Sexuality and the Devil

Symbols of Love, Power and Fear in Male Psychology

Edward J. Tejirian

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317211075
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

At the time of publication our understanding of sexuality relied heavily on biology, and also on morality, as was particularly evident when homosexuality and bisexuality were discussed. In this title, originally published in 1990, the author presents a compelling case for viewing the sexual dimension of life through an understanding of its symbols. The potent figure of the devil serves as his avenue of approach.

In the first part of the book, the author presents a detailed case history of a young man who began psychoanalytic therapy with him because of a terrifying conviction that he could be possessed by the devil. In the course of therapy it emerged that the devil had entered into his consciousness as a vehicle to express a complex of homosexual wishes and fears that were deeply troubling to a man whose life history had been entirely heterosexual. The author argues that the assumptions about male psychology that came to pervade psychoanalytic theory after Freud's death could not account for the nature of this young man's conflicts or for the outcome of the analysis.

In the second part of the book, the author cites historical and anthropological data to demonstrate that the depth and breadth of male psychology extend beyond the limits of what was considered normal by the neoconservative theorists who revised Freud's theories to exclude his ideas about bisexuality. Rejecting the reduction of sexuality to biology, the author asserts that sexuality can be properly regarded as symbolic, in the same way that meaningful works of art and rituals are symbolic. The power of sexual images and actions comes from their ability to combine important meaning with intensely felt emotion. Finally, the author examines the way in which culture affects sexuality through its control of consciousness and its influence on what kinds of sexual symbols may be utilized and what kinds of meanings they may express.

Part II Theoretical Considerations

The ultimate testing ground for psychological theory is the individual case. When a general theory does not adequately explain the outcomes in the life of an individual, then the theory needs modification. However, an alternative to modifying the theory is modifying the perception of the individual so that he no longer appears to be an exception to the rules of the theory. The latter alternative is a danger in psychoanalytic work. Initially, I found myself trying to fit my understanding of Frank into the framework of analytic theory as I understood it in the mid-1970’s. I have tried, in Part I, to convey some of the ways in which I began to question those theoretical assumptions. In particular, the viewpoint that homosexual feelings were “pathological” and represented a retreat from heterosexuality did not fit. In Frank, there was no retreat from heterosexuality. And as I came to understand the feelings that were behind the homosexual pressures he was battling, they seemed to have much more to do with normal human feeling than they did with anything deformed or diseased.

I wanted to present the case of Frank in detail in order to provide the reader with much of the “data base” that prompted me to propose the theoretical formulations of Part II. I expect professional readers to bring to the data of Part I their own fund of clinical experience and introspection. It is against that experience that the utility of my proposals can also be tested. Nonprofessional readers will, I trust, bring their own life experience and observations to the same task.

In our century, discourse about sexuality has taken place primarily within two frameworks. The first is the religious/moral framework, which is an aspect of the wider culture. The second is the biological/medical framework. This framework has aspired to operate independently from the religious/moral framework, and practitioners of psychotherapy from all disciplines, behavioral as well as medical, have tended to operate in their culturally defined roles as healers of the sick. Nevertheless, analytic theorists, particularly since the death of Freud, had to some extent also been operating as representatives of the religious/moral viewpoint. In this context, they spearheaded a revision of one of Freud’s basic tenets—the theory of universal bisexual predisposition. Under the aegis of the “adaptational” school especially, they reconfirmed heterosexuality as the biologically determined, “normal” sexual modality, and redefined homosexuality as a psychologically determined and pathological deviation.

The facts of Frank’s life could not be satisfactorily explained by the revisionists’ monosexual hypothesis. Instead they call for the recognition that, in men, emotional needs in relation to men and emotional needs in relation to women operate with considerable independence from each other. Sexual experience that satisfies emotional need with respect to one sex will not necessarily have the effect of reducing the desire for sexually mediated emotional experience with the other. These and other facts call for an approach to sexuality in terms of theoretical frameworks other than the religious/moral and biological/medical. One of these frameworks is the framework of historical/anthropological analysis. The other framework is the artistic/symbolic.

A central thesis of this book is that sexual action and imagery function in a symbolic sense to enable people to experience and express complexes of ideas and feelings which can only be mediated through symbols. At the center of the analysis described in Part I was the powerful, millennia-old cultural symbol of the Devil. The symbol of the Devil rose up in Frank’s consciousness because the homosexual symbols that would otherwise have mediated the complex of ideas and feelings whose repudiation was incorporated in the symbol of the Devil were not available to him. The homosexual symbols were prohibited by the culture, but the feelings expressed by these symbols were too powerful to remain entirely in repression. The case of Frank illustrates the fact that culture exerts powerful controls over consciousness by determining which symbols are permissible to mediate thinking and feeling.

Part II of this book will deal with sexuality as it functions symbolically in ritual, art, religion and—of course—Frank’s life.

The symbol of the Devil was particularly well suited to express the complex of wishes and fears that so deeply troubled Frank. It emerged into his consciousness precisely because it has served as a historical and cultural repository for feared and repudiated elements of psychological experience which have also been symbolized in the revulsion against homosexuality.

I think the case of Frank illustrates the fact that the outcome of analysis has to be viewed in cultural perspective. The therapeutic process takes place in a cultural context that can be understood but never entirely transcended. Even such basic elements of psychological experience as wishes and defenses seem susceptible to shaping by culture. Later in this book I will have occasion to repeat what I think is a basic truth: that a person is both an exponent of his culture and, at the same time, an individual in a dynamic and potentially confrontational relationship to it. This was the truth that created Frank’s dilemma. The resolution of that dilemma through the help of analytic therapy may illustrate another “truth”—that the outcome to an analysis is virtually sure to have elements of compromise between what is individually necessary and what is culturally possible.

4 Bisexuality Theory and the Biological/Medical Framework

DOI: 10.4324/9781315618487-4

In his paper “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” Freud (1937) expressed some views on the nature of human sexuality. He observed, “… we have come to know that all human beings are bisexual … and that their libido is distributed between objects of both sexes, either in manifest or latent form” (p. 347).

I think it is important to see that, in this paper, one of the last of his works to be published, Freud restated his bisexuality theory in these unequivocal terms. As I think an unprejudiced consideration of the data in Frank’s case shows, the homosexual and heterosexual themes coexisted in his feelings and both reflected important complexes of feelings in relation to people of both sexes. These facts were certainly consistent with the observation by Freud that I have just quoted. Nonetheless, after his death, a process of revision of this basic tenet got under way. It was led by medical analysts who used a medical model of health and sickness to repudiate Freud’s bisexuality theory. In their revision, heterosexuality was biologically normal and healthy and homosexuality was psychologically determined and pathological. I am going to try to show how the arguments they used were specious and had as an unacknowledged aim the reinstatement of the sexual morality that psychoanalytic theory under Freud’s leadership had challenged.

Earlier, in his 1915 footnote to his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), he had stated, “Psycho-analytic research is most decidedly opposed to any attempt at separating off homosexuals from the rest of mankind as a group of special character. By studying sexual excitations other than those that are manifestly displayed, it has found that all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object choice and have in fact made one in their unconscious. Indeed, libidinal attachments to persons of the same sex play no less a part as factors in normal mental life, and a greater part as a motive force for illness, than do similar attachments to the opposite sex. On the contrary, psycho-analysis considers that a choice of an object independently of its sex—freedom to range equally over male and female objects—as it is found in childhood, in primitive states of society and early periods of history, is the original basis from which, as a result of restriction in one direction or the other, both the normal and the inverted types develop. Thus from the point of view of psychoanalysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attraction that is ultimately of a chemical nature” (pp. 11–12).

Chronology is significant and should be taken into account in assessing Freud’s views because, over his long career, his thinking and theories evolved and changed in some respects. His writings are voluminous and complex enough to lend themselves to finding just the “right” quotation to back up the point one wants to make. In this sense, they are similar to the Scriptures, from which a quote can be extracted to justify almost any moral position. As the founder of psychoanalysis, Freud continues, through his reputation and his writings, to exercise tremendous charisma and one might quite naturally want to have him on one’s side in an argument.

In his book on Leonardo, however, Freud quotes that artist as saying, “He who appeals to authority when there is a difference of opinion works with his memory rather than with his reason” (Freud, 1910, p. 72). Rather than using Freud in that manner, my intent is to try to show how the data of this case are supportive of important elements of one of Freud’s theories—a theory that, unlike many others, has suffered from neglect and even repudiation by many who would describe themselves as Freudian in their orientation. I refer to the theory of universal bisexual predisposition. He held to this theory consistently, even though his theories about the causation of homosexuality per se seem to me to have had several different strands, indicating that he never subscribed to one single model to explain all homosexual outcomes in life. Still, the one element that he almost never failed to mention was the idea of the tendency to bisexuality present in everyone. This element in their makeup was one that both homosexual and heterosexual men had in common.

After some initial remarks on differences between the two, he returns to the theme of essential similarities between them. “In inverted types, a predominance of archaic constitutions and primitive psychical mechanisms is regularly to be found. Their most essential characteristics seem to be a coming into operation of narcissistic object-choice and a retention of the erotic significance of the anal zone. There is nothing to be gained, however, by separating the most extreme types of inversion from the rest on the basis of constitutional peculiarities of this kind. What we find as an apparently sufficient explanation of these types can be equally shown to be present, though less strongly, in the constitution of transitional types, and of those whose manifest attitude is normal. The differences in the end-products may be of a qualitative nature, but analysis shows that the differences between their determinants are only quantitative” (Freud, 1905, p. 12).

I think it is important to realize that, in those days, Freud was not a conservative with regard to attitudes about homosexuality. On the contrary, the prevalent attitude that he was actually repudiating was likely to equate homosexuality with degeneracy. The “degeneracy” theory that psychoanalysis, under Freud’s leadership, refuted was in fact elaborated by the medical profession. Greenberg (1988) discusses in some detail the process by which the previously moral and religious prohibitions against homosexuality were reinforced and rationalized on medical grounds. Thus, Freud says, in opening his discussion of “inversion”: “The earliest assessments regarded inversion as an innate indication of nervous degeneracy.” He adds, “Several facts go to show that … inverts cannot be regarded as degenerate …” (Freud, 1905, p. 4). He goes on to say that “inversion” is found not only in people who exhibit no other deviations from the normal but that it is also found in people of high intellectual and cultural accomplishment. He was well acquainted with the fact that homosexuality was both frequent and even had important institutional status in the civilized ancient world as well as being prevalent in many cultures termed “primitive” in the world contemporary with his own.

What comes through in Freud’s views with respect to homosexuality is that, although it differed from heterosexuality in the choice of object, the personalities of both homosexuals and heterosexuals were mosaics composed of the same elements, differing somewhat in their arrangement, but in the end being more alike than different. However, this stance did not necessarily conform with the views of some homosexual people of the period. In Leonardo … he first states that, “… everyone, even the most normal person, is capable of making a homosexual object-choice, and has done so at sometime in his life, and either still adheres to it in his unconscious or else protects himself against it by vigorous counter-attitudes. These two discoveries [the other being the intense erotic attachment to the mother Freud had seen in all his own analytic cases of homosexual men] put an end both to the claim of homosexuals to be regarded as a ‘third sex’ and to what has been believed to be the important distinction between innate and acquired homosexuality” (Freud, 1910, p. 49). Freud was unequivocally asserting by 1910, not only that homosexual men had a history of heterosexual object choice in their own lives but that heterosexual men had made an analogous choice which was kept in repression by “vigorous counter-attitudes.”

Even in the 1905 edition of the Three Essays … when Freud acknowledged that one of the tasks implicit in object choice was that it should find its way to the opposite sex, he thought it reasonable to speculate on the factors that worked against a homosexual outcome. He first noted the effect of attraction of the “other” sex on both men and women. Yet, he felt, that factor alone would probably not be enough. As for other factors militating against inversion, he observed, “Chief among these is its authoritative prohibition by society. Where inversion is not regarded as a crime it will be found that it answers fully to the sexual inclinations of no small number of people” (p. 95).

It seems clear that a major component of the bisexuality that Freud spoke of had to do with dualism in sexual object choice, not overt traits of “femininity” or “masculinity.” An issue that has attracted the interest of researchers in recent years—the acquisition of character traits that are “masculine” versus varying degrees of effeminacy—did not seem to preoccupy Freud.

In fact, the question of what is “feminine” and what is “masculine” seems to have become less and less important in his thinking. In his New Introductory Lectures … (1933) in the latter part of his career, he seemed to feel that it was futile to try to define “masculinity” or “femininity” in any objective way. “Active” versus “passive,” a rather rough-and-ready distinction that he had, with reservations, used in the past, he now felt to be unhelpful.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, published in 1930, he had said, “The theory of bisexuality is still surrounded by many obscurities and we cannot but feel it as a serious impediment in psychoanalysis that it has not yet found any link with the theory of the instincts. However this may be, if we assume it as a fact that each individual seeks to satisfy both male and female wishes in his sexual life, we are prepared for the possibility that those two (sets of) demands are not fulfilled by the same object, and that they interfere with each other unless they can be kept apart and each impulse guided into a particular channel that is suited to it” (Freud, 1930, p. 53). Nonetheless, surrounded by obscurities or not, Freud never saw fit to abandon the theory of bisexuality.

He had earlier, in 1926, shown that he was capable of reversing himself on a major theoretical point when he relinquished the theory that anxiety arose from the libido of a repressed instinctual impulse. Instead, he asserted that it was the ego’s perception of danger that both generated anxiety and set repression into motion (Freud, 1926).

However, the concept of bisexuality, in the end, remained rooted in clinical observations and the bedrock of the Oedipus complex. He noted, “Closer study usually discloses the more complete Oedipus complex, which is twofold, positive and negative, and is due to the bisexuality originally present in children: that is to say, a boy has not merely an ambivalent attitude towards his father and an affectionate object-choice towards his mother, but at the same time he also behaves like a girl and displays an affectionate feminine attitude to his father and corresponding jealousy and hostility towards his mother. It is this complicating element introduced by bisexuality that makes it so difficult to obtain a clear view of the facts in connection with the earliest object-choices and identifications, and still more difficult to describe them intelligibly. It may be that the ambivalence displayed in the relations to the parents should be attributed entirely to bisexuality and that it is not, as I have represented above, developed out of identification in consequence of rivalry” (Freud, 1923, p. 23).

The prototype of psychological bisexuality is found, it would seem, in the dualism of the child’s affectionate feelings for his parents. The little boy’s adoring feelings for his father, in their erotic aspect, are defined as the feminine counterpart of his (masculine) strivings toward his mother. This formulation is repeated in numerous places, and there seems to be little doubt that Freud regarded the boy’s negative complex as the prototypical homosexual object choice. It was the child’s potential, confirmed through psychoanalytic observation, to respond to both parents with affectionate and sensual feelings that seems to have clinched for Freud the credibility of the theory of bisexual predisposition. His anatomical and physiological observations seem to have reflected his interest in establishing links between the psychological and physiological, as well as between the psychological and the historical. Nowhere does he seem to rely on these speculations as persuasive proof for the validity of the theory. The physiological component of the theory was succinctly stated in the 1905 edition of the Three Essays …: “For it appears that a certain degree of anatomical hermaphroditism occurs normally. In every normal male or female individual, traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex. These either persist without function as rudimentary organs or become modified and take on other functions. These long-familiar facts of anatomy lead us to suppose that an originally bisexual physical disposition has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one, leaving behind only a few traces of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Title Page 01
• Copyright Page 01
• Dedication
• Frontmatter Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Three Phases of the Analysis
• Theoretical Considerations
• References
• Index