Shame and Sexuality

Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture

Claire Pajaczkowska, Ivan Ward, Claire Pajaczkowska, Ivan Ward

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317724063
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why do human beings feel shame? What is the cultural dimension of shame and sexuality? Can theory understand the power of affect? How is psychoanalysis integral to cultural theory?

The experience of shame is a profound, painful and universal emotion with lasting effects on many aspects of public life and human culture. Rooted in childhood experience, linked to sexuality and the cultural norms which regulate the body and its pleasures, shame is uniquely human. Shame and Sexuality explores elements of shame in human psychology and the cultures of art, film, photography and textiles.

This volume is divided into two distinct sections allowing the reader to compare and contrast the psychoanalytic and the cultural writings. Part I, Psychoanalysis, provides a psychoanalytic approach to shame, using clinical examples to explore the function of unconscious fantasies, the shame shield in child sexual abuse, and the puzzling manner in which shame attaches itself to sexuality. Part II, Visual Culture, is illustrated throughout with textual analysis; contributors explore shame and sexuality in art history, politics and contemporary visual culture, including the gendering of shame, shame and abjection, and the relationship between shame and shamelessness as a strategy of resistance.

Claire Pajaczkowska and Ivan Ward bring together debates within and between the discourses of psychoanalysis and visual culture, generating new avenues of enquiry for scholars of culture, theory and psychoanalysis.

Part I

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Psychoanalysis

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Chapter 1

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The inherent shame of sexuality

Phil Mollon

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Despite a seemingly sexually liberated culture, sexuality is still disturbing and puzzling. Freud's original emphasis on the importance of sexuality has largely been lost in much contemporary psychoanalysis, displaced by a focus on ‘attachment’. However, his intuition that sexuality and civilization are in some sense in conflict may have profound implications, throwing light on the nature and function of our linguistic culture and the fetishistic nature of human sexuality. Sexuality, it is argued here, is the paradigmatic object of shame and repression, tending to incorporate all else that is repressed and in opposition to the quasi-linguistic structure of culture. Human beings may tend to long for experience that is unmediated by the linguistic – and this is the promise and the terror of sexuality.

Why is sexuality shameful? Consider a quotation from a person suffering from Tourette's syndrome – a neurobiologically based condition displaying a compulsion to utter obscenities. Its significance will become apparent as my argument unfolds.

‘See, FUCK MY FUCKING FUCKING FUCKING CUNT, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, FUCK, I finished tenth year of high school FUCK MY FUCKING CUNT and the new year started, the eleventh, and I went to school, and I was in school ten minutes when one of the teachers that knew me FUCK

MY FUCKING CUNT and was teaching at the school when I was there before….’ (and so it goes on)

(from a paper by Martindale 1977, quoted in Rancour-Laferriere
1985: 226)

Why is such speech, with the intrusion of the crudely sexual, so disturbing – embarrassing – shameful (especially when heard rather than read)?

I propose the following thesis. Sexuality is frightening for human beings, because its biological imperative threatens the symbolic nature of our sociocultural world and personal identity. The development of the symbolic sociocultural world may actually have depended upon the repression of sexuality (leading to displacement of signification and the creation of symbols – as in dreams and our communicative language). Because sexuality is threatening and frightening, it is repressed or banished from discourse (even in our supposedly sexually liberated society) and is referred to only indirectly. Sexuality, like the body, is clothed. Because sexuality is the fundamental object of repression, it tends to incorporate whatever else is repressed – so that a person's most shameful and unexpressed needs and narcissistic injuries tend to become sexualized. One hundred years after the publication of Freud's Three Essays on Sexuality, much of psychoanalysis has lost touch with the importance of sexuality. Freud said:

I can only repeat over and over again – for I never find it otherwise – that sexuality is the key to the problem of the psychoneuroses and of the neuroses in general. No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.

(Freud 1905: 115)

Ironically, psychoanalysts today do not talk about sex very much – preferring instead to focus on issues of attachment, dependence, fears of abandonment, aggression and envy.

Shame is associated with the desires and other aspects of self that are not allowed access to shared discourse. The objects of shame are driven from the group, the tribe, the conversation. This barring from discourse is not necessarily the same as repression, which prevents mental contents from finding access to the language of consciousness. The object of shame may be conscious (allowed access to private internal discourse) and yet denied entry to the social realm of shared discourse.

We are all prone to shame and embarrassment – the potential is ever-present whenever people are gathered together, since misperception, misunderstanding and failures of empathy are always possible when human beings interact. Shame arises in the gaps and failures in human communication, in the misconnection of expectation that one has of another (Mollon 2002). Every situation of embarrassment is one involving disrupted expectations that one person has of another. Embarrassment is an immediate shock reaction experienced at the moment of disrupted presentation of self in a social situation – shame is the close associate of embarrassment, but may be a more enduring, and sometimes lethal, pain arising from the memory of the scene of embarrassment.

This response of shame and embarrassment to failures of communication and expectation is very basic and hard wired in the human brain. It is displayed even by preverbal infants, as demonstrated in the ‘still face’ experiments (Tronick et al. 1978) when mothers were asked to make eye contact with their babies but avoid smiling or being facially responsive – the infants became distressed and averted their gaze in a manner that seemed a precursor of adult shame (Broucek 1991).

However, some are more shame-prone than others. For example, a successful lawyer always feared that his outward persona, with high social status, would be discovered to be a sham and he would be revealed to be ‘a disgusting pile of muck’. His childhood relationship with his mother had been such that he felt he could win her love and approval only if he were compliant and hid any trace of potential rebellion or other characteristics that might evoke her formidable scorn and condemnation. He became adept at presenting himself in a favourable light to her and to others – inwardly harbouring mounting rage, at her and all the others whom he placed in the same position of needing to be pleased or placated, and at himself for his chronic inauthenticity. His achievements and professional acclaim gave him fleeting gratification but no real satisfaction, being associated with contempt for both self and others. I have called this kind of situation ‘psychic murder syndrome’ (Mollon 2002), using a metaphor of a Stepford Child, derived from the film in which the menfolk of a small American town systematically kill off their actual wives and have them replaced by robotic replicas that are perfectly compliant with their desires. In psychic murder syndrome the child feels that his or her actual self is unwanted, a faecal self to be disposed of – the disgusting pile of muck – and to be replaced by a self compliant with mother's desires. Erikson (1950) linked struggles over shame and autonomy with the anal stage of Freud's psychosexual scheme – and, indeed, the child may come to feel that those parts of the self that do not meet mother's approval are only fit for disposal down the toilet. This is part of the basis of the ‘false self described by Winnicott (1960).

Some of the areas of self most likely to be foreclosed from social discourse are those of sexuality – and indeed sexuality has always been deeply associated with shame. In the German language, the genital region is called die Scham, the pubic mound Schamberg, and pubic hair Schamhaare, and the labia Schamlippen (shame lips). For some reason, the ‘private parts’ are universally regarded as private and not for public display or reference. Why is this?

One patient, Jeanette, reported, with tremendous embarrassment, how she had learned to masturbate and give herself an orgasm at the age of seven and had indulged regularly in this over the subsequent years, but always feeling some sense of shame afterwards. Her turning to her own body for pleasurable stimulation had been given impetus partly by her feelings of loneliness and lack of emotional stimulation – her lone parent mother tending to be preoccupied and often intoxicated. One day, whilst at school aged 14, Jeanette had experienced a sudden ‘realization’ of the nature of her sexual activities and was overwhelmed with intense feelings of shame and a terror that others would know her secret. She had rushed home and tried to tell her mother, who failed to respond in an empathic manner but instead reacted with anxiety and disapproval. Subsequently Jeanette developed a disabling social anxiety, which turned out to be based on the fear that the word ‘masturbation’ would crop up in conversation and that she would go red. Naturally her anxiety about blushing and this being seen tended to bring about the very effect she feared whenever a conversation turned to sexual matters. Jeanette's adult feelings of shame centred not only on her childhood masturbation, which she regarded as excessive, but also on her view of herself as having an abnormal interest in sex. Discussion of her sexuality in psychotherapy led to a rapid diminution in her feelings of shame and associated anxiety.

Parents often do interfere with the child's autonomy in relation to its exploration of the body's sexuality. Amsterdam and Levitt (1980) suggest that a common source of painful embarrassed self-consciousness is the negative reaction of a parent who looks anxiously or disapprovingly when the child is engaged in genital exploration or play. They argue that the mother's disapproval of the child's autoerotic exploration may be one of the first narcissistic injuries experienced by the child. Amsterdam and Levitt point out that, in contrast to the ‘gleam in the mother's eye’ which Kohut (1971) emphasized as a foundation of the child's sense of self, mothers in our culture do not normally beam whilst their infants play with themselves. They argue that in this way the child's dream of his or her own perfection is destroyed and the source of pleasure – his or her own bodily sensations – now produce shame. Exploration of sexuality has led the child out of the Garden of Eden. One might say that at such a moment the child learns that not all experiences and desires are admissible to shared or social discourse. A division occurs within the self – between what can be admitted to discourse and what cannot – and the latter is associated with shame. Freud wrote of something similar in his paper ‘On the Sexual Theories of Children’ (1908), in connection with the child's suspicion of the spurious explanations given by grown-ups of where babies come from:

With this, however, the child experiences the first occasion for a ‘psychical conflict’, in that views for which he feels an instinctual kind of preference, but which are not ‘right’ in the eyes of the grown-ups, come into opposition with other views, which are supported by the authority of the grown-ups without being acceptable to him himself.

(Freud 1908: 214)

Sexuality is the paradigmatic quality to be banished from discourse. It is, I suggest, inherently disturbing to the child (Bollas 2000) – partly because the child cannot make sense of it. There is something inherently mysterious about sexuality – dimly recognized yet not understood by the child. Consider the phantasy of the primal scene, the actual or imagined intercourse of the parents in the eyes or mind of the child. The child is fascinated by, and excluded from, a scene that he or she does not understand. If she enquires, she will not receive a reply that satisfies. The child may be aware of bodily excitements that are experienced as both pleasurable and puzzling. These do not easily find a way into conversations with parents, or indeed with other children. In our contemporary society, children rarely observe animals mating, or giving birth. Thus the question ‘Where do babies come from?’ is not easily answered in a way that satisfies the child. The great puzzle of sexuality, with its attendant curiosity – the state of not knowing – is itself experienced as shameful.

We might contrast this with another pleasurable bodily activity – eating – which is public and social. The child knows about eating – there is no mystery to it – the child sees adults eating and knows that it is essentially the same activity that he or she engages in every day. Eating and desires to eat can be referred to publicly and explicitly without shame. This remains the case for adults. If a man were to go up to a woman and say ‘Hello would you like to fuck?’, this would usually not be a very successful means of initiating intimacy (there may be exceptions) – whereas ‘Hello would you like to have dinner with me?’ is much more likely to result in a favourable response. Although this is obvious enough in terms of our cultural experience and expectations, I suggest that the reason for this contrast between oral and genital activities is not immediately obvious. Why is the oral desire more socially acceptable and validated? There is no embarrassment in saying ‘I'm really hungry – I'm dying to eat something!’ – whereas one would normally need to have established a degree of intimacy with a person in order to say ‘I really want to fuck you!’

Activities and desires associated with the bottom and the genitals undergo repression insofar as they are banished from language, either in part or completely. Freud emphasized the factor of the human erect posture – and what he called the ‘organic repression’ of smell and sexuality:

With the assumption of an erect posture by man and with the depreciation of his sense of smell, it was not only his anal erotism which threatened to fall a victim to organic repression, but the whole of his sexuality; so that since this, the sexual function has been accompanied by a repugnance which cannot further be accounted for, and which prevents its complete satisfaction and forces it away from the sexual aim into sublimations and libidinal displacements…. Thus we should find that the deepest root of the sexual repression which advances along with civilization is the organic defence of the new form of life achieved with man's erect gait against his earlier animal existence.

(Freud 1930: 106)

Note Freud's phrase regarding the repugnance that ‘cannot further be accounted for’, suggesting that he was aware of the puzzling nature of the repression of sexuality. In the Three Essays, he emphasized that the dams which restrict the flow of sexuality – ‘disgust, feelings of shame and the claims of aesthetic and moral ideals’ – are essentially ‘organically determined’ (1905: 177). Freud also makes a number of references in his letters to Fliess to the role of smell in the ‘organic’ repression of sexuality. Thus in letter 55, dated 1897, he writes:

The principal sense in animals (for sexual as well as other purposes) is that of smell, which has lost that position in human beings. So long as smell (or taste) is dominant, hair, faeces and the whole surface of the body – and blood as well – have a sexually exciting effect.

(Freud 1886–1899: 241)

Then in letter 75, also dated 1897, he writes of:

the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright carriage adopted, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth be...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introducation Shame, sexuality and visual culture
• Part I Psychoanalysis
• Part II Visual culture
• Index