Tag Archives: sandor ferenczi

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 , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

July 20, 2020 · 7:21 am

Gaslight

 

Have you heard of this word? It’s quite popular these days in…what do I keep calling it? Mental health circles? Psychotherapy circles? Circles? Not even offices, “these days”. The milieu is the online cyber-sphere, the realm of Zoom, the I-phone; possibly the socially distanced consultation. But not conferences, networking lunches, or live “treatment team” discussions. Literature? Maybe. The editors I’m conversing (exchanging e-mails) with say they’ve been furloughed, or otherwise detained. So they won’t read me and they won’t read or publish anything new for a while. Our profession: it’s being podcasted, you-tubed, perhaps, but its edifices are being ghost-towned. Ghosting. That’s…well, that’s for another entry. Today’s subject is another staple of sex addiction treatment, Gaslighting. It’s an important concept, actually—perhaps more relevant to people’s daily lives than any other communication problem—though it’s an appropriated property, with a pedigree in drama, modern and classical. Here’s my footnote on it from Getting Real About Sex Addiction:

“Gaslight is a 1938 play and later a film about a man who torments his wife, searching for jewels to steal in her attic (the lights in which dim the lights elsewhere in the house—hence the title) and lying about his behavior and disappearances. The term has come to mean someone who deliberately seeks to induce anxiety, even psychosis in another through deception. Interestingly, the play recalls Sandor Ferenczi’s famous concepts of “identification with the aggressor” and “confusion of tongues” (1933): a sign of trauma is the subject’s identification with and induction into patriarchy—an internalization of its demands—exploiting a child’s dependence, need for love.”

Have you heard of Sandor Ferenczi? You should have. He’d be a darling of social justice warriors, Me-Too crusaders looking to history for evidence of good men. Ferenczi was a psychoanalytic dissident of the 30s; a once acolyte of Freud who thought the project’s original Seduction Theory—which would have implicated scores of Viennese men in the practice of sexual abuse—should have been restored to the center of psychoanalysis, in place of Freud’s subsequent theory of infantile sexuality. The latter became the model for the human mind, not the belief that external events—trauma—is the original sin besetting humankind. Modern psychoanalysis sings a different tune, humming the bars Ferenczi sang, citing the Gaslight example. I prefer its dramatic antecedent, Hamlet, but I get the point, what the stories are trying to say about what really drives us nuts. But even the zeitgeist ethos doesn’t capture the common hold that Gaslighting has upon everyday interaction. See, it’s not just about events that occur that are later denied. More intricately, it’s about thoughts conveyed that are soon denied, to be met by knowing yet beguiled and censored responses. Here’s my play. It’s from 2020:

A man invites another out for a drink, wanting company. He is rejected, but he will jettison—that is, split-off—that feeling. His stoical other and soon-to-be nemesis seems indifferent, elusive. He says no. Twice. The homoerotic current is subsumed beneath a hetero front: the first man provokes, asks if the other even likes parties…women. In the cold moment, the other man keeps a surface calm, but he looks away, knowing that eye contact in this instance would be aggression. It would betray hate. He gets up, stifles a reply but moves to leave. The first man delivers Gaslight comment number one: “what’s your problem?” Does it sound familiar, this chestnut of denial; this projection of offense? “Nothing”, the other says, not wanting a conflict—not finding the words, it has to be added. “Seriously”, presses the first man. He presses his luck. He acts like he doesn’t know what he’s said, and in some protean sense he is telling the truth, for he is on automatic, unaware. Still, he presses. Is he asking for something? Is he asking to learn?

The second man gives finally. Heaving a breathy sigh, as if it’s all an effort to explain himself, he declares, “You’re disrespecting me. You know you are.”

The first man shrugs, affecting indifference. Now he’s rejecting—rejecting truth, rejecting feeling, and altering the script. This is now about a guy who over-reacts to a simple question. Sensitivity. The second man juts his chin, utters a disgusted noise. Will he press his case, declare further what is happening in this banal, everyday moment? Given the stilled tongue of the adversary, further words might not be necessary. The escalation: it likely won’t happen; but what is the verdict? What will the narrative be if and when the stories are spun beyond this testy dyad? He–the second man–could state what is happening. He just about knows and understands the phenomenon. Everyone does, he thinks briefly. His family, his friends, himself at times; anyone: they’ve all done this thing. They all deny what happens and then fumble for words. Only one sums it up.

Another example, better perhaps, concerns a man who gets quietly drunk, is sternly obnoxious, and asks rude questions in the guise of being interested in others’ lives: “How’s your…” followed by “Well, sounds like he hasn’t got long to go…” –that sort of thing. Never mind why others put up with it. That’s a long story. And it’s not likely to change because if one raises an objection in the moment the man becomes confused. Talk to him about it later and he simply won’t remember. Either way, he’d pay minor lip service to the question of offense, chuckle it away, insinuate that the offense is in the complaint (“I was merely…”), and otherwise ridicule the protest. What do we now call this protest?

