Tag Archives: sigmund freud

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-20^th 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.

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Tagged as addiction, claudia black, esther perel, health, impacted partner treatment, mental health, psychoanalysis, relationships, sandor ferenczi, sex, sex addiction, sex addiction treatment, sexism, sigmund freud, trauma

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.

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Tagged as d.w. winnicott, fetishism, psychoanalysis, sex addiction, sigmund freud

January 15, 2023 · 4:43 pm

Pit Bull Eva

“The same object doesn’t have fixed colors”

“What?”

“The laws of beauty do not lay in the laws of nature. You can paint it whatever color you like”

“Yeah”

“You don’t care anymore?”

“It’s not that. Sorry, I’m distracted. My friend’s child got mauled by a dog yesterday, a pit bull. The child’s injuries aren’t life-threatening, but there’s scarring. A surgery’s planned. I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“The scarring. It’s inside and out”

“No doubt. Anyway, red is the only color I can think of today—red, for hate. I hate dogs”

Sylvia parted from Renee, her older brother, moments later, though he promised he’d be back. He was just taking a break. He often took breaks. He would leave now, satisfied, at least understanding Sylvia’s latest bout of torpor. Semi-predictably, near-routinely, she was erratic in her endeavors: At times, she had bursts of creativity, producing numerous pieces ready for exhibition. Then she’d stop, or rather freeze, with every action, every thought even, subject to equivocal pondering. In her art, she liked the idea of an intuitive process, yielding pieces of imagery tied to random thought that would acquire, or not sometimes, context over time, though not without thorough examination. As Renee sauntered towards the exit of her downtown loft, Sylvia called out, thinking her random thought a gift to him.

“Think I’ll paint a portrait of dogged human power—a woman named Eva—Eva Peron, maybe.”

Renee glanced over his shoulder, returned a wry, appreciative grin. Or was it a controlled smirk, signifying concern for his sister’s whimsy?

“Is that an expression of hate?”

“Hmm…partly. Maybe hate transformed, turned to activism”. Now she gave a sly, ambiguous smile: “Do something productive, right? Turn a negative into a positive?”

Renee turned to leave. Once outside the apartment, he dashed down the stairs of Sylvia’s building, taking mental note of its thinly concealed flaws, its just-this-side-of-disrepair quality. It would still be overpriced, he thought, and Sylvia would barely take notice, consumed as she was by impractical, aesthetic matters. Their father would shake his head if he knew—if he were allowed to visit—for he would do nothing but scrutinize the structural flaws of Sylvia’s building. He wouldn’t indulge anything to do with her artwork, except perhaps to inquire when her next exhibition would be and whether she’d make any money off of it this time. Renee’s sensibilities lay somewhere in between those of his father and sister. As a psychologist, he had situated himself in the middle, at a murky halfway point amidst the material world and the realm of art. It was difficult locating himself. He was ever around, ever available, but ever quick to get away and find space. In this way, he was like Sylvia, and their mother, as he came to think of her. She had died in her early thirties, when Renee and Sylvia were preteens. She’d had cancer, was a dogged provocateur of rigid people and their rigid establishments. Like Eva Peron.

Their mother loved their father, but didn’t like him, it seemed—didn’t like her strange choice of a stolid, unapologetic industrialist, a rich man who acted as if ruining the lives of people would make them love him, or at least follow him. Need equals love. The choice had made their mother sick, Renee thought: first mentally, then fatally. Mental illness. It starts in the body. That’s what his education and training had taught him. It returns, he believed, mourning. Repressed desire. Social ills. As Renee left his sister’s neighborhood, shedding its grey and urban, working-class residue, thoughts turned to the revolution he had not joined, only observed from a distance. He drove back to his leafy suburban home in his sturdy, cost-efficient Prius and thought of modest compromises, modest living. He’d make subtle adjustments, taking in his sister’s influence, his mother’s muted memory, but eschewing the radical departures both women had made. A free clinic? Sorry Wilhelm Reich, or even Sigmund Freud. Not working in one of those. A sliding scale? A county services contract with a lesser hourly fee. Yeah, okay. Next, he thought of a woman he’d been dating recently, kept offering him a pill or a gummy bear. MDMA. CBD. Had therapeutic value, she insisted. Surely, he agreed, being a professional. The former was aphrodisiac, she added flirtatiously. He conjured Reich’s orgone boxes, the “orgasmatron” from that Woody Allen film, with Diane Keaton smoking a cigarette after a thirty second immersion. Things weren’t like how they were envisioned a century or fifty years ago. Today, it’s about pharmaceuticals, not magic enclosures, mock sci-fi contraptions.

