Feminine Sensuality

Alcira Mariam Alizade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780367324520
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429913693
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides an overview of the events of intimacy, a chronicle of the erogenous events that occur in a woman's body. It discusses the concept of psychoanalysis keeping very close to the body—a body that feels, vibrates, and is repressed, a body that depends on its fellow beings.

Chapter One
The sense of the body

In this chapter I consider as a whole those experiences that play a part as phenomena in the sense of the body and at tempt to show the complexity of erogenous experience in its intimate interaction with sensoriality. “Experiential mass” is the name that I give to the body that is in a state to receive stimuli while at the same time reacting to these stimuli in ways that are unique to each individual. All individuals have their own fund of sensitivity, the different components of which are mingled in a particular formula, and this again will vary according to circumstances and to the dominant psychopathological structure.

Some general principles

1. Fundamentally, there are two planes that influence the instinctual world—the sensorial and the representational.

2. The sensorial plane can be divided into three strata: the perceptual, that of the sensations, and the affective.

3. Erogenous experience circulates between experiences, emotions, perceptions, affects, and representations. Two considerations arise at this point:

a. There is individual variation with respect to the amount of libido and sexual requirements. Freud said that “it is one of the obvious social injustices that the standard of civilisation should demand from everyone the same conduct of sexual life—conduct which can be followed without any difficulty by some people, thanks to their organisation, but which imposes the heaviest psychical sacrifices on others” (1908d, p. 192). To listen to erotic demands from the psychoanalytical point of view implies shedding prejudices and ideologies and accepting a wide variety of needs and inhibitions that range far beyond convention. Vicissitudes in object-relations, the dimension of human love, conflicts of loyalty—all these divert the course of the erogenous impulses and allow for successful sublimations and forms of erotic relationships that challenge the physiology of sexuality, bringing substitute satisfactions, and ego-orgasms (Winnicott, 1958) that offer profound well-being in the context of indirect instinctual satisfactions.

b. The importance of the concept of instinct is disputed, as Didier Anzieu points out in the epistemological preliminaries to his book, The Skin-Ego (1985). Nor is the list of instincts closed. Freud himself divided them three times, first distinguishing between instincts of self-preservation and sexual instincts, then between ego-libido and object-libido, and finally between the death instincts and the life instincts. But in addition to these classifications he left isolated passages in which he gave other names to instincts. Thus in his work on jokes (1905c) he conceptualizes the “urge to communicate the joke” (p. 143), on the basis of a term coined by Moll: the “instinct of contrectation” [Kontrektationstrieb]—a type of social instinct that impels us each to make contact, one with the other. In this text Freud makes repeated use of the verb “to impel” (pp. 142, 154-156), referring to the force that peremptorily urges one to pass a joke on to others. He also predicates the existence of an “impulse to dominate” (1905d, 1913i, 1915c)—a non-sexual instinct whose aim is to dominate the object by force. Later investigations produced the important contributions of Bowlby (1969) on the instinct of attachment, and those of Imre Hermann (1930) on the instinct of apprehension. They are instincts concerned with contact with the primary object. They include—as do the theories of Spitz—the idea of another person, significant as psychic food for the preservation of life. In this instinct sexual elements co-exist with those of self-preservation. They help me to reflect on the value of the function of “taking on a body” throughout life (see chapter two).

4. I firmly emphasize the huge distance that separates animals from humans. Rooted in animal corporeality, in its quality of subject of the language, and bearing a code of affects, the human being separates itself from its own biology and transforms the material elements that have gone into shaping it. Thus every general law trying to define the pleasure of the senses remains disputed.

5. The area “before the word” is fundamental in the sense of the body. It includes the field of the unutterable, the innumerable, of somatizations, of dynamics and somatic communications instinctually cathected. Words count as “things”, their symbolic content is contingent. They are “missile-words”, or “armour-speech”, “action-language”, words that hide, speech sited “beyond words” (Schust-Briat, 1991). We note the paralinguistic effect of words of pure acoustics, of pre-verbal signifiers. These signifiers were conceptualized by Rosolato (1985) and Didier Anzieu (1987). Rosolato calls them “demarcation signifiers” and compares them with representations of things. These signifiers originate in early infancy, and may precede the acquisition of language. He proposes the following list of opposed pairs for demarcation signifiers: pleasure-unpleasure, good-bad, presence-absence, inside-outside, passivity-activity, oneself-others.

Similarly, Rosolato points out the importance of the analogical gesture that allows mutual understanding to occur without words, establishing a common element based on sympathy, which argues that there exists a terrain of reciprocal identification that is somatic and tactile.

Didier Anzieu prefers to call them “formal signifiers”, that constitute not so much the “objects” that form the basic unconscious psychic contents as the psychic containers. Further on he adds: “They allow impressions, sensations, and ordeals that are too early or too intense to be put into words to be committed to memory” (D. Anzieu, 1987, p. 11). They impose themselves on the psyche as ineffable.

