T H O U G H T
A N D
S E X U A L I T Y
And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.
The Fire Sermon
The Waste Land - T. S. Eliot
PART I:
A. Psychoanalysis was born of modernity and lives in the company of the thought of its
time. It is impregnated with and influenced by culture. Dialectically, it distinguishes
itself as a specific area of knowledge while influencing all the rest of modern culture.
Based on this position, I would like to take Hugo
Friedrich's classical book, "The Structure of Modern Lyrics," as my point of
reference. Friedreich considers Baudelaire as the initiator of modernity in lyrics, and
shows the reasons for his break with what came before. He shows how, in "The Flowers
of Evil," the raw material of poetry arises from negative categories, such as images
that are disparaged by common sense and by established viewpoints. These negative elements
include fragments, aspects of urban life, abnormality, and everything else that could be
abandoned and disqualified in the sense of having any poetic force. At the same time, he
establishes extreme pretension through discipline and exactitude, and inserts his own
reflection in the body of his poetry.
Eliot, a fragment of whose "The Fire Sermon," from "The Waste Land," I
quoted above, even uses parts of poems by classical authors in association with
contemporary images. The above passage for example, is a rearrangement of a passage from
Ovid inserted into Eliot's poem in the middle of an amorous event of modest import. This
same use of re-arranged elements taken from classical sources can also be seen today in
the plastic arts.
I would like to draw an analogy between this tendency and the birth of psychoanalysis. In
effect, the origins of psychoanalysis are based on what was disregarded by the science and
philosophy of the time, and it remained marginal in relation to medicine. Freud went like
a miner to his ore, to sift out slips of the tongue and dreams from this
"waste". He takes his material out of everyday life and from magic and casts his
light on them to make his conjectures. The uninteresting hysteria is chosen as his area of
interest and scandal and discomfort ensue in the wake of the reaction by common sense.
The well-behaved Jew from Vienna disfigures or, better stated, re-figures his time. Freud
had Mallarmé as forerunner, an adapted character who radicalizes the marginality totally
configured by Rimbaud.
Rimbaud only lived to the age of 37 and all his work was produced in a four-year period at
the end of his adolescence. But he revolutionized language and the very structure of
lyrics. He then went on to a phase of adventure to Asia and Africa and complete literary
silence. By contrast, Mallarmé fulfilled his literary revolutionary in a quite normal
bourgeois life.
Obviously, radicalism and marginality are only necessary in one's method and in defining
one's object of interest.
Lyrics, like the plastic arts and art in general, continue. They necessarily seek new
WASTE, such as bits of newspaper, marginal materials, fractured figures, explosion of the
integrity of colors, ruptures in tonality, etc. They go on to fulfill their function of
revealing and creating realities, and permanently need to fashion metaphors. To create a
spark of something new, art needs the presence of the unexpected. Even words need new
connections if they are to maintain their strength. They are as susceptible to destruction
as buildings.
The 1937 Exhibit on Degenerate Art in Berlin showed that it was in a certain sense in the
right direction, in spite of its obscurantism. It made a direct attack on the very essence
of contemporaneousness by attacking the ugliness and bizarreness in modern art. Many
celebrate this exhibit.
On that occasion the Reich confronted its aesthetics of beauty with the
"deformation" introduced by modernity. It equated portraits like Modigliani's to
degenerative maladies and it showed the deformation present in the art produced by Jews,
Bolsheviks and all kinds of marginal groups. That widely repudiated exhibit, organized by
the official ideologists, displayed works by Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall, Otto Dix,
George Grosz, W. Kandinsky and others.
That same Berlin exhibit was reconstructed in 1991 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
under the title: "Degenerate Art - The Fate of the Avant Garde in Nazi Germany."
Once more the parallelism between psychoanalysis and culture could be seen.
In psychoanalysis, as in art, repetition is anti-ethical. New raw material has to be
sought if presence is to be maintained. Another analogy with psychoanalysis is that new
metaphors and new languages are needed if mankind enmeshed in new science is to find
expression.
But dreams, lapses and symptoms have long since come out of the shadows. They have been
become official, and are periodically celebrated.
