Sexuality and Gender Now

Moving Beyond Heteronormativity

Leezah Hertzmann, Juliet Newbigin, Leezah Hertzmann, Juliet Newbigin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781782205296
• eBook ISBN: 9781000022940
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Sexuality and Gender Now uses a psychoanalytic approach to arrive at a more informed view of the experience and relationships of those whose sexuality and gender may not align with the heterosexual "norm". This book confronts the heteronormative bias dominant in psychoanalysis, using a combination of theoretical and clinical material, offering an important training tool as well as being relevant for practicing clinicians.

The contributors address the shift clinicians must make not only to support their patients in a more informed and non-prejudicial way, but also to recognise their own need for support in developing their clinical thinking. They challenge assumptions, deconstruct theoretical ideas, extend psychoanalytic concepts, and, importantly, show how clinicians can attend to their pre-conscious assumptions. They also explore the issue of erotic transference and countertransference, which, if unaddressed, can limit the possibilities for supporting patients more fully to explore their sexuality and gender. Theories of psychosexuality have tended to become split off from the main field of psychoanalytic thought and practice or read from an assumed moral high ground of heteronormativity. The book specifically addresses this bias and introduces new ways of using psychoanalytic ideas. The contributors advocate a wider and more flexible attitude to sexuality in general, which can illuminate an understanding of all sexualities, including heterosexuality.

Sexuality and Gender Now will be essential reading for professionals and students of psychoanalysis who want to broaden their understanding of sexuality and gender in their clinical practice beyond heteronormative assumptions.

CHAPTER ONE

Sex and the consulting room

Juliet Newbigin

In this collection, psychoanalytic clinicians are reviewing theoretical ways of thinking about the sexual behaviour and gender presentation of individuals they meet in their consulting rooms today. And here, my subject is sex itself: sexual excitement, its nature, and its impact on other aspects of our lives. These things have, of course, always been the focus of psychoanalytic study. Freud is often caricatured as the Viennese doctor who saw sex everywhere. But, since the first decades of its development as a discipline, psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world has shifted its perspective in a somewhat different direction. Indeed, ironically, psychoanalysts have been accused of tending towards an attitude to sex—particularly sex in its experimental and non-heterosexual forms—that is even conservative and disapproving. The British Object Relations School has developed Freud’s original ideas in a highly creative direction, but one that has moved away from Freud’s nineteenth-century drive-based model. Susan Budd, in a paper called “No Sex Please—We’re British” (2001) argued that the school’s inter- and intra-personal model of relating made the focus of its concern, not bodily adult sexuality, but the emotional quality of attachment, seen through the lens of infant/parent dynamics. Because in the United Kingdom there has been from the beginning a tradition of accepting lay (i.e. non-medical) analysts, many of these were women involved in education and child-development, like Anna Freud and Melanie Klein. Significant male figures, such as Bowlby and Winnicott, were paediatricians. Presenting psychoanalysis as a way of thinking about the nature of the bond between mothers and children proved a valuable route towards the acceptance of psychoanalytic ideas, and these ideas have played a significant part in the culture of post-war Britain (2001, p. 62).

The timing and nature of the Oedipus complex was an important area of disagreement in the Controversial Discussions (King & Steiner, 1991) that led to the setting up of the different groups in the Institute of Psychoanalysis, and a tendency to avoid reopening these differences may also have inhibited exploration of bodily sexuality, according to Marilyn Lawrence (2012). But the subtle shift of psychoanalytic interest in the direction of pregenital experience has had a significant impact on the way in which relationships are described. Peter Fonagy (2008) reports on the results of a survey that he conducted with Mary Target into the incidence of language related to sexual behaviour in psychoanalytic journals. He says:

Some still consider the hallmark of psychoanalysis to be its concern with sexuality (Green, 1995, 1999; Spruiell, 1997). Yet it is an open secret that this cannot be the case. The major theories of psychoanalysis today place the crux of their clinical accounts elsewhere—principally in the domain of emotional relationships. A frightening survey of the use of sexual and relational language in the electronically searchable journals of psychoanalysis showed a dramatic decline in words in psychoanalytic articles directly concerning sexuality. Contrasting this decline with relational theoretical words indicates that the decline is not in jargon words per se but in concepts specific to sexual theoretical language. ... Even contrasting general relational words (such as love, affection, intimacy) with general sexual words (referring to body parts, sexual orientation, and sexual acts) shows the divergence of slope between the two domains.[Fonagy, 2008, p. 11]

He agrees with Budd that object-relations theorists have produced a highly nuanced understanding of interpersonal dynamics in the consulting room, but one that tends to steer away from details of bodily sexual experience. He says:

Psychosexuality . must be rooted in sensorimotor embodied experience. An explanation that fundamentally sees the psychosexual as a symptom of object relations misses an essential aspect. Erotic experience is unarguably intensely physical, and the failure to incorporate this aspect, or the reduction of physical arousal to a social construction, appears to us to create a distorted and shadowy representation of human sexuality that cuts it off from its roots in bodily experience.[Fonagy, 2008, p. 17]

Dagmar Herzog describes similar developments in the United States in the recent collection edited by Alessandra Lemma and Paul Lynch, Sexualities: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives (2015). In Lemma’s chapter, entitled “What happened to psychoanalysis in the wake of the sexual revolution?” she describes psychoanalysts’ resistance to the Kinsey reports published in 1948 and 1953 (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953) and, later, to Masters and Johnson’s book, Human Sexual Response (1966). In both cases, the profession came out strongly against the broad and varied picture of sexual behaviour that emerged from this research, which included a much higher incidence of homosexuality than had been previously thought. Instead, at the time, psychoanalysts placed an emphasis on the need for stable heterosexual relationships for sexual health and stressed the importance of love and kindness in the sexual encounter. Promiscuity and thrill-seeking sex were roundly condemned, and homosexuality, which became stereotypically associated in many clinicians’ minds with the practice of meeting up with partners for casual sex, was firmly pathologized, as detailed in Kenneth Lewes’ well-known book, Psychoanalysis and Male Homosexuality (1995). Speaking of the attitudes prevalent among US psychoanalysts in the years after World War Two, Herzog says:

. . . I want to propose that the animus against homosexuality could also be seen as part of a much deeper-seated ambivalence within the psychoanalytic community about the centrality of sex of any kind to the psychoanalytic project. For sex was both the topic analysts thought they were experts on and they were deeply anxious about being too strongly associated with. This uncertainty and discomfort had as much to do not least with the aggressive Nazi, as well as the conservative Christian, attacks of the 1930’s on psychoanalysis as not only an overly “Jewish” enterprise but also an overly sex-obsessed and therefore “dirty” one.[Herzog, 2015, p. 23; italics in original]

Freud, recognizing the unruly, excessive aspect of the libido, saw its inhibition or attempted suppression as the foundational cause of neurotic symptomatology. However, he also argued for the value of sublimation, and he believed that sexuality should be expressed in an appropriately managed way. In the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he suggested that lingering too long on foreplay led to perversion (1905d, p. 211) and that, although we were all familiar with the polymorphous pleasures of early childhood, these should be sidelined in adolescence, when genital sexuality became “subordinated to the reproductive function” (p. 207). Any other outcome led to psychological problems. Peter Fonagy (2008) argues that in spite of Freud’s bold free-thinking, his eventual developmental model was shaped by evolutionary theory. Although his embodied picture of sexual excitement captured its compulsive and often ruthless quality, Freud’s concept of libido was finally described in Darwinian terms as a manifestation of biological necessity. Fonagy points out that the impulse behind the development of object relations theory was need to correct the “scientism” of this picture, and, in spite of its tendency to foreground infantile experience and parent–child dynamics, it adds the emotionally engaged dimension that is downplayed in Freud’s earlier drive-based account of psychosexuality.

In this chapter, I introduce a discussion of psychosexuality that is relational, but also more reflective of the world we currently inhabit. I am intending here to reevaluate the excessively judgemental stance of psychoanalysis in relation to “perversion”. I see this as an aspect of the austere view that tended to be taken towards the sexual freedom that emerged after contraception released women from the threat of unwanted pregnancy and allowed people to pursue sex for pleasure and excitement, both in and outside the context of committed relationships. In addition, the demographics of the psychoanalytic profession—a preponderance of older, white middle-class people—also threatens to leave the attitudes of clinicians out of touch with the modern world.

Contemporary theoretical approaches

I have been quoting the work of Mary Target and Peter Fonagy, UK clinicians who have drawn attention to the recent lack of focus on psychosexuality. They have explored the ideas of the French analyst, Jean Laplanche and the US analyst Ruth Stein. Fonagy and Target have produced an influential body of work, which convincingly links the capacity in childhood to develop affect regulation to the experience of secure attachment to caregivers. They suggest that it is the caregiver’s appropriate “marking” of the child’s emotional communication that allows the child to recognize its own mind in the mirroring capacity of the other. Recognizing that a child’s active sexual behaviour, such as masturbation, tends to meet with negative responses from adults and that incest fears cause adults to shield children from adult sexuality, both Fonagy and Target suggest (Fonagy, 2008; Fonagy & Allison, 2015; Target, 2015) that negative or inscrutable mirroring leads the child to internalize an ego-alien sense of its own sexual pleasure, which contributes an air of mystery to sexual experience when the adolescent comes to approach it for him or herself. They both reference the thinking of Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (Laplanche, 1995; Laplanche & Pontalis, 1968).

The particular character of the French context gives Laplanche’s theory an emphasis that is different from that of Anglophone psychoanalysis. He was a psychoanalyst and a translator of Freud’s writing into French, and although Lacan was his teacher, his own position is distinct. But he was also a philosopher, within a tradition of Continental philosophy that has been particularly concerned with phenomenology. This approach differs from that of the British and American schools, rooted in a position born of logical positivism and analytic philosophy, which takes for granted an objective world. Instead, since Husserl and Heidegger, Continental philosophy has viewed the individual as entering a world that is met through pre-existing interpretation. Laplanche’s theoretical approach to Freud is concerned to go beyond what he thought of as the limitations in Freud’s revolutionary ideas. Freud was unable, thought Laplanche, to maintain what he describes as Freud’s “Copernican” insights into the intersubjective origins of the mind and strayed back into the “Ptolemaic” world of scientism and evolutionary biology (Laplanche, 1997). He adhered to Freud’s early seduction theory and argued against its abandonment. But Laplanche’s interpretation of the adult’s “seduction” of the infant is different, seeing it as the necessary means by which the infant’s own internal world comes into existence. Laplanche claimed that, as well as the basic relationship between mother and child based on the day-to-day business of survival, the mother inevitably unconsciously transmits traces of her own sexuality to the child in the process of handling and feeding, sending the child “enigmatic” messages that the child responds to with excitement (2002). This excitement is, however, beyond the child’s capacity to understand, and, as it is also mysterious and unrecognized by the mother, the child is left to struggle with this arousal alone. Nevertheless, it is in the struggle to grasp the communications from this lost object of excitement that the child’s internal world comes into being. Laplanche argues that Freud was wrong in describing this early stage of infant development as “auto-erotic”, as it arises from an experience that is profoundly related, but in a way that endows it with a mysterious and tantalizing quality, where something enormously desirable is sought but never completely grasped. Only afterwards, in a hopeless attempt to process the experience, does the infant find a means to prolong the pleasure in an auto-erotic form, thus giving rise to the infant’s earliest experience of sexual fantasy. Laplanche’s picture emphasizes the relationship between infant and mother as an asymmetrical encounter with a much larger, mysterious other, who evokes a powerful mixture of feelings that are always beyond reach (2005).

It is his practice to describe this area as “le sexuel”, in order to distinguish it from the term “sexual”, which exists in English but not in French. When Laplanche uses the term “sexual”, he means it to designate the objectifying, Darwinian attitude that he thinks Freud slips in and out of while describing this crucial aspect of development in the Three Essays—reverting to the Ptolemaic language and losing sight of his revolutionary insight. Laplanche argues that this enigmatic and frustrating search for a lost object of desire will come to underlie all later sexuality, which will never quite match the promise of fantasy. The view of Fonagy and Target where the adult’s disapproval of the child’s excitement or the failure of attunement on the part of the mother makes sexual excitement feel as if it is alien to the self, is understood in Laplanche’s terms as an inevitable aspect of human existence, but one that is also creative and accounts for what is excessive and momentous in sexual experience.

Target’s version of Laplanche’s view is expressed within the language of British Object Relations, which stresses the reciprocity of mother–infant relationships as opposed to the asymmetry that is more familiar in the context of French philosophical thinking. For her the difficulty of sexuality arises from moments of maternal failure, or moments when the baby’s demands are unbearable for the mother, making the difficulty between the mother and baby a mutual one:

One may imagine a number of linked reasons for this sort of misattunement. The mother may unconsciously associate frustration and insistent drive pressure from another person with a sexual relationship: the baby implores and bullies the mother in a way she may unconsciously associate with a partner in a state of sexual desire ... .

In both of these situations of repeated inadequate mirroring, desexualisation and sexualisation of the baby’s drive pressures, he may internalise a representation of his state coloured by his mother’s mind especially her unconscious associations.[2015, p. 51]

In spite of these differences, the important issue that I wish to take up here is that these authors’ ways of thinking give us an account of sexual excitement as something unmirrored and enigmatic, which takes place outside the bounds of socially sanctioned ways of relating. Fonagy has described it as “borderline”, in that sexual behaviour assumes a freedom to violate body boundaries that would, in other circumstances, be outlawed (2008). I have been arguing that psychoanalysis has developed a tendency, for understandable reasons perhaps, to downplay what is unruly, excessive, and aggressive in sexual experience, in pursuit of a more domesticated fantasy of a “healthy” sexuality that is “non-perverse”, loving and properly practised in the context of stable relationships. I think that, if we are prepared to open this up to include what I would suggest is a more truthful picture of actual sexual behaviour, we will be able to recognize with more acceptance the highly unstable mixture of feelings associated with sexual response, which can ignore body boundaries and include cruelty, disgust, and shame, all of which, as Freud himself pointed out, contribute to excitement in the process of overriding them (1905d, p. 152).

The writings of Ruth Stein are very helpful in finding this more complex, darker emotional register. Like Fonagy and Target, she uses the theories of Laplanche to develop the psychoanalytic theorizing of sexuality beyond drive theory and object relations, to take account of its particular quality.

She says: in my recent work (Stein, 1998a, 1998b, 2006) I have suggested that we are in need of a phenomenological, experience-near probing into actual sexual experience, sustaining a stance that differs from our habit of reducing the meaning of sexuality to the workings of the impersonal drive of drive theory, or to a sexualized derivative of, or defence against, early object relations. Both drive theory and object relations theory have been used to encase too narrowly the complexity of human sexual experience, and their reductionist use in totally explaining sexual experience may have been an important factor in the insidious marginalization of sexual experience and the forgetting of its otherness. The theoretical reduction of sexuality within psychoanalysis has enabled many of us to hurry over experiential aspects of sexuality our patients describe (or defend against describing) to us. Patients tell us of encounters or practices that are sometimes strange, excessive, “perverse”, and irrational, and we at such moments hastily reach for explanations that help us normalize such experiences.[Fonagy, 2008, pp. 44–45]

She suggests that we need to find a language that recognizes better its enigmatic quality. She says:

I have proposed that we look at sexual experience as comprising three strands. Psychosexuality is characteristically woven with specific, uniquely poignant body sensations; it is excessive of normal functioning, of work rationality and purposefulness, and even of containment; and, finally, it is enigmatic, being based on the mystery of the desired other’s unconscious intentions and the mystified longings they call forth in our embodied mind.[2008, p. 46]

Stein’s approach lays a stress on the excessive quality of sexual arousal that involves overriding the strictures of self-control imposed by the superego, which is the legacy of early social relationships. In sex, we claim for ourselves the right to a pleasure that, in childhood, under normal circumstances, seemed mysterious and unmirrored by parent figures. Robert Stoller, coming from the direction of US Ego Psychology, nevertheless was aware that one of the main components of sexual excitement was the transgressive feeling of overcoming internal inhibitions. He said: “To judge by the evidence thus far available regarding erotic excitement (versus dull rubbing), tension is either necessary for or improves excitement. Excitement is tension is psychic friction is anxiety-to-be-surmounted is anticipation of danger (pseudo-danger) is elements of hostility” (1991, p. 1095).

Sexuality today

Like Ruth Stein and Robert Stoller, I think the truth is that sexual excitement is sought precisely for its excessi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction
• I: Sex and the consulting room
• 1. Sex and the consulting room
• 2. Homophobia, heteronormativity, and shame
• 3. Working with sameness and difference: reflections on supervision with diverse sexualities
• II: Desire
• 4. Losing the internal oedipal mother and loss of sexual desire
• 5. The primary maternal oedipal situation and female homoerotic desire
• 6. Mending the Symbolic when a place for male same-sex desire is not found
• III: Perspectives on gender
• 7. From bisexuality to intersexuality: rethinking gender categories
• 8. Notes on a crisis of meaning in the care of gender-diverse children
• 9. Crossing over
• 10. Gender now
• 11. A person beyond gender: a first-hand account
• REFERENCES
• INDEX