Formal signifiers are intimately attached to the bodily scheme, and special sites in the moving body. They can be pathological or non-pathological. They all allude to phenomena that take place on an original plane of psychic function, closely linked with experiences of the bodily ego. With his investigation Didier Anzieu enters the pre-representational world, related to pictograms (Aulagnier, 1975) and to the archaic concept of hysteria (McDougall, 1986).

The phantasmal stimulation that takes place in a sensual body-to-body situation favours the revival of these formal signifiers in the climate of regression that may accompany the encounter. The amazing dimension of the destruction of form, of strange bodily changes, even touching on something sinister and nightmarish, helps us to understand the distance on contact, the limitations and controls with which many subjects go through their sensual life.

“Beyond words” and “before words” are seen as fascinating realms for psychoanalytic exploration in the world of somato-psychic adventures.

6. Sensuality works within a “determined context”, which includes both the social and the cultural ambience and public opinion, with its criteria and taboos about what is considered an optimal sexual life within the established canons. The superego watches over sexual satisfactions and affects the quality of experiences. As an example, I would mention the enormous value set on homosexuality in ancient Greece, and the high esteem in which the temple prostitutes were held in certain religions—holy women, called “the divine donors of their bodies” in Tibet (Monestier, 1963).

7. The sense of the body can appear in an autoerotic form or in relation with another body. In the first case, the play is with objects of phantasy internally linked. The direction of the unconscious in the sense of its tireless orientation towards pleasure governs the way to erogenous sensorial stimulation. This allows a certain control of the sensual situation and its interruption when intolerable representations or affects arise. In the second case, the vulnerability of the subject is greater, in that in the intersubjectivity with another body the interchange is subject to surprise, to a share of the unforeseen, to a different look that is narcissistic or disqualifying in effect. And, above all, once the sexual act is over, there remains an impregnation with the vibrations of the experience, a sweet or bitter taste, according to the illusions awakened, the affective use that has taken place, the approval or disapproval of the superego, the narcissistic wounds, the expectations of loving and being loved, and so on.

Notes on perception and sensation

Perception is the process through which a living organism becomes conscious of stimuli. Perception is always perception of a relationship. It constitutes what is given immediately, the first to be given. It is the function that attends, successively, to the stimuli that flow constantly and are entered in the record of sensations, affects, representations. The world is perceived from that accumulation of flowing instantaneous events. The collection of impressions links the different perceptible qualities one with another.

The living body is a mass that feels, a burning mass, continually shot through with images, sounds, pressures, odours. These perceptions are associated with imprints on the memory and then involve memory function (Freud, 1900a, “Regression”). Perception immediately decodes the various perceptions with which it is bombarded, starting with the pleasure-unpleasure polarity in a conscious or tanconscious form. Recollections of perceptions enter the memory. To the sensorial perceptions derived from outside events impressed on the five senses are added perceptions derived from the interior of the body (kinaesthetic, self-perceptive, etc.). One step further, and we encounter the affective perceptions: a look of hate, a scornful laugh, a wounding word, an aggressive pressure, a breath of love ….

Freud (1900a) worked out a scheme linking the perceptive with the motor pole. Perceptions are conscious by definition; responses at a motor level are not. Stimuli set in motion “incipient movements” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 209), which are associated with the quality perceived, forming a sort of halo around it. The perception rapidly installs itself as a sensation that prolongs the earlier one and echoes through the responses it generates.

The sensations or perceptible qualities show their motive physiognomy “enveloped in a living significance” (Merleau-Ponty, p. 209). They consist of various attributes: quality, intensity, extent, duration. Analysing the sensorial world enriches the approach to sensuality by allowing access to “a life of my eyes, of my hands, of my ears, which are so many other natural egos” (p. 231).

The mass of experiences affords a glimpse of the fabric of which it is composed, the partialities of which it is constituted, the fragments that mark every love-life. One “is” one’s body beyond what is imaginable, in that one inhabits a first corporeality marked out by affects, experiences, and the inexhaustible universe of language.

Perceptible experience is a vital process, which puts us in contact with the world about us. At the same time, the invisible is taken up in the visible when we are connected with parts of our body that we do not see or which we shall never see, which we perceive obscurely and sketch in our thoughts (Merleau-Ponty, p. 205).