Institutions tend to become academies for maintenance and reproduction, as we adapt to the
secure and the consecrated. Where are uneasiness and risk? Do we choose our candidates for
their courage? Where is the freedom of free association? What does it mean today? Where is
our raw material to come from? Where are we to find today's "waste"? With so
much production in aesthetics and criticism, how long will we continue to repeat Keats's
idea of negative capacity? Shouldn't we have Eliot's daring to recompose classical
passages in new associations, instead of scrubbing them down and looking for their most
correct meanings?
Among the concepts that psychoanalysis is founded on, perhaps the one that holds to its
marginality is sexuality. Personalities as varied as A. Green and H. Etchegoyen seem to
point in the same direction, namely, the marginality of the conceptualization of
psychosexuality in our current practice and theorization.
The idea of sexuality still tends to be relegated to sexual behavior, be it that of
adults or children, in its varying forms. Although this is an incorrect understanding, it
has well-defined roots. Following this mistake, all efforts to keep it from participating
in the psychoanalytic clinic can be explained. In the clinic, ideas like sufficiently
analyzed, analytic neutrality, or even the search for correct discourse can be found. The
eternal quest for the therapeutic effectiveness of the mutative interpretation is still
present.
Obviously, the subject of the interpretation is not questioned.
Freud's originality is that he pinpointed the origin of sexuality at the intersection
between the somatic and the psychic. The ontology of psychoanalysis is the theory of the
drives, that nebulous sphere where lust is no more, but where there is no representation
either. It is an area of silence, and arises from the relentlessness of the body's needs
and their future mastery by culture. This is the where psychosexuality originates. The
psychism is organized out of this sphere, which is the sphere of the individual culture,
the breach with nature. In this configuration there is no human act or thought without
some sexual root.
I want to stress that I am not talking about sublimation here. Sexual behavior itself
needs complex organization in order to function. Without culture, that is, without psychic
organization, there is no pleasure. There is chaos. But this paper will not take up
sexuality as the term is understood in common language.
The title of this paper sets up an improper dichotomy, as if we had psychosexuality on the
one hand and thought on the other, mutually opposing and exclusive. I intend to go into
this point in Part II.
Questions come up. Is any analytic discourse or, more broadly, is any analytic interaction
possible without sexuality? Can there be any neutral discourse? Even computers have men's
or women's voices. Doesn't our "smoothly accepting" way of talking contains some
proposition? Might not we be implicitly saying that orality is permissible sexuality? And
when we theorize, is there a tendency to oscillate between the sexual and the non-sexual?
Even at the level of theory, is the sexuality of the author being expressed? Can we write
anything without exposing ourselves? Isn't there a certain fright involved here? Isn't
this exposure to an unknown reader frightening?
To use a well-known example, then, all of Freud's theorizing about female sexuality is
questionable. The idea of the "dark continent," the sight of the frightening
female genitals, the "non-visibility of female genitals," the definition of the
female as the absence of what is male," etc. How much has been interpreted of the
dreams found in Freud's work, and how much has been said of his clinical cases? And they
still face the theoretical impediments and impasses of each author.
Umberto Eco has written about the re-creation of texts based on each reader or on each
sphere of reading. Isn't each reader's sexuality also contained in each reading?
Obviously there is no more room for the interpretative reflections so in vogue in times
past that try to explain texts through psycho-biographies. Texts exist in their own right,
and to try get through them to the author's personal characteristics is improper, since
for analytic conceptions to operate we need the analytic situation, specifically, the
interchange of two subjectivities.
B. Now let us look at the hypothesis of there existing some question of the presence or
absence of the concept of sexuality in the theoretical framework.
Theoretical concepts can be divided into basic concepts and structural concepts.
I will call basic concept the final element that, by decomposition of an entire
structure, maintains its analytic specificity and still allows the clinical act to be
characterized. By structural concept I mean the highest level of abstraction that,
in its unity, contains a multiplicity of particular concepts.
The unconscious is an essential structural concept in Freud's first topic. The basic
concept would be mnemic mark. Mnemic mark, that is,, the result of an experience of
satisfaction, tends to re-appear whenever a frustration arises. It is characteristically a
psychic and primary element that makes the bridge between need and desire, between nature
and culture, between lust and sexuality.
