The Group as an Object of Desire

Exploring Sexuality in Group Therapy

Morris Nitsun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781583918722
• eBook ISBN: 9781135446055
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Why do people find it so difficult to talk openly about sex?

In this original and ground-breaking book, Morris Nitsun argues that desire and sexuality are key components of human experience that have been marginalized in the group psychotherapy literature.

Drawing on theory from psychoanalysis, developmental psychology and sociology, while keeping the group firmly in focus, he creates a picture of the potential in group therapy for the most intimate narrative. Highlighting current concerns about sexual identity, boundary transgression and what constitutes effective psychotherapy, detailed clinical illustrations cover areas such as:

• The erotic connection
• The dissociation of desire
• The group as witness
• Erotic transference and counter-transference

Psychotherapists and all those interested in sexual development and diversity will value the challenging approach to sexuality this book offers.

Part 1

THE WIDER DISCOURSE

1

DISCOURSES OF DESIRE

Andre Breton, one of the leading figures of the Surrealist movement in the 1930s, described desire as ‘the sole motivating principle of the world, the only master that humans must recognize’ (1937: 11). The Surrealists dedicated their work to the liberation of desire, passionately influenced by Freud's journey into sexuality and repression and the emerging revolutionary trend that sought to ‘re-sexualize’ society. They saw desire both as the inner voice of the self, an expression of authentic being, and a force that linked self to others in an empowered society. In the century that followed, the psychoanalytic emphasis on desire as the central organizing force in human experience waxed and waned, surfacing strongly in the work of Lacan and the French psychoanalysts, diminishing in the evolution of object relations theory and resurfacing in the writing of some contemporary American relational psychoanalysts.

The subject of desire has hardly been touched on by group psychotherapists, including group analysts. Yet, it represents a major challenge to the vision of the group as a therapeutic medium. Since desire is usually very private, and sexual desire in particular may harbour transgressive wishes, how far can group members go in revealing their desires in the social arena of the group, with its connotations of judgement and censure? If desire is at the core of human experience, in all its intensely personal and subjective forms, how is it represented in the group? Is it possible to give voice to individual desire in the collective of the group? Further, what happens to desire in recent group analytic theory developments which argue against an individual perspective in general, and the notion of individual centres of energy in particular, in favour of a social perspective of the group?

Throughout this book, I suggest that group psychotherapy has marginalized sexuality and desire in the evolution of theory and practice and that a critical reappraisal is needed, with the aim of establishing desire in the group domain or at least understanding the constraints that prevent it from being established. How much is the marginalization of desire a product of a particular therapeutic medium with its own, defined value system and how much is it a defence against the intensity and potential disruptiveness of desire, particularly if given free rein in a group? There is also the question of whether the group itself can evoke desire: not so much desire among the participants but desire of the group as an experience in itself. This chapter aims to provide an overall framework within which these questions can be considered, drawing on traditions that include psychoanalysis, philosophy and arts discourse.

The journey starts with Plato and moves on to Freud, the perspectives of Lacan, philosophers such as Bataille and Dollimore, and contemporary American writers such as Emmanuel Ghent, Jody Davies and Jessica Benjamin. These are mostly writers who view desire as both deeply individual and socially contextualized. Although none of them write about groups in a clinical sense, their work frequently verges on group concerns. In fact, it is interesting to see that many writers who give prominence to desire are also attuned to wider social issues and the role of desire in shaping society (and vice versa). Returning for a moment to the Surrealists, Lomas describes how they extrapolated from the poetics of desire a politics and ethics of surrealist revolt, a ‘belief in erotic desire as the agent of a critical transformation in human consciousness. Desire, unquenchable and indomitable, is a convulsive force to be pitted against the despised status quo of bourgeois, patriarchal society and religion’ (Lomas 2001: 55). This agenda was echoed in the views of a group of radical Freudians, mainly Reich and Marcuse, who advocated a revolutionary sexual programme to revitalize society (see Chapter 3).

The aims of group psychotherapy are more modest than the rad-icalization of society but they concern change at personal and interpersonal levels, and there is a question about how far change can go in the absence of seeing and knowing desire. In any case, desire is multi-form. Dimen (1995) refers to the sea of desire that envelops us. Le Brun (2001: 305) described desire as ‘neither masculine nor feminine’ and so wide-ranging that ‘we are carried away to the very antipodes of what we are’. But desire is not only about the grand passions. It is also about the wish for small and precious experiences. What is common to all levels of desire is the wish to have, to appropriate for oneself, something of the other, of the external world. Recognizing desire contributes to self-knowledge but with it comes an upsurge of conflicting feelings — a sense of the right to desire and a fear of doing so, feelings of shame and guilt about un-nameable desire, resentment about the thwarting and frustration of desire, envy of those who dare to desire and get what they want. It is not an absolute state but is embedded in the intricacies of the self and the relationship to the other. It is in relationships that desire lives or dies, prospers or withers, enriches or deprives. These are as much the themes of group psychotherapy as they are of individual psychotherapy, perhaps even more so because of the interactional setting of the group. If anything, the group, with its plural membership, pulsates with desire, providing a dense playground for the exploration of desire.

Rather than attempting a comprehensive review, this chapter is a configuration of ideas and perspectives on desire that contribute to our understanding of it as a subject in psychotherapy generally and group psychotherapy in particular. I am not arguing for or against a particular theoretical standpoint or value system, other than the substantiation of desire as a crucial aspect of our lives and a vital part of the therapeutic dialogue.

Plato — the perfect union

Although much of this chapter is devoted to the complexity of desire, it is useful to start with a familiar myth that emphasizes a simple but profound quest — the longing to find a perfect partner. The myth recounted in Plato's Symposium concerns the theory that each human being originated as a rounded whole with two faces, two backs, four arms and four legs. When the god Zeus cut these creatures in two (out of fear of their strength and aggression), this unleashed a yearning in each part to find its lost partner and return to its original state. The perfect lovers are those who have been joined together in a complete whole.

Armstrong (2003) comments that this vision of original unity has had a powerful influence on the romantic imagination in suggesting that we live with an abiding lack or longing which we hope will be redeemed in love. Echoes of this vision can be found throughout literature and psychoanalysis and are repeated throughout this chapter: the desire to merge with another is widely regarded as one of the most fundamental desires. Whereas Plato's myth offered no resolution to the problem - the one half was destined forever to search for the other — psychotherapeutic approaches have tended to emphasize resolution through a process of mourning: grieving the loss of the ideal and accepting the unavailability of perfect union.

I have previously referred to the preference for individual over group psychotherapy as an expression of the longing for merging with one other individual (Nitsun 1991, 1996). Whereas individual therapy is believed to provide a relationship that in itself will satisfy this need or provide a route to its satisfaction, group therapy is seen by some as counter to this need: having to share attention in the group and having to share the therapist frustrates and contradicts the fantasy of the one perfect other. The group is then experienced as intrusive or superfluous. In this sense, it cannot become an object of desire. I suspect that this may be more of a problem if the underlying desire for a relationship with one other is unrecognized or minimized in the establishment of a group culture. If the group takes account of this longing and deals with the ensuing disappointment and resentment, the likelihood of therapeutic integration in the group, I suggest, is greater.

Freud and desire

Freudian theory has an ambiguous status in the twenty-first century. Regarded by many as anachronistic, a curiosity, reductive in its broad generalizing sweeps and dominated by outdated biologistic and instinctual thinking, it nevertheless revealed and explored in great detail the complexity of desire in the individual and social context. Its themes remain relevant to the present-day and the centring of desire in the work of Lacan and more contemporary theorists is directly traceable to Freud's unflinching investigation of sexuality in human development.

Freud's theory of infantile sexuality and its consequences is in many ways the epic story of desire: desire that is primal, immediate and demanding, that is an intense combination of bodily urges and primitive imagination. But it is also a story of the frustration and surrender of desire. In his earlier writing, Freud envisaged this as a struggle between the pleasure principle and the reality principle: he regarded these as the two most essential but conflicting tendencies in human behaviour. The pleasure principle impels the individual towards immediate, impulsive action and instant gratification. The reality principle imposes the obstacles towards immediate gratification and the need to delay satisfaction. Between them, the individual finds an uneasy, unsettled, reluctant compromise.

Adam Phillips (1998), strongly aligning his views with those of Freud, laments the loss of the innocent and passionate desire of the child. He describes the child as ‘the beast in the nursery’, a creature that is born ‘in turbulent love with the world’ but that is tamed from early on by the dulling effects of education and social conformity. Dollimore (1999) comments on the Victorians' outrage at the idea of childhood sexuality. In spite of overwhelming evidence that this exists, there remains a fierce resistance to it. Dollimore suggests that in part this is because of the discomfort it causes adults: ‘… the child confronts adults with their own renunciation of instinct; the child is what we have lost’ (1999: 183). In Freud's vision, the infant is the ‘virtuoso of desire’ and infantile sexuality is seen as ‘a kind of apotheosis of curiosity’ (Phillips 1998: 6, 16). It is almost as though the child is lived by, or lives through, its sexual curiosity. This sexual curiosity is intensely bodily and at the same time a quest for understanding one's place in the world, in the chain of life and in the relationship with family, parents and siblings (Nitsun 1994). Desire is therefore linked to questions about existence and purpose in life and these twin lines of interest continue throughout life. But whereas existential questions can be addressed in a variety of contexts, sexual curiosity itself is dampened, repressed, dissociated.

Freud's preoccupation with the repression of sexuality and its social implications deepened in his later years when he shifted his focus to civilization as a whole and suggested that the very existence of civilization depended on the subjugation of sexuality. Dollimore (1999: 183) notes:

As is well known, for Freud the evolution, not to say the very survival, of civilization depends upon the containment, restriction, repression, sublimation and channeling of sexual desire. The early efflorescence of infantile sexuality is doomed to extinction as we become constrained, organized (fixed/fixated) as subjects in the social order, always haunted by the loss of that original libidinal freedom. Our original instinctual energies remain forever alienated in order that civilization may be, but those energies are never entirely eliminated; there remains an unending conflict between the demands of the original instincts and those of civilization. Even when the processes of repression are as successful as they can be, that conflict remains at the heart of the human individual.

Freud's earlier theories of the libido and the pleasure and reality principles yielded in his late work to the concepts of Eros and Thanatos, the life and the death instincts. Abel-Hirsch (2001) describes Eros as ‘the principle of attraction’. It is the idea of a force which ‘binds together’ the elements of human existence — physically through sex, emotionally through love and mentally through imagination. Thanatos, the death instinct, by contrast, is an unbinding force which destroys the ties of sex, love and imagination.

The concept of Eros has significant analogies to the group process in its positive and optimistic forms. Eros is not just about sex: it is about connection and relationship. Freud saw the life instinct as holding all living things together, as creating increasingly greater unities out of living substances ‘so that life may be prolonged and brought to higher development’ (Freud 1923: 258) and aiming at ‘complicating life and at the same time, of course, preserving it’ (1923: 40). Freud also described Eros as a force that creates difference. The unifying process is at the same time a differentiating one. This has a disruptive effect and creates renewal through the collision of differences, while the ultimate aim remains that of integration and cohesion. Kennedy (2001) draws attention to the disruptive, even destructive, potential of Eros, reflected in the destabilization of emotions in the passionate response, the turmoil of falling in love and the intense affects that may follow, such as yearning, jealousy and rage.

The parallel between Eros as desire/sexuality and a collectivizing force that both differentiates and unites is a potent metaphor for group psychotherapy. It is surprising that Foulkes, the originator of group analysis, an avowed Freudian who expressed a strong belief in the dual instinct theory, never made this connection or linked desire with the generative process of the group. Freud's definition of the life instinct highlights very similar processes of differentiation/ integration and cohesion/coherence to those which are commonly referred to as the core processes of group development. I draw attention to this not to make of Freud's theory a group psychology, which it is not, but to begin to explore the function of desire as a connecting and differentiating force within the group.

The major thesis of Freud's dual instinct theory, of course, was not the separate operation of the instincts but the clash between the life and the death instincts, and with this came his pessimism about the fate of desire. In his paper, ‘Beyond the pleasure principle’, Freud (1920) committed himself to a dark vision of the death instinct: ‘The aim of all life is death’, he stated, an instinctual movement towards a state in which there is a complete absence of excitation, a state of non-tension characteristic of the inorganic or the inanimate. In his view, this explained not only the conflict in the human psyche but the perpetual cycles of violence that keep not just particular societies but civilization itself on the edge of extinction. His pessimism was reflected at several levels: the destiny of society as a whole, the human struggle to keep desire alive in the face of anxiety and repression, and the outcome of psychoanalysis which he saw as more fragmentary and limited than was usually acknowledged (Thompson 1991).

In spite of the intense criticism that Freud's theories evoked, his ideas have in many ways been inscribed in western thinking. Dollimore (1999) shows how they opened up, in particular, a rich seam of thought about desire and loss in western thought. In some of this thinking, what is emphasized is not so much death and destruction as concrete events but a sense of the inherent mutability of life: the inevitability of loss and change. Dollimore describes this as a narrative of human desire riven by loss. The sense of pervasive, lurking loss animates desire, the wish to re-find the lost object, to replenish and renew the subjective world, but it can also foreclose and dissipate desire. Bataille (1987) argues that the aim of eroticism is to replace a deep sense of discontinuity (we must all die) with a sense of continuity. Bowie (1991: 165), in his fine study of Lacan, describes desire as ‘the alpha of experience already overprinted with the omega of death’. Different strategies have been propounded for dealing with this dilemma. Dollimore (1999) suggests playing mutability at its own game: instead of yearning for permanence in the relationship with desire, consider the fleeting, subversive pleasures of flirting, of promiscuity, the chance sexual encounter. This challenges a conventional morality tied to the illusion of permanence.

I have previously noted several attempts to interpret the death instinct in terms that make it more palatable (Nitsun 1996). Various writers advocate a psychological reinterpretation. Segal (1993) argues that it reflects the longed-for state of peace and reconciliation in the face of intolerable frustration that is explicable in psychological and not necessarily instinctive terms. Boothby (1991), writing on Lacan, contends that the drive aims not at the extinction of the organism as a whole but the dissolution of the self, the ego in its defensive and imaginary unity. It has also been suggested that the value of the concept of the death instinct lies not in its (arguable) status as an explanatory theory but in its strength as a critical principle. Thompson (1991) maintains that it usefully challenges conventional assumptions about human development as well as the optimism about psychoanalytic outcomes.

In spite of these reinterpretations, the dual instinct theory, particularly the concept of the death instinct, tends to evoke strong criticism. Much of this criticism has come from psychoanalysis itself, a point that is often overlooked, particularly in relation to Freud's mechanistic model of the mind. Increasingly, the Freudian meta-psychology has been revised in relational terms. However, it is unarguable that his insights stimulated a narrative of desire that holds significance until the present time and that his emphasis on the paradoxical nature of desire is as contemporary now as it was in his time.

Lacan

The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, has presented what is probably the most obscure, complex and elusive of all psychoanalytic theories. However, in one respect Lacan is clear — the central importance of desire in both the individual psyche and the analytic consulting room. Bowie (1991: 158) sums up the enormous relevance of the concept in Lacan's vision as ‘a theory of the desiring speech in which all living beings live and die’. For Lacan, desire is irrevocably linked to lack. The sense of lack is aligned to a desired other, the desire for and of the other, reflecting an ongoing quest for merging with the other, a quest that is essentially unfulfillable since the moment of satisfaction gives way to a new moment of desire, in an unending chain: ‘Desire is desire only if it succeeds in postponing something’ (Verhaeghe 1999: 151). For Lacan, ‘there is something fundamentally impossible about satisfaction itself’ (Mitchell 1982:6).

While lack is a condition of life, in Lacan's terms, its presence is re-evoked in a number of situations — entry into the symbolic area of language, the fantasy of castration, the subjection to the Law of the Father — but the main source of lack is in the original loss of the mother. This is the loss experienced in weaning and, with it, the surrender of the primary desire for mother to the more ‘normal’ socially prescribed desire of other objects. Dollimore (1999: 184) notes, ‘as desiring subjects, w...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 The Wider Discourse
• 1 Discourses Of Desire
• 2 Sexual Development
• 3 Sex And Psychoanalysis
• 4 Sex And Politics
• Part 2 The Group Discourse
• 5 Sex In Group Psychotherapy — A Review
• 6 Desire In Group Analysis
• 7 A Group Psychotherapy Perspective Of Sexuality
• Part 3 The Clinical Discourse
• 8 The Erotic Connection
• 9 The Theme Of Incest
• 10 Dissociated Desire
• 11 The Group As Witness
• 12 Sexual Pairing
• 13 Erotic Transference And Counter-Transference
• 14 Homosexuality In The Group
• Part 4 The Linked Discourse
• 15 The Therapist
• 16 Overview — Linking Theory And Practice
• References
• Index