The substances were meant to mellow them out. Well, they mellowed him out, not that he needed any more of that. He got more of that, too much of that. His date? The flirtation escalated, got aggressive. Rough nails felt like claws. There were teeth in her kisses. He pulled back, glanced at a necklace that was meant to entice but looked instead like a dog collar. “Sorry”, he said, not feeling it thereafter. He was supposed to see her again tonight, was thinking of texting her, begging off with some excuse. His sister’s ill, needs him. It wouldn’t sound convincing. The date would question his backsliding, suggest that he chill out, loosen up his body armor, relax. Relax. He couldn’t, at least not like that. Too dangerous, to let go like that. Too much at stake. Others can chill out, choose what colors to paint objects while he just continued with everything the way it was, with no variations, no new information or changes in the way things are. “It’s her phobia,” he’d say, regarding Sylvia. “She can’t help the panic attacks. She can’t stop the meltdowns when she sees a dog nearby. It’s her neighbor apparently, and they’re not even supposed to have them in her building. A pill wouldn’t help. I’ve gotta go to her, don’t know long it will take. See, I’m the only one who understands because I’m the same way, only calmer. It’s about dogs. We both hate dogs.”

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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?

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January 29, 2022 · 4:27 pm

So you’re angry…and guilty

So you’re angry. You feel entitled. You’re like Richard III with the deformity, or so wrote Freud. The world, or the microcosm in which you live, has dealt you a blow, an unfair disadvantage. You’re gonna take what you can get, not expecting anyone to do anything for you. And you extend this attitude to your sexuality, with which you play like it’s a toy; actually, like it’s a modern toy, as in some electronic goodie that merits an upgrade like, every other week or something. Meanwhile, you’re down on the old toys, and especially one toy in particular. And this toy is a she, typically (yes, I’ll be ironically sexist for a moment). She’s your wife, or your long-term partner, whatever. Long-suffering, some will opine. Deeply impacted, traumatized, abused, others will say, including her, though some of the words are borrowed. The thing is you agree. It’s not like you don’t feel bad after you’ve done your thing after the Xth time. It’s not like you don’t feel guilty. And in feeling guilty you will feel penitent, at least until resentment returns and you sort of remember why you felt the things that made it okay to act upon your fantasies which then led you to feel guilty.

Validation. See, it’s not just about sex for you. It’s about the package of emotion that you wrap around sex, which includes murky yet happy experiences of freedom, relief, the pull of seduction, of play. That sinful other offers a conflict-free experience: she’ll admire you, or at least not intrude with her own troublesome wishes. With her you’ll escape the vague feeling that you are used up, have been used up, studded and then dispatched to some figurative pasture wherein you perform tasks that are drudgery, or acts that border on the heroic but which yield little in the way of thanks. Can’t she—meaning the old toy—make a bit more effort? Lose weight, put on some make-up…ya know, act like she did before you put a ring on it. Those days are gone, it seems. Now you’re trapped, or you feel trapped, subject to daily criticisms that now far outnumber the once-upon-a-time compliments. You know what to do. It’s 2021 still (yeah, I know, wrote this a month ago), hanging on by a thread, and something that’s trending aint gonna stop anytime soon. It’s never been easier to have affairs, writes Esther Perel, a modern author on the subjects of sex and relationships. It’s also never been harder to not get caught. If you get caught you might come see someone like me. I’m paid to take your confession, and then, as far as you’re concerned, tell you what to do about the old toy that you want to keep, apparently.

You want me to validate you? Tell you what to do? Affirm that you were entitled (whenever that attitude emerges) to all the toys on the shelf because of all that you do, all that you have tried, that merits the reward of intimacy. You tried everything, didn’t you? Did you? If you’re like the average (or even the not so average) obsessive, or “addict”, then you tried everything except actually asking for what you want, regularly, in the relationships that you chose. You think you asked for it, meaning the things you want. Well, maybe you did…once or twice. Yeah, okay. She said no. Then she said no again. Then you gave up and sought out that or who that says yes.

So you’re angry. You feel entitled. You discovered that text from that someone else and it blew a fuse. You walked in while he was looking at those images with his hands down his pants and you wondered, in part because he’s usually better at hiding, how much is this going on? The first time you found evidence of this you brushed it off, thinking it was normal, for men that is. Your girlfriends said the same thing, waving their hands, moving the air, declaring it was no big deal. A dissenter is your one friend who is bisexual, or maybe she’s more gay than before, you can’t tell. Anyway, she’s woke and she tells you you shouldn’t put up with this shit. Well, you’re not gonna put up with this shit. Not anymore. Plus, this getting caught thing: it means he’s losing control, doesn’t it? It must mean he has an addiction, unless he wants to get caught. Does he? Maybe he doesn’t love you anymore and this is just his way of saying it? An avoidantly attached personality, your therapist friend said. But you’re confused on that point because he says he’s sorry, wants to work stuff out, get some help. For himself? So he says, though he keeps implying that you’re to blame for the thing that he is doing a lot—so much so that he’s calling it an addiction.