Merleau-Ponty makes a profound study of perception and sensation from a phenomenological point of view. I want to highlight the richness of his observations on the interchange between the sensor and the sensible, between qualities, or, if you like, between the external sensations that irradiate a certain life-style with their “power of magic” and the sensor, the one who goes in search of them through an act of the senses. He says:

The sentient and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually external terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sentient by the sensible. It is my gaze which subtends colour, and the movement of my hand which subtends the object’s form, or rather, my gaze pairs off with colour, my hand with hardness and softness. … Apart from the probing of my eye or my hand, and before my body synchronises with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning, [p. 214]

This is a beautiful description of a meeting of two bodies that mutually perceive each other and feel each other, alternately occupying the place of sensor and sensible, in which the quality of magic impregnates the atmosphere and sensations are potentiated and displayed on the background of the natural egos of the parts of the body that attract or repel each other. The sensorial functions are redistributed in the body, reviving, so to speak, the basic vicissitudes and properties of corporeality, moving from the category of the living to that of the inanimate. Merleau-Ponty writes: “As every sensation is, strictly speaking, the first, last and only one of its kind, it is a birth and a death”.

It is a profound communion of the senses, which acquires a different dimension when the body is in the situation of having had sex—that is to say in an affective context in which the attraction of the object and the capacity of receptivity towards it acquire the greatest relevance. Now the senses are covered in an erogenous wrapping and seek an object that will acquire existence by either desire or love. One plane covers another, and the sensory-perceptive stimuli begin to be under the direction of sexuality.

If, as Merleau-Ponty says, “every sensation implies a germ of a dream or depersonalisation” (p. 215), the blossoming of this germ allows us to watch the world of voluptuousness (see chapter three), in which sensations are transformed, change their qualities, are thrown into confusion, change places with each other in a movement of regression, while desire is blindly uniting one body with another.

Sensitivity varies from one moment to another. It depends on the differential thresholds in relation to the attributes of sensation. There will be bodies that are more or less sensitive, and bodies that are specifically sensitive to definite stimuli. For that reason, every sensual experience is unique, and any generalization in that field is impossible.

I want to emphasize the profound, immeasurable value of the world of the senses, the conglomeration of experiences anchored in the live productions of the sense of the body, in which the essential circulates, adhering to the flesh, the eye, rhythm, temperature, pressure, colour, the perceptible universe of sensoriality. “The perceptible has not only a motive and vital significance, but is no more than a certain manner-of-being-of-the-world which proposes itself to us from a point in space, which our body picks up and assumes if it is capable of doing so, and sensation is, literally, a communion” (Merleau-Ponty, p. 225). It is a communion with the world without words, in a primal language, a language of the skin and the viscera, a code of archaic affects.

The space of the skin-ego

The skin-ego (D. Anzieu, 1985) is a precursor of the ego anchored in the epidermic covering that contains the image of oneself. As early as 1970 we find a precursor of the skin-ego in the concept of senti, which Anzieu formulates in close relationship to what Spitz called “the co-enaesthetic universe”, Anzieu includes the notion of sensorial coverings, among which he mentions the “bath of words” or “bath of prosody” that the infans receives from its primary object. One of the principal functions of the skin-ego consists of distinguishing the outside from the inside, what belongs to me from what does not belong to me. He writes (1990):

… the projection into the psychism of the surface of the body, that is to say the skin, constitutes that doubleness, that interface, to speak in modern scientific terms, which is the ego. In fact, tactile experience possesses the peculiarity in relation to all other sensorial experiences of being endogenous and exogenous at the same time, active and passive. … Tactile sensation allows the basic distinction between the ‘within’ and the ‘without’. … I am speaking of the skin in its incidence on the psyche, that is to say what I have called the Skin-Ego.

Among the many functions of the skin-ego I should like to quote those of holding of the psyche, of support and container of the inner world and of sexual excitation, of localizer of the erogenous zones, and of the recognition of the difference between the sexes.

In my perusal of the sense of the body, I come across this basic imaginary structure for the linking or rule of the inaugural perceptive and instinctual disorder.

The skin-ego as precursor of the ego rooted in the biological body is a primal starting-point for thinking of the trophic flow of sensuality. It is an imaginary intermediate space, which links the archaisms of the senses, affects, and partial instincts, enveloping them in its phantasmatic covering of skin, in its own Gestalt [Ichgestaltungen] from which the subject organizes his affective and instinctual ego.

The functions of the skin-ego are eminently at the service of the life instinct. It is enough to look through the pages of Anzieu’s book to prove this observation, even when Anzieu does not disregard the connections with the destruction instinct and perverse fixations or masochism.

The skin-ego is required as an intermediary between the mother and the infant in the process of fusion or individuation. To be armed with a good skin-ego implies the emergence from the inaugural chaos of early psychic experiences biologically supported in an imaginary container provided by the epidermic envelope. This means to be “decked out” with all the bio-psychological arse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• FOREWORD
• Introduction
• 1 The sense of the body
• 2 The body in psychoanalysis: the nucleus of stone
• 3 Feminine orgasms
• 4 Feminine virginities
• 5 The dissolution [Untergang] of the Oedipus complex in women
• 6 Faithfulness–unfaithfulness
• 7 On passion and passionate sensuality
• 8 Feminine masochism: eroticism and the human condition
• REFERENCES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX