By Kevin Murphy, B.A., M.Sc., Reg. Pract. APPI.
Psychologist and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Recently a very famous Hollywood male actor said in an interview that after a life of womanizing he was now lonely and expected to end his days alone. On the face of it, it is a sad epitaph to an otherwise full and successful life. Yet this man has probably been a strong role model for many who identify with and possibly even try to imitate his lifestyle. The attraction of living the carefree life and of engaging in many sexual encounters is one that, for some, will never lose its appeal. In fact, it might be even more alluring today than at any other point in history. But what lies behind this choice of lifestyle? And why is it so routinely accepted as an enriching way to live?
Perhaps we should begin with why it is so attractive. In the first instance, there is the promise of ever more pleasure. Once a relationship loses its sparkle there will always be another so one doesn’t have to remain sad for very long. And who knows, the next ‘relationship’ might be even more exciting?
It also offers the illusion of freedom – no partner ever becomes ‘the one’ we can’t live without. I say illusion purposely and I’ll come back to that word. Then we have the repeated experience of winning over the object of our desire. This can be an intoxicating element depending on the individual. After all, when we have conquered someone’s heart, so to speak, we have made ourselves the ‘only one’ for them and that can often be considered a satisfying victory.
Having a succession of lovers also puts us in control of our lives. After all, we are directing ourselves along a particular path, with particular objectives and particular outcomes. It looks as though we have a plan.
Finally, a major advantage of constantly moving on is that we avoid the less interesting bits of relationships. Much like a meal where we only consume the parts we like, we only engage with the upside of the relationship, leaving when we are bored, or not in love anymore, or annoyed, frustrated or feeling threatened because we might have to take the other person’s wishes into account.
There may be many more ‘positives’ to be added to the list but even as it stands you begin to wonder if there is any downside to this way of life. And so the question, what drives it? Is it purely about pleasure? Our famous actor claims he is lonely, and even though we may have to take that with a grain of salt, there is likely to be some truth in it. The end result, then, of his self-defined philandering is ending up with no-one. Now the interesting thing is that historical and literary examples of the same way of living indicate the same result.
Giovanni Giacomo Casanova was one of the most famous womanizers of them all. Born 1725 in Venice, the eldest of six children, he was a seducer of women and probably the first ‘playboy’. Ironically he was due to be a priest but he was caught in bed with someone at the seminary and expelled. He got fired from his next job for the same reason and so began a wandering life across Europe. Along the way he ended up in jail for witchcraft, made and lost fortunes, became a spy in Venice, met Pope Clement XIII, Voltaire, Rousseau and Mozart, and had seemingly endless romantic exploits. And yet after a life filled with adventure and mishap, he ended his days as a librarian, frustrated, bored and alone, apart from the company of his fox terriers. Even the location of his grave remains unknown today.
Fiction too has its version of the man who loved every woman. Don Juan is the Spanish fictional equivalent, again a womaniser who eventually seduces a nobleman’s daughter and kills the girl’s father when he tries to avenge his daughter’s honour. And, Casanova was no stranger to duelling either. But with a far more dramatic twist than Canasova’s life, Don Juan then defies the ghost of the man he has killed, refuses to repent and is eternally damned. Interestingly Casanova too said he regretted nothing of the way he lived. Both men however, one real, one fictional, end their lives alone and faring badly.
The message of fiction and history, if that is what we can call it, appears to be that a dissolute life – one dedicated to sexual conquest – does not lead to happiness or well being. I mention it because the influence of this kind of ideal can still be seen today. Our famous actor is just one high-profile example. But in the therapeutic setting one often comes across the man - particularly the married man with children - who wants to enjoy all other women, or as many as he possibly can. One even comes across the female version also.
Now there is probably a small book to be written on the moral view of all this but that is best left to the moralists and perhaps those with religious agendas to pursue. Of interest here is the psychoanalytic perspective which offers an understanding of something that is often taken for granted as being simply what ‘red-blooded people’ do. And, just to point out, this is not to stigmatise someone for having numerous lovers. The issue in question here is of a different order. This is a lifelong compulsivity that is more aimed at seduction, winning over and then departing in order to start again. As we can see from the examples above, it doesn’t do the person themselves any real good. And it is equally not pleasant for any partners who feel they were exploited and then cast aside.
In order to get an understanding of behaviours like this it can often be useful to examine the end result and work backwards. In the Hollywood actor’s case we have a man who devoted his life to the pursuit of women with essentially nothing to show for it. Allied to that is the prospect that he might end up alone. If, for argument’s sake, we take this as our starting point and ask a simple question: what if the end result was actually the ‘thing’ he was, without knowing it, looking for in the first place? What if, without knowing it consciously, the real priority of the man in question (it could equally be a woman) was to end up alone? Of course, people will argue that this is impossible. How could anyone do something like that? Well, one of the central elements in psychoanalytic theory is that people act against their best interests on a regular and consistent basis. That’s why people who get into a pickle can’t believe they ended up there. Yet they did, and usually by their own actions.
Or if we look at Casanova we know that he had a record number of sexual conquests to his name. But he holds another record – the record for departures and separations. In essence, by his own actions he not only repeats the process of attaching to another person sexually, but he constantly repeats the act of separating from them and being alone. If there is anything in this as a possible theory, then we have a further question to ask. Why would someone want to repeat the pattern of being alone for their entire life?
Well in the first instance, it wouldn’t seem like this to him. He would only be aware of the constant search for a new woman to enjoy sexually. Even in that we get a glimpse of a constant search for something that never really exists. There is no satisfying the appetite that he is attempting to satisfy. There is no finding the 'thing' he is trying to find. The pleasure being derived from it, however, blinds him to what is happening on the other side of the same equation.
He starts off being alone and then there is the choosing of the new love object and the beginning of the seduction phase. This is then followed by the consummation of the relationship and then, for whatever length of time, he engages in the relationship itself. Inevitably, he gets tired of the new partner and an excuse is made – it doesn’t really matter what it is - to bring it to an end. And so the pattern repeats again. What you usually find is that the beginning phases are extremely pleasurable for any seducer. It is a romantic time, an exciting time, very little is demanded other than they be a perfect lover, do the right thing, say the right thing. The safest place for anyone to hide is the place where their partner is completely enthralled by what is happening. There inevitably comes a point, however, when something more is demanded of them. It could be something trivial, or indeed important, but it requires them to step outside the phantasy of all-satisfying, unconditional love and deal with something real. When you hear these men talk of the moment a relationship changes for them, when the bubble bursts, this is the moment they speak about. It could be something as mundane as going to a family celebration, or the supermarket for the weekly shopping, or the suggestion of moving in together, or even the belief that the partner has been won over totally and there is no longer any challenge in it. If someone is structurally designed to have one eye on the exit, it doesn’t really take very much.
But on each and every occasion the serial lover is stepping away and repeating the experience of being alone. And if this is what is being repeated it suggests that this might be the hidden objective. Quite obviously the business of remaining in relationship with any one person is deeply problematic for them. This further tells us that something in the way they learned to bond with others from an early age was not pleasurable for them. There is more comfort for them in distance rather than closeness. And this will often run counter to the pleasant nature of the person, how considerate they were, how thoughtful. For a time, they appeared to be the perfect partner, the ideal. And that’s very much the impression they wish to leave behind each time. There’s not much chance of creating a legend if people are glad to see the back of you when you go.
