Sweet Dreams

Erotic Plots

Robert J. Stoller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781855757295
• eBook ISBN: 9780429919602
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A previously unpublished work by the author. 'It was like discovering a previously unknown recording by the Beatles. On a 2007 visit to the author's widow, Sybil, she handed me a manuscript. The author's last book had been placed in a publishing queue by his retiring editor. After Bob's death Sybil was told that the publisher had discontinued psychoanalytic books. It languished on a home shelf in Los Angeles for sixteen years. I was holding the final work by psychoanalysis's most eloquent writer on sex.' - From the Foreword by Dr Richard Green

Part I
Plotting Plots

This book, as is true of my other books, is nothing but a chapter in the “book” being written these past more than 30 years on “sexuality”, that is, gender identity and erotics. The large book will, I trust, have more chapters, but no ending. I do not know its plot, its full structure, all the characters, where it is heading, or what is its purpose.

The first phase of this continuing project was “Gender Identity”; the second is “Erotics”. I think of the term “erotics” as having sexual meanings: a subject for study (such as “economics”); a set of behaviors, including fantasies such as daydreams; dynamics of an aspect of mental life (with underlying biologic dynamics); and people who are erotics—the way we say “lunatics”—seen from the perspective of their erotic desire, people such as Sade or my informants, such as Bill, a professional pornographer whom you will soon meet, or Fay, who lives for love, who first arrives at my office with Bill.

Getting more involved in studying erotic excitement, I saw that erotic daydreams, including pornography, not only offered a way to understand someone’s erotic life but could give a wider view of personality. As, over the years, that awareness grew, I have had to confront my failure to jump in and mine the raw material. What I now know to be my resistance—avoidance—I used to think of as “simply” boredom, disbelief, conviction that these scripted fantasies had no value for theory or its confirmation; unwillingness to get into disreputable stuff that could harm my reputation, and uneasiness about descending into certain dark areas of human behavior and fantasy. And there was no path in that jungle. But the subject was being pushed at me from above by patients and informants and pulled toward me from below by my curiosity. The latter is strong; so the more I understand the dynamics of erotic excitement, the more the fun in exploring people’s erotic lives. The clues accumulate.

In Part I of this book, I shall concentrate on pornography—its functions and its dynamics; in Part II on pornography—for—one: the functions and dynamics of erotic daydreams. The bridge between the two is Fay, who Bill had thought could be a porn performer. Let us start with pornography. In brief, I believe:

1. That a piece of pornography is a daydream
2. That its manufacturer sees as an erotic daydream for a group of people
3. For each of whom it represents a primal daydream
4. That summarizes the person’s erotic preferences
5. And mirrors that person’s whole character structure far beyond its erotic components.
6. In that summary, buried but retrievable, is the history of that person’s life from birth on, the successes and failures, the traumas and frustrations, the defenses and reparations induced at every stage and in every important relationship.
7. Carrying such heavy freight, the daydream made manifest in the pornography is usually too dangerous to be revealed to others, not the least because it has not been safely concealed by being rendered unconscious.
8. Too embarrassing to be revealed, it is hidden in behavior, erotic and non-erotic,
9. But could be roughly deciphered were a detective to follow the daydreamer twenty-four hours a day.
10. Nonetheless, much would be lost to the observer in sub-liminal motions and nuances;
11. Even the microscope of psychoanalysis cannot uncover the full text
12. Since the difference between more exciting, less, or none depends not only on the gross text, but even more, on the nuances.
13. For every detail counts.
14. Though daydreams can be muffled, transformed, disguised, and falsified in the telling, pornography cannot. Pornography reveals itself. It can be looked at repeatedly, elements do not disappear, nuances can rise from subliminal to glaring, association can be sought and found, interpretations tried, theories tested. Yet the investigation is not a Gestapo device: the owner can sill resist, be off, refuse.

Were a therapist regularly to evaluate patients with the favored pornography as the test device, its power would probably be lost. Psychological tests shortcut that long process of developing confidence; they are for saving time and tricking resistance. The sense of trust, participation, curiosity, and desire to search might convert into wary alertness; the examination aura psychologic tests can create. Asking people to tell their dreams, erotic or otherwise, is threatening enough, and to then bear down on the questioning is invasive: one had better have a strong relationship with the person being studied. For daydreams should not be ripped from the womb; the cooperative use of pornography can, at times, allow for a natural delivery. At any rate, I rarely use the technique. Daydreams, being built from humiliation (weakness) to protect against humiliation (weakness), are far more revealing than night dreams; their exposure promises humiliation (weakness).

In this book—this chapter in the unending book—I study erotic daydreams gathered from two sources: pornography and Fay, who flirted with the idea of working as a porn actress in order to realize her daydreams. I trust you find these two sources not only complementary but detailed enough so that, with them, you can test your theories and mine on origins of erotic excitement.

Bill brings up an aspect of pornography worth noting here. I have wandered for years, aimlessly I thought, through the study of pornography. But once the idea surfaced that my hypotheses on erotic dynamics found in individuals needed to be checked on large populations, I saw another use for pornography. Each genre—e.g., transvestism, bondage and discipline, nude nubiles—is usually manufactured for the delectation of lots of people. Are those folks, however different their erotic desire, under the spell of similar forces (aesthetic choices)? If I could get into the minds of people who make pornography, the experts—directors, writers, producers, actors, publishers—I could bridge between the erotic scripts of individuals and of cultures. That idea brought me to ethnography, a discipline opened up for me by Professor Gilbert Herdt (Herdt and Stoller, 1990).

Though not appropriate to discuss now, this “urban ethnography” of erotics has enlarged both my view of ethnography—which I think is a field congenitally but not irreparably crippled by its institutionalized failure to know how to talk intimately with the people studied (Herdt and Stoller, 1990)—and psychoanalysis, which is congenitally but not irreparably crippled by its institutionalized failure to include culture (except, too often, in the most general, vague, grandiose, jargon-poisoned ways).

Fascinating for me has been the development of my sense of erotic daydreams, especially pornography, from being for people an uncomplicated, unproblematic stimulant to its being an illuminator of genres (e.g., a particular perversion), to biopsy of a person’s erotic life, to biopsy of total character structure, to representation of a life (its history in facts and in psychic structure), to a mirror of one’s place in culture, to a biopsy of the culture at large, to marker against which other individuals and cultures can be measured.

It began long ago: once upon a time. A transvestite informant dropped off his pornography. It said nothing to me: the text and the drawings had no meaning and asked no questions. A few years later, on knowing more about transvestism, I found that the pornography now—as did its former owner—made some sense. Then, over the years, one or another patient or informant would tell his or her paradigmatic erotic daydream, and, once in a blue moon, I got to see a piece of the pornography that exemplified such a daydream. Then I began talking with the people in the porn business; one would refer a colleague, the colleague referred a colleague, two or three would come in at the same time, people would talk of others whom I eventually met; the individuals took on added dimensions so that they were not just individuals but parts of a network. The plot thickened.

Now there is a tapestry; the threads are forming patterns. For instance. Twenty-five years after I saw those first pieces of transvestite pornography an informant from a new generation, a different world, and another approach to erotics, talks of the career of the artist who he knows, who—so long ago—had drawn those transvestite images. Or: treating a pedophile, Pat (Chap. III), I hear, as he moves toward adult heterosexuality, of clubs he frequents, where women do lewd dancing. Unknown to him, I am talking with one of those women, for she also is an actress in pornographic films. Her husband is the man who knows the artist of the transvestite pornography. The transvestite who gave me the pornography, whom I have not talked to in over 20 years, was an acquaintance of the transvestite you will meet in Chap. IV, who has been demonstrating to me for almost 30 years the progression of his transvestism. Such networking is a form ethnography that reveals a culture—if one takes the time and has the luck—that is not approximated by the standard ethnographies of the anthropologic literature.

You will not find in this book, except at this moment, my conviction that biologic forces play their part in erotic life.

I leave aside that knowledge because the research on which it is based is still too rudimentary to explain such details as why one man is excited by blonde women and another by an erect penis, why one woman always chooses men who victimize her and another is a grand mistress of the whip, why one man is turned on by wearing women’s underwear and another finds his true love in depictions of a crucified woman. In time, biology shall take its place in explaining erotics, but we shall not live to see that.

The literature on pornography is large and accelerating. Knowing the risks and losses of failing to do so, I have nonetheless not become familiar with most of these works. For the present, I feel pressed simply to report the observations with which informants flood me. Later, that mass of information can be more fully digested, the process helped by my becoming familiar with the ideas and arguments of others who also study pornography. My decision to proceed this way is necessary but need not be excused.

