in his stories. So, with that in mind, Neil has it out with Brenda about the diaphragm, about why she let it be found by her snooping, we-thought-we-raised-you-better mother. Why didn’t she take it to school, avoid the problem of it being found, Neil asks. A mother going through a daughter’s belongings: that’s to be expected, he chastises, perhaps thinking of Jewish mothers in general and his own burning sexual guilt. Brenda has an explanation, an excuse for her laxity, only Neil is having none of it. His sense of persecution is piqued, and is foregrounded as they fight, which leads to a deadened climax—their break-up. Now the chutzpah with which he once approached Brenda and later called upon her, feeling brazen and hopeful, is gone, displaced by a paranoia that was previously absented, but ever floating in the literary unconscious. Don’t you know? He says as she bristles at his insinuation that she’d deliberated this discovery. No, she insists. Now she’s estranged from her parents, having disgraced them with her sexual impropriety. Why would she do that on purpose?

           But what Neil experiences, what he feels and what he calls upon the reader to acknowledge if she won’t, is his rejection, as if this were all pre-ordained. Yes, she liked you. She wanted you. She might even have fought someone over you in the unseen, unwritten scenes of a middle act. But in the end, she can’t have you and you can’t have her, not even in America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, plus being equal. And worst of all, you can’t even get it straight, as in the truth, if there are blind spots. That this was her plan all along—a dalliance, but not a life due to her myopic self, which is foreshadowed in their first meeting—is his and our putative takeaway. She didn’t remember him, she first claimed, being demure and foreshadowing their unhappy end. She asked him to hold her glasses at the pool. She didn’t see him. Goodbye Brenda, and middle America. Goodbye Columbus is the name of the story.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , ,

August 25, 2025 · 4:37 am

A psychoanalyst and sex addiction specialist spar

G: Hey there, welcome. This is Graeme Daniels, psychoanalyst and author. I am a co-author of Getting Real About Sex Addiction and more recently, the author of An Analyst in Training, and I am the winner of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Lee Jaffe prize for my paper, “Panal Treatment of an Alcoholic with Substitute Addictions”. I am here today with a guest, dr. Davide Sakmanov, host of the podcast, “the empathy coach”, plus the workbook, “do it the right way: a practical guide for behaving properly”. Davide Sakmanov, welcome to the show.

D: Thankyou for having me

G. So, Dr. Sakmanov—sorry, the doctor—is that a medical title?

D: No, it’s a sobriquet, as it were

G. A nickname? So, you’re Doctor Davide?

D: I prefer coach Davide. The doctor thing is more of a nom de guerre, if you will

G: Nom de guerre. So, this is war. And you’re not a doctor

D: Not as such

G: Or an academic?

D: Umm…define academic

G: a Ph.d, for example

D: No, not a Ph.d. Sorry, are we here to discuss my credentials?

G. Only if you don’t have any?

D: Alright, if it’s like that, then I’m an MSW, a CCPSC…

G: MSW—social work. CCPSC?

D: Certified Process Safety Professional

G. Is that a mental health credential?

D: It can be. Look, I thought we’re here to talk about my intervention model for the treatment of sex addicts and their impacted partners. You’ve written your big to-do paper on “substitute addictions” or whatever—good for you, and I read it in fact—but I’m here to talk about my model of care that emphasizes empathy. I call it the 2 Es idea—emphasis and empathy—that are the building blocks of a paradigm that has drawn countless listeners and followers…

G: Countless? I mean, if you’re referring to your podcast, it’s easy to track #s. It tells you how many people you have listening, so it’s only countless if you don’t know how to read numbers

D: Okay, thousands. Is that what you want to hear? I have thousands of listeners, and lots of readers

G: Lots?

D: Yes, lots. I’m popular. Very popular. You’re popular too, I’m sure, though I bet not AS popular as me

G: Okay, we’re popular. Maybe you’re more popular, let’s leave it at that, shall we? Let’s talk ideas

D: (relieved) Yes, thankyou. Gawd…

G: Okay, so in your model, the—lemme get this right, Recovery Empathy Couples Therapy Unified Mission– just thinking of what that spells, actually—you bring together couples who have been impacted by infidelity issues, sometimes other addiction issues (we’ll come back to what that means, maybe) to do interventions relating the traumatizing effects of cheating behavior, which includes use of online pornography, utilizing feedback from a treatment team of collaborating professionals. So, I’m curious in particular what that last part means, the “utilizing feedback” from a treatment team

D: Right, so as you probably know, old school therapy models, addiction models, recommend that the sexually misbehaving person, or perpetrator as we call him, does his personal therapy work privately while the woman does hers separately without any coordination that would make her feel safe. The thing is, as the partner, you have every right to know what he is doing and what his treatment plan consists of, and you get to weigh in as to what you believe will strengthen the relationship.

G: Well, there are a number of phrases there that bear exploration, but firstly, again, regarding “utilizing feedback” and say, the “right to know what he’s doing”: do you mean that impacted partners have a right to know, and therefore should know via feedback of a treating therapist, when a cheating behavior has occurred? Are you asking individual therapists to inform other therapists in a treatment team, and thereafter, their impacted partner clients, when a behavioral slip or relapse has occurred?

D: We can do it that way. I know of countless occasions when that has proven therapeutic both for the perpetrator of infidelity and the impacted partner. We know from our clinical experience that disclosing behavioral slips makes an impacted partner feel safer, plus it’s relieving for the other person to have that experience

G: Clinical experience. Not exactly proof, as you put it, but let’s say we agree that it can be therapeutic for an acting out person to reveal their secret behavior to a partner. But you’re suggesting, I think, that the disclosure would occur via an informant therapist, not the perpetrator, as you put it.

D. It doesn’t have to work like that. It would be best, I guess you’d say, if the perpetrator did the disclosing.

G: Under duress? Meaning, it would be “tell your partner or else we will”

D: See, I think you’re trying to make this something it’s not

G: I’m more than trying, I think I’ll succeed in making it sound like what it is. You’re saying that if a client in your program reveals to their individual therapist that they have slipped in their behavior—let’s say, looked at porn—then that individual therapist would communicate that information either directly to the impacted partner, or to that partner’s individual therapist, who would in turn relay that info to the impacted partner, yes?

D: Under the terms of an honesty agreement that we have our clients sign, then yes, that’s how that might play out. I don’t see a problem with that

G: The terms of an agreement? Is there an understood window of opportunity in which the acting out person must disclose to a partner?

D: We like 48 hours. We think that’s enough

G: Between disclosure to a therapist and thereafter to a partner, or between the onset of the behavior and disclosure to a partner?

D: Okay, well I guess the former in practical terms since the disclosure to us is when we’d remind the client of the honesty agreement

G: (upon pause) Do you find that they need reminding? Presumably, they are aware of this agreement all along, or certainly upon agreeing to it. You’d think it would influence whether they choose to share with a therapist an instance of cheating behavior, as your program defines that. Don’t you think that sets up a dynamic that contaminates the authenticity of disclosure? Why would your clients share their secrets with you if you’re going to either inform, in effect, their partners, or else guilt them into doing that?

D: I think you’re getting into the weeds here. Our method has helped untold number of couples heal after years, even decades of deceit and disloyalty

G: Which you seem to think you can dissolve with an honesty agreement and a “come to Jesus” moment in your office. I think you’d consider this matter “the weeds” because your training around confidentiality issues has been remedial

D: Remedial? Lemme tell you something, our program has gotten more positive feedback from all corners of this industry than your outdated psychoanalytic whatever…ever will

G: Again, I’m sure you’re a big hit on tik-tok

D: See, now you’re being a snob. Our program employs the golden seal of approval from leaders in the field of sex addiction: renowned experts in a condition that afflicts millions of men across the world

G: They’re experts in a condition not recognized by the AMA or APA, by the way.

D: It is recognized, meaning sexual compulsivity is recognized, by the WHO

G: Yeah, only as recently as 2017, and with a caveat within its criterion language that warns against diagnosis for moralistic reasons. You don’t merit diagnosis of sexual compulsivity disorder just because you “violated your own values”, like masturbating when you think it’s a religious sin, or because objectifying women via porn violates a feminist affectation. Also, why are men the only focus of your program? The pronouns you use imply that the perpetrators of this sexual abuse, as you think of it, are dominantly if not exclusively male

D: Not exclusively, but most are male. I think it’s harder for women, they have to face the stigma relating to their sexuality, so for them sex addiction or infidelity treatment is really shaming

G: which would be moot if the “right to know” or the “trauma” of their impacted partners were being privileged, as it is in your model. So, why wouldn’t male impacted partners be calling you in #s asking for you put their wives and girlfriends under privacy-violating cross-examination, to “hold their feet to the fire” with honesty agreements, full disclosures, polygraphs?

D: Like I said, I think it’s more complicated

G: Meaning you don’t know why you don’t attract male impacted partners

D: I think maybe they don’t want to appear weak so they don’t…who knows?

G: Sure, who knows? Women don’t want to be shamed for their sexual desires. Men don’t want to appear as victims, would rather act out and feel guilty—actually, that is something I think is true—but maybe these are side issues, “weeds” that are unworthy of attention, as far as you are concerned. Back to the main point: you think the impacted partner, likely female, has a “right to know” what the perpetrator is doing in his behavior. They have a right to know whether that perpetrator’s individual therapy is facilitating expression of appropriate guilt and awareness of the full impact of the perpetrator’s behavior upon their partner’s emotional, physical, and spiritual health

D: Absolutely!