It’s probably a roundabout way of coming to something we always knew. The person who can’t settle on loving any one person has a deep-seated difficulty with interpersonal intimacy. They have no problem with physical, bodily intimacy. In fact, they substitute it all the time for the other kind. The emotional kind of intimacy, though, never gets brought into play. It remains protected, hidden away. And yet the emotional kind of intimacy is the only one that can ensure the relationship has an authenticity that extends beyond the physical. Without it, there really is just a series of sexual encounters with physical bodies. And at the end of such a compulsively and identically repeating series is it any wonder we might ask what exactly we are left with? The answer might be found in that little word I used at the beginning – illusion. And for many people it has not lost its allure.
Monday, February 16, 2015
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
The Words to Say It*
By Kevin Murphy, Reg. Pract. APPI.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
One of the questions people often ask is ‘how can talking about myself make any difference?’ It is, on the face of it, a reasonable question. Someone suffering from anxiety, or depression, or repeated negative behaviour, or unexplained symptoms, or an inability to engage with others sexually, or suffering post traumatic effects from abuse, will naturally wonder how such an ordinary human thing as talking can work. The answer to the question is quite simple: it is not just what is being said that is important, it is also the act of speaking.
Being able to speak about oneself in a considered, criticism-free way is a sign of health. It denotes a desire to try, no matter if it misses the mark sometimes, to put words on things that relate to ourselves and our experiences in life. It means that an inquiring drive is at work somewhere within us not necessarily to find answers to big questions but to put words on parts of our experience that have never had spoken words put on them, and that have long been the root-cause of guilt, anger, shame, frustration, embarrassment, panic, sadness, confusion, anxiety, and so on. Speaking allows us re-visit and re-examine events, ideas, experiences that were often poorly understood when they first occurred. We get a chance to reclaim something of them for ourselves, and stop them belonging to others. The actual work of putting words on these moments engages another part of our mind – the powerful associating agency that links single ideas together in combinations to bring newer meanings for us.
There is an interesting way of illustrating this but before we move to that we have to keep one more important thing in mind. Speaking is also a way of re-establishing our often ruptured relationship with memory. The famous French psychoanalyst Dr Jacques Lacan put it succinctly many years ago when he said: ‘We do not remember because we are cured. We are cured because we remember.’ And what is it we are required to remember? The answer is the past, our individual past, the past the no one except us has had, the personal history that makes us unique and different from everyone else.
Many people shirk this challenge. Many want to simply run away from it. And so, speaking will naturally be difficult for them. They’d prefer a therapy that does not require them to speak about themselves, and there are many to choose from and that is their choice. Some prefer medication, because that doesn’t require them speak about themselves at all. That too is a choice. Indeed, there are many other ways we can keep memory at bay, but unfortunately a lot of them are ultimately harmful and self-destructive. Contemporary society is filled with examples. What all this tells us is how difficult the seemingly simple act of speaking can be for some people and the variety of ways they use to try and avoid it. Speaking opens us up to ourselves and to our history, our story. For some, that is too risky.
This is not to ignore those people who have genuine difficulties in speaking but who still engage in the ‘talking cure’. The courage they display is evident. In these situations the issue of not being able to speak becomes part of the process of finding a way through. Just because someone has difficulty finding the words to say it does not mean they are beyond help.
But not speaking, as in not wanting to speak, is a different thing. If we move to the entirely other end of the spectrum and consider the most damaged and damaging type of people there are, we can perhaps get a useful perspective on this thing called speaking. The study of psychopaths teaches us something quite interesting, particularly serial killers. As well as their heinous crimes against ordinary and innocent human beings, you find they also have something quite unique in common: when they are caught they practically never speak about what they have done. Harold Shipman, the UK doctor who killed about 280 people many years ago never spoke at his trial or afterwards in any way about why he did what he did, or about his past. Danny Rolling in the US, the man on whom the Scream movies were based, never spoke about what he did and even got a fellow inmate to confess on his behalf rather than speak himself. Jeffrey Dahmer, known as the Milwaukee cannibal, could not explain and refused to talk about what he did. Dennis Nilsen in London, who chopped up his victims and flushed them down the toilet, spoke volumes once convicted but was incapable of understanding why or of putting it into words due to years of internal isolation from those around him; even Henri Landru who murdered 11 women in 19th century France refused to speak about it and refused to admit anything even when the death penalty was handed down. The same goes for Ted Bundy in the US, the savage killer of anything between 30 and 100 innocent women, some of whose bodies have still never been found. He did confess somewhat hours before his execution but even then words failed him and he was unable to speak fully about his crimes.
This is not to say that people who choose not to speak are psychopaths, far from it. This is to simply learn from extreme mental pathology that not speaking, at its most damaging, is a symptom of a locked-in condition that ensures the individual remains outside the human fold, beyond the reach of human comfort and its potentially curative properties. And in the case of serial killers that also includes beyond law, convention and moral order. Speaking in as open a way as possible, in contrast, then becomes a clear signal of well-being and health. Seen in this light, it now becomes a necessary tool for survival rather than just a whimsical choice of maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Sigmund Freud, who invented the talking cure, paraphrased Frederick the Great by saying that every man and woman must 'find out for themselves in what fashion they can be saved'. He was putting the responsibility back onto us. We have a choice.
*Based on a series of lectures on ‘Serial Killers’ delivered to 2nd year MA students of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Independent Colleges, Dublin.
'The Words to Say It’ is the title of a 1975 book by novelist Marie Cardinal about her personal experience of psychoanalysis. It sold 2.3 million copies and was translated into 18 languages. It won the Prix Littre in 1976.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
One of the questions people often ask is ‘how can talking about myself make any difference?’ It is, on the face of it, a reasonable question. Someone suffering from anxiety, or depression, or repeated negative behaviour, or unexplained symptoms, or an inability to engage with others sexually, or suffering post traumatic effects from abuse, will naturally wonder how such an ordinary human thing as talking can work. The answer to the question is quite simple: it is not just what is being said that is important, it is also the act of speaking.
Being able to speak about oneself in a considered, criticism-free way is a sign of health. It denotes a desire to try, no matter if it misses the mark sometimes, to put words on things that relate to ourselves and our experiences in life. It means that an inquiring drive is at work somewhere within us not necessarily to find answers to big questions but to put words on parts of our experience that have never had spoken words put on them, and that have long been the root-cause of guilt, anger, shame, frustration, embarrassment, panic, sadness, confusion, anxiety, and so on. Speaking allows us re-visit and re-examine events, ideas, experiences that were often poorly understood when they first occurred. We get a chance to reclaim something of them for ourselves, and stop them belonging to others. The actual work of putting words on these moments engages another part of our mind – the powerful associating agency that links single ideas together in combinations to bring newer meanings for us.
There is an interesting way of illustrating this but before we move to that we have to keep one more important thing in mind. Speaking is also a way of re-establishing our often ruptured relationship with memory. The famous French psychoanalyst Dr Jacques Lacan put it succinctly many years ago when he said: ‘We do not remember because we are cured. We are cured because we remember.’ And what is it we are required to remember? The answer is the past, our individual past, the past the no one except us has had, the personal history that makes us unique and different from everyone else.
Many people shirk this challenge. Many want to simply run away from it. And so, speaking will naturally be difficult for them. They’d prefer a therapy that does not require them to speak about themselves, and there are many to choose from and that is their choice. Some prefer medication, because that doesn’t require them speak about themselves at all. That too is a choice. Indeed, there are many other ways we can keep memory at bay, but unfortunately a lot of them are ultimately harmful and self-destructive. Contemporary society is filled with examples. What all this tells us is how difficult the seemingly simple act of speaking can be for some people and the variety of ways they use to try and avoid it. Speaking opens us up to ourselves and to our history, our story. For some, that is too risky.
This is not to ignore those people who have genuine difficulties in speaking but who still engage in the ‘talking cure’. The courage they display is evident. In these situations the issue of not being able to speak becomes part of the process of finding a way through. Just because someone has difficulty finding the words to say it does not mean they are beyond help.
But not speaking, as in not wanting to speak, is a different thing. If we move to the entirely other end of the spectrum and consider the most damaged and damaging type of people there are, we can perhaps get a useful perspective on this thing called speaking. The study of psychopaths teaches us something quite interesting, particularly serial killers. As well as their heinous crimes against ordinary and innocent human beings, you find they also have something quite unique in common: when they are caught they practically never speak about what they have done. Harold Shipman, the UK doctor who killed about 280 people many years ago never spoke at his trial or afterwards in any way about why he did what he did, or about his past. Danny Rolling in the US, the man on whom the Scream movies were based, never spoke about what he did and even got a fellow inmate to confess on his behalf rather than speak himself. Jeffrey Dahmer, known as the Milwaukee cannibal, could not explain and refused to talk about what he did. Dennis Nilsen in London, who chopped up his victims and flushed them down the toilet, spoke volumes once convicted but was incapable of understanding why or of putting it into words due to years of internal isolation from those around him; even Henri Landru who murdered 11 women in 19th century France refused to speak about it and refused to admit anything even when the death penalty was handed down. The same goes for Ted Bundy in the US, the savage killer of anything between 30 and 100 innocent women, some of whose bodies have still never been found. He did confess somewhat hours before his execution but even then words failed him and he was unable to speak fully about his crimes.
This is not to say that people who choose not to speak are psychopaths, far from it. This is to simply learn from extreme mental pathology that not speaking, at its most damaging, is a symptom of a locked-in condition that ensures the individual remains outside the human fold, beyond the reach of human comfort and its potentially curative properties. And in the case of serial killers that also includes beyond law, convention and moral order. Speaking in as open a way as possible, in contrast, then becomes a clear signal of well-being and health. Seen in this light, it now becomes a necessary tool for survival rather than just a whimsical choice of maybe I will, maybe I won’t. Sigmund Freud, who invented the talking cure, paraphrased Frederick the Great by saying that every man and woman must 'find out for themselves in what fashion they can be saved'. He was putting the responsibility back onto us. We have a choice.
*Based on a series of lectures on ‘Serial Killers’ delivered to 2nd year MA students of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy at Independent Colleges, Dublin.
'The Words to Say It’ is the title of a 1975 book by novelist Marie Cardinal about her personal experience of psychoanalysis. It sold 2.3 million copies and was translated into 18 languages. It won the Prix Littre in 1976.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Love Without Sex*
By Kevin Murphy, Reg. Pract. APPI.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
The world around us is a very sexual place. We are sold all sorts of consumer products based on sex, we choose our partners, make conscious choices, and even choices we’re not aware of, on the basis of it. That’s why it is probably hard to imagine a life with little or no sex. Or, to put it another way, to imagine not finding another person sexually attractive.
Yet that is the experience that asexuals have. They are not sexually attracted to other people. Asexuality is a small but growing part of the population and it now has its own online communities. You could say that asexuality, like homosexuality before it, is coming out of the closet.
According to one US online community, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who the person is. “Asexuality does not make our lives any worse or any better, we just face a different set of challenges than most sexual people. There is considerable diversity among the asexual community; each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently,” according to its website.
It also states that asexual people have the same emotional needs as anyone else and, like in the sexual community, vary widely in how they fulfil those needs. Some asexual people are happier on their own, some are happiest with a group of close friends, while others have a desire to form more intimate romantic relationships, and will date and seek long-term partnerships. Asexual people are just as likely to date sexual people as they are to date each other.
For those who believe the world is a sexual place and that all human consensual relationships are based on something sexual, this might sound startling and new. The asexual viewpoint is that, sexual or nonsexual, all relationships are made up of the same basic stuff. ‘Communication, closeness, fun, humour, excitement and trust all happen just as much in sexual relationships as in nonsexual ones,’ AVEN says.
And that is true. For the asexual there is no difference between their emotional needs and anybody else’s. But because the sexual attraction is missing from any relationship they might have, there is a difference no matter what way you look at it. And it is that difference that needs to be understood.
The asexual position – one you will find very well understood by such groups as London organisation Pink Therapy which promotes a healthy attitude to gender and sexual diversity – is that the asexual person is better positioned than anyone to understand how natural it feels to them to have no sexual attraction to another person. In fact, for Pink Therapy, asexuality is itself a branch of human sexuality and if we accept the principle of sexual diversity then that is an argument we would have to go along with. However, the asexual position, equally, is one that is often misunderstood, or not understood at all, by a cultural context in which sexual engagement is arguably the dominant discourse, to the point of saturation. For that reason, the asexual experience more often than not is one of alienation, rejection and discrimination. It is not far removed from the gay or lesbian experience of ten or maybe twenty years ago in this country. And some would argue that the legacy of those prejudices still hang over certain attitudes today.
Be that as it may, the main area of conflict in which asexuality finds itself is in relationships with non-asexuals. A great deal of the asexuals in this country have, for one reason or another, not realised their asexuality and have entered into long term relationships – having children, having sex, doing all the usual things - in which they have had to hide this truth about themselves. But one’s true nature can’t stay hidden forever and so the asexual element has gradually made itself known and this has led to the non-asexual partner feeling confused, hurt and rejected. Admitting to oneself that you don’t experience sexual attraction to others is not an easy thing to do. Nor, once that has happened, is asking one’s partner to accept your asexuality as a part of what they understood to be a physical relationship. Not every relationship survives that experience. Equally, pretending that one’s asexuality is actually a lack of interest in sex, or a lack of attraction for one’s partner, or a result of a too busy schedule, or a headache, or some other diversion tactic, is a recipe for long term deception and conflict.
There are no easy answers for these issues, partly because this is new territory for most people. Academic researchers have only just begun to look at asexuality and among the many questions being asked is why at this point in western culture’s development have we seen a more vocal community of asexuals emerging. It is also asking how we can better understand the position in order to ensure asexuals can live as they wish to live.
• Based on an academic paper entitled ‘The Imaginary and Asexuality – A Consideration of Absence’ presented at the 11th annual conference of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups, October 11 – 13, 2013, Boston, USA.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
The world around us is a very sexual place. We are sold all sorts of consumer products based on sex, we choose our partners, make conscious choices, and even choices we’re not aware of, on the basis of it. That’s why it is probably hard to imagine a life with little or no sex. Or, to put it another way, to imagine not finding another person sexually attractive.
Yet that is the experience that asexuals have. They are not sexually attracted to other people. Asexuality is a small but growing part of the population and it now has its own online communities. You could say that asexuality, like homosexuality before it, is coming out of the closet.