So now you’re angry. Now you’re angry? Actually, you’ve been angry, or at least tense, for quite some time, because you thought something was going on but you were brushing it off and he was saying it was nothing, and nearly everyone else was saying it was nothing, and now it’s out of the bag and the pants are down by the ankles and suddenly it’s a something. It’s an addiction? Okay, well now it’s time for all the pent up feeling that you didn’t feel justified to vent is coming out, big time—like never before, it seems, which stirs another thought: actually, getting pissed at things has never been easy. You’ve never felt entitled to vent your spleen, even though people say you do so all the time. What they don’t know is how guilty you feel afterwards; how painful it is to get angry. That’s why you do it in secret a lot, which includes speaking to confidants, people who are as secretly angry as you so they vicariously enjoy (sorry, feel) your pain. Thing is, that’s starting to ignite guilt also. These confidantes: they can take so much, or worse, they’re gonna start judging you, thinking you’re too angry. Bitter. Time to pay someone to listen to you. A therapist. Specifically, find someone who specializes in something called betrayal trauma.

Validation. You want to hear someone validate your experience, tell you that you’re entitled to your anger and, by implication, the vengeful actions that will proceed from that anger. Here’s your secret: despite what has happened, you’re not sure you’re entitled to your anger, or to that much anger. So the next bit is unconscious: you want to borrow entitlement from someone else, and specifically, an expert. This is a form of permission seeking, and guilt reduction. And this was Freud’s deliciously amoral point: righteous anger is how we soothe guilt. It’s the bone we look for to justify the diatribe, the melt-down, the action movie climax that we all want to inhabit: the one in which the hero, or heroine, gets payback! Ah, those movies! Those HBO/Netflix binge-worthy gems: don’t they trade masterfully upon our desires? Addictive, you might say. See, if you pay close attention you might notice your internal conflict is not so different from that of the addict. The problem is guilt. Guilt doesn’t quite get extinguished, even in scenarios wherein the righteousness is fever-pitched. Why? Because the capacity for guilt may be inherited. It may be part of character, part of who we are, as opposed to something stirred by circumstance, the strictly external phenomena. You wanna know what a psychodynamic or psychoanalytic treatment would “do” for a patient like this?

Well, if you’re a Winnicottian worker, your marching orders will incline you to validate the anger of the betrayed, and even the underlying disappointments of the acting out figure. You will likely think that many in our patient mist lacked an original strong parent to teach them entitlement. As a result, you’ll think that some of us are simply ill-equipped to ask for what we want, or to protest unfairness, or wrongdoing. As a result, you’ll think it your task to bolster the wounded selves of such patients, give them a hint, at least, that what they secretly or impulsively want is…dare they say…deserved—so deserved that they might integrate that entitlement into their daily lives, which leads, broadly speaking, to the likely therapeutic goal: to be entitled in a way that is honest, non-destructive; at peace with the world. Ah! Doesn’t it sound nice, like a soothing hot tea before a nice hot fire on a cold, damp night? It sounds nice, but sometimes a little condescending, when those who claim to have reached this promised land boast of the achievement.

If you’re not Winnicottian. If you are, say, a Bionian or Kleinian figure, you’ll tread a less popular path. When a patient asks you, “It’s only fair and right for me to ask him to leave, isn’t it?”, you might respond with, “what are you asking me for?” (to be fair, only if you’re prepared to piss off your patient), or—slightly less frustratingly—“well, I think we can see how you’re struggling with the question of what to do. You’re angry and you want to express that. But you’re not quite sure it will feel right, so you ask me what I think, hoping I can make it easier”. You’ll know you have an analytic patient if the person can think upon this answer; if they can, as Bion once proposed, tolerate the frustration of not knowing answers long enough so they can use their minds, think about who they are and how they relate, historically, to anger and guilt.

Whether they perceive the irony or not, the rest of the patient population will seek out that which makes them feel better. Like any addictive habit, that will feel good, for a while.

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April 12, 2020 · 5:52 pm

I’m thinking of something

The analytic situation may be studied from the point of view of the methodology it stands for: a framework comprised of technique, context, and the variables of temporal and material reality imposed upon a subject, and therefore the subjective experience. The current analytic situation, rendered “Telepresent” by the outbreak of Covid-19 and the resultant lockdown of motility, brings a range of affordances which disturb the project that is analysis, yielding a new situation, shorn of its familiar parameters of sight and sound, and creating others due to the illusions of both distance and proximity. Nearly forty years ago, during a meeting of the British psychoanalytic society congress, what some dismiss as an apocryphal instance occurred: Society member W.O. Wodcot emerged from his seat to alert his quarrelsome colleagues, “excuse me gentleman, we’ve just invaded the Falklands”. That few in the room had ever heard of the obscure archipelago southeast of Argentina was aptly reflective of a psychic and material reality, the not-happening-here phenomena, as Abstemios (1969) refers to it. Such experiences are echoed in our transitional analytic situation wherein features of telepresence enable a secondary, man-made wall of resistances, most of which privilege an absence that is circumambient to the present experience. “I could be swearing,” exclaims a consultant psychiatrist, referring to the possibility of muting herself within the telepresent framework. “I could be lip-reading” I counter from the viewpoint of resilient, human adaptability. Or, I imagine an aliveness-draining parallel to another famous exchange, this between two notable figures of political history. Lady Astor: “Winston, if I were your wife, I’d unfriend you on Facebook”. Churchill: “Madam, if you were my wife I’d unfriend myself”. This dystopic vision draws our attention to a fresh project: how to restore the “kicking and kissing” problem of psychoanalysis; that lurking danger that lies beneath the veneer of civilized meeting that spares our profession from an imputing of utter hypocrisy.