Gaslight

 

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , ,

December 22, 2019 · 7:27 am

Life weans the giraffe

Not so randomly placed in mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, are the ontological issues surrounding the term sex addiction. It’s in the title, even, this suggestion that what we’ll be doing is examining the term sex addiction more than any other mental health abstraction and therefore addressing the problem of problem sexual behaviors: is this a thing, a variously skeptical public asks? The members of Sex Addiction Anonymous (SAA) have of course made their decision on this question. Committees of The American Psychiatric Association and The World Health Organization have not quite made theirs, rejecting the proposed diagnosis Hypersexual Disorder in the case of the former body, and recently (and provisionally) accepting the diagnosis Excessive Sexual Drive in the case of the latter organization. To be clear (or not), neither of these terms are synonymous with the construct of sex addiction, but we’re in the same ball park here. The issue is complex. It is medical, psychological and meta-psychological, as in ontological: is a human being’s sexuality a function of biological drive and are problem behaviors therefore a matter of excess desire? And even if that natural conclusion is drawn, where is the role of nurture in the matter of etiology? Are we talking about an interpersonal versus an intrapsychic event, as in a phenomenon derived from early childhood development—a weaning that went awry versus a web of innate fantasy (or phantasy as Object Relations terms it) within an infantile mind? Or is the broader social and cultural environment the more prominent accomplice in a dysfunctional sexual development?

We’d prefer to think so, at least. And so we hear weary chestnuts that even the most progressive-minded observers must be tired of hearing by now: theories of pubescent or post-pubescent development wherein boys are subject to mores that encourage their essentialist aggression, their concomitant sexual freedom, with consequent pressure to conform and therefore perform when being so deterministically sexualized. Meanwhile, girls are discouraged by societies across cultures from expressing freely their sexuality; they are raised to be demur, ashamed of their sexuality, and therefore passive or possibly manipulative in their sexual expression. And even if this is changing somewhat in a millennial age (really, have you noticed?), then it is surely a reaction to those previous oppressive norms, yielding a confusing transition phase wherein girls, boys, or those along the gender fluid continuum (suggesting a flight from binaries) switch roles at times, thus conforming to a newly burgeoning if less-defined ethos. And so we observe a faction of diffident men and boys who speak of respecting the feminine as if they are resisting in their stance a combined biological and social force upon their being. And we observe women and girls who seem increasingly aggressive and entitled in their sexual freedom while proclaiming the lack of freedom that is afforded them by an arbitrary social reality. In analytic terms, this is the realm of the unconscious but not the repressed, these habits and mores that we download from the culture. By unrepressed I mean something that is not kept away. Isms and other mores may be unconscious, but as we routinely observe, they are hardly kept away. They leak and make a mess, pervading our experience.

The premises of these positions must be difficult for the average mental health professional to sustain given the contradictions of theory and life itself. Firstly, within our profession’s demographic map, that average person is likely female, white and therefore privileged in terms of race, at least. She has been raised and subsequently educated within an atmosphere that encourages or affords (not privileged—we only use that word in this context if we’re feeling critical) a social justice lens, which means supporting narratives that advocate for the underprivileged. In Getting Real, I argue that within the niche field of sex addiction treatment (and perhaps psychotherapy as a whole), this demographic phenomenon of recent generations results in a skew that targets a privileged (non-ironic diction) client population–heterosexual men—for devaluation. The aggregate of thought suggesting how males and females are socialized towards sexual behaviors and identities emphasizes the post-pubescent experience, which for some might imply agreement with an embattled psychoanalytic idea: that pre-pubescent and certainly pre-verbal sexuality is repressed, as in kept away, and for the most part is not leaked and is therefore a lesser factor in pre-teen childhood development. There is no scientific evidence of an Oedipus Complex, say critics of psychoanalysis. There is evidence of pre-verbal attachment styles, the capacity to communicate and comprehend on a pre-verbal level, thus children’s psychological development is profoundly impacted from birth onwards by events, both benign and traumatic, that occur perpetually.