G: And those perpetrators will gladly disclosure those slips and relapses, past and recent past, moved by your coaching about how their partners deserve to know the truth! They will be galvanized by learning the extent of their impact upon their loved ones—they will learn how they have induced hyper-arousal, high anxiety, self-blaming, in an innocent partner—and in developing this awareness, they will not only significantly reduce if not entirely halt their harmful sexual activity, they will take empathy to another level, privileging a definition of empathy as meaning the validation of an impacted partner’s feelings and perceptions, whether they are distorted or not: the “perpetrator” will eliminate argument from their repertoire of conversation; validation of their partner’s feelings and perceptions will become a near reflex. They will surrender their will to the power of God as they understand it. They will extinguish negative feelings that are denied but acted upon, and love…will prevail

D: I know you’re being sarcastic, but yes…all of that

G: Well, I doubt you understand all of that. And given your stance, plus—I will concede, that of many professional counselors, licensed and not—an astute consumer of psychotherapy might wonder why a mental health professional versus a clergyman is even necessary when it comes to infidelity treatment. A priest, or anyone for that matter, can say that an intimate partner has “a right to know” truths. Anyone can point out the common sense that secretive behaviors violate consciously made agreements about sexual exclusivity. What difference does it make that an “expert” can recite the criterion of PTSD syndrome. You want details? Vivid anecdotes to relate to? Go to CODA meetings. They existed long before you came up with what you think is your original “empathy” model.

D: Hold on. What is it you think I don’t understand?

G: Firstly, I don’t think you understand what I meant by “feelings that are denied but acted upon” because your model ignores unconscious process. I think you think that individuals can be coached to access their loving feelings, put aside what is implicit in acting out—angry feelings, underlying rage—and skip to guilt as a therapeutic tool that will heal. You think that perpetrators are NOT aware of the impacts of their behavior, hence needing education. They ARE aware to the extent that they attempted, at least, to keep their behaviors secret. To complicate matters, they are paradoxically in denial of impacts so as to protect themselves from feelings of guilt, which in turn stem from uncomfortable hostile feelings towards loved ones. It is therefore the INHIBITION of these thoughts, the failure to access AMBIVALENCE, that is THE PROBLEM. Your model, plus—I guess I’ll say, “countless” like it—emphasizes reactive love response designed to vanquish ambivalence. You think your clients or coachees can’t tolerate ambivalence, likely because you can’t tolerate ambivalence, so you preach “get over yourself” rhetoric

D: That’s not true. We talk about ambivalence. We understand ambivalence. We educate that ambivalence is normal

G: Yeah, educate, right. So, in this model of “She has a right to know” regarding slips, plus “what’s happening in the treatment”, that latter ambiguity implies that disclosure beyond the matter of perpetrating behaviors are subject to being relayed to the partner. Regarding empathy, if your client discloses a slip in empathy—let’s say, “I hated her guts yesterday”—that should be shared with the partner, or is there an agreed upon or tacit agreement that such thoughts would not be shared, and what would be the reason for not sharing? The client’s right to private thought? A fear that such thoughts would be traumatizing for the impacted partner, triggering a reactive outrage?

D: Probably more the latter. I see what you’re saying, there’s room for counselor discretion. I wouldn’t share that thought you mentioned. I think that would be re-traumatizing for the impacted partner, and plus I’d think that a defensive thought on the part of the guy

G: Probably true, though your thought about the impacted partner suggests an illustration of my earlier point: you think the impacted partner would not be able to tolerate the hostile feelings of her partner

D: She’d think he shouldn’t have those feelings, sure…

G: And you’d agree with her…

D: (Pause) yeah, I think so. Because I’d think he was being defensive. You said “probably” so maybe you disagree

G: I said probably because I wouldn’t foreclose the possibility that his anger may be legitimate, and that what’s defensive is the addictive acting out as a displacement, plus the inhibition of what may be a rightful protest

D: What rightful protest, hating his wife’s guts? How is that in any way healing?

G: Why do we have to rush to healing? Since neither of us is a doctor, can’t we look to understand the thought, which may only be an impulse, before we seek to eradicate it? So, forget informing the wife for the moment. If we did that, we’d likely get into managing or soothing her feelings, which I think interferes with the process of understanding, taking focus away from his internal problem. Besides, why not consider that the expression, “I hate her guts” is a reaction to a series of repressed thoughts, the content of which is obscured by what’s disturbing in the intense expression

D: Okay, I can see that, sort of…and I can see why we don’t have to share with an impacted partner, or encourage sharing with an impacted partner, every time this guy has an undesirable thought…

G: Right, so…

D: At the same time, I’d be concerned that by inviting more details about this rightful protest that is speculative, we’d be indulging a defensive pattern, which would take us in the wrong direction

G: That presumes a bi-linear process, plus the bias that all negative thoughts are a “slippery slope” that must be avoided. But lemme give an example: a man and his wife are in household garden together, having what at first seems like a benign disagreement about an arrangement of flowers. At first, the problem is that he had gone ahead with the flower arrangement without consulting with her. As they talk about it, the conflict escalates. He says, “what’s the problem?”. She says, “it looks fucking stupid!” and further starts cussing him out, after which he complains that she’s always abusing him or talking down to him. That scene ends with her storming off, shouting “I want a divorce” over her shoulder. Backstory is layered, the presenting problem at least 2-fold: 3 years ago, he was caught cheating on her, getting caught on film with another woman at a party—pictures and video posted online—then they went into couples counseling. He stopped the affair, acknowledged the pain he caused and listened to a lot of podcasts on that subject, has passed 3 polygraphs since, and generally lives in the proverbial doghouse. After a year of little more than mea culpas he says he started bringing up in couples therapy how she mistreats him…as in the flower arrangement instance. She admits she can cross a line and be harsh sometimes but says it’s because she’s still angry and traumatized about the betrayal of their marriage through his infidelities

D: (pause) So, what’s the issue? Doesn’t that make sense? She’s been traumatized by his betrayal, now she’s sensitive to his not talking about things with her, so she gets upset because, as you might think as an analyst, the flower thing is a substitute for the affair-seeking plus keeping it secret and ignoring her. The task is for him to acknowledge the links there, show that he understands why she’s upset, and apologize for the fact that he doesn’t share his thoughts with her while he goes about doing whatever he wants to do…

G: I agree with what you’re saying to an extent: I’ve no problem with acknowledgements, the apologies, especially for not sharing his thoughts, and I appreciate your “it actually isn’t what it is” attitude towards the seeming source of conflict, the flower arrangement. However, your position still presumes a unilateral disorder, likely grounded in, as you might put it, “old school” addiction narratives: that person has THE problem, etc. Anyway, the thing is this: he says the abusive language got worse after discovery of his affair-seeking, but the condescending attitude, her talking down to him, is long-standing, is almost as old as the relationship itself so it predates the betrayal, and to compound the problem with irony, when he brings this up either with her or with therapists—and they had at least one episode prior his acting out pattern, he claims—both his wife and therapists dismissed the subject

D: Well, I’m not sure I buy that, especially if they were in therapy before the sex addiction or just cheating behavior started. As for now, I generally think it’s a problem to muddy the waters of treatment, focusing on matters that could be just a way to excuse the acting out behavior

G: But that in itself strikes me as a splitting response—that is, a black and white way of looking at the problem. You deny the possible or maybe likely complexity of the problem because it takes focus away from a singularly defined task, and also because that background complexity appears to justify acts of escapism. No one is saying that. That’s rather what you are inferring from the speculation of an old relational dynamic for which both parties bear responsibility, even if those responsibilities are rendered asymmetrical by the betrayal of infidelity. In my “clinical experience”, a variety of problems get shelved and obscured by the specter of sexual betrayal: betrayals relating to substance use, money, parenting choices, to name some issues. Only the specter of violence supersedes sexual betrayal as a source of clinical attention. Indeed, this may be the principal reason why cheating or sexual betrayals perpetrated by women are marginalized in most models pertaining to these problems. What’s the priority? The safety of a partner discovered in her cheating behavior by an angry, or otherwise abusive male. I have no evidence of this bias per se, but maybe you can tell me: if you had a female client who had cheated on her male partner, would you insist on that honesty agreement and pressured disclosure if she said she was afraid of his temper?

D: (wearily pausing) I don’t know. Maybe you’re right in one sense about this being complicated, and maybe that’s because there isn’t a moral equivalence about these kinds of situations.

G: Wait, what do you mean by that, moral equivalence?

D: Well, basically that women have more cause to be afraid of men’s anger than the reverse

G: So, what are you saying? Does that set up a double standard with respect to honesty agreements? Do you employ “man up and get honest” interventions with male acting out partners, but then refrain from coercive rhetoric with the fewer female subjects you treat?

D: I don’t think of it as a double standard. Again, I think this is a moral equivalence issue

G: How about we call it rationalized asymmetry. There. I’ve coined a new piece of therapeutic jargon

D: Yeah, I don’t know. Like I said, I just think we’re getting into the weeds here on some of these issues. People come to me, they come to you, wanting help, practical help mostly, with what to do when they’ve done something, maybe a lot of something, that they feel bad about and they want to make a repair, express their love despite whatever other feelings they have, move on and be happy. That’s what it all about, I think, and all I can say is that I think my empathy model has helped a lot of people to find spiritual wellness, forgiveness, peace, and overall happiness. Exactly how many people, I don’t know…just…

G: Countless people. Yes, I know. Well, thank you for coming on the show, Mr. or Doctor Sakmanov

D: How about coach Dave?

G: Sure, anyway this has been an episode of Getting Real About…well, I’d say psychoanalysis, or formerly sex addiction—not sure what to call this at the moment. It isn’t quite what it is, maybe. Thanks for listening

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , ,

July 22, 2025 · 6:41 pm

Tools

I read your email earlier today and it’s been on my mind most of the afternoon–in between sessions, at least. I took some notes, wanted to retain elements as I wrote back: there was an incoming text. You immediately confessed. I was struck by what was tacit: the other woman, you’ve been caught, etc. Then the quick fallout. You leave the house. A custodial split is arranged. NO talking–par for the course, it seems. The next bit tells me where you’re at in my podcast series: you’ve thought about the Madonna/Whore split. Your wife’s the Madonna, the total saint. But you’re sexually incompatible, meaning you’re not asexual. 

Who knows what your rep is with her. Hypersexual? The dichotomizing would fit with how far apart you seem from each other. So, the psychological splitting became tangible. She wanted a divorce. You wanted to reconcile, but perhaps you didn’t know how to start the conversation. Actually, I find that most (usually men) in your situation know how to start the conversation: apologies, promises, reassurances, etc. It’s what comes next that’s the problem. It’s good that you don’t blame your wife for your acting out with a consensual partner. What’s not good is that you and your wife never resolved your differences about love and sex. For that you’re both to blame. 

That doesn’t mean the fuller conversation’s easy. It’s hard for a myriad of reasons, some of which implicate parenting rationales. Example: “Let’s not fight in front of the kids. It’ll be traumatic for them”. Great. I guess that means they’ll learn how to resolve conflict via peers, the internet, or some other magical influence. Actually, it means they’ll learn to say “I’m done with…” when they have interpersonal problems of their own, accept forgiveness when they don’t agree they’ve done anything to merit forgiveness, or offer forgiveness under similarly false pretenses; outsource their needs for love and sex, possibly abuse drugs, largely because dealing with difficult people is…well, too hard, it seems.

The sociocultural context you indicate does matter, as many of my podcast commentaries argue. I imagine you may have felt inhibited from raising the issue of sexual incompatibility, afraid you’d be rebuked for having excessive or perverse sexual needs; for objectifying women, or oppressing them with sexual entitlement; for “having only one thing on your mind”. There’s little to suggest that men in our progressively-minded society will feel in any way affirmed for feeling unwanted by their female partners. The concept of Narcissism, weaponized as it is in pop psychology circles (it’s amazing how many therapists actually know very little about theories of Narcissism), is employed to critique masculine ego and tame men’s desire. 

You ask a compelling question about how betrayed partners might reconcile. Where is the gray, you ask, in between profuse mea culpas and frozen impasses? These are the toughest of your questions. I don’t have a simple answer. I’ve worked with some betrayed (female) partners who come to recognize that the Narcissism in their marriages was shared–meaning, they’ve fell in love with and admired the strength in their male partners, their “winning” qualities. This is an important sociocultural point because pop psychologists who lament that men “don’t get in touch with their feelings (they mean vulnerability)” tend to overlook how traditional and even feminist women collude with that phenomenon via their attractions to stoical, ambitious, not observably vulnerable men. Reconciliation? Consciousness is where it starts, I’d say. After the apologies and assurances have been made, and each party has taken its share of “time-outs”, or employed other “tools” of how to manage feelings, then the task is to STOP managing feelings and instead really get into those thoughts and feelings like you’ve never done before. Question is, how bad is everyone willing to feel to get to the truth?

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

June 24, 2025 · 1:41 am

You want honesty?

“I don’t feel like I can be honest”

The lament of the…well, of many people, but here, today, in this context, I’ll stick to an old chestnut–the compulsive person–and let the reader extrapolate what they will. What can’t they be honest about? their problem behaviors: drugs, sex, violence. If you have forbidden or just difficult thoughts are you meant to share them? Is there really a gap between thought and behavior? Think quickly, your compulsive self doesn’t think (think?) so. Meanwhile, doesn’t a complaint about honesty imply a willingness to listen to thoughts that acting out behaviors displace?

For those confused by that question, I shall retrace my steps and describe the concept of “acting out” as first explained by Freud (1914). Action replaces thought, feeling, and memory. Compulsive behaviors, for example, are substitutive: they displace energy from one objectionable idea to another, and the latter idea, though objectionable, is actually a lesser idea. That’s right, says the average dissenter, straining to understand this cant yet suspicious of its source…sounds NPR-like, or something. Yes, annihilating another or others in the plural may yield a sting of guilt, but it’s preferable to the sting of victimization, which is belittling, annihilating and, for the sake of posterity…so ultimately shaming. Make me great, as in big, again, not small. The small do not win, H.G. Wells be damned*.

An illustration, perhaps. A person has a complaint about an intimate partner–said partner has become less attractive physically. She’s a women whose hips have expanded. He’s a man sporting a “dad-bod”. Or, either has become difficult in some personal habit and is obstinate in the face of protest. “That’s your problem”, they dismiss, not perceiving the cliff of calamity that can greet such carelessness. The person who “acts out” with porn, drink, an affair, the reckless spending of money, is typically seeking an escape from such impasses. Not so fast, argue those cathected to the narratives of compulsivity. They aver that addicts will do what they do when they want to no matter what stressors or stimulants exist, therefore dog-whistling deflections are contra-indicated, if you please. Sorry, allow me a moment to slap my hand that taps on a keyboard, chastise the mind that thinks what it thinks. See, a question remains, slipping past the modern repressive: do the rules du jour mean that the “obstinate” partner is at fault for the mooted acting out that may or may not follow–ya know, that spending, hoarding, drinking, to infidelity and therefore betrayal hierarchy?

No, and the reader, if you haven’t already opened a new tab and becoming ensconced in a video instead, may notice that I will dodge dichotomies as if they are intellectual potholes. What I am saying is that conflict avoidance is the meta-essence of escapism, and that “acting out” and so-called betrayed partners share a responsibility–that’s right, share–for the relational phenomenon of checking out. Regarding those complaints about your physicality, your lessened drive, your attribution of “this is all you want” to your plaintive other, your wearying politics, or your fixed notions of what constitutes romance and “genuine love”–all the things about which you are politer, more open-minded during the the courting stage of a relationship. So, do you really want to talk about all that stuff, and potentially revise your views. Yes? No? What do you want?

** a reference to The War of the Worlds wherein the tiny, heroic virus does what humanity can’t: defeat the alien

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

February 23, 2025 · 8:30 am

Bumper sticker treatment

I’ve heard it before a thousand times. I wrote about it in a book that was published three years ago by a prominent exponent of modern psyche literature: Rowman & Littlefield, now Bloomsbury. Getting Real About Sex Addiction could have been written twenty or thirty years ago, largely because not much has changed in that time. Some who toil in the field of sex addiction think that much has changed in that time because they weren’t in the field prior to that point and think that the things they observe and talk about weren’t being noticed before they came along. Well, some things, like bumper sticker treatment, have not changed at all.

              A woman calls me up, asks if I treat sex addiction, as my web profile suggests I do. I confirm that I do, though I add that I don’t presume that condition upon meeting a prospective patient. Rather, I assess a person’s situation over time, explore the meaning of concepts like addiction, compulsion, voyeurism, monogamy, sexual freedom, etc. “Uh-huh”, says the woman. “What about integrity?” she asks, which signals that she’s either done some reading on these subjects or else had a conversation or two with a sex addiction specialist. I think this because SA specialists like to use words like integrity while claiming they aren’t judgmental and aren’t looking to impose their morality on anyone. That means they think masturbation isn’t as sinful as religious zealots think it is, that pre-marital sex is normal and healthy, and that habitual porn use might be okay as long as one isn’t lying about it to an intimate partner. Pause. That is an area of moral judgmental, they might concede: don’t lie, or keep secrets and then lie when confronted about said secrets. Actually, that’s not a moral judgement, they’ll amend. It’s merely ethical, or it’s about values, which is conveniently broad and ambiguous. Ethics is not the same thing as morals. Ethics is morality light, and it’s humanistic, vaguely feministic, as opposed to being hoarily patriarchal and otherwise over-doggish.

              Anyway, my woman caller sort of blocked out of her mind the bit about exploring meaning because she’s already determined certain meanings. She dissociated, some might offer, on the hint of uncertainty—an aspect of her trauma, perhaps. When trauma is invoked in this context it’s another way of saying that thinking has stopped when something cognitively dissonant arises. She’s already diagnosed her husband as a sex addict having checked boxes on an online questionnaire and then watched videos about narcissism, which is often tagged as a sex addiction companion. “It’s not a diagnosis”, I say pedantically, referring to sex addiction, not narcissism. It doesn’t matter. It might as well be a diagnosis as far as this caller is concerned. She thinks several other labels are diagnoses also, all because someone has attached the word disorder to a series of bad words. She says she’s done her research. That doesn’t mean scholarly, peer-reviewed professional psyche literature. She’s been listening to a podcast about betrayed partners comprised entirely of female subjects, and speaking to a sex addiction specialist who delivered a familiar chestnut of preliminary telephone consultation: “his behavior has nothing to do with you”. It’s hard to say when this greatest hit of infidelity treatment intervention was first drawn from the pop psyche toolkit. Claudia Black’s Deceived, published in 2009, featured a chapter that was headed by the phrase, and I’ve heard it quoted back to me countless times since, at least. Apologists for this brand of proto-counsel will staunchly defend the necessity of making such a pronouncement early in a treatment episode, even before it has properly begun. The rationale includes the following: the importance of reducing blame that is typically directed at impacted partners, which includes the likelihood that the sexually addictive pattern has been lied about for protracted periods, possibly years, and that the betrayed partner has been made to feel stupid or crazy for having harbored suspicions of secretive, unfaithful behavior. Beyond the compulsivity of the behavior itself, this pattern of lying, of obfuscating (SA specialists like that word too) constitutes a form of psychological abuse tantamount to an act of rape. Therefore, it is necessary to validate the long-denied suspicions and declare a new era of healing wherein all assertions by the designated sex addict are taken with a fat grain of salt.