According to one US online community, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who the person is. “Asexuality does not make our lives any worse or any better, we just face a different set of challenges than most sexual people. There is considerable diversity among the asexual community; each asexual person experiences things like relationships, attraction, and arousal somewhat differently,” according to its website.
It also states that asexual people have the same emotional needs as anyone else and, like in the sexual community, vary widely in how they fulfil those needs. Some asexual people are happier on their own, some are happiest with a group of close friends, while others have a desire to form more intimate romantic relationships, and will date and seek long-term partnerships. Asexual people are just as likely to date sexual people as they are to date each other.
For those who believe the world is a sexual place and that all human consensual relationships are based on something sexual, this might sound startling and new. The asexual viewpoint is that, sexual or nonsexual, all relationships are made up of the same basic stuff. ‘Communication, closeness, fun, humour, excitement and trust all happen just as much in sexual relationships as in nonsexual ones,’ AVEN says.
And that is true. For the asexual there is no difference between their emotional needs and anybody else’s. But because the sexual attraction is missing from any relationship they might have, there is a difference no matter what way you look at it. And it is that difference that needs to be understood.
The asexual position – one you will find very well understood by such groups as London organisation Pink Therapy which promotes a healthy attitude to gender and sexual diversity – is that the asexual person is better positioned than anyone to understand how natural it feels to them to have no sexual attraction to another person. In fact, for Pink Therapy, asexuality is itself a branch of human sexuality and if we accept the principle of sexual diversity then that is an argument we would have to go along with. However, the asexual position, equally, is one that is often misunderstood, or not understood at all, by a cultural context in which sexual engagement is arguably the dominant discourse, to the point of saturation. For that reason, the asexual experience more often than not is one of alienation, rejection and discrimination. It is not far removed from the gay or lesbian experience of ten or maybe twenty years ago in this country. And some would argue that the legacy of those prejudices still hang over certain attitudes today.
Be that as it may, the main area of conflict in which asexuality finds itself is in relationships with non-asexuals. A great deal of the asexuals in this country have, for one reason or another, not realised their asexuality and have entered into long term relationships – having children, having sex, doing all the usual things - in which they have had to hide this truth about themselves. But one’s true nature can’t stay hidden forever and so the asexual element has gradually made itself known and this has led to the non-asexual partner feeling confused, hurt and rejected. Admitting to oneself that you don’t experience sexual attraction to others is not an easy thing to do. Nor, once that has happened, is asking one’s partner to accept your asexuality as a part of what they understood to be a physical relationship. Not every relationship survives that experience. Equally, pretending that one’s asexuality is actually a lack of interest in sex, or a lack of attraction for one’s partner, or a result of a too busy schedule, or a headache, or some other diversion tactic, is a recipe for long term deception and conflict.
There are no easy answers for these issues, partly because this is new territory for most people. Academic researchers have only just begun to look at asexuality and among the many questions being asked is why at this point in western culture’s development have we seen a more vocal community of asexuals emerging. It is also asking how we can better understand the position in order to ensure asexuals can live as they wish to live.
• Based on an academic paper entitled ‘The Imaginary and Asexuality – A Consideration of Absence’ presented at the 11th annual conference of Affiliated Psychoanalytic Workgroups, October 11 – 13, 2013, Boston, USA.
Friday, November 1, 2013
On Stanley Kubrick's 'The Shining' *
By Kevin Murphy, Reg. Pract. APPI.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
“If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along the lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of the same kind.”
This was written in 1932 by Sigmund Freud and in terms of forensic psychotherapy is still valid today. Jack Torrance, the character played by Jack Nicholson in Kubrick's classic movie, certainly cracks up but not in a haphazard way, he breaks along discernible lines of cleavage.
All the trappings that he evidently values - family, ambition, self-regard, identity, even narcissistic aggression – combine to disguise treacherous fault lines lying just below the surface of his personality. These fault lines pose a threat because no authentic sense of personhood acts as the glue to keep the structure together. Instead there is anxiety, paranoia and aggression, elements that are present from our earliest infant stages and which most of us manage to positively reconfigure. But not Jack...
The moment Wendy discovers he is not a writer is the moment the subterfuge, the pretending, is no longer possible. His core delusion, the flimsy idea that was holding him together, has been shattered and someone will be made to pay. But he’s not a serial killer, carefully selecting his victims and enjoying the suffering he imposes. Nor is he a calculated wife killer, who might have locked her out in the snow and let nature do his dirty work. No, he’s a deranged layer-down of the law, the father’s law, the corrector of wayward family members, who will project his narcissistic fury into chopping them up into little pieces, teaching them a final lesson, as if he was the warped embodiment of an exaggerated righteousness.
Unlike most offenders, the thought of covering his tracks never enters his head. He is too intent on obeying a delusional command, handed down by the authoritative, fatherly figure of the hallucinated waiter, who corrected his family in the same way.
Even Jack’s caretaker job is a legal obligation, handed down by a higher authority who must also be obeyed at all cost. Yet the owner of the hotel, the other male authority figure, is kindly, understanding, patient, and is still fully in control. His name is Ullman (can we hear 'all man’ in this?), an ideal that Jack could have possibly identified with but chose to overlook, in the Overlook Hotel. Even chef Hallorann takes up a kindly father-figure position with Danny and is able to see in the boy something his own father has again overlooked.
Jack’s ideal man comes with frightful power over those below, fearful obligation to those above, and has so little mercy or forgiveness or patience it is almost cartoon-like in its simplicity.
The lines of fracture for him run fairly and squarely through his place in the world as a man and as a father, provider, protector.
From the start his paranoid psychosis has been emerging. We see it in resentment to his son and disinterest in his wife, his moments with both characterised by coldness and an unnerving sense of distance.
In terms of the wider metaphor, characteristic of psychosis, Jack is withdrawing from external reality to an inner world and not just in his dealings with his family. His weak foothold in the social order, in his questionable ability to support his family, is already evident when he withdraws to the solitude of the hotel. He then withdraws further to the stifling embrace of hallucination and delusion. The final withdrawal comes when his psychotic rage, directed at his all-knowing son, drives him into the metaphoric maze of his own mind where a frozen, catatonic state awaits.
Jack’s inability to position himself as father would have us question his experiences of being fathered. Equally, his ambition to be a writer when he patently can’t write – and language disruption is a key indicator of psychosis - would have us ask why this and not some other money making scheme? The choice has a grandiosity about it, much like his skewed view of fatherhood. Even the setting he writes in is like a throne room and yet how incongruous he looks in it. Being a writer promises prestige, an elevated place from which he might overlook a great swathe of humanity, as author, authority figure, as an all-man to be looked up to. Unfortunately for Jack, that coveted place is only available through the malevolent sycophancy of his hallucinated barman and waiter. When he comes apart, it is along lines of pre-existing fracture and what we see in the gaps that emerge is a lack of any authentic sense of being, which could very well be the thing that has always haunted him.
* A presentation based on this article was made at the UCD Science + Film Festival screening of The Shining (http://www.ucdscienceexpression.ie/), which took place at The Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin, October 31, 2013.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
“If we throw a crystal to the floor, it breaks; but not into haphazard pieces. It comes apart along the lines of cleavage into fragments whose boundaries, though they were invisible, were predetermined by the crystal’s structure. Mental patients are split and broken structures of the same kind.”
This was written in 1932 by Sigmund Freud and in terms of forensic psychotherapy is still valid today. Jack Torrance, the character played by Jack Nicholson in Kubrick's classic movie, certainly cracks up but not in a haphazard way, he breaks along discernible lines of cleavage.
All the trappings that he evidently values - family, ambition, self-regard, identity, even narcissistic aggression – combine to disguise treacherous fault lines lying just below the surface of his personality. These fault lines pose a threat because no authentic sense of personhood acts as the glue to keep the structure together. Instead there is anxiety, paranoia and aggression, elements that are present from our earliest infant stages and which most of us manage to positively reconfigure. But not Jack...
The moment Wendy discovers he is not a writer is the moment the subterfuge, the pretending, is no longer possible. His core delusion, the flimsy idea that was holding him together, has been shattered and someone will be made to pay. But he’s not a serial killer, carefully selecting his victims and enjoying the suffering he imposes. Nor is he a calculated wife killer, who might have locked her out in the snow and let nature do his dirty work. No, he’s a deranged layer-down of the law, the father’s law, the corrector of wayward family members, who will project his narcissistic fury into chopping them up into little pieces, teaching them a final lesson, as if he was the warped embodiment of an exaggerated righteousness.
Unlike most offenders, the thought of covering his tracks never enters his head. He is too intent on obeying a delusional command, handed down by the authoritative, fatherly figure of the hallucinated waiter, who corrected his family in the same way.
Even Jack’s caretaker job is a legal obligation, handed down by a higher authority who must also be obeyed at all cost. Yet the owner of the hotel, the other male authority figure, is kindly, understanding, patient, and is still fully in control. His name is Ullman (can we hear 'all man’ in this?), an ideal that Jack could have possibly identified with but chose to overlook, in the Overlook Hotel. Even chef Hallorann takes up a kindly father-figure position with Danny and is able to see in the boy something his own father has again overlooked.
Jack’s ideal man comes with frightful power over those below, fearful obligation to those above, and has so little mercy or forgiveness or patience it is almost cartoon-like in its simplicity.
The lines of fracture for him run fairly and squarely through his place in the world as a man and as a father, provider, protector.
From the start his paranoid psychosis has been emerging. We see it in resentment to his son and disinterest in his wife, his moments with both characterised by coldness and an unnerving sense of distance.
In terms of the wider metaphor, characteristic of psychosis, Jack is withdrawing from external reality to an inner world and not just in his dealings with his family. His weak foothold in the social order, in his questionable ability to support his family, is already evident when he withdraws to the solitude of the hotel. He then withdraws further to the stifling embrace of hallucination and delusion. The final withdrawal comes when his psychotic rage, directed at his all-knowing son, drives him into the metaphoric maze of his own mind where a frozen, catatonic state awaits.
Jack’s inability to position himself as father would have us question his experiences of being fathered. Equally, his ambition to be a writer when he patently can’t write – and language disruption is a key indicator of psychosis - would have us ask why this and not some other money making scheme? The choice has a grandiosity about it, much like his skewed view of fatherhood. Even the setting he writes in is like a throne room and yet how incongruous he looks in it. Being a writer promises prestige, an elevated place from which he might overlook a great swathe of humanity, as author, authority figure, as an all-man to be looked up to. Unfortunately for Jack, that coveted place is only available through the malevolent sycophancy of his hallucinated barman and waiter. When he comes apart, it is along lines of pre-existing fracture and what we see in the gaps that emerge is a lack of any authentic sense of being, which could very well be the thing that has always haunted him.
* A presentation based on this article was made at the UCD Science + Film Festival screening of The Shining (http://www.ucdscienceexpression.ie/), which took place at The Lighthouse Cinema, Dublin, October 31, 2013.
Tuesday, May 14, 2013
Fifty Shades of Being One Step Down
By Kevin Murphy,Reg.Pract. APPI.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
For those who have read Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’, the foundational feminist text of the 20th century, the success of a recent light porn trilogy must have them scratching their heads in wonder. What happened to the women’s movement? Where is the indignation at being portrayed as inferior to men? What has become of the feminist ideal that women do not need men to define who they are?
All, it would seem, is so much history. The modern equivalent is that a woman finds happiness in bending over backwards, no pun intended, to become the thing the man wants her to be. Such is the storyline of the above mentioned trilogy which has found favour with some 65 million buyers, most of whom are reported to be women.
In the story, the good looking rich young man – damaged by a childhood of abuse and deprivation – has a liking for kinky sexual practices. The beautiful woman – younger, impressionable and not rich – arrives awestruck into his gravitational pull and so an affair ensues, coloured by her amazement that one-so-great-as-he could find her attractive. Gradually she comes to be introduced to his practices and, after a very brief spell of being against them, starts to enjoy it. As tales of sadism go, it is about as user-friendly as you can get. Readers of this will not be searching out ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ by Frenchman Donatien Alphonse Francois, otherwise known as the Marquis de Sade.* The modern version is politically correct down to the ingratiating habit the hero has of apologising for being the way he is, even for hurting her which in terms of sadism has got to be a first.
There is always a need for good entertainment in life. The danger with this type of narrative, however, is that it reinforces a message already out in the public discourse that a woman only has value in a relationship if she can figure out what the man wants her to be and can transform herself into that. Maybe that’s the inevitable direction that things go when so much time, money and energy is invested on appearance and playing to sexual stereotyping.
Unfortunately if you criticise this kind of commercial success you are accused of spoiling the party. The possibility that this kind of product offers complicit support for the exploitation of women is completely missed. And yet it is complicit in a most cynical way. Re-arrange the configuration of the hero of the three ‘novels’ and you get an entirely different picture. Keep him rich, but now make him a bit older, with a pot belly and a comb-over, and suddenly a rather different impression is created. Now it begins to have the creepy overtones that bring it closer to reality.
Perverse sadists come in all shapes and sizes but the odds are that if our heroine in the novel came upon one with less money, less status and fewer scolded-puppy apologies, the love story wouldn’t have gone far beyond chapter one. In reality, our heroine would have had a deeply unpleasant experience. It quite possibly could have scarred her for life. It could also have made it incredibly difficult for her to ever trust another person in relationship again, which is often what actually happens.
Not so in fiction-land where she saves the hero from himself while at the same time developing a taste for kinky sex, much as she might a new dish created by his personal chef. That wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the implicit message that the man – in this case rich, famous and slightly inarticulate – is always to be pleased. Decades of feminist outpourings to the contrary would appear to have missed their mark. There is instead the aforementioned trend in various contemporary versions of femininity that sees the role of woman to be whatever it is that pleases. For some, both men and women, it is apparently the perfect solution to the tensions already inherent in adapting the role of woman to the demands of the modern world. Perfect, that is, until the ability to please fades or becomes less impactful over time. Then the woman is left to her own inner resources to support a sense of identity and prestige in a world that tends to judge, harshly at times, on the basis of surfaces and appearances.
de Beauvoir’s partner, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, in his weighty tome ‘Being and Nothingness’, makes an interesting point in this regard. I referred to this in a slightly different way in an earlier blog but it is worth mentioning again. Sartre says the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He does not want to possess an automaton. The total enslavement of the beloved, as he calls it, kills the love of the lover. If the woman does become an automaton then the lover finds himself alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing: he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess her freedom as a freedom. In love, therefore, what the man desires is that he be the unique and privileged occasion of this freedom.
Of course, that’s assuming we are dealing with a man, or indeed a woman, who is able to love. Not everybody is able to love in the way they want. Love after all involves giving of oneself to another at many levels (as distinct from making oneself submissive to the other) and that can often be too big an ask for some people. Be that as it may, Sartre’s point is well made. Love, if we are to look at it in all its complexity, does not include ownership of the other as an object (our hero’s obsessively protective urges throughout the novels are regularly passed off as love), nor does it include control of the other as an automaton. But maybe that idea has had its time and maybe that time is gone. If it is, then we need to accommodate a new way of thinking about love and the nature of the relationship that emotionally binds (as opposed to physically binds) human beings together.
• The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade was written in 1785. Four wealthy men resolve to experience the ultimate sexual gratification in orgies. They seal themselves away for four months in an inaccessible castle with 46 victims, mostly young male and female teenagers. Not for the faint-hearted.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
For those who have read Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’, the foundational feminist text of the 20th century, the success of a recent light porn trilogy must have them scratching their heads in wonder. What happened to the women’s movement? Where is the indignation at being portrayed as inferior to men? What has become of the feminist ideal that women do not need men to define who they are?
All, it would seem, is so much history. The modern equivalent is that a woman finds happiness in bending over backwards, no pun intended, to become the thing the man wants her to be. Such is the storyline of the above mentioned trilogy which has found favour with some 65 million buyers, most of whom are reported to be women.
In the story, the good looking rich young man – damaged by a childhood of abuse and deprivation – has a liking for kinky sexual practices. The beautiful woman – younger, impressionable and not rich – arrives awestruck into his gravitational pull and so an affair ensues, coloured by her amazement that one-so-great-as-he could find her attractive. Gradually she comes to be introduced to his practices and, after a very brief spell of being against them, starts to enjoy it. As tales of sadism go, it is about as user-friendly as you can get. Readers of this will not be searching out ‘The 120 Days of Sodom’ by Frenchman Donatien Alphonse Francois, otherwise known as the Marquis de Sade.* The modern version is politically correct down to the ingratiating habit the hero has of apologising for being the way he is, even for hurting her which in terms of sadism has got to be a first.
There is always a need for good entertainment in life. The danger with this type of narrative, however, is that it reinforces a message already out in the public discourse that a woman only has value in a relationship if she can figure out what the man wants her to be and can transform herself into that. Maybe that’s the inevitable direction that things go when so much time, money and energy is invested on appearance and playing to sexual stereotyping.
Unfortunately if you criticise this kind of commercial success you are accused of spoiling the party. The possibility that this kind of product offers complicit support for the exploitation of women is completely missed. And yet it is complicit in a most cynical way. Re-arrange the configuration of the hero of the three ‘novels’ and you get an entirely different picture. Keep him rich, but now make him a bit older, with a pot belly and a comb-over, and suddenly a rather different impression is created. Now it begins to have the creepy overtones that bring it closer to reality.
Perverse sadists come in all shapes and sizes but the odds are that if our heroine in the novel came upon one with less money, less status and fewer scolded-puppy apologies, the love story wouldn’t have gone far beyond chapter one. In reality, our heroine would have had a deeply unpleasant experience. It quite possibly could have scarred her for life. It could also have made it incredibly difficult for her to ever trust another person in relationship again, which is often what actually happens.
Not so in fiction-land where she saves the hero from himself while at the same time developing a taste for kinky sex, much as she might a new dish created by his personal chef. That wouldn’t be so bad were it not for the implicit message that the man – in this case rich, famous and slightly inarticulate – is always to be pleased. Decades of feminist outpourings to the contrary would appear to have missed their mark. There is instead the aforementioned trend in various contemporary versions of femininity that sees the role of woman to be whatever it is that pleases. For some, both men and women, it is apparently the perfect solution to the tensions already inherent in adapting the role of woman to the demands of the modern world. Perfect, that is, until the ability to please fades or becomes less impactful over time. Then the woman is left to her own inner resources to support a sense of identity and prestige in a world that tends to judge, harshly at times, on the basis of surfaces and appearances.
de Beauvoir’s partner, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, in his weighty tome ‘Being and Nothingness’, makes an interesting point in this regard. I referred to this in a slightly different way in an earlier blog but it is worth mentioning again. Sartre says the man who wants to be loved does not desire the enslavement of the beloved. He does not want to possess an automaton. The total enslavement of the beloved, as he calls it, kills the love of the lover. If the woman does become an automaton then the lover finds himself alone. Thus the lover does not desire to possess the beloved as one possesses a thing: he demands a special type of appropriation. He wants to possess her freedom as a freedom. In love, therefore, what the man desires is that he be the unique and privileged occasion of this freedom.
Of course, that’s assuming we are dealing with a man, or indeed a woman, who is able to love. Not everybody is able to love in the way they want. Love after all involves giving of oneself to another at many levels (as distinct from making oneself submissive to the other) and that can often be too big an ask for some people. Be that as it may, Sartre’s point is well made. Love, if we are to look at it in all its complexity, does not include ownership of the other as an object (our hero’s obsessively protective urges throughout the novels are regularly passed off as love), nor does it include control of the other as an automaton. But maybe that idea has had its time and maybe that time is gone. If it is, then we need to accommodate a new way of thinking about love and the nature of the relationship that emotionally binds (as opposed to physically binds) human beings together.
• The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade was written in 1785. Four wealthy men resolve to experience the ultimate sexual gratification in orgies. They seal themselves away for four months in an inaccessible castle with 46 victims, mostly young male and female teenagers. Not for the faint-hearted.
Monday, December 17, 2012
Knowing and Not Knowing
By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
The recent exposure of a high profile celebrity paedophile in the UK shocked British society. How did nobody know what he was up to? How could such a high profile person get away with the scale of abuse for such a long period of time?
These are valid questions. But looked at from the perspective of this country where we have had respected members of this community doing the same thing for even longer, it is a more familiar phenomenon if not equally shocking.
The central and simple question common to both jurisdictions is how did nobody notice? It’s a question that gets its power from the retrospective point from which it always gets asked. Looking back, with the knowledge we now have, it seems astonishing that abusers were allowed to do what they did without any hint of suspicion falling on them. And, equally, how many of them were so often nearly caught only for someone with the power to expose them deciding that nothing bad was going on. So the answer to the simple question is an equally simple word that is regularly used in psychoanalysis but rarely used anywhere else: disavowal.
The dictionary definition of disavowal is: To disclaim knowledge of, responsibility for, or association with something. That’s what the dictionary says but this definition assumes we disclaim knowledge and responsibility purposely or consciously. Not every one who looked away when abusers were in their midst did so knowingly. Not every one who failed to act, did so out of unconcern. Which brings us to our next question: How can this happen?
Psychoanalysis has long recognised that we can choose to ‘not know’ without even knowing we’re doing it. When the celebrity UK paedophile was abusing children, good people were not consciously turning away from what they saw; they were unconsciously doing it. Why? Because to acknowledge that they saw what they thought they saw would have been too real, too overwhelming, too much to bear. And because nobody else signalled any suspicion they felt justified in their judgement.
That’s why in psychoanalytic usage, which expands on the dictionary definition, the term "disavowal" is often translated as "denial". It denotes a mental act that consists in rejecting the reality of a perception on account of its potentially traumatic consequences. Note that in this definition the reality of a perception takes places first in order for it to be rejected secondarily.
But people will say to themselves, wait, there’s no way we could have spotted what that man was up to and walked away knowing he was abusing young girls. That’s true, but that is to assume that you would have consciously acknowledged what the person was doing. You would have needed a moment in which it was crystal clear in your thinking so that you could say, ‘Hey wait a minute, this man is not doing good things here and it must stop.’ These situations, in reality are never clear, so we tend to disavow them. We see something odd, but only partially, and so our instinct is to shove them out of our minds because we are not sure what it is we really saw. And when it comes to anything sexual that we don’t understand, it is usually the first thing to get shoved out.
The cleverness of nearly every paedophile is to play directly at this instinct in all of us to see, half understand what we are seeing, recognise the inherent unpleasantness of it if turned out to be true and then look other way, telling ourselves we didn’t really see what we thought we saw. All of this happens in a split second and is over before we’ve even had a chance to think about it properly. It is how we automatically defend ourselves against unpleasant things. Part of the paedophile’s pleasure, on the other hand, is gained, not just from what he does to his victims, but in turning the scrutiny of sensible others away from his actions knowing they are confused and uncertain of what it is they might suspect him of. The clerical child abuse over decades in this country is an illustration of this very thing.
While disavowal works at its strongest in areas of sexual matters, it is not confined to them. Every time you come across good people standing by while bad things happen and continue to happen, you will find some form of disavowal. In contemporary society, you’ll find it cropping up in the most unusual places; in government, in civil life, in relationships, on committees. A current but more extreme example that comes to mind is the recent mass killing in the US that has brought gun laws back into the spotlight. Yet the pattern there has always been one of consistently forgetting about the problem very quickly once the publicity has died down. These are all forms of disavowal.
We can even have it in terms of our relation to ourselves. We can know something needs to be done and yet it never gets done. We can understand that our lives might be better if we stopped doing this or started doing that, and yet we never seem to do it. To understand it, and to spend time coming to see it in ourselves, is an important first step in being able to ensure we in our own small way learn to deal with disavowal. That, in turn, means we can move closer to recognising it when it occurs in the wider world around us and allow us to maybe do something positive about it.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
The Allure of Pornography
By Kevin Murphy,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Pornography is an enjoyable and necessary part of human life; an activity that free, liberated people can engage with as they wish. It represents an openness around sexuality that is refreshing and unrestrained, and it provides very visible answers for anyone who has any questions as to how the sex act should be conducted. It should be applauded not criticized for the work it does in the democratization of sex. It allows access to the viewing of sexual acts to all adults. Any attempt to stifle the free sexual expression that pornography symbolises is an attempt to bring us back to the dark ages when sexual issues were forbidden from being discussed. Pornography is the ultimate freedom.
I think that more or less sums up the position of those on the side of pornography. They are sentiments you will no doubt have heard in one form or another. And, of course, pornography is no longer pornography, it is adult entertainment.
Well, it is certainly that, even if you might quibble with the nature and content of the entertainment on offer. But one thing is certain, sex sells. There are no shortage of users for this form of ‘entertainment’, the scale of the pornography industry is enormous and there are plenty of candidates willing to tell you that it is healthy and wholesome. But is it?
I’m not arguing from a moral or religious point of view or from the concern about the commercial exploitation of one gender or another. Rather I am taking a view from the perspective of mental health and mental wellbeing. So let’s have a look at some of the things that pornography users talk about when they present themselves in the clinical setting. First and foremost, it is predominantly men. Women, in my experience, may use internet pornography but they seem to use it in a way that does not have them seeking help to get away from it.
So it is predominantly male, at least in the confidential setting of my private practice, and the predominant feature is that they wish to get away from using it, to stop altogether. I find this an interesting phenomenon. Pornography is a ‘pleasure’ product – like so many products on offer in our culture – and yet here we have men saying they are indulging in too much pleasure and want to stop. That’s because too much pleasure is the same thing as un-pleasure. And we never know we’ve crossed the dividing line until it’s too late. That’s something we never hear debated much these days.
The next feature worth mentioning is that they find they cannot stop using it. It has become a compulsion, an addiction if you like. And like all addictions, it is a way of regulating our internal pleasure economy, as one analyst describes it. The problem is that this chosen method of regulation of our pleasure gets out of control and instead of us controlling it, it controls us.
The next point to bear in mind is that some men come to realise how destructive internet pornography is to their real relationships. When so-called perfect bodies are engaging in so-called perfect sexual acts and giving all the impressions of getting so-called full satisfaction from it, it is difficult to get one’s real life experiences to match. Real life is not always like that. So pornography creates an illusory ideal. And illusory ideals can be one of the most destructive elements in our thinking. We can never reach them, they never go away and the uncomfortable tension between these two positions can last indefinitely. Men will often tell you that their real life partners just do not excite them after watching pornography.
The other psychologically destructive point is that pornography is not real. You’d be surprised at the number of people who disagree with this statement. No, they will say, pornography is real, there are real people on screen, I can see them! The key words here are ‘on screen’. It is a virtual world, a world of make believe, where fantasies of male potency and pleasure can be acted out without consequences. There is no engagement with a real, living person, no relationship is forming, and even more importantly no real lessons in how to love or engage sexually with another human being are being learned. Rather it is a repetitive exercise that eventually takes on the form of an unsatisfying cyclical experience that is devoid of human contact.
But bear in mind, the choice of pornography for most men is made for this very reason. It is a move away from reality, away from the demands of the real other person, into a world of imagination where no demands are made and no expectations are imposed. Unfortunately, the impersonal, self sufficient, self pleasuring gain, for those who do come for therapy, has long ago been far outweighed by the loss involved. And what is the loss?
Pornography remains a solitary act, an essentially empty pleasure which draws us in with great promises that are never delivered. At the end of it we remain the same as we were when we started; isolated, questioning and alone. There is no enrichment worth speaking about, other than a momentary, facile pleasure. When this experience comes to dominate the experience of users of pornography, they then seek therapy. Or when some other real life interruption ‘jolts’ them out of the fantasy.
The lure of the forbidden, though, always has a certain cache, a certain alluring gravitational pull. To combat this, you will hear some pornography users talk about it as if it were an active, directed choice. They make it sound like the kind of thing that men of action do, a kind of taking control of one’s pleasures in a rational, almost heroic way. All men do it (by implication, all men of action) and so do I, you’ll hear them say.
And yet internet pornography – an industry of massive scale – is a passive act. There is no action involved here. Even interactive pornographic experiences are ultimately virtual in nature – there is no real interaction and it ultimately involves passive viewing. It is essentially the passive viewing of others’ enjoyment, one in which we share only at the level of a visual experience. We can certainly join it as a masturbatory experience, as practically all men do, but it is still not ours, it is somebody else’s. This passive position usually sits at odds with most men’s view of themselves as being active and in control of their lives. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find examples from other parts of their lives where they watch and secretly engage with other people’s experiences. But, on the other hand, if you were to look for the first possible examples of where the urge to view others having sex might arise in a person’s life, you might find yourself asking if it has Oedipal roots.
