How We Become Who We Are - 1

By Kevin Murphy, MSc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.

People often ask what is the difference between psychoanalysis, psychiatry and psychology. Well, you could easily distinguish psychoanalysis from the other two on the basis that they have opted for a scientific based approach and in psychiatry’s case a pharmacologically based one. Their approach is based on observable, repeatable phenomena in order to arrive at general rules that explain human actions and offer a generally applicable treatment or cure for all forms of deviations from the norm.
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, has focussed firmly on the unconscious as the hidden locus of our motivations, aspirations and actions. And each treatment is tailor made for the individual.
But there is another significant way in which the distinction can be made. Psychoanalysis has been committed from its very inception to the notion of sexuality. That is, a sexuality that runs to the root of who we are as human beings. Granted in our early infantile life this sexuality is more what Freud once called an ‘affectionate erotic interest’ in other beings around us.
But from quite early on, this affectionate interest becomes joined by a sexual stream that leads us eventually towards puberty and a developing maturation as a sexual being.
And why is sexuality so important to us? Well, while studies might tell us that men think about sex every three minutes, or that the average married couple might engage in sex 2.1 times per week, all of us are aware of our sexuality on a continuous, second by second basis. There is no part of our waking day (or our dreaming night) when we are not conscious of ourselves as either man or woman. This knowledge of who we are is genderised, it has a sexualised content.
Sexuality, therefore, is a central element in our sense of personal identity, whether in our private moments or in our interactions with others. This also encompasses the notion of being a man who might love men or a woman who might love women.
For this reason when it comes to examining issues in the consulting room that affect people in their daily lives – depression, anxiety, personality issues, relationship problems and so on – we often find somewhere in the background an issue of sexuality to some degree. If we examine identity, and there’s no getting away from it, then we bump up against sexuality practically every time.
Indeed, it is the threat of finding this very root that often brings some people to a halt in their therapy. Naturally they’d like to feel better but they’d rather not go there, fearing what it might reveal about them.
The irony is that the fear around this is usually the same unconscious fear driving their symptoms in the first place.
So why does sexuality have such a central place in our lives? The answer is because of the central place it has in our development. Modern psychoanalytic theory traces it back to our helpless infant state when we are at the beck and call of internal drives that are as insistent as they are confusing. To answer the demand of these internal drives – eg, hunger, thirst, discomfort, heat, cold, anxiousness, satisfaction - we look to our primary carer.
We develop the vague awareness that if we understand what it is that makes our carer respond to us then our needs will be met. This usually involves becoming whatever it is that triggers their desire to meet our needs.
A little later we notice our primary carer usually, but not exclusively, has another person on the scene. This is usually father and from this point on we realise that we don’t have the exclusive magic entity, whatever it is, that can trigger mother’s desire in our direction. Maybe father has it too or has a better version than we have?
Of course, we never find out if father actually does have it but even so we usually imagine he does. At this point we now take our early infantile state of helplessness in which our needs have to be met by the primary carer and we do an interesting thing.
We apply what we experience around us, as the third point in this interpersonal triangle facing two distinct genderised positions, the caring human figures that now come with a sense of sexual difference, and we come to the following understanding: if the father figure has the answer to this question of desire, then having one’s needs satisfied must be something to do with this genderised difference.
From the age of 5 or so we are vaguely aware that gender difference, in particular something that this male figure has, is the key to the whole thing.
Just to confuse you a little further, in modern psychoanalysis one’s biological make-up has nothing to do with defining oneself as a man or a woman. As a result, it is possible for a biological woman to take up the role of father in this scenario. But I’m going to stop here at this point. The next part of development needs a full explanation so I will continue on this theme next week.