I summarize the dictionaries (Websters, OED) on Plot; all the meanings below apply, at least metaphorically, to this book. A parcel of land, as for a garden; a parcel of land as a place of burial; a sample of census; a collection of land parcels; a ground plan; a sketch of a narrative structure or poem; a secret common nefarious scheme; a chart or map; a ship’s control centre; a patch, spot, or a mark. To Plot. To draw to scale; to mark a site on a map or chart; to measure out land; to locate and mark a point by means or coordinates; to create a curve (graph) from discrete points; to represent mathematically by a curve; to plan evil; to contrive a story; to form into a ball; to solidify; to scorch.

Plots. Plotz.¹

¹ For the non-Yiddish reader: to burst or explode.

CHAPTER ONE
Pornography and a theory of erotic excitement

Because it presents itself as if transparent in intent and lean in its grammar, I did not find pornography useful for my studies on sexuality (gender identity and erotic excitement): no questions beckoned from within it. It seemed to serve people simply as a masturbatory aid, a sometimes better illusion-device than their own daydreams. Its functions looked too uncomplicated for dissection and microscopic analysis. The stories were clear, repetitive, linear, and obvious; and I lacked the curiosity and good sense one needs for approaching the obvious. This obtuseness was made easier by my taking for granted that I was the center of an erotic universe divided into two categories: the normal (i.e., heterosexual acts) and the abnormal (i.e., everything else).

In the early 1960s, as mentioned in the Introduction, I was given a collection of his pornography by a man, less a patient than volunteer subject, who, for a few years, told me about his fetishistic cross-dressing, i.e., transvestism. In one of those guilt-fits that strike such men, he dropped off his porno booklets. I glanced at the covers, read a few words in one, checked my impressions by looking at a second, and tossed them into a storage box. The material seemed trivial, frivolous, poorly produced, tedious and—had I bothered to concentrate—incomprehensible as an inducer of pleasure. I could grant that these stories, with their illustrations, excited transvestites, but, unable to know what was exciting to them, much less why, I presumed (that center-of-the-universe-natural-law-effect) these stories were unfathomable manifestations of a psychopathology.

I do not remember now why, a few years later, I looked at the material again. The boredom returned, again curable by discarding the object. But this time, on returning the booklets to their box, I wondered why I had no response. Which brought the idea that “no response” is a response. In the years between the second and the first time, I had become interested in the dynamics of transvestism and was beginning to get a better sense of it. I was now more open to information about transvestism, in fact, having found that perversions are not necessarily infectious, about perversion in general. That awareness should let one begin to become intimate with the interior of a perverse person.

And so I switched from realist to nominalist; from absolutist to relativist; from a universe whose geometry had me as its center to my simply being one of the fragments, all of which move. At that moment—I know now but did not then—an interest in studying origins and dynamics of gender identity began to make room for an interest in studying erotics. Bit by bit and with increasing focus, I came to value pornography as a tool in the study of erotic behavior.

First, it represents a person’s favorite storyline. Therewith, we have an up-to-date version of a lifelong daydream. Second, the text stands still; it can be repeated in identical form. Third, since both owner and observer look at the same text (“text” can include illustrations, aural material, movies and videos), we have a common ground to which we can return as we each spin out our version of what we are studying. Fourth, existing in the tangible world, the material can be tangibly referred to: “What about this detail in the upper left corner?” an operation much less precise with a reported daydream. Fifth, though one cannot get people to report exactly their daydreams (and not just erotic); no such problem occurs with pornography. Sixth, we can observe, as time passes, shifts in importance of details: interpretations of what is going on may change, parts of the background may move to foreground, and so on. Seventh, once revealed to another, pornography is harder to deny or minimize than a daydream. Eighth, our repeated examination, together, of a piece of pornography, decreases its owner’s uneasiness about revealing himself/herself to me. Ninth, the above advantages make it easier for its owner to use the pornography in therapy as a jumping-off point for associations. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• PART I: PLOTTING PLOTS
• PART II: INTO THE FIRES OF LOVE: FAY DREAMS DAYDREAMS
• PART III: BENEATH THE DAYDREAM
• INDEX