The onset of sexuality is a function of hormonal development, says a medical argument—not some manner of release from childhood repression. Puberty is the psyche’s sexual alarm clock, indicating that it’s time for play of another kind; an incipiently adult kind. Feelings like joy, excitement, wonder, fear, shame, and guilt may all be observed in small children, some pre-verbal, some not. Emotional expression, proximity-seeking, may be developed or not, contingent upon the presence and consistency of a capable adult. The nature of a child’s attachment to a parent (or primary caregiver) will be internalized as a working model of attachment that will further shape development and relationships, possibly over a lifetime. That was John Bowlby speaking and writing over fifty years ago, saying something similar to what D.W. Winnicott was teaching, only with more attention to physical need than the fostering of a distinctive, creative mind. If you the reader are silently nodding in agreement, then you’re joining at least two generations of mental health providers who generally agree with these principles while implicitly thinking that sex is not part of the early attachment equation. You’ve likely been taught to believe that proximity or object seeking, plus patterns within those relational drives, are shaped interpersonally and by broader environmental norms; that we have implicit (neurobiologyspeak for the unconscious) memory of early attachment patterns, whether they were traumatic or not; that we have implicit bias (appropriating social justicespeak for the unconscious but not repressed) in relationships, yielding prejudice directed at distinct social groups. Yes, joy, creativity, and some of that bad feeling stuff is indeed fostered in a child’s development, but not sex. Not arousal, or longing. That potential is activated later…when it’s appropriate, of course.

So, why are there excesses? Why this untidy disorder, this chaos of spillage, as if life were some kind of cosmic dumping. There, says…something: here are your tools in a pile and a flood. Do with them what you will. Is addiction, for example, a blend of natural hormonal excess negatively complemented by an insecure attachment style, of weak or failing repression barriers? And if this shaping does occur both intrapsychically and interpersonally, shall we break with our profession’s current theoretical orthodoxy and resolve that sexual nurturing largely coincides with biological schedules and is dominantly imparted with the help of the cultural village? A village that also fails, perhaps. Because if this isn’t the roughly hewn plan then we must revisit what our developmental theories otherwise imply: go back to society with ideas it doesn’t want to hear and consider taboos, as in pre-teen or even pre-verbal sexual exposure, as the original source of sexual development. We’d have to imagine that arousal and longing are part of the same dyads or village-child-passing-around norms that bring food, enable good sleep, play and a spark of imagination. We’d have to imagine that breast-feeding, or the bathing of infants’ genitalia, or the physical control of their evacuations are truly antecedents of sexual desire, or that excesses in this private realm nurture later distortions of sex as much as any unconscious yet unrepressed social message conveyed via so-called modeling to a conscious mind.

Though it would likely elicit thought-blocking accusations of misogyny or homophobia, we’d need to re-think child-rearing in a way that might stir panic; contemplate sexual orientation in a way that would challenge etiological assumptions. If the excesses of sex addiction are rooted in early childhood development, trauma specialists sometimes suggest (but don’t prove) that childhood sexual abuse is an accomplice to later sexual acting out. In this way, modern psychology comes full circle, revisiting Freud’s original Seduction theory, only with a significant permutation. Instead of conversion symptoms like the paralysis of limbs, patients present with compulsive behaviors, what Freud described as repeating versus remembering, or the shorthand, repetition compulsion. Sandor Ferenczi later gave us the term and concept “Identify with the aggressor”, attempting to rescue Seduction theory from its then-exile, to denote a relational identification between victim and abuser—to indicate a kind of psychic hostage-taking. If the vast majority of sexual abuse perpetrators are male, as a mother-idolizing culture would have us presume, then why doesn’t a corresponding majority of male molestation victims report or manifest ego-dystonic feelings of same-sex attraction? Or perhaps they do and are therefore, in keeping with analytic thought, manifesting the defense of reaction formation via a false heterosexual identification. Does it seem complicated, this human development?

And what of those who mooted, like Freud, that infantile sexuality is a thing; that attempts to seek pleasure and reduce drive tension happen from the outset of life, stimulated through erotogenic zones: the oral, anal, and the genital. With odd references here and there in Getting Real, I suggest that sex addiction is derived from a period of oral excesses, a pleasure-seeking yet tension-fraught jouissance, as Lacan put it. The mother brings her eroticism to the table, some have said–no, that doesn’t mean sexual molestation. But it might mean excess arousal–something that is then repressed. Necessary, it seems. It seems to be taking longer and longer for children and young adults to grow, with the meta-tasks of an internal, interpersonal, and collectivist set of systems to navigate. I understand that some animals in the wild are able to walk within a day or an hour of their births. They grow up quickly in less complicated systems, with simple brains that are mindlessly free of sexual neurosis. Are the plainer brutalities of nature—the ubiquity of predation, or the threat of being left behind if not ambulatory—the forces that force giraffes to their feet? Do their hormones help? Or do they “grow up” quickly in other ways? What if our life expectancies were less than a decade? Would we evolve a quicker, more expedient onset of the pubescent watershed, becoming unrepressed yet thoughtless, and actively or relentlessly sexual, all because it was necessary to survive?

Leave a comment

Filed under Uncategorized

Tagged as , , , , , , ,