The Impossibility of Sex

Stories of the Intimate Relationship between Therapist and Client

Susie Orbach

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921056
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In this book I have struggled with certain words without a satisfactory conclusion. I am unhappy about all the words used to describe the person who visits the therapist's consulting room. Is she or he a patient? Well, sometimes yes. Certain individuals like that word because it captures for them the sense that there is something wrong, an emotional illness. Is she or he a client? Again, sometimes yes. Certain individuals like that word because it connotes a kind of consultative process. Is she or he an analysand? Certain individuals like this word because it conveys something about the process of a therapy and it has a symmetry: analyst–analysand. I myself find that all these words capture something about the therapy and the therapy process but are considerably less than perfect. In what follows I have chosen to use the words interchangeably, as well as the words psychotherapist, therapist and analyst. In the text, in the musings in italics, I have usually referred to the primary carer in the person's early life as mother. I realize that this is not always the case. There are fathers who have primary responsibility for their children from birth and there are relatives and nannies who fulfil this role. Rarely in my clinical experience of seeing adults has this role been an enterprise between two people in the way that it is becoming for some couples with children today. We have yet to see the effects of joint child-rearing on adult psychologies so I have retained the notion of the mother or mother substitute, a notion which will have to be expanded as the generations now raising children make new arrangements between them. I have also chosen for simplicity's sake to use the word 'she' throughout for the personal pronoun rather than 'she or he'.

The Impossibility of Sex

It started off pretty alarmingly. No sooner were they through the door than Maria started shouting. It was the shrieking of someone in terrible anguish putting her emotional case before me, for that moment the judge and jury of emotional life. Carol, the accused, sat on the sofa next to Maria, emanating stillness. One white, one black, one calm, one wild — mirror images of one another. I could not tell whether Carol's stillness would continue or whether she would be drawn into an escalating fury and the whole room would take off. It was a matter of waiting and seeing.

Some couples invite you into the centre of their relationship by having their rows in front of you. Some show the sourness between them. With others it is the contempt that often conceals deep disappointment. What occurs in the first session can be like a tableau, capturing the essential elements of the couple's relationship.

Maria's shouting was extreme and compelling. Such fierce rage could signify some terrible sense of injustice, some hurt too heavy to quiet. Was she coming to therapy to make sure it was heard and addressed? It took more than a few minutes to make out the context of her rage. Betrayal, abuse and deception were the condemnatory words that Maria threw at her lover, each word increasing her ire.

I am not a therapist who is inclined to see the expression of anger as necessarily positive in itself so, although I was looking for a place to intervene, I needed to wait, to take the measure of what was occurring. As the anger reverberated across the room I looked at the two women facing me. They were both elegant. Carol was tall and sat with a very straight back. She had fine features, a peachy white skin and softly curling shoulder-length hair held with a couple of ebony- and ivory-coloured combs. She was dressed in a stylish black suit. Her nails were manicured. A luxuriously supple deep brown wallet-type briefcase leant against her left leg. She had the style of an architect or a designer whose clothing and looks radiated an unworked-at confidence. I guessed that she was in her late thirties. Maria was also very stylish and beautiful. She had tiny features, short-cropped curly black hair, chocolate-coloured skin. The casual but elegant bohemian flavour to her dusty-green cotton jacket, beige boots and brown linen pants went along with her free expressiveness in the room. Maria was an African-American, first-generation educated. Her clothes made me think of her as a poet, artist, publisher or writer. I could not quite peg her age but I had the sense that she was younger than Carol, in her early thirties.

They were a striking couple. I could have kept my eyes on them for a long time without losing interest. While Maria continued to shriek, Carol remained silent. I was taken by her continuing stillness. Where did such sphinx-like calm come from? Was there a division of emotions in this couple – Maria angry and Carol still? Were Maria's expressiveness and Carol's quiet a part of what drew them to each other? How was Carol able to accept the rage that was directed at her? Was this usually how it was with them or had the therapy session skewed their stances in this contrasting way?¹

After several minutes it looked as if Maria's frustration would propel her to shake Carol violently. Interceding at that moment, lest it was the stillness that was increasing her rage and my quiet was now adding to it, I simply said, 'I can see how terribly upset and angry you are, Maria. But I wonder if the two of you could back up a bit to tell me what's brought you here?'

Earlier in the week Carol had outlined to me on the telephone some of what was bringing them to seek couple therapy at this point. They had been together three and half years. Four months earlier a friendship Carol had with Sonya, a university lecturer some ten years older than her, had developed into an affair. Maria was threatened and upset. She thought she was about to lose Carol, although Carol insisted she did not want their relationship to end. Carol was trying to work her way out of her sexual relationship with Sonya but it was still causing both Carol and Maria tremendous pain. They had decided on couple therapy as it seemed they needed a place to talk through what was happening.

When I open the door to a new couple I never know what I shall encounter. Is this a couple who have come to try to stay together? Is this a couple who have come to break up? Is this a couple who are no longer able to feel love for one another but are entwined in ways that make separation impossible to contemplate?

What kind of challenges and dilemmas will this couple present me with? How can I be sure to take sufficient account of each of them as individuals, as well as a couple? Can I be even-handed, sufficiently empathic to each one, not hearing their relationship through the filter of my own relationship and the relationships of my friends? How can I ensure that an unconscious moral filter does not distort how I listen and what I hear when our values are dissimilar?

Carol and Maria began to talk about the crisis that had precipitated the great anger and distress that I had witnessed. There were plenty of appeals from Maria for me to affirm how wronged she had been but as Carol talked and showed her pain the dominant feeling shifted to confusion and bruising. Although they were in difficulty as a couple, there was a vibrancy and aliveness between them. It was clear that this was a relationship that neither was about to relinquish. The energy that passed between them was charged. It was passionate, argumentative, insistent and urgent. I began to think of Carol's affair not as an attempt to leave Maria but as her way of trying to address something that was not right in their relationship. I wondered what it was.

For a year prior to Carol's affair with Sonya, sex between Carol and Maria had been sporadic. For the first two years of their relationship, their sexual life had been blissful, imaginative and highly erotic. Then it had tapered off. Life: going to work, shopping, cooking, dealing with relatives, making social plans, arranging for the plumber or who would be home for Chloe, Carol's seven-year-old, funnelled their daily contact into the pedestrian. Dissatisfactions – the normal kind that come up when ecstasy gives way to the business of ordinary life – began to surface. Differences and pressures arose. The demise of their sexual passion had a certain logic.

As for many couples who experience a similar change, sexual intimacy, once irresistible and exciting — the way to connect and communicate – turns humdrum. Sex becomes less frequent, less urgent, and moves from being an opening up and exploration by two people of one another to becoming a block between them, an act surrounded by expectations, disappointment, worry or routine. Sex is now a hurdle to get over rather than an exquisite exchange. It is almost impossible to imagine that the person in bed next to you was once sexually irresistible. Impossible to remember the time when the way their face looked in repose, when they smiled or walked into a room was an erotically loaded moment. And so it was for Carol and Maria. They were partners but rarely lovers. By day they each hoped for an erotic night-time tryst with the other but, engulfed by the business of living, the contact failed to materialize. Despite the story they told themselves about it, there was a loss for both of them, anxiety and some despair. It was not surprising that Maria freaked out when Carol got involved with Sony a. The affair had all the hallmarks of how Carol and Maria had come together. It challenged the idea that it was okay between them that sex had disappeared.

Perplexingly and dramatically, exciting, lustful and irresistible sex had come back into their lives with Carol's affair. It had prompted (as these things can) the kind of crisis in their relationship which meant that making love for Carol and Maria was suddenly very compelling, very exciting and very significant. There was renewed dynamism between them. Their love, desire and commitment to one another took centre stage. Gone was the dismaying near-celibacy of the previous year in which a cosy, warm and supportive ambience seemed to have banished passion. Drama and danger appeared and with it sexual passion.

It was Maria, whose more open, sexual and sexy manner seemed to go along with her rage and her demand for justice, who articulated the confusions from her side. During the period of relative celibacy, her femininity and attractiveness had felt consigned to the reject pile. Carol's affair had ignited the passion between them but it had still made Maria feel that she was unwanted. She had been wobbly and angry and had veered between thinking she could understand it and a feeling of being used.

For Carol, her affair had, paradoxically, highlighted how much she valued and wanted Maria. Since she had taken up with Sonya, Carol had found Maria fantastically sexually attractive in a way that she had not during the previous year. Maybe it was inevitable, Carol ruminated. By threatening the relationship she saw Maria as a separate and highly desirable person, and no longer part of her. Their closeness had made them too much of a unit, absorbing their strong personalities and eclipsing their individualities.

Carol was puzzled by why this should be and although I had some thoughts that might illuminate this problem which can beset couples, I stayed quiet while I listened to Maria to see what she made of all this.

Maria was less measured. Her rage was still rampant as she accused Carol of always 'looking for the exotic because that's what makes her feel alive'. Sonya, she complained, was 'Carol's latest quest to charge herself up by getting close to "ethnics"'.

Sonya was Asian, Maria African-American and Carol was upper-middle-class English with a twist. She was a Jew from an anglicized and assimilated family, educated at a private school and confused, Maria suggested, about where she belonged. Something about cleaned-up and educated 'otherness' – Maria was Harvard-educated and Sonya went to Oxford – charmed and attracted Carol. It was part slumming, part trying to find her place. She found other misfits with whom she could brave and shock the British class system.

Although on the face of it, Maria and Carol's views could have been interpreted as antagonistic positions, they seemed rather similar. Both pointed to the importance of separateness as an important feature of an alive sexual life for them. Both linked difference with the erotic. Both equated excitement with otherness. I did not rush to explore the links between what they were both saying because I was not quite clear where the therapy was headed or what they wanted from it. In individual therapy one has the luxury of following whatever makes sense in the moment. Stumbling over whatever is at hand and straying wherever one might be led are features of therapeutic inquiry, so that conversations in therapy have different parameters to those of ordinary conversations. Working with a couple demands that the therapist be more aware of what is wanted by both of them and this can force a kind of definition. Beyond the report of Carol's infidelity, I was not sure whether they were in therapy ostensibly to help Carol give up her lover, to help Maria accept Sonya or to discuss the weaknesses in their sexual relationship or their relationship in general.

The session had started with Maria expressing her hurt and rage at Carol, while Carol took her punishment. Now I needed to clarify what hopes they had about what might emerge from the sessions. In a quiet but authoritative voice Carol stated clearly that she wanted to try to stop seeing Sonya and that the therapy was part of her mission to do so. She was committed to Maria, wanted to stay with her, and she wanted to repair the hurt. Maria wanted to stay together too but she did not feel she could go on unless Carol guaranteed that she would not see Sonya at all and would accept that she had wronged her. Maria wanted to be able to trust Carol again.

Trust is one of the most overused and yet ill-defined concepts brought to all relationships. It has great weight attached to it but it is also most delicate. The hurt of broken trust often propels an individual to seek therapy when a relationship ends or is endangered. By contrast, a frequently expressed sentiment at the beginning of a therapy is that the person feels safe in the therapy because they feel they can trust the therapist. Although there is a way in which, of course, I understand what this means — therapy is confidential, it is dedicated to understanding and making comprehensible, and so on – at another level the use of trust as an idea is ironic, for the process of therapy reveals how very difficult it can be to trust. We may trust at one level but often when trust has been eroded what we see is its fragility.

Not uncommonly a central aspect of the therapy relationship is the investigation of how great the impediments to trust are on an unconscious level. Individuals find themselves encountering their own resistances and hindrances to trust even when they believe they are trusting and when they most need to be so for their own development. They then discover that they do not easily surrender or trust another to care or to hold something precious and meaningful for them. Early disappointment which has gone unrecognized and unacknowledged means that most people have a store of repeated hurtful experiences that has bowed their notion of trust in ways that they are often unaware of. People crave trust and believe that they enter new relationships with their capacity to trust intact. It is more often the case that they consciously suspend their distrust, for when their trust is threatened it soon collapses, revealing how tangential or fallible it is.

So Maria's aim to trust Carol again, and her wish for Carol to take responsibility for having 'wronged' her, meant that we would have to clarify what trust signified to her to see whether what she was wanting was viable. How might she be able to trust Carol again? What could Carol do? What did Carol need to guarantee? What would trusting Carol require of Maria? Who had responsibility for that? Was Maria's continuing distrust of Carol a way of staying in the hurt and in feelings of betrayal?

Although psychoanalysis can seem excessively laborious in its examination of the commonplace, its questioning of everyday ideas, such as trust, allows us to understand the subtlety of our desires, conflicts, feelings and concerns. The kind of reflective conversation that marks out psychoanalytic conversation depends upon questioning the habitual and the understood to clarify, extend and make sure that we portray more accurately what we long for. This is not so much navel-gazing – the mendacious term used to dismiss the study of the subjective — as it is a different kind of discourse on human experience and intersubjectivity. Through examining in depth the issues that arise when individuals, couples or families are in difficulty, we extend our understanding of what human relationships are about for all of us.

Maria complained about the fracture in their relationship: she had lost an unqualified belief in its trustworthiness and in Carol, She worried that she would never again be able to fully relax with Carol or quell her need to be alert to every nuance of Carol's interest beyond her. An examination of trust led us to hear how much distrust she evinced, how dismayed she was about feeling unsure of Carol, and how fearful she was that what had happened between Sonya and Carol had irrevocably altered the shape of their future relationship. Of course the latter was true. There was no way to press the delete key on the affair as if it – and the accompanying betrayal and hurt had never happened.

Both Carol and Maria experienced some relief in having this stated. It is often an unarticulated wish of the couple visiting a therapist that she will be able to achieve what the couple has been unable to do: to restore the relationship to what it was, as though it had just fallen off the shelf, broken into pieces and required simple gluing. In my naming the obvious, that is to say the fantasy in Carol and Maria's minds, and dispelling the myth of an easy repair, it was possible to go forward. Not pretending was important. They both knew very well that the events had changed both them and their relationship.

But then we had to avoid being ensnared by an attitude that the affair had changed everything. We needed to avoid the trench which might encourage Maria to become wedded to being a victim and Carol to carry endless guilt. It would be better to see whether understanding the affair – why it had happened and what it meant – could allow both Carol and Maria to get out of the grip of an emotional policing so that they could come together again. Carol's declaration that she would not do it again could assuage one part of their joint distress but it could not make right what had gone wrong. It was that tension and the short-term insolubility of that predicament that needed to be accepted.

An enormous amount of ground had been covered in this first meeting. We now had a basis for couple therapy. What had started with a shriek had turned into an agenda: how to trust and how to understand the psychological factors that had led to the demise and then to the resuscitation of their sexual life and what might evolve from that. We agreed to meet weekly.

Some months later I noticed a change in the character of the sessions. There was an excitement and an intensity about them akin to the atmosphere that a new love affair can bring. Thinking about seeing Carol and Maria brought a smile to my face. I looked forward to them as though with their entry into the room something vibrant was about to happen.

Their lives together were a triumph over their upbringing. Carol, essentially unparented, raised by a nanny and sent to boarding-school at an early age, as though to efface everything Jewish about her, had connected with Maria, brought up with her four siblings on the North Shore of New York's Long Island, where her father worked as a carpenter and her mother as a school teacher. Neither woman would have predicted that she could have crossed the class, ethnic and national divides as strikingly as she had. Ten years earlier Maria would never have dreamt of living in London. But a combination of the lesbian culture in which they circulated and Carol's work in environmental design had opened up the transatlantic world for them. They were women of their time, free to work, to enter social territories that had previously been off limits, to be more or less open about their sexuality, to map their own lives. They inhabited their lives rather than merely adapted to the roles assigned to them.

Sonya by now had begun to disappear as the issue. She had become absorbed into their extended circle and this made her less threatening to Maria. The topic of trust was being addressed. The personalities I had been introduced to in the first session were filling out and it was very easy to be taken with them both. They were extremely attractive, articulate women with appetites for their interesting work – Carol in environmental design and Maria in landscape architecture. There was much in what they were struggling with in their lives that went to the heart of the preoccupations of women today. They loved their work and found it very meaningful but they did not want it to overtake them. Because they were women brought up in the shadow of a time when economic support within marriage was still just about on offer, they battled internally with the confl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• A Room with a View
• The Vampire Casanova
• Belle
• Footsteps in the Dark
• Fat is a . . . Issue
• Two Parts Innocent: Two Parts Wise
• The Impossibility of Sex
• And So
• Reflections and Questions
• Thanks
• End Notes