Building upon Freud (1912), the conditions of a framework that include an analyst’s “evenly hovering attention”, Ariel (1992) offers the permutation, “evenly hovering presence” to signal the totality of the analyst’s being in the analytic situation, both with material and dynamic implications. “What’s the ladder for?” asked a patient when encountering an early experiment in this manner of working. The querulous anxiety in this patient was partly assuaged, according to Ariel, by the observation that note-taking was obviated by the analyst position, due to the risk of falling. This finding highlights the dichotomy of absence and presence that seems intrinsic to theories of change, or as Abstemios (1971) observes in his follow-up work: “Yes, that happens, but then so does something else”. The vicissitudes of affect, and of subjective experience in its entirety, is thus impacted by the variables of an analytic situation which, despite the contrivances of technique, process, and setting, are subject to collective contingency. So convinced was Ariel by the impact of the analyst upon the patient within the analytic frame that her homonymic nom d’une analyse was itself subject to mutation at different stages of her career. It is understood that while she never entirely renounced the validity of her “ladder” technique during her middle period, subsequent incarnations of her treatment method have introduced Le Terre analyse to indicate the grounded position of the analyst in the presence of the subject. This quiet failing notwithstanding, the absence of an alternative frame of being, as Obstinach (1975) has described, has hitherto placed a stifling burden upon the evolution of modern psychoanalysis.

The way I have stated this problem suggests the institutionalization of our project, and yet that project continues with the paradoxes of equidistance and absence unabated. The possibilities of thought, untouched by orthodox opinion, and tangential to zeitgeist, or else subsumed within a cornucopia of literature, are obscured over temporal and subjective reality. The inchoate emergence of dissident voices upon the analytic situation signal new affordances in our extant frameworks while echoing the creative opinion of silenced innovators. “That silence is selective”, wrote Quixote (1984), with double-meaning, referring to a patient with selective mutism, but also to a generalized observation that experiences in the patient third, in which an othered space disallows the pressure of the concrete interpretation, is transformed into a collective happening, observable yet indeterminate, and thus subject to disappearance. Falsthink (1987), whose neuroscientific research into the continuity of genomes has been discredited, views this same transformation in the context of a happening now versus post-phenomenon experience wherein subjective experiences of crisis and grief intersect, and then split-off. The dividend of his observation is today present, telekinetically or not, for our close reading and inspection: that what continues is the function of the mind despite the impinging of the environmental third, the vicissitudes of engagement and dissociation. Indeed, this happening accentuates the connection that we and our patients seek. It is our answer, to be alone in the presence of the absence.

REFERENCES

Abstemios, J. (1969) The diary of Fogo Von Slack: a dissertation upon smells. Flack lit press, Fargo, ND.

Abstemios, J. (1971) The mother of Moby Dick and the death of whaling. Carnic books, Muncie, Indiana.

Ariel, F. (1992) “Assault upon the frame: the evenly hovered presence”. Eurasian regional journal of free associative discourse. Vol 12: pp.73-73(about two-thirds of a page)

Falsthink, J. (1987). Forget about the genome thing, how about this? Carnic books, Muncie, Indiana.

Freud, S. (1912) “Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psychoanalysis”, The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol 12: 97-108.

Obstinach, O. (1975) “In response to the suppression of Ariel’s ladder technique: a step down” International Journal of Psychoanalytic Controversies not otherwise published. Vol 1, p. 3.

Quixote, Q. (1984) Selective Mutism: the patient who would not be heard…sometimes. Carnic books, Muncie, Indiana.

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March 21, 2020 · 10:09 pm

The Ego & the Id

Not the original, but a variation on a theme

Jogging past an assembly of children one morning I overheard a lesson being directed at them. An energetic, fatherly man was giving a taut lesson in basic soccer skills to a host of playful novices, and prefacing their exercises with a more fundamental, context-traversing appeal: if you have any questions—any at all—don’t be afraid to ask. There are no dumb questions. Everyone got that? He asked, sounding a bit more forceful than necessary given the point of his statement. With numb expressions, the kids gazed up at him, nodding compliantly, with their parents (a few were flanking the group) looking down with prompting influence. Did they get it? I wondered. Did any of them dare ask?

Such encouragements or exhortations tend to presume the following of both adults and children: not so much the possibility of incomprehension, as this coach was implying, but rather the constancy of attention. Everyone got that? He asked, with seeming reference to comprehension. This after implying, despite a contrary intention, that anyone who did not understand was “dumb”. A reaction formation, this would be called. But what of the inattentive? What of those children whose minds will have wandered, onto whatever is more pleasurable, or less onerous. Less onerous than soccer? I ask incredulously, because I’m a fan. The ego says to listen; to listen intently, without interruption, distraction. Comply, and to pay attention is even more important than to understand, so to not listen is to commit the greater sin, and to be consigned to shameful silence, at best hoping the information is repeated, granting a second chance to hear. The ego adds that when the authority figure asks if you understand, you affirm him or her lest that also bring about a problem, despite what the authority promises. For what would it mean if just one of those children—each about four or five years old, I guessed—had raised a hand and with impish innocence said something like, “I don’t understand what we’re doing”.

My reverie. My memory, perhaps? My wish? Had I ever been so brave as to draw attention to my incomprehension, or my implied indifference to an endeavor everyone around me seemed so committed to? I scroll through the tapes: not much, I have to say. Oh, there are moments when I have, with confidence usually, asked something that challenged the premises of an exercise; made a statement or two that drove a fork in a process, compelling someone or everyone to halt momentum, deal with me, my opinions, plus the glitches that difference, indifference, or disagreement produces. Freud taught that the unconscious is ever pushing for expression. It wants what it wants, does what it does, and so it traverses repression barriers, leaking out our bungling, our dreams…our distractions, our pleasures. The symptom of distraction, at times aggregated into diagnoses like ADHD (typically aimed at children who don’t listen), constitute the return of the repressed, in disguise. “Sorry, I forgot” says the person who nodded compliantly when asked if he understood, but then behaved in a manner that betrayed a secret truth: his mind was elsewhere. The ego operates imperfectly. Like the Id, it operates unconsciously (not always), contrary to popular opinion, looking to postpone the seeking of pleasure (the sole purpose of the Id), collecting sense data through the body, but failing to plug all the gaps, blocking those ideas that stir in us. The Ego is responsible for the censorship of truth—that moment of compliance in which the secret of inattention is held close to the chest. But then, so, too, might the moment of disclosure by the “brave” person voicing incomprehension be an act of the ego. It speaks to reality. Repression, that signature defense which is meant to keep our pleasure-seeking drives at bay, exerts a pressure to keep the unconscious hidden. This results in a counter pressure towards the conscious, yielding anxiety. Repression proper, as it is called, manifests in the derivatives of neurosis: our displacing symptoms as well as our inhibitions. Our phobias and other compromises.

What is this compromise of play, and what is a game, anyway, if not one more human activity with rules?

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January 27, 2020 · 9:19 am

Epater Le Patriarchie*

The ontology of addiction has been the central controversy in the sex addiction treatment industry for quite some time, alongside the quieter issue of whether upward interpretations (those that pre-suppose capacity) are appropriately directed at the habitually acting out. But neither of these should be the most controversial topics in this field anymore. What should be? Well, the clues are in the demographics of who presents for treatment; who typically presents as the impacted others, and thirdly, who are the treating professionals holding the protean sexual ethics that gird the treatment process. In communities with a diverse client base, those ethics reflect progressive values that obviate the casual pathologizing of sex, but in my suburban neck of the woods, a curious blend of traditional biases and menu-feminism continues to dominate discussions. More often than not, women presenting as betrayed partners exhibit authority with respect to intimate relationships; they are the standard bearers of what constitutes emotional maturity. This is a real problem in our profession: women who enter individual therapy, or couples therapy, or who direct their hapless male partners into therapy having read pop psychology literature that teaches that they have more empathy; that they have bigger limbic systems or thicker Corpus Callosums connecting their right and left hemispheres, thus enabling greater sensitivity to blah, blah, blah…ya know, that BS. Read feminist author Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, one of several books profiled in mine and Joe Farley’s forthcoming book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, plus one or two recent studies we quote, to obtain a proper debunking of such femicentric myths.

And the myths extend to sex addiction treatment, skewing conceptions of male and female sex addiction, leading to diagnoses as well as intervention strategies with essentialist biases. I wouldn’t suggest that practitioners do not hold their male patients in high regard—that they do not sympathize with their lives or wish them well. I don’t mean anything as caviling or facile as that. However, I do suggest that our professional models of care, with their catalogues of nomenclature, jargon and assumptions now privileges feminine perspectives in psychotherapy because A) that’s now the dominant consumer base for psychotherapy in The United States, and B) Women represent the majority of practitioners in mental health care. I know it’s not like this from the female perspective. I’m sure my female colleagues would report that many domineering men enter therapy, including couples therapy, making their wives’ lack of sexual appetite the identified problem of treatment; overbearing fathers who assert that “lack of discipline” is the prevailing problem of all systems. But at least such clients are publicly and professionally decried, whereas the analogous excesses of our feminine client population are not. It’s becoming more common, for example, to read articles or hear of workshops that draw attention to negative patriarchal attitudes, masculine narcissism; the problem of “difficult men”. Do we read about or hear of ways to combat the problem of matriarchal attitudes? Female narcissism? Would our profession’s proletariat tolerate a workshop—especially one taught by a male therapist—entitled, “How to work with difficult women?”

The word is out upon patriarchy: heavyhanded parenting, sexual entitlement, and while many men do bring their passive Stepford wives to female therapists for a corrective talking-to, I think the example of women directing men to a redeemer class of men is more common these days. Thus, the worst offenders on this matter of skewed approaches may be male therapists. I’m speaking of a certain type of male therapist: he’s a rock star type—knows how to patronize feminine needs, advocate for them; be that man who will show other men how to be men in the 21^st century. Ugh! I can conjure this hero in a couples’ session: he sits forward, talks straight, emphasizes action over words, patronizing the bias that thinking or the expression of it is overrated, and stares “man-to-man” into the eyes of his adversary, that “narcissistic” guy who won’t show his vulnerability, but instead terrorizes the women in his life, plus his kids, with his bad temper, his selfish entitlement. This rock star therapist will set him straight, and some women will love this guy, privately wishing he could replace the dinosaur that’s the subject of intervention. And can you imagine how this scenario is exacerbated when the context of treatment is that dinosaur’s sexual acting out? His mooted sex addiction?

The skewed approaches are grounded in a plethora of orthodoxy about how men and women are raised and therefore what shapes their development; and though careful women therapists may leave to those rock stars the harder foot work of confronting angry, hypersexualized men, the marching orders they carry out still reflect a feminine hegemony. Even popular figures like Esther Perel, admired perhaps for her paradoxically challenging neutrality, betray bias in how case illustrations are conceptualized. For example, in State of Affairs: rethinking infidelity, she rightly challenges, in my opinion, the common supposition that women’s sex drive is inherently weaker, only to then imply that the feminine drive is imbued with more imagination and relational intensity. Now, in keeping with the spirit of my last entry, I’m not one to pull the science card and say, where is the evidence for that theory? At the same time I think, where’s that opinion coming from? Who decided that it was a given, that it needn’t be substantiated? Next, in comparing (I think anecdotal) accounts of men and women’s regrets upon having affairs, she reports that women say things like, “I lost myself”, while men are more prone to say, “I lost my woman”. In descriptions like these, Perel accentuates the theme of self-determination in the meaning of women’s affairs, and while a traditional interpretation of the “I lost (her)” expression may assign romantic longing to the grief-ridden man, I think Perel is attaching a proprietorial connotation to the male figure’s experience. By doing so she suggests a lesser sympathy for him, instead joining the progressive critique of masculine possessiveness that is so fashionable in contemporary psychotherapy.

There are other subtle examples of bias in Perel’s largely admirable text, but the most egregious case of epater le patriarchie lies in her equally subtle adherence to an Oedipal Complex-derived theory of male infidelity, plus a diatribe about how female adulterers are treated worse by society than male infidels. Intrigued by a commonly-observed figure that is a decent, genteel man who nonetheless engages in affair-seeking or compulsive porn use, she paraphrases collegial psychologists who profile for such men a background of abuse at the hands of alcoholic fathers. The result is a hapless, codependent figure caught in the middle between a castrating patriarch and a downtrodden wife and mother. Subsequently, these boys become men who protect vulnerable women who are blurred in their minds with their mothers; hence, they deny their own feelings, including their libidinal impulses, which they believe are intrinsically harmful to these women—such is the distorted identification with the bad father. Sex with the mother/partner blur becomes a taboo—incest, even. The affair-seeking behavior is therefore a splitting defense: the man must keep separate his libidinal self, protecting the good, as in his image and her delicate feelings. Now, on the one hand, this is a fair interpretation of an Oedipal triangle, but one that relies upon the conscious memory of the abusive father and a bias towards blaming pathology upon that phenomenon. Robert Bly, in his then-zeitgeist writing of the nineties, observed a similar triangle between “nice” men and their enmeshed mothers and distant, angry fathers. But while also observing that such men fear their own feelings, Bly’s men’s movement slant afforded more sympathy to the exiled father, and more blame, I think, to the emotionally incestuous mother.

For the most part, Perel is not hamstrung by the need to appear “evidence-based”. Her book is riddled with pronouncements that she doesn’t feel compelled to substantiate, alongside an arbitrary few that she does feel obliged to support. For example, when asserting that infidelity is the worst thing that can happen to a marriage, according to Americans—even worse than incest of domestic violence—she cites Gallup polls indicating that people condemn cheating more than they do reckless gambling, divorce, or even suicide. Strangely, in a passage that’s only a few sentences long, she fails to give numbers supporting the claim that infidelity is deemed worse than incest or DV. That’s because that claim is unlikely, I say. Next, there’s a passage claiming that society judges more harshly “other women” than it does cheating husbands. Honestly, this complaint makes me laugh. It never seems to occur to plaintive women, whether they are feminist in sensibility or traditionalist, that this bias, which I agree does exist, is actually grounded in feminine chauvinist beliefs. This is like men complaining that they are “expected” to make more money than women. Yes, you’re expected to make more money because you do make more money. Correspondingly, the flip side of women’s relative lack of sexual freedom is an assertion of either moral superiority, superior self-control as it relates to sexual urges, or in general, a belief that women are the more mature gender, both emotionally and sexually. There. That’s my unsubstantiated, non-evidence-based pronouncement. After all, it’s women who covet and lay claim to the white dress, as there is nothing in a groom’s sartorial splendor that affords him a virtuous, as in virginal air. So yeah, I guess Beyonce was more pissed at that “other woman” than she was at her “errant” husband, as Perel asserts. But that’s a result of traditionalist assumptions. The woman lapsed to the man’s standard. That Jay-Z is a dirty dog is deemed a given. Duh!

Most subtle, however, and likely unintended, except on an unconscious level maybe, is the echo of the ancient feminine voice in the lament, “I lost myself”, that Perel attributes to women who have sought affairs. Yes, I know that thought—mine or hers—may sound a little precious, but my thought pertains to a series of passages in Getting Real About Sex Addiction that cite feminist historians’ theories of prehistorical societies. One such theory asserts that society was once matriarchal in its power structure and only became the opposite when men discovered the significance of their role in procreation and proceeded thereafter to usurp social authority. After this, the story goes that women were subjugated, their mythical images consigned to the sea, hence the ubiquity of metaphors that link womankind with water, and man with the later emerging dry land. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, said biologists in the nineteenth century, to indicate that an embryo’s development mirrors that of a species. Freud subscribed to this principle, also. So, for each individual man, one woman, the mother, was once in charge of everything. For man as a collective, women were once in charge of everything. Then came the battle. Women lost. The battle continues, and man’s love/hate of woman manifests partially in his sexual liberty, taken to excess says one of several polemical movements taking aim at masculine privilege: sex addiction treatment.

It’s funny, but I’ve known a lot of people, clients mostly, who identify as addicts. Wait, that’s not the funny bit. What’s funny, as in strange, is that most of the addicts I’ve known will lie, blame, deflect, self-pity, act out, lie, blame, deflect, self-pity, all in a perpetual cycle, over and over again, until they die in some cases. Some of them stop. Seriously, in a manner that only addicts seem to manifest, some stop their behaviors and become hardcore acolytes of a “recovery” lifestyle: assiduous participants in treatment, therapy, 12-step meetings and general fellowship; dogmatic proselytizers of religiously inflected principles; somewhat closed-minded yet reliable stalwarts of rectified living, complete with rigorous diet plans, exercise regimes and otherwise clean habits that would put the average person to shame. In the aftermath of their active days of excess, the lying, blaming, deflecting and self-pity are not so much extinguished as muted—a stoical nod of acknowledgement and regret hides a repressed hatred of something, subdued under a remainder-of-life gag order. Of the heterosexual male sex addicts I’ve known, some betray residual resentment towards the officious women in their lives—wives and girlfriends, mostly (there’s that phrase again). Others, those “decent” men that Esther Perel writes about, have picked up the narrative of abusive fathers, sinister uncles, cousins and violating mentors, implying with ambiguous, half-formulated though not wholly misguided logic that such abuses are the root causes of both low self-esteem and the addictive behaviors that soothe. The one thing they won’t do is blame mothers. The one thing men will rarely do—not with words, because it breaks the world—is blame mothers for the bad that comes from sex.

*a play on the term epater le bourgeoisie, a rallying cry of the French decadent poets of the 19th century. The term epater means “to shock”.

****

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Tagged as Cordelia Fine, esther perel, patriarchy, sex addiction, sex addiction treatment, sigmund freud

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?

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Tagged as feminism, John Bowlby, oedipus complex, ontology, psychoanalysis, sandor ferenczi, sex addiction, sigmund freud

December 8, 2019 · 6:12 pm

Many a true word (aka no joke)

Okay, so what’s the deal with the comedy? Why this thing about flippancy versus an appropriately sober and earnest tone, one might ask? Well, first of all, I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Mine and Joe Farley’s book, Getting Real About Sex Addiction, is filled with serious comment, academic rigor, and “getting real”, thumb-on-nose zeal. We have over a hundred references in our bibliography—perhaps close to one fifty—reflecting a studious approach and a whole lotta reading. And I think Joe read at least one book about sex addiction. But seriously, what’s there to be serious about? Who said that being serious was the thing to be when discussing controversial subject matter? When did humor get cast away to the deleted files, and who or what institution made that call, anyway? I get that most psyche lit is dry and pedantic. Sometimes it’s plaintive and proselytizing, offering nomenclature with assumptions about reader literacy—like thinking he or she knows words like nomenclature. Read analytic literature and all this is on another level: words and terms that may be obscure or unexplained are rampant and oblique turns of phrase are ubiquitous. Take phrases like Winnicott’s “going on being” or Wilfrid Bion’s “attacks on links” (actually the title of a paper). This is well-known verbiage to students of psychoanalysis. In a recent article by analytic writer Arthur Nielsen, the concept of projective identification (PI) is explained with sentences like, “inducers, by contrast, continue to be involved with the projected qualities in what Meltzer and Fisher have felicitously termed a bifurcation of experience.” Yes, in English please, I hear the reader ask.

Actually, it is English, and Nielsen’s article in the latest issue of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association is a pretty interesting, if complex take on why one in five marriages in the US will fail in the first five years. Hey, that’s not that bad, I think, given what I notice in couples that come to my office. The PI is off the charts, back and forth and all over the place. I’m near dizzy after an hour with a couple in a PI mess. I’m in need of a good joke, and I’m often tempted to make one. Not a stand-up joke. I don’t mean a “hey did you hear the one about the…” overture, or an ice-breaking aside for a couple who walk in with stony expressions like they’d just been sitting in ice. No, I mean the kind of plays upon words that circle back to previous things said in a session; to matters raised in some other context but which might be raised again, thrust into a new moment and therefore given an altered and—if the satire takes aim—a diminished, possibly diffused meaning. Satire. Now there’s a word. Again, that’s a concept that doesn’t belong in a serious discussion of psychology or mental health problems, and in a sensitive moment, one ought to be careful with humor lest anyone get their feelings hurt versus diffused. Humor can hurt. Truth hurts is a permutation on this theme. Humor as truth: is that your point, Graeme? No, I reply to invisible heckler X. Actually, it might have been Sigmund Freud’s idea. Seriously, I don’t think he ever decreed that analysts should abstain from using humor like they were meant to abstain from sex (with patients that is).

See, Sigmund taught that the unconscious is a free reservoir of instinct, feeling and ideas, albeit largely objectionable ideas. There is no “no” in the unconscious; it knows no limits, doesn’t get endings, of pleasure especially. That’s the ego or Superego’s job, to effect limits in the case of the former apparatus; impart morality and civilized order in the case of the latter. Humor represents that which has slipped from the truthful, as in uncensored, unconscious realm of our mind. It’s contrivance as a quip, a witticism, or an infantile gesture is a compromise, one that grants distance but at the same time allows a glimpse of what is really on a person’s mind. Many a true word, wrote Shakespeare, and there are many true words in Getting Real About Sex Addiction. Some of my favorite writers and filmmakers are comic in their style, thinking this the best way to provoke or inspire. Meaning, they determine that the best way to convey reality is through absurdism. Go figure. This brings to mind (again) Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, about which I’ll be giving a talk in Charleston, South Carolina of all places, next spring. One of my bullet points to be is to point out that Stanley Kubrick’s black comedy, cold-war classic was preceded or released contemporaneously with ponderously sincere fare like 1959’s On The Beach, or 1964’s Fail-Safe. Back in the fifties and sixties, producers thought audiences wanted to be soothed and orated to by the likes of Gregory Peck and Henry Fonda. Who woulda’ thought that nebbish Peter Sellers playing three ridiculous roles, all of them with a latent smirk, would be the one to deliver the most impactful messages of social warning: we’re all gonna die so let’s have some fun while we talk about it.

In co-writing Getting Read About Sex Addiction, I took a similar approach after having read so many books and blogs about sex addiction that left me deadened and therefore needing some fun to rouse me; or, I’d listened to TED talk or You Tube mini stars, speakers who took themselves, it seemed to me, a bit too seriously. It’s not all fun and games, our book. Much of it’s a trauma, or has been, for someone, or maybe everyone. No laughing matter, but the contradictions in the field are what’s funny. You’ll see, or read. I dragged Joe and his infectious giggle with me on this thing, and he soon got into the spirit of drive and mischief, calling me up with mock-homophobic questions like “what are you wearing?” and joining me in this simultaneously, ambiguously serious yet irreverent endeavor. I’ll continue in this vein for a while in blog-space, gauging when to laugh and when not too. If I offend, either in the book or in these pages I’ll take a return joke on the chin, thinking that will be fair play, maybe hate play. Or I might circle back to something I’ve said or written before, because ultimately, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, most people are still laughing about sex.

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Tagged as dr strangelove, sex addiction, sigmund freud, Stanley Kubrick

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