Which brings me to my last point. There are many different forms of pornography on the internet. You can probably find every sexual taste catered for in some form or another. Most involve consenting adults while others are in the realm of serious violence against vulnerable women and children, cynically masquerading as liberal sexual practices. Not all forms of pornography mean the same thing. Some people are looking to escape the real world of human relationships; some believe an ultimate form of pleasure exists and it is only a matter of finding it; others use pornography to deal with anxieties that masturbation might comfort; others still are engaged in more complicated relations of domination and submission; and those who seek to hurt are giving free rein to the basest instinct of all, the violent urge to destroy lives.
Generally speaking, for most men pornography is a pleasure-seeking escape into fantasy from reality. Until, that is, for some it becomes a reality they have difficulty with and so their daily lived experience becomes impoverished and problematic as a result. The allure of pornography is that it offers forbidden pleasures along with the promise that the ‘freedom to enjoy’ is as simple as turning on a computer. But freedom to enjoy is a much bigger thing. It involves understanding what we want to enjoy, how we want to enjoy, and with what real, other, consenting person we might choose to enjoy. If passive and solitary viewing of the sexual acts of others on a computer screen were the answer, we’d have been recommending it long ago.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Pornography is an enjoyable and necessary part of human life; an activity that free, liberated people can engage with as they wish. It represents an openness around sexuality that is refreshing and unrestrained, and it provides very visible answers for anyone who has any questions as to how the sex act should be conducted. It should be applauded not criticized for the work it does in the democratization of sex. It allows access to the viewing of sexual acts to all adults. Any attempt to stifle the free sexual expression that pornography symbolises is an attempt to bring us back to the dark ages when sexual issues were forbidden from being discussed. Pornography is the ultimate freedom.
I think that more or less sums up the position of those on the side of pornography. They are sentiments you will no doubt have heard in one form or another. And, of course, pornography is no longer pornography, it is adult entertainment.
Well, it is certainly that, even if you might quibble with the nature and content of the entertainment on offer. But one thing is certain, sex sells. There are no shortage of users for this form of ‘entertainment’, the scale of the pornography industry is enormous and there are plenty of candidates willing to tell you that it is healthy and wholesome. But is it?
I’m not arguing from a moral or religious point of view or from the concern about the commercial exploitation of one gender or another. Rather I am taking a view from the perspective of mental health and mental wellbeing. So let’s have a look at some of the things that pornography users talk about when they present themselves in the clinical setting. First and foremost, it is predominantly men. Women, in my experience, may use internet pornography but they seem to use it in a way that does not have them seeking help to get away from it.
So it is predominantly male, at least in the confidential setting of my private practice, and the predominant feature is that they wish to get away from using it, to stop altogether. I find this an interesting phenomenon. Pornography is a ‘pleasure’ product – like so many products on offer in our culture – and yet here we have men saying they are indulging in too much pleasure and want to stop. That’s because too much pleasure is the same thing as un-pleasure. And we never know we’ve crossed the dividing line until it’s too late. That’s something we never hear debated much these days.
The next feature worth mentioning is that they find they cannot stop using it. It has become a compulsion, an addiction if you like. And like all addictions, it is a way of regulating our internal pleasure economy, as one analyst describes it. The problem is that this chosen method of regulation of our pleasure gets out of control and instead of us controlling it, it controls us.
The next point to bear in mind is that some men come to realise how destructive internet pornography is to their real relationships. When so-called perfect bodies are engaging in so-called perfect sexual acts and giving all the impressions of getting so-called full satisfaction from it, it is difficult to get one’s real life experiences to match. Real life is not always like that. So pornography creates an illusory ideal. And illusory ideals can be one of the most destructive elements in our thinking. We can never reach them, they never go away and the uncomfortable tension between these two positions can last indefinitely. Men will often tell you that their real life partners just do not excite them after watching pornography.
The other psychologically destructive point is that pornography is not real. You’d be surprised at the number of people who disagree with this statement. No, they will say, pornography is real, there are real people on screen, I can see them! The key words here are ‘on screen’. It is a virtual world, a world of make believe, where fantasies of male potency and pleasure can be acted out without consequences. There is no engagement with a real, living person, no relationship is forming, and even more importantly no real lessons in how to love or engage sexually with another human being are being learned. Rather it is a repetitive exercise that eventually takes on the form of an unsatisfying cyclical experience that is devoid of human contact.
But bear in mind, the choice of pornography for most men is made for this very reason. It is a move away from reality, away from the demands of the real other person, into a world of imagination where no demands are made and no expectations are imposed. Unfortunately, the impersonal, self sufficient, self pleasuring gain, for those who do come for therapy, has long ago been far outweighed by the loss involved. And what is the loss?
Pornography remains a solitary act, an essentially empty pleasure which draws us in with great promises that are never delivered. At the end of it we remain the same as we were when we started; isolated, questioning and alone. There is no enrichment worth speaking about, other than a momentary, facile pleasure. When this experience comes to dominate the experience of users of pornography, they then seek therapy. Or when some other real life interruption ‘jolts’ them out of the fantasy.
The lure of the forbidden, though, always has a certain cache, a certain alluring gravitational pull. To combat this, you will hear some pornography users talk about it as if it were an active, directed choice. They make it sound like the kind of thing that men of action do, a kind of taking control of one’s pleasures in a rational, almost heroic way. All men do it (by implication, all men of action) and so do I, you’ll hear them say.
And yet internet pornography – an industry of massive scale – is a passive act. There is no action involved here. Even interactive pornographic experiences are ultimately virtual in nature – there is no real interaction and it ultimately involves passive viewing. It is essentially the passive viewing of others’ enjoyment, one in which we share only at the level of a visual experience. We can certainly join it as a masturbatory experience, as practically all men do, but it is still not ours, it is somebody else’s. This passive position usually sits at odds with most men’s view of themselves as being active and in control of their lives. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find examples from other parts of their lives where they watch and secretly engage with other people’s experiences. But, on the other hand, if you were to look for the first possible examples of where the urge to view others having sex might arise in a person’s life, you might find yourself asking if it has Oedipal roots.
Which brings me to my last point. There are many different forms of pornography on the internet. You can probably find every sexual taste catered for in some form or another. Most involve consenting adults while others are in the realm of serious violence against vulnerable women and children, cynically masquerading as liberal sexual practices. Not all forms of pornography mean the same thing. Some people are looking to escape the real world of human relationships; some believe an ultimate form of pleasure exists and it is only a matter of finding it; others use pornography to deal with anxieties that masturbation might comfort; others still are engaged in more complicated relations of domination and submission; and those who seek to hurt are giving free rein to the basest instinct of all, the violent urge to destroy lives.
Generally speaking, for most men pornography is a pleasure-seeking escape into fantasy from reality. Until, that is, for some it becomes a reality they have difficulty with and so their daily lived experience becomes impoverished and problematic as a result. The allure of pornography is that it offers forbidden pleasures along with the promise that the ‘freedom to enjoy’ is as simple as turning on a computer. But freedom to enjoy is a much bigger thing. It involves understanding what we want to enjoy, how we want to enjoy, and with what real, other, consenting person we might choose to enjoy. If passive and solitary viewing of the sexual acts of others on a computer screen were the answer, we’d have been recommending it long ago.
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