              Just one or two…or three, four, or five things to inject here: firstly, as suggested earlier, this assessment category—sex addiction—is not exactly an exactly defined condition, let alone something that can be pronounced with ironic impulsivity. So, as an introductory intervention, the treatment-orienting, bumper sticker pronouncement—“his behavior has nothing to do with you”—is predicated on an assessment of sex addiction that has not been properly made when this pearl of support is typically delivered the first time. It is an a priori, or presumptive supposition. Were a range of unfaithful behaviors cast as hitherto unknown, in which case the full scope of the behavioral pattern would also be unknown, the behaviors might be characterized as non-addictive, maybe aberrant, and therefore imbued with relational meaning: it was a “revenge” affair; the unfaithful partner was feeling lonely because the so-called impacted partner was verbally abusive, neglectful—in other words, the unfaithful behavior was very much to do with them, as it were. As the reader might glean, or know if having read my 2-year old blog entries or a handful of my podcast episodes over the last couple of years, this narrative is largely reserved for women who present for infidelity or sex addiction treatment. Actually, back up: the presumptive narrative is such that a would-be female patient would likely not be cast as a sex addict so quickly unless they were self-identifying as such.

              This is the real reason why sex addiction treatment is dominantly aimed at men—nothing to do with “lesser resources for women in psychotherapy”, which is a BS cover story promulgated informally by sex addiction cognoscenti who either ignore that most psychotherapists are now women, or they tacitly believe that anyone who hasn’t earned one of their precious sex addiction merit badge certificates is not really qualified to indoctrinate the consumer base with their bloated assumptions and derivative theories. The theory and meta-psychology on the gender disparity is as follows: many social workers, couples therapists, psychologists, etc., hold a semi-educated view that Freudian theory remains applicable to masculine sexuality and ego while asserting that it doesn’t apply to women. That Freudian theory holds that the human mind operates in a more or less economic manner, discharging libido, seeking to achieve a state of homeostasis that controls or lessens stimulation, including excitement and restive anxiety. Humans “discharge” is the idea, ultimately seeking equilibrium. The psyche or mental apparatus, as Freud put it, experiences vicissitudes, quotas of affect, a primarily quantitative manifestation of desire and need. Many still believe heartily that this theory of mind adequately explains masculine mentality, or at least masculine sexuality, therefore male sex behavior is not relational: “he” seeks pleasure regardless of context, or emotional state, much less the qualitative state of an intimate relationship. Ergo, the phenomenon of sex addiction, including the prejudice that it exists much more in men, is simply a derivative of this roughly one-hundred year old economic model of the mind.

              See, somewhere in the mid-20th century, along came object relations theory (a subdivision of psychoanalysis), plus humanistic and feminist influences upon modern psychology, to assert that not all minds work like this, and that women’s minds certainly don’t work like this, and that we should all think more positively, more wholesomely, more relationally, about what drives the human soul, whether we think religiously/spiritually about these matters or not. So, while “boys will be boys” ideas are readily grafted onto psyche assessments and verbose theoretical pronouncements, those of girls and women are nuanced to integrate elements of social conscious/unconscious forces: societal influences, the oppressive sexist external, not so much an impinging libidinal “drive” from within. For at least fifty years, the foot soldiers of our mental health army, including myself, have been trained to think that problems besetting the feminine are borne of social forces that are inhibitive, not an internal, biological compulsion, or a biological drive supplemented by an internalized social force that privileges rather than inhibits. Fifty years! That’s a long time to consider how things have changed or should change. It’s a long time to recite bullet points, learn the jargon, the right vocabulary, answer the questions correctly on an exam, or write the correct thing in an academic paper, or post on the Psychology Today letters to the editor, or more latterly, their popular blog-spaces, sympathetic, progressive ideas about psychological phenomena.

              Phenomenology is a big word signifying a rabbit-hole topic about why things are as they are, and how we as a collective got here in this state of affairs, as Esther Perel puts it. Bumper stickers, like letters to an editor, are likewise anachronistic, if better for the near-sighted. Blogs seem passe also, buried in the internet miasma. Tik tok and podcast presenters: these are the carriers of messaging these days, not writers. And the message is a formulaic, mini-essayistic delivery, something that will fly off the tongue and serve as a validating selling point—sorry, intervention tool—for a consumer who says they need treatment in order to learn something new about themselves, something they don’t understand, something previously unconscious…ya know, something that will make them feel better (NOT!). What do you want to hear? If you’re a provider, meaning a therapist, a social worker—a sex addiction “specialist”—what are you prepared to say if something rare happens, like a man calling you up for a consultation who claims that his wife is a sex addict, and he is a betrayed, impacted partner? The chestnut phrase coined by advocates, not neutrals, will come to mind. You know how it goes: “his…wait…her? His”, you start again, stammering because your tongue is letting you down, confused. Her behavior has nothing to do with you. Would you think it? Could you say it if you did?

And do we have to lean in further to gender stereotype to find what’s truly axiomatic amid bumper sticker thinking? So, as stated, I’ve heard the catch-phrases a thousand times. I’ve pushed back with something I’ve said maybe a hundred times, and written at least once before in, ya know, that book I mentioned. It’s this: of course, the person engaging in the behavior of taking their sexuality outside of a committed relationship is solely responsible for that likely repetitive behavior. The “acting out” person needs to own that, as SA specialists say, and not blame a partner for having gained weight or becoming conservative in their sexual tastes, or whatever the trope on this part of the debate is. Incidentally, the term “acting out”, widely used now in psychotherapy, was first coined by Sigmund Freud in 1914 as part of a paper that introduced another seminal term and idea, the “compulsion to repeat”. The concept of acting out refers to action (behavior) that unconsciously replaces thought, feeling, and memory. Okay, all that’s already too long for a bumper sticker, and simplistic treatment providers who con people with catch-phrases that make them feel better are reinforcing defenses when they, in effect, say you don’t have to look at your part in this. What’s this mooted “part”? It’s part two of the axiom, the twist if you like:

Addicts, non-addicts, cheaters, co-dependents, wives, husbands, boyfriends and girlfriends, theys and thems–whatever label you’re using to describe yourself: if you’re in a committed relationship then you have and have had a responsibility to talk, listen, and do those activities properly, as in think about what someone is saying to you, as in empathize, suspend for some indeterminate period how you think, even how you see the world. In psychoanalysis, this is termed “taking back projections”–yeah, I know, another catch-phrase. Take a look at your reactions to events, notice your struggle with dichotomies of good versus bad, villain versus hero, perpetrator versus victim, instead of good and bad, the idea that heroes and villains are contained in each of us but often projected onto others. No, once again, I don’t mean you’re responsible for someone else’s affair-seeking behavior or porn use. If you read this and then think, “so, you’re saying it’s my fault”, then you’re illustrating my point about the problem of dichotomizing. I mean that you’re responsible for the many problems in a relationship that you don’t want to deal with.

Try to explore the antecedents of your trauma responses and then notice that “….has nothing to do with you” in the context of an intimate adult relationship is a profoundly wrong suggestion. You think this is blaming, trying to get you to listen, and to think about what you bring to a flawed relationship? If you’re an impacted partner, you think this is “disrespecting” or not understanding your trauma? Okay, do a little research on that topic (trauma, I mean), and I don’t mean re-reading your favorite chapter in a self-help workbook. Actually, do a fair amount of research, act as if this is worth your time. Read American Psychiatric Association criteria for PTSD and find categories pertaining to avoidance of distressing stimuli, what afflicted persons do, repeatedly, to avoid uncomfortable feelings, alternating between states of dissociation, which essentially means emotional cut-off, hyper (meaning excessive) and hypo (under-reactive) states of arousal. Do a Wikipedia search on a man named Sandor Ferenczi, who wrote about trauma, childhood sexual abuse and how that impacts people in adulthood, nearly a hundred years ago. Revitalizing Freud’s once proposed and then renounced Seduction Theory, he paved the way for generations of traumatologists by arguing that episodes of trauma are not self-contained but rather re-enactments of developmental trauma, likely spawned in childhood. You’ll find that addictive states and those of trauma are eerily analogous, at times crossing over in individuals, otherwise blended within a dyad (a couple) in which the pathologies only appear to be segregated. This is probably why afflicted people tend to find and bond with each other, feeling compelled to repeat something forgotten.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

November 3, 2023 · 2:01 pm

Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson

Want more on guilt and shame, how they get confused, the one feeling obscuring the other? Well, let’s look to cinema again, and more specifically, to the fast-fading iconography of the boomer era. In 1968, the year of my birth, the name Mrs. Robinson quickly became a shorthand for a proto-feminist, Betty Friedan era woman who had missed her chance to take life by the scruff, so instead she dons the role of seductress and settles upon a hapless young man as her target of revenge.

That’s at best half the premise of The Graduate, a great sixties artifact that is otherwise about generational divides: young versus old, war versus peace, complacent materialism (“I’ve one word for you, Ben—plastics!) versus the implied vows of poverty from those who would tune in, turn on, and drop out. Ben, as in Benjamin Braddock, the protagonist, gets to take his time before dropping out of anything. In the film’s opening scenes, he is drifting amongst his parents’ friends, amidst the ephemera of white, upper middle-class wealth. He has graduated from college, has won some kind of award for athletic excellence, and is poised to join the rat race, climb the social ladder, find a nice girl to marry—you know, all those unfashionable yet routinely chosen privileges that lay before him, waiting like appetizers on a lavish buffet table. Ben is stolid, lonely and depressed, not to mention repressed, and disillusioned, and as he wades through a celebratory crowd trading platitudes with party guests, the filmmaker captures a fleeting glance of a fly in the ointment: the watchful, likewise alienated Mrs. Robinson. She has Benjamin Braddock in her crosshairs.

The wife of a long-time partner of Ben’s father (their business type stays unidentified), Mrs. Robinson follows Ben to an upstairs room—his childhood bedroom, we’re meant to guess—and appears suggestively at his door, asking for two things: a cigarette, plus a ride home. Right off the bat, the viewer gathers that she is as bored as Ben is by the graduation party at his parent’s home, though her initial queries to him seem like those of a gossipy, traditional house-wife. Is he depressed over a girl? She asks. Unlike Ben’s parents, she is at least attentive to his feeling and curious as to his thoughts, which signals a running theme to the story: the lack of empathy between young and old. Clueless and self-absorbed, Ben is slow to recognize the intentions of the apparently long-time neighbor, but he complies with her wishes (the ride home) out of politeness, or perhaps to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the party. Arriving at her home, she entices him indoors, again with traditional artifice (she wants to be escorted to the door), while Ben still seems reluctant and put out, as if this is all stealing time better spent with private ruminations. Impatiently, he indulges her questions, agrees to wait with her until her husband arrives home, and then, finally, after the queries get increasingly personal and a bit of clothing gets shed, he cottons on to her desire.

Thus, the stage is set for an unlikely affair that takes comic and then dark twists and turns. Not quite a May-December coupling, there is enough of an age difference between the two to make her the dominant personality. However, after traversing first-timish jitters, Ben relaxes enough to request sincere conversation on one of their clandestine hotel nights, during which he manages to get under Mrs. Robinson’s skin. It turns out that she was once an aspiring artist, or at least an art student in college. Dolefully and briefly, she recounts the history of an unhappy marriage, of an aspirational life thwarted because of a grubby sexual fumbling in the back seat of a car, resulting in pregnancy and the later birth of her daughter, the soon-to-be-real love interest of her now younger lover. What kind of car? Ben asks, betraying his callow, nerdy side. Mrs. Robinson scoffs at his irrelevant question, but it is nothing compared to the offense she feels upon hearing his next remarks: “so old Elaine Robinson was conceived in the back seat of a—” (I don’t recall what car it was and it matters even less that I remember the make), followed by an ill-advised quip about dating the daughter, Elaine, in part because that’s what Mr. Robinson keeps hinting at in his odd, cuckolded scenes. In their hotel bed, Mrs. Robinson becomes a black widow, grabbing Ben’s hair, jabbing a finger at him and compelling a promise that he’d never go near her daughter.

Initially bullied into a false promise, Ben soon gets hot under his own collar, thinking that Mrs. R. has now insulted him by implying that he’s “not good enough for her daughter”. It’s not clear why she’d think this besides having good reason to believe he’d not be a faithful partner, which is at least hypocritical of her given that she clearly made the initial advances towards him. One supposes that Mrs. Robinson is feeling protective of Elaine, who is similarly naïve as Ben, yet by implication less corrupted than he is at this point in the story. But regardless, the cover story of “not good enough” seems unconvincing, a not-good-enough narrative of what’s actually happening. Firstly, each seems to be getting very ahead of themselves, as if something is already known and felt about the characters (Ben and Elaine) who at this point in the film have not yet interacted, though they will have been acquainted as kids and it’s tacitly understood that each is attractive. So, there is a putative jealousy in the older woman’s aggression, but that also seems an imprecise takeaway, unless the viewer is meant to infer a profound dearth of self-esteem in her character such that she would react with such venom towards Ben’s suggestion. It’s a kind of how dare you think of her the way you might of me expression. Anyway, Mrs. Robinson apologizes to Ben for offending him, though she stops short of explaining herself more fully and Ben is likewise avoidant of unpleasant truths, at last saying “let’s not talk. Let’s not talk at all”.

Shame. Let’s not talk. Let’s just do that thing we do; that thing that was fun when it started, full of intrigue, mischief, an escape from something banal. That Ben is full of self-doubt and therefore believes he is looked down upon by his older lover is not shocking. We’d seen it in his Hamlet eyes from the first shot of the movie. It was that dissociated gaze that was meant to signify lost if talented youth, floundering in the aftermath of a Kennedy assassination, struggling to maintain fragile ideals. Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, and all that. That Mrs. Robinson has regrets, low self-esteem is not shocking. We observe it in her bitter air, caustic expressions and alcoholism. This mid-life crisis, this affair with a younger man, would dwindle from this scene onwards and the prohibition that she aims at Ben regarding Elaine would go the way of many other instructions from her generation: it would be rebelled against. And what of the absent daughter? She pops up mid-way into the story, cheerful and pretty, unremarkably bright yet somewhat oblivious to the cynicism that’s all around her. Under pressure from his parents, Ben does indeed date Elaine. It’s as if his father and hers had arranged their marriage when they were ten or something, though clearly Mrs. Robinson wasn’t consulted on this mooted plan.

Is he good enough for her? We don’t learn the answer to that question, or learn that Mrs. Robinson was necessarily motivated by jealousy when she forbade Ben from pursuing Elaine, or even when she spitefully outs her affair with Ben to Elaine, which temporarily blows that budding romance while sinking the affair that has been a guilty pleasure to observe. What follows is an interesting spell wherein the viewer is left to consider the ironies of what relationships are forbidden and why. In other words, the forbidden match of Ben and Elaine is a displacement from the more forbidden affair of Ben and Mrs. Robinson. Regarding the motivation of the seductress, I suspect a reversal of what she first conveyed to Ben in that hotel bed is closer to the truth. See, her morose reminiscence about a life unfulfilled plus a climactic line from Elaine to her are clues that Mrs. Robinson was likely envious of her daughter’s lot in life rather than merely jealous of Elaine’s youth, charm and beauty. This isn’t mirror, mirror on the wall, and it’s not that Ben is not good enough for her daughter; it’s that he is good enough, that he represents passion and idealism despite his fumbling actions. Ben represents the kind of young man that Mrs. Robinson may have wanted as a partner earlier in life: he’d be a good partner to Elaine; unthreatened by her promise, supportive of her aspirations, faithful—a good friend as well as an attentive lover. And that’s the problem.

“It’s too late”, says Mrs. Robinson when Ben arrives at a church to disrupt the wedding between Elaine and a frat house robot she’d met somewhere along the line. Mrs. Robinson’s pronouncement is delivered twice: smugly at first, but then in a panic as Ben seizes Elaine’s hand. A young woman rips her white wedding dress and dashes from the altar. A mother attempts to pull her daughter from a wedding crasher/bride hijacker who is also her former lover. Yes, the times they are a changin’. “Not for me, it isn’t”, Elaine replies, now matching her mother’s wits. And there it is: a knowing moment between women across a generational divide. A parent is supposed to want what’s best for her child; she is meant to want more for that child than she ever obtained for herself. That’s our Superego talking, injecting guilt into the equation. The Graduate posits amongst its more famous themes that Oedipal rivalry between women exists; that parents’ envy of their children’s hopes is a thing. But it’s okay, Mrs. Robinson. We—meaning the audience that made you famous—celebrate your complexity, your dark humor, your blend of old and new, of good and evil. Ben’s heroism notwithstanding, you were actually the most memorable character in The Graduate, and as your song goes, Jesus loves you more than you will know.

1 Comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as ,

September 5, 2023 · 5:45 am

Theory filtered through politics

With choppy rhythm plus an aversion to run-on thought, the following sentence begins a paragraph in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction (I shall blame Joe for the choppy rhythm): “Undercurrents filter down into therapists’ offices, lurking as assumptions that inflect counsel”. This teasing opinion, one of many offhand expressions in our text, signals a critique of what lies in the cuts of sex addiction treatment. Via jargon, popular or theoretical, and often derivative of older, more esoteric theory, sex addiction specialists (and others, to be fair) impart a repertoire of ideas reflecting biases, and psychological theory, like scientific data, is a tool of manipulation; a means to an end.

In this blog, I’ve made numerous allusions to psychoanalytic theory or psychodynamic technique without giving many examples of either. Partly, the reason is that theory and especially interventions are hard to represent out of context, meaning case illustrations, and case illustrations are lengthy and, I suppose, not blog-worthy, though I’m not quite sure what I mean by that. I guess I mean something similar to my use of the word “teasing”: I’m introducing a book, not delivering it in serial form. Anyway, it seems apt to give illustrations of theoretical ideas, especially ones that can be represented economically. I’ve decided as much as I begin my latest and likely final perusal of copyedits and notice a certain pause upon the concept of reaction formation. It is a pause of sustained interest, not doubt.

Reaction formation is one of several fraught concepts in the Sigmund Freud lexicon: meaning, it is controversial, but that only depends upon its application. That in turn means that reaction formation is subject to bullying; it is a kicked around idea, used to represent standard thought, establishment thought, ill-advised thought…taken for granted thought. If you’re not an avid reader of psychoanalytic literature, you won’t know the term, but you’ll know its meaning. You’ll have observed its application, even employed it yourself, on countless occasions. Basically, the concept refers to a reversal of feeling based upon a defensive position that counters an uncomfortable thought and feeling. Wait, what does that mean? Well, it means something derived from a famous line in a Shakespeare play: “the lady doth protest too much”. When you take a position of opposition to something—a position of moral offense or disgust—a psychoanalyst will suspect that your offended position conveys the opposite of your desire, as a defense against a wish that is incompatible with ego, Superego, etc.

In our text, I make reference to reaction formation numerous times. The reason, as you might imagine, is that sex addiction, porn addiction, sexual deviancy, or just plain sex, is subject to moral objection, of course. In (fact?), what incurs moral objection or disgust more than sex, or that which falls under the general heading of sex? Anything? Notice I’m adding the word disgust to the term moral objection. This cues an example I noted in the manuscript: a man prone to sexually addictive habits, including certain “perversions”, elicits disgust from his wife, which he in turn finds arousing. This is an example of a paradoxical reaction—a reaction formation—to an adverse stimuli: to counter the unpleasant with a pleasure reaction, thus defending against anxiety and revulsion. More commonly, we tend to understand reaction formation as something like the wife’s reaction: a reaction of moral disgust to the sexual demands of her husband. Moral indignation: men only want one thing, etc.

What we suspect of her isn’t nice. It isn’t politically correct, to cue the secondary purpose of this entry: to indicate the selective application of this commonly known phenomenon with an obscure name. In the current zeitgeist, it is likely deemed sexist to interpret arousal from revulsion…at least as it pertains to what heterosexual men perceive in women. And don’t get me wrong. It is politically incorrect for some sensible reasons. Perceiving arousal within rejection has rationalized innumerous episodes of sexual harassment and assault, no doubt. Therefore, to rebuke an interpretation of reaction formation within a sexual rejection is to prevent danger. But that is about censoring thought due to fear of its behavioral corollary—not so much to cement a counter-truth that would govern the thought itself.

When reaction formations are deemed less dangerous, or else when they seem to represent worthy retributions, they are given a pass. In the realm of sex, we might therefore consider the issue of homosexuality. Within the history of psychoanalysis, and likely beyond amid a dominant heteronormative culture, homosexuality has been deemed a reaction formation, or again, as something like it. Freud offered that a same-sex sexual orientation results from a failure to properly identify with the opposite-sex parent; in the case of boys (Freud’s focus), it represents an excessive identification with a mother such that a boy would mirror her sexuality and thus aim libidinal interest at men. Mainstream society more or less agreed with this idea and at some point (possibly before Freud, for all I know) coined a derisive shorthand for this phenomenon: “mama’s boy”.  To be gay is to fail at acquiring a Superego, which in a dominant heteronormative culture means adopting the conscience and moral repertoire of the traditionalist, largely patriarchal system.

However, Superegos change because culture changes, and in the 21st century, within the largely diversified as well as secularized world of psychotherapy, Freud is often chastised for his sexism while his anti-religious positions are for the most part forgotten or ignored. As for homosexuality and the perception of that trait, another kind of reversal has taken effect, possibly a reaction formation of another kind. So, think of the following example: a man exhibits moral objection, even disgust, at the advances of another man towards him, and issues a rebuke to the offending figure. A commonly held opinion is to cast the man exhibiting the disgust as a homophobe. He is exhibiting a reaction formation: a reversal of idea to counter feelings within himself about which he is uncomfortable. He does not have a phobia in a medicalized sense (he doesn’t have panic attacks, necessarily), so the use of the term phobe or phobic is figurative and offhand. However, the assignment of reversed affect is in earnest.

And so, these examples illustrate the infiltration of social mores into psychological theory. Indeed, they illustrate how theory is subordinate to culture and historical change, whether that change is institutionally imposed, or else populist. Science has its data, its facts, and sometimes those facts define phenomena. In psychology, data is thin and is often spun to designate truth. Instead, it defines a surface layer of truth while an interior truth is left to speculation, theory, interpretation and bias. Speculation and theory represent what we want them to represent, only the “we” is variable. Some think the we is more inclusive than it once was. Probably. Or maybe. More substitutive, I’d suggest.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , ,

August 1, 2023 · 7:38 am

Glancing Views of Peripheral Matter

Within psychoanalysis, much has been written about perversion. Ever since Freud’s 1905 work Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we’ve wondered about child sexuality, and while inclined to attribute sexualization to childhood trauma, we (meaning, psychoanalytic thinkers) still consider that unconscious oedipal and pre-oedipal fantasy remains significant in psychosexual development. Addiction, especially sex addiction, has taken a back seat to perversion in analytic literature, with few even bothering to address the topic of addiction, thinking it derivative, perhaps, of the Freudian lexicon. They may be right. Meanwhile, practitioners and theorists outside of the psychoanalytic tradition dominate the sub-field of sex addiction, which more or less compelled a distracting polemic in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, published in 2022. In that milieu, which markets to a consumer (patient) base that generally seeks practical, short-term treatment options and is thinly aware of deepening analytic approaches, professionals like me work to tear away from bad objects that have hijacked standards of concept and intervention, acting upon zeitgeist notions of what men owe women, especially.

This is why some of the suggestions that inflect our non-fiction, fitting in between the lines of other narratives, offering readers a glancing view of peripheral matters, might disorient yet give pause—have them consider a reversal. There are comments here and there, footnotes that add density to offhand assertions, especially those that pertain to childhood sexual abuse, perversion—ya know, the mooted etiology of men’s preoccupation with porn, prostitution, or deviant sex. I allude to the intimate relationship between a mother and child, of a mother’s seductiveness, her influence upon psychosexual development. My comments are provocative, if hardly original. Readers looking for attachment history accounts of abusive or neglectful fathers or mothers may nod in recognition of some familiar verbiage, but they may recoil as they read theories that go way beyond what standard attachment theory proponents offer. Take Graeme Taylor’s 2019 article, “Creativity and Perversion: waiting for the muse”: published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, this paper offers a case illustration of an adult male who presented with depression plus a fetish for giant women, which began as a foot fetish when he was three years old. The man spent time drawing pictures of giant women, which represented a perversion (a “distortion”) of a once observed talent. The patient’s mother had once idealized her son’s artful abilities, but pushed him in his adolescent years in ways that met her narcissistic needs. Pressured to accommodate her, the patient lost his sense of identity, ceasing to draw creatively and pursuing an unrewarding career in book-keeping, seemingly in denial of himself. He disavowed his gift and his sexuality, eschewing sublimation while he acted out a dread of annihilation, turning it into pleasure.

Though he kept drawing, the patient’s depiction of nude or giant women was a part-rebellion, as his mother had been prudish, disapproving of nudes and not allowing him to watch films with scenes of nudity or violence. Jealous mother, we might think. Meanwhile, in his adult life, she was intrusive with her own physicality, kissing him on the lips whenever they met. Further, the patient’s father was a passive man, seemingly unable to take a firm stand with other people, including the patient’s mother. Guilty that he was not utilizing his talent to its fullest extent, the patient was nonetheless stifled, dreading separation from his mother but acting subversively with respect to her wishes for him, the guilt countering the aggression he felt. The giant woman fantasy was a source of comfort for the man, allowing him to deny unacceptable feelings of hate for his mother; indeed, to transform such feelings into sexual excitement. A reversal.

In Getting Real, I reference this kind of reversal, backgrounded as glancing illustrations of emotionally (perhaps physically) incestuous mothers who represent bad internal objects while good internal objects (passive or absent fathers) are missing. In Taylor’s essay, he draws from numerous sources to describe the role of a muse: a traditionally female figure that represents either an equal or an internal good object that facilitates creativity. He disagrees with analysts who believe that the focus of treatment (of perversions) might focus upon the sexual and generally physical inadequacies of the subject. In this Adlerian-sounding formulation, the subject counters feelings of “being small” (and therefore not gratifying the seductive mother) with fantasies of largesse. From the analytic perspective, creativity requires a degree of aggression, which in turn requires an identification with a potent object, or else an introjection of a good-enough mother, as conceptualized by Winnicott. A traumatizing, not-good-enough mother fails to contain her young child’s terror and emotional pain, and the child’s image of her becomes fused with the mother’s rage, plus the oral and anal-sadistic impulses that the child projects onto her. The Medusa-like figure fosters annihilation anxieties which generate helplessness, plus an ongoing struggle to sublimate, but it does not inhibit the split-off rage via acting out behaviors.

Here, the term “acting out behaviors”, so common in sex addiction treatment circles and therefore in Getting Real, replaces the term perversion, more commonly employed by analytic writers, even though the term acting out connotes re-enactment. The terms acting out and perversion are more or less synonymous as they pertain to dynamics that subjects experience with their objects. However, as I wrote previously in “The biggest elephants slip out of sight”, the tendency in SA treatment, besides avoiding terms that suggest “judgement” (as if we couldn’t simply define perversion as distortion) is to assign acting out behaviors to a root-cause of castrating fathers rather than powerful, abusive mothers. More specifically, the tendency is to follow classical psychoanalysis in an unthinking way: blame the abusive (hitting, yelling) father, for that thinking retains the masculine identity of abuse, which is in turn ego-syntonic with populist thought. The shift in analytic thinking, which may not be a shift but rather simply a contextual alternative for flexible thinkers, reflects a Kleinian versus Freudian conception of childhood development wherein the nexus of development is the breast, not the phallus.

In one respect, I envy the likes of Graeme Taylor, or at least that’s what I felt reading his essay. See, as I read his analytic formulation of a fetish-obsessed man, I wondered about the backgrounded figures, like the impacted spouse of his possibly addictive pattern—the shadow consumers, as I have less flatteringly dubbed them. Regarding Taylor, I think, how do you do it? I mean, do you live in a psychoanalytic vacuum, cut off from pop psychology, the pull of the sex addiction zeitgeist? All this stuff about annihilating objects, oral and anal sadistic impulses, and not once do you mention the m word: misogyny. Remarkable. You’re in a different world, mate, assuming you’re not catching flak from circular arguments. See, if you cast a husband as Frankenstein to his wife, then you’re describing misogyny. You cast a wife as Medusa, then you’re describing misogyny. Get it? Okay, maybe Frankenstein is a more sympathetic character, but my point is that demonizing is perceived differentially. The men in my therapy groups, versus those who choose or whom I invite into analysis, live in a world of social justice, of love languages, mindfulness training workshops, not sweating small stuff and working the steps. Upon hearing the Oedipal theory, some would subscribe to the castrating father story (though they’d invariably refer to “abuse”, not castration), as the Kleinian theory is more emasculating. It says that men who suffer from perversions feel dominated by women, and some (though not many) in a group of men would admit to that. They are also less likely to report drawing giant women and masturbating afterwards.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

September 26, 2022 · 5:40 am

Fire in the hole

Recommendations for technique. That’s what Freud called his paper on the matter. A bit plain, don’t you think, rather like ‘psychology in everyday life’—another good one. Took him a while, it seems, to gather his thoughts and give some tips on how to do things his way. Can’t believe he wrote it after Totem and Taboo (1912), or Three Essays (1905), or his first big splash into big, meta-thought, Interpretation of Dreams (1900). That’s where he laid out the big ideas**, suggesting that we all have an unconscious that surreptitiously guides the mind; that children have sexual fantasies; that humankind acquired guilt feelings more or less biologically, from a prehistoric moment in time when an incest occurred and a tribal elder was murdered and then cannibalized.

Oops!

Yeah, back to the present day, to the plainer task of sitting with a troubled person looking for guidance, thinking that an analyst might have answers. Sigmund eventually suggested that his acolytes (meaning his proteges) assume a position of medical authority, with the authority and spirit of a scientist gathering evidence. Worthily, he suggested that analysts keep a relative distant, listen with “evenly hovering attention”, encouraging free association though anticipating resistance, and above all, maintaining a neutral stance. That meant, roughly, not imposing beliefs onto a needy patient. There’s enough of that in religion, Sigmund thought. Others elaborated the idea: don’t gratify, we’re told in training. Don’t assume the expert stance with reassurances, with advice, or even what we might preciously call affirmations. If a patient says, “I went to church and said my prayers” in a cheerful, relieved voice, there’s no need to say, “good for you”, as if they’d otherwise feel guilty about the pronouncement. We’re not behaviorists looking to reinforce what people already think is a sound, healthy way to live. What are they hiding, or even reversing? Freud would have wondered. Sex and aggression. That’s what he was listening for. Of course, people have other needs, but sex and aggression are what people inhibit, or repress, as he termed it. He was right.

Indifference was another word he used to describe an analyst’s stance. A lot of people don’t like this suggestion. Taking him a bit literally, I think. I think my couples’ therapist is bought into this indifference thing, though not in the way Sigmund recommended. Indifference. Damn right she is. Doesn’t give a shit, I mostly think. Caught her looking at the clock after ten minutes in our last session. Can’t say I blame her. Sometimes, when Liz is bending my ear, I’m gone after a minute and a half—sometimes under thirty seconds. The therapist and her get on like a house on fire, like they could give or take me being there. I half expect them to go out for coffee afterwards—that’s when they’d really sort things out. In the meantime, the therapist has got to play her part, which means pretending that she cares about the two of us and that I have a legitimate point of view. A fair amount of nodding conveys this. Not very neutral, an analyst would say. Sometimes, there’s much effusion in the room: arms wave about, moving the air, performing an illusory expansion of otherwise benign principles. Yes, we should have boundaries. We should come up with a pros and cons list about our relationship. There’s so much to unpack here, this woman exudes with tired eyes and a fiercely contained sigh.

She was fascinated by our first visit, and by the “uncanniness” of the situation that brought us to her. Unpacking is right. Packing too, and packing quickly. Funny also, that thing I said about a house on fire, for it was a literal fire in our quite material home that nearly went up in flames because of nearby wildfires that penetrated our indifferent, ungratifying life and upset the homeostatic deadness. Liz and I: we knew we’d get little familial sympathy should this happen. Sure enough, everyone who had an opinion about our woodsy home on the lake warned us of the danger ages ago. Since the evacuation, they’ve not been so much indifferent as smug, though most don’t the half of it. Right now, I’d take indifference or smugness about our current state of transiency, especially as we can go back soon because the fire actually stopped short of our place, but mainly because the fire’s not the real reason we’re seeing a therapist.

But it is an interesting metaphor for your relationship, that therapist observed. A disaster, or a disaster averted, which means an opportunity. I think that’s what she meant, plus the fact that the approaching threat of fire caused an ironic discovery. See, if it hadn’t been for the fire then Liz wouldn’t have been packing things up in a hurry (packing things in a hurry and Liz are not words that go together) and therefore finding photos and letters from an old relationship that I was keeping from her. Very sentimentalist of me, not to mention careless. But I had my excuses, which cued my counter-complaint, which has to do with her cluttering, not my pre-digital era affair-seeking behavior, which—as the discovered ephemera suggests—is not even an up-to-date thing anymore. In that sense, I’m as dead as our marriage. She doesn’t even think I’m having an affair. It’s that I hold on to things, but not her. So, nothing like a disaster to shake things up, some might say. Damn right, I say for a second time. Liz half thinks that I started the wildfire as an attempt to leverage a clean-up; as a protest against her indifferent, cluttering habit. I didn’t, of course, but it’s not a bad idea, I’ve since quipped. In fact, I’m surprised no one has thought of it, or that it hasn’t been mooted as a common arsonist’s motive. When we get like this the therapist’s eyes glaze over, like she’s had enough of us. Her interest in the uncanny, near cosmic events that bring patients to her office isn’t sufficient to help her endure the prosaic disputes of everyday life. There’s little hope for us, I think she thinks. What’s your plan? She drones wearily.

Or, she’s invigorated by an inspiration, thinks there’s something in these metaphors that keep popping up, especially fire. It happened towards the end of that last session. She reached out her arm, like she was prying her way between us, but also aping a movement Liz assigns to me: that of a football player stiff-arming an opponent while in full flight, like the figure frozen on that famous trophy, the Heizmann. It’s what I do to Liz, I guess: I stiff-arm. Anyway, this therapist’s gesture looks like this, so it drew a burst of sniggers from my beloved. Fire. What had we been talkin’ about? The woman asked. What is the meaning of this crisis? Liz held her hand over her mouth, clearly holding something back. I held mine slightly open, as if tentatively waiting for something to enter me: a fire in the hole, so to speak. Fire in the belly, the woman translated, as though reading my mind. And where is the fire between us? Liz and I glanced at each other, at once knowing where this was going. On that we were on the same page. We got it: fire, as in passion, needed to be rekindled. That’s what the fire was really about. That’s what this disaster really means, and so we have a choice. We’re at a crossroads. Jesus, how many metaphors are we gonna stick in this thing? Do we burn still for each other. Gotta stick in this thing. Speaking of which, should we try that again? Liz and I thought. Better tidy things up first, she said.

** yes, yes, Freud’s first major model of the mind was called Seduction theory, and it was a trauma model grounded in the idea that not everyone had an unconscious—only those suffering from reminiscences, meaning sexual traumas that will have been enigmatic originally, subject to repression because they are impossible to understand, but later activated and understood thru secondary sexuality. Are we all traumatized in childhood in this way, to one degree or another? Do we all get messages in infancy that are eroticized in nature, that we simply can’t take in?  

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , ,

July 24, 2022 · 4:34 pm

Female Sex Addicts: the protected species

“In the books, they say, rather wistfully, that men want to put their faces there. Return to mother, Keith. But I don’t agree. I don’t think men want to put their faces there.”

“Let me tell you what women want. They all want to be in it. Whatever it is. Among themselves they all want to be bigger-breasted, browner, better in bed—all that. But they want a piece of everything. They want in. They all want to be in it. They all want to be the bitch in the book.”

                                                                 —from London Fields, by Martin Amis

So we come to the topic of female sex addicts and the social/political undercurrents that shape the treatment of them. Nowhere in the realm of sex addiction treatment is the specter of gender bias more apparent than in this supposedly lesser studied area. As we might say in our book (and we don’t typically, to avoid cheesiness), let’s get real about something: the average therapist in this country, and certainly in California, is not a patriarchy-imposing old white male with a bow tie dispensing turgid interpretations with an air of aloofness. It (or, excuse me, she) is a white female, educated at varying points over the last 50 years, who talks a lot about “systems”, aims words like boundaries, empowerment at women especially, which is code for go for that position on that soccer team, go for that job or promotion, make sure you’re making as much money as men, and only have sex when you really want to. With male patients that tactical stance shifts. With men the tendentious terms are vulnerability, intimacy, comprising a code that says go home, help with the domestic chores, cook a meal or two, pick up that daughter from soccer practice, and with respect to sex, “hey, have you thought about what she thinks is sexy?”

See, the problem mainstream society has with Freud is not just that he told women they have penis envy, or that men are superior to women (actually, he thought the reverse in some ways), or that he told some women that their sexual victimizations were all in their heads, reflecting their desirous fantasies, not the revulsion contained in their symptoms (we only know that because he copped to this, in a famous case called Dora). It’s that he and his followers continued to follow Superego guidelines which instruct boys to identify with fathers, separate from mothers, and more or less adapt to and follow a traditionalist path versus the noble trail of social revolution. Therefore, latter day progressives, if they are inclined towards psychoanalysis or the exploration of the unconscious, tend to prefer the likes of Jung or Winnicott, or modern inter-subjectivists who instruct men to fem up, support the levelling of fields, do the equality thing, which means surrendering to inequality in some contexts, which is what the field leveling alludes to. Well, as mine and Joe Farley’s book and this blog often imply, it’s problematic if understandable to treat individuals not as individuals but rather as group representatives. Our book is more about helping individuals, not systems, which paradoxically meant devoting considerable print to how sex addiction treatment programs subtly background individuals within a systemic framework. The stories of individuals are richer, if diluted by generalities, the intrusions of groupthink. As for helping, as I consider that task in itself, our book isn’t necessarily “helpful” in the conventional sense of healing anyone or anything, much less a non-leveled system, with anything except thought. As much as anything, we just wanna say how things are.

Years before writing Getting Real About Sex Addiction, I’d talk with female therapists who either specialized in sex addiction or else worked with individuals and couples whose lives were impacted by this much-debated, is-this-a-thing condition. If a patient in question was a partner of an identified sex addict, they’d be called an impacted partner, or sometimes a betrayed partner; once they were called co-addicts—not so much anymore. Female sex addicts were and are another breed of client, lesser spotted in treatment circles, or lesser identified as such, anyway. Called Love addicts, maybe, which sounds nicer: you love, not so much lust. As for their partners, they’d be called…well, I’m not sure what they’d be called, actually, especially if they are male. Angry, unforgiving, abusive or potentially abusive men, if the decrees of my female colleagues were to be accepted—not “betrayed” partners. See, female sex addiction is a relatively rare bird. Not much has been written on the subject. Supposedly not much research has been done, and our text only references one book that is entirely devoted to it: Marnie Ferree’s edited 2013 volume, Making Advances: a comprehensive guide for treating female sex and love addicts. Therefore, despite the widespread understanding that sex addiction is a “pathologizing” label, the paucity of study about female sex addicts is cast as systemic neglect of women. As a system we are denying help borne of stigmatizing labels. Reminds me of the reductio ad absurdum from Dr. Strangelove: “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the war room!”

Humor. My deflection, my coping with absurdity, revealing yet also distancing, because humor reveals what is out of synch—that I am out of synch with the times. Like Italian cinema of the early sixties (yeah, I know—not exactly trending), I leave the surfaces of earnest realism (*my bicycle has been stolen!), and spend time with interior lives, the contemplation of what’s happening on the inside. Humor draws attention to the contradictions, presenting a surprise, which shames, embarrasses, causes us to cover our mouths, our eyes. We laugh. We laugh it off. I have tried to laugh off contradiction and absurdity, being out of synch with the times, the zeitgeist that psychotherapists like to think they’re in front of. Stigma. That’s the reason women don’t enter therapy for the treatment of sex addiction. That’s an opinion I’ve heard numerous times from my fellow therapists—women mostly. The likelihood that most SAs enter treatment under duress having been “discovered” (thus rendering the prospect of “choosing treatment” moot) is ignored by the former argument. Anyway, the argument persists: to identify as a female sex addict is to risk hearing epithets like “slut” or “nymphomaniac”. From whom would they hear this in sex addiction treatment? Scores of slut-shaming, patriarchy-imposing male therapists who dominate our field in 2022 while feminist-leaning women struggle to achieve a foothold in the profession? Hmm…regardless, I’m sure men have it way easier: they only have to put up with terms like “pig”, “dog”, “pervert”, “gender violence perpetrator” or “asshole” from their relatively forgiving, not-as-angry, traumatized and sympathetic partners, and maybe the labels sex addict and narcissistic personality disorder from therapists who have so worked through their countertransference issues and wouldn’t dream of using clinical language to disguise ad hominem attacks.

Sarcasm. Yes I know. Very declasse of me. Anyway, back to the narratives: female sex addicts are continuously neglected by a pathologizing sex addiction treatment industry, and—let’s not forget—also by impacted male partners who somehow neglect to employ that mythical plurality of patriarchy-imposing male clinicians. Or, unlike girlfriends and wives, they simply overlook the option of mandating their female partners into treatment with relational ultimatums, or polygraph exams or uber-dignified “full disclosure” exercises to elicit honesty, hold accountable the assh—sorry, the empathy-deserving afflicted. When will women be granted the kind of celebratory, loving attention that Tiger Woods publicly received, or that Anthony Weiner once enjoyed to the benefit of his political career, or that jettisoned Pee Wee Herman into a career strato…wait, what happened to him?

Okay, stop it now

The men who take part in my therapy groups have gotten the updated memos. They’ve been told they are privileged so their sexually addictive behaviors will be excused by a society that simultaneously deems their behavior objectifying and indecent, unlike female sex addiction which is more relational, part of a misguided yet somehow less abusive repertoire of self-discovery. Well, they’re not paying for it, you see. Notwithstanding virtue-signaling terms like “self-discovery”, which attaches so-called problem behaviors to the cause of sexual freedom, or capitalist hypocrisy (some things we shouldn’t pay for. Really? I can think of worse things than sex that we contentedly pay for, regularly), or the thin tissue of horseshit that our profession pathologizes female sexuality more than it does that of men, those who proclaim that sex addiction is an excuse think that what constitutes an “excuse” is any response to sexually deviant or acting out behavior that is anything less than punitive action—ostracism, incarceration, castration, etc.—and is tantamount to an unjust act of clemency towards those who act with exploitative and objectifying intent, especially towards women. Given how disproportionately the term sex addiction is aimed at men versus women, it’s transparent that the concept of sex addiction lends women a 21st century narrative via which they can derogate male sexuality: in particular, male partners whose frequency of desire outstrips their own, or whose non-monogamist thinking, at least, may be religiously or irreligiously impugned.  

Which prompts a return to female sex addicts, whom we still neglect with our helpful-if-pathologizing sex addict labels, even in an essay that was meant to be about them: in Making Advances, the authors argue, “women are different than men. Their brains are different, socialization is different”. Further, they assert that women do best when a therapist is sensitive to their attachment histories, injuries and attachment needs. Now, do they mean to imply that men’s needs are not governed by trauma and attachment needs, or less so? Perhaps not, but given that these recommendations were delivered in the same passage as the “women are different” platitudes, one would think an inference along those lines could be made. Imagine if books, pundits, podcast-pontificators started calling out misandry the way they call out the misogyny of male sex addicts. Imagine if they knew the word misandry. Imagine if they started calling what female sex addicts do hate, not trauma; misandry instead of the tendentiously circular “internalized misogyny”; “toxic femininity” instead of sexual empowerment; sex addiction instead of its ennobling synonym, love addiction. Would their treatment still be condemned as “slut-shaming”? Recently, I’ve been hearing of men and women leaving marriages, seeking divorce because a partner won’t accept transition to a polyamorous lifestyle. Is that not a betrayal of a contract? is it a form of sexual entitlement, of “gender-based violence”? I’d bet that a woman leaving a marriage under that pretext is hearing from a progressively-minded therapist, someone who otherwise espouses betrayal trauma something like, “well, you’re exploring different sides of yourself for the first time”—said with airs of sympathy.   

Referring to the mythos of the ages, I refer in mine and Joe’s book to the legends of Uranus and Orpheus to represent the images that men hold in feminist society as rapists, seducers, opportunists…gazers. Elsewhere, I expound upon the Madonna-Whore complex, a mythopoeic term coined by Freud to denote the dichotomizing (splitting) of women by men into irreconcilable images: the ideal of the nurturing, wholesome woman versus the demeaned, sexualized “whore”, reflecting a struggle to overcome unconscious, Oedipal taboos against that which stirs sexual feelings towards anything resembling the maternal. In deference to the modern zeitgeist, I could have pointed to the Minotaur, the half-man, half Taurus who rapes and cannibalizes a hapless female virgin in The Labyrinth—the sculpted image of which caused a stir when presented by modern artist Damien Hirst. What a fuss, but also what a capturing of man’s present-day image. This conjuring precedes the man, not the woman who enters sex addiction treatment in contemporary culture, for there is little in trending or mythopoeic thought that draws attention to the ways women dichotomize men. What? You don’t even know what I’m talking about? Well, does the term Saint-Brute mean anything to you? Don’t you love a man in uniform, the guy with the snarl and the six-pack abs, and not so much that “nice guy” whom you later (like, when it’s time to “settle down”) declare is sexy because of his “acts of service”? The guy who is the “right” choice even though he’s a bit dull for you? Getting warmer? Anyway, that’s sidelined, cryptic thought, and things will remain this way until unctuous yet well-positioned thought-shapers decide that fields have been sufficiently leveled, human beings can go back to being individuals instead of group representatives, and gender commentary in our media and academic circles achieves a state of genuine parity.

             So, what am I saying of my female colleagues, most of whom I don’t know closely, with respect to how they treat male versus female sex addicts? And have I truly examined my own biases when I treat men versus women? I’ll certainly admit that more men come to me with the term sex addict poised upon their lips, at least in part because the term has been directed at them. Women? Not so much. They utter the term nervously, querulously, as if performing a reconnaissance of themselves, the concept, of me as a would-be listener, and possible judge. They’ve talked to women before, you see, and they’ve felt something odd: a mix of pious adherence to the zeitgeist values of the day—that you go, girl ethos that would protect women from slut-shaming society, blended with a sense of a familiar disdain. The modern ethos can’t quite block it out, it seems, and the women I talk to still perceive it, still feel the sting of the old Superego within the post-modern “be accountable” verbiage. Me, I’ll reference the buzz words, the subscriptive jargon, but usually with an air of otherness—I’ll observe it, detach myself from advocacy, and remain credulous of something undiscovered. I’ll ask the same questions of women that I’ll ask of men. I won’t point fingers with moralistic intent, figuratively or not. I’ll ask what is the impact upon significant others rather than instruct, or educate. I’ll ask patients to think, not to substitute my thinking for an absence of it. But I won’t collude with reversed, neo-double standards that my profession pretends don’t exist**. If you’re a first-time reader of this blog, you may not know what I’m getting at. Or maybe you will. Think of it this way: it’s 2022, not 1989. Take a look around, have a listen. Note the jargon that prevails in the Psychology Today articles, the latest books by Rebecca Solnit or Terrance Real; what the bumper stickers say; what tweets get re-tweeted versus ignored or excoriated.   

*an allusion to Vitorio De Sica’s 1948 film, The Bicycle Thief

**Ask an average SA specialist why fewer women than men are assessed and treated as sex addicts and they’ll likely say that there are fewer resources for women than men for the treatment of SA: this is BS in my opinion as it ignores the fact that 70% of licensed psychotherapists are women; or else it implies that practitioners must have the relatively slight Certified Sex Addiction Therapist (CSAT) credential (a referral base which may be lesser comprised of women) in order to treat SA. I think the plurality of women in the field of psychotherapy are more than capable, qualified (and certainly willing) to speak to women about their sexual behavior, whether it’s addictive or not, a problem behavior or not. BTW: SA specialists might also imply that SA is primarily a men’s issue, hence the disparity in care, though this sets up yet another circular argument within this field.

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , ,