In Search of Aphrodite

Women, Archetypes and Sex Therapy

Chelsea Wakefield

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317592853
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

What does it mean to be "in search of Aphrodite?" For most women, sex is complex, and more than a juxtaposition of body parts. Women sense the possibility of depth, meaning, even transcendence, but in a somatically disconnected, sexually superficial world, it can be difficult for a woman to discover her inner fire, define who she is sexually, and confidently communicate this to her partner.
Part philosophy, part treatment manual, In Search of Aphrodite addresses women's sexual problems from an inspiring, creative perspective, integrating Jungian Psychology and sex therapy. Readers will deepen their understanding of the sexual psyche and how this realm impacts women's lives, as well as what the author calls the journey of Sexual IndividuationTM.
Chelsea Wakefield covers a variety of topics such as healing ancient wounds, resolving inner conflicts, exploring sexual essence, identity, scripts, primal instinct, desire, fantasy, longing, and more. She offers pathways to sexual enrichment and improved communication with a partner. Sexual archetypes are introduced and organized around the author's Sexual Essence Wheel. Gatekeepers and Eros-inhibiting archetypes are described, along with what to do when treatment stalls.
This book is appropriate for:
• Clinicians who are nervous about venturing into conversations about women's sexuality
• Clinicians who are comfortable with sexual topics and are curious about new interventions
• Sex therapists who want a treatment model that acknowledges the multidimensional aspects of sexuality
• Jungian analysts and Jungian oriented practitioners who want helpful tools for addressing sexual issues as an invitation into individuation
• Pastoral counselors and spiritual guidance practitioners who seek to heal souls wounded by sexual trauma and sex-negative teachings
• Women who want to explore their sexual psyche and define their sexual essence, and men who wish to better understand the sexual depths of women.
Rich with case histories and an "Inner Cast of Characters" that clients can explore, this resource will help women discover joyful embodiment, innate eroticism, and sexual pleasure!

Part I

History and Backstory

Sexology and Jungian Psychology—Strange Bedfellows

Chapter 1

Ancient History and New Views

“Your body knows its heritage and its rightful need

and it will not be deceived.”

Kahlil Gibran

In Ancient Times, Sexuality Was Revered

There was a time in antiquity when women’s bodies were viewed as divine vessels with magical powers that corresponded with the rhythms of the moon. During her moon cycle, a woman’s body could bleed without dying. A woman’s body brought life into being, and then sustained that life with the milk of her breast. The nearness of a woman’s body could cause a man’s sexual organ to rise, and her capacity to give and experience pleasure had no limit (Eisler, 1996). There was a time when sexuality was revered as a mystery and viewed as a source of cleansing, having magical powers to heal. Sexuality could elevate consciousness, even enlighten. Sexual union with a temple priestess was seen as having the power to recivilize, reinstate humanity, heal the wounds of war, and make men whole. From what we know about these prepatriarchal times, there were few restrictions around women’s sexual expression. Sex was not burdened with territoriality or shame. Children born during that time were considered a gift of the Divine Mother rather than the property of a particular man. Children were raised and cared for by the community at large and no child was considered illegitimate (Eisler, 1996; Gimbutas & Dexter, 1999; Qualls-Corbett, 1988; Savage, 1999).

As the monotheistic religions gained supremacy, our deep connection with the Great Mother was undermined and made taboo. The concept of property became established, and women became part of that property system. The right of sexual access to women’s bodies was considered a reward for conquering warriors and for those who held power. As this happened, women’s sexuality became increasingly conscripted, and over time, the rights of women to determine anything in their own lives was abolished. The lineage line became increasingly important for the inheritance of property. Virginity and sole sexual fidelity (for the woman, not the man) gave men the assurance that their fortune was passing to a child of their own bloodline. Heavy punishments were enacted for the woman who dared stray outside the dominion of her father’s governance, and then her husband’s. By the time the Greeks began to record their epic stories, women and their bodies had been conquested and demoted from sacred chalice to male property for the purposes of either procreation or recreation.

The church became a powerful force in the subjugation of sexuality, the denigration of the body, and the distrust of all things instinctual. Pleasure for the sake of pleasure alone became vilified and strictly forbidden. Virginity became elevated to the highest state and women were split into two categories, Madonna (exemplified in the celibate nun) and Whore. Riane Eisler’s (1996) Sacred Pleasure is a master work that provides a sweeping history of the cultural, economic, and religious forces that have shaped the fear and prohibition of pleasure and conscripted women’s sexuality. Another excellent treatise on our fear of the body and the senses is Coming to Our Senses, by social philosopher Morris Berman (1990).

Philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault (1990a, 1990b) has written definitive works on the social control of sexuality and pleasure. He emphasizes that pleasure must be discouraged in a society where efficiency and productivity hold the highest value. St. Augustine formulated the theology of “original sin,” and named woman as entirely responsible for the fall of man. Sexuality was deemed a necessary evil, only allowable for the purpose of procreation. During the middle ages, women were viewed as decidedly corrupt and filled with insatiable lust, which needed to be strictly controlled. Celibacy and the cloistered monastery became a place of protection from these dangerous temptresses.

The promotion of desexualized purity (even for married women), reached its height of idealization in the Victorian period. During that time, no decent woman would express any interest in sexual pleasure. Amid their placid, sedentary lives, many women suffered from a malady called “hysteria.” The symptoms were thought to be caused by a “wandering uterus.” The cure became wildly popular among respectable Victorian women. It involved a manipulation of the genitals until “paroxysm” was achieved. The waiting rooms of the doctors who practiced this cure were filled to capacity. During this same period, there was a growth of prostitution among the working class, whose clientele consisted of wealthy Victorian men (Maines, 1999; Slick, 2007).

The Birth of Sexology

Sexuality has been a central part of our human experience since the dawn of time. When it comes to sex, we all speak the same universal language as we did at the dawn of time: moans, grunts, gasps, laughter, tears, panting, screams, and sighs. Sexuality is laced with archetypal themes, and the joys and sorrows related to sex are a central part of the human story. Sex has always been a focus of curiosity, confusion, conflict, and conversation. It has been studied by philosophers, theologians, scientists, doctors, artists, and poets, who have pondered it from every conceivable direction.

The scientific study of human sexuality and sexual dysfunction became established in the mid-1800s. The most significant work of that era was Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis, published in 1886. Havelock Ellis was another important sexologist who published a six-volume series in 1936 entitled Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Radical for his time, Ellis’s work asserted that women were sexual beings who had sexual needs and desires just like men (Berman, Berman, & Bumiller, 2005). Margaret Sanger forwarded women’s sexual freedom and opened the first clinic to disseminate information about what she called “birth control.” She did this in an era when it was illegal to do so and was arrested for violating “indecency” laws, which only served to escalate public awareness regarding ways in which women could choose whether to become mothers. The work of Ellis and Sanger began a pendulum swing away from the virtuous, asexual Victorian Woman, as people began to consider that women might have sex for the purpose of pleasure. In the 1950s, Alfred Kinsey conducted face-to-face interviews with 12,000 people and compiled a massive amount of data about the diversity and frequency of human sexual behaviors, which showed that the private behaviors of ordinary Americans was significantly different from the publicly promoted “norms” (Berman et al., 2005; Masters, Johnson, & Kolodny, 1995).

Freud

Sigmund Freud entered the scene towards the end of the Victorian era and began to publish works related to sexuality in the early 1900s. His ideas regarding psychosexual development continue to have vast influence on psychological theory today. He believed that the sexual drive (libido) was the primal motivating force that underlies all of life (albeit largely unconscious). Sexual instincts were always seeking gratification, and the conscious “ego” and the regulating “super-ego” served to redirect these animalistic lower drives (“id”) into civilized outlets. The inner tension created by this conflict was always seeking discharge. When repressed, it produced neurosis, when sublimated (redirected), it led to the creation of great art and civilization (Stein, 1998).

Freud was a voice in the wilderness of suppression advocating pleasure as an important component of life. He made it possible to have open conversations about sex, but he also did significant sexual disservice to women. First, there was his theory of penis envy. He then generated a powerful mythology regarding what he considered the “mature” and “immature” orgasm. With a lack of knowledge regarding female anatomy, he considered the clitoris to be the immature focus of sexual pleasure, which would be abandoned by healthy adult women, when they shifted their interest to the “proper organ of receptivity,” the vagina, and graduate into the “mature” vaginal orgasm. Freud engendered untold misery for two generations of women, who thought they were neurotic or repressed because they could not achieve an orgasm through intercourse alone. Unfortunately, there are still women who suffer under this false paradigm even though William Masters and Virginia Johnson established that all orgasms originate through either direct or indirect clitoral stimulation (Berman et al., 2005), and Shere Hite’s (1976) research showed that only about one third of women ever reach orgasm through simple intercourse alone.

The Sexual Self

In 1973, John Gagnon and William Simon wrote a seminal text that began to explore the phenomenon of the Sexual Self as a central building block of our identity. The Sexual Self is socially constructed through the interaction of socialization and sexual experiences. Although sex involves instinctual drives, it also involves the enactment of a complex set of cultural meanings, which Gagnon and Simon referred to as “sexual scripts.” Our sexuality is governed by these elaborate scripts, which tell us what to do, who the actors are, what part we play, and why, how, and when the events should unfold. Sexual scripts have a performance aspect (governing the sequence and acts of sexual behavior) and a cognitive aspect (shaping thoughts, fantasies, and attitudes). Sexual scripts define what is normal, functional, moral, and acceptable. They are internalized from our early environment and continue to be shaped by media, culture, religion, peer group, and life experiences. Scripts operate on three levels: cultural (social), interpersonal, and intrapsychic (Gagnon & Simon, 1973; Kimmel, 2007).

The Sexual Revolution

The “sexual revolution” of the 1960s turned the virtuous sexual script on its head. For the first time in patriarchal history, women were encouraged to experience pleasure and to be sexually free. Although this released women from sexually oppressive scripts of the past, it did not help all women to become more sexually empowered. It did not teach women how to say no to unsafe sex (physically, emotionally, and spiritually), and it did not help women make more discerning choices about who they would “freely” share their precious bodies with.

Naomi Wolf (1997) writes about her journey into adulthood during the sexual revolution and how she navigated the dicey line between Prude and Slut. She suffered continually with an anxious awareness that winding up on the wrong side of that hard-to-discern line would be costly. It was a confusing time.

Shere Hite (1993) suggests that the sexual revolution merely put pressure on women to have more of the same kind of sex, rather than helping them redefine what kind of sex they really want to have. Sex is strongly intertwined with economic provision and Hite emphasizes that “you cannot decree women to be sexually free when they are not economically free; to do so is to put them into a more vulnerable position than ever, and make them into a form of easily available common property” (p. 91).

Bernard Apfelbaum (1995) cites an ironic downside of the sexual revolution, “response anxiety.” Women now feel pressure to respond positively (rather than authentically) to whatever a partner is doing, and return the favor, rather than just receive. This has created a whole new form of performance anxiety. “Producing” an orgasm has become the “gold standard” of a man’s sexual skills, and many women admit to faking or amplifying their orgasmic response in an effort to validate their man’s sexual skills or simply to end the effort. If orgasm is the only dimension of sexuality a woman knows, then not having one can be frustrating. If the woman has never had an orgasm, it becomes an elusive experience (Cass, 2007) that she feels deprived of, or sexually inferior about. Although the ability to have an orgasm is important to women, it is not the be-all, end-all of sexual experience, and having an orgasm does not necessarily define women’s most meaningful sexual and erotic memories (Kleinplatz et al., 2009; Ogden, 2006).

Sex in the 21st Century

Very few people have been given any useful direction for harnessing the power of primordial instincts. Instead, our instinctual lives have been shamed and condemned. For centuries, the only sex education that people had was an exhortation towards denial and prudence. The result of this is to send our instincts into the shadow lands, where they become like feral animals that begin to stalk us and break out in distorted ways.

Currently, in the 21st century, sex is everywhere. Our media-oriented culture is filled with images and story lines that tell women they should be sexual. Entire sections of bookstores are devoted to sexual information and how to have the hottest, best sex ever. Sexually explicit websites pervade the Internet along with sites to facilitate private hook-ups for every conceivable sexual fantasy or desire. Virtual worlds such as Second Life allow people to create characters of their own design, who can explore the outer reaches of sexual imagination online.

Amid this sexual free-for-all, the number one presenting complaint of women in sex therapy is a lack of sexual desire. An increasing number of men are coming to sex therapy because they don’t know how to relate or cannot become aroused in the presence of a real woman. There is a disturbing lack of awareness that real women are not porn stars (Maltz & Maltz, 2010).

Under the veneer of our pleasure-promoting society, we still have a lot of anxiety around pleasure. People are particularly at a loss regarding how to make real-time intimate connections (Resnick, 1997, 2012). Women continue to hear the vague whisperings of stern, tight-laced ancestors, whispering in the background, warning of “the road to ruin.” It is difficult for women to find the Goldilocks zone, where their “porridge” is not too hot, not too cold, but jus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I History and Backstory Sexology and Jungian Psychology—Strange Bedfellows
• Part II Sex Therapy From an Archetypal, Inner Self System Perspective Working With Archetypes, the Inner Cast of Characters, Scripts, and Sexual Essence
• Appendices
• Index