In the first topic the concept of mnemic mark is like a brick of which the psychic
apparatus is built. In its articulation with desire, it is the basis of the clinical act.
Let us not forget that the neurotic suffers from reminiscences. The mnemic mark is
therefore the result of a human relationship. On a somatic level it has sexuality at its
root, but it becomes psychic when it becomes representation and becomes psychosexual when
it becomes desire. Through its pulsation, representation is opposed to current experience
and, by projection, it tints all externality with human color.
Based on this first definition, others necessarily follow, such as the pleasure principle,
the reality principle, infantile sexuality, Oedipus, repression, etc. It should be
understood, however, that all have as their basis the idea of mnemic mark.
It is clear at this point in the theory that the concept of psychosexuality receives
special emphasis. It is the psychic act par excellence, and configures humanity. It has a
physical basis as the supposition on which it rests. It obliges abstract concepts from the
definition of drives, that are areas of silence, that can deal with ideas, origins and
directions. (??)
As was stated above, however, in its operations sexuality also sets up opposition as a
concept. On the one hand there is a broadening of questions such as the search for
pleasure in self-destruction and, on the other, new irruptions that infiltrate into this
unbearable perception. With increasing construction of structural conceptualization, we
arrive at the second topic.
In the second topic the basic concept is identification and the mnemic mark becomes
explicitly the mark of a relationship. The nostalgia of this relationship again structures
the psychism. Mourning is its model. "The Ego is the precipitate of abandoned object
cathexes," said Freud, and the Superego is a differentiation of the Ego. The Id is
the matrix from which these structures arise. In the dynamics involving the concepts,
there is an increased tension between basic and structural concepts that, due to the
distance between them, tend to separate. In this theoretical structure, a tendency of the
structure to separate from sexuality can easily be seen. Although Freud published a number
of articles about Oedipus following his "The Ego and the Id," historically there
is a point after which less emphasis is given to sexuality in various theoretical
currents. We begin to read about ego free from conflict, pre-sexual stages,
non-integrative stages, non-transferential moments in the clinic, etc.
In the theoretical evolution of psychoanalysis, next comes the Kleinian system. There the
basic concept is object relations.
In her first book, on the analysis of children, she takes a radical stance regarding
identifications and the death instinct. The psyche, attracted by its own destruction, goes
out and impregnates the world, fashioning the relationships that have constituted it by
internalizing them.
Klein uses long sentences in long paragraphs as she attempts to describe the multiple
forms of sexuality that operate simultaneously in interaction and contradiction. Her style
is direct and her figurations are shattered, even repugnant.
Strictly speaking the reaction is repugnance, and it can be said that there is a renewal
of Waste as raw material for representing the new, in both the radical positions of the
first Kleinian system and in modernity in general.
The dynamics between externalization and internalization gives rise to the psychic
apparatus simultaneously with the possibility for thinking. The appropriation of the
internal world frees the outside world from its coercion (projection of the death
instinct), and allows it to be appropriated.
At this point Melanie Klein is not concerned with an overall view. She seems to show a
sort of enthusiasm with the fertility of the basic concept of internal object relations,
the heir of the concept of identification. In this inheritance, object relations remain
impregnated with the conception of sexuality. The rejection that Klein's first
descriptions caused is well known.
If this hypothesis I am formulating makes sense, the next step is to desexualize, through
two tendencies. The first is by setting up a school where repetition is the rule.
Repetition prevents the vivifying breath of new metaphors related the mobility and poetry
intrinsic to the description of conflictive and evanescent sexuality. The second
desexualizing tendency takes place by grouping sexual movements into structures, giving
rise to the descriptions centered around thought and psychic organization. This was the
period of the schizo-paranoid and depressive positions and the complex, abstract form of
sexuality in its definition of projective identification.
There is an attraction toward the "normality" of the depressive position, maybe
an echo of Freud's problematic concept of sublimation.
It is from these movements of thought that Bion sets off. He refers to neurotic and
psychotic ways of thinking, and then makes a first correction in bearings. He proposes
alternation between positions instead of progress inside them. The proposal of the
coexistence of the sexual forms in the first Kleinian system is replaced by the idea of
phases, again implicit in the definition of the normality of the depressive position.
Returning to Bion, in this first correction the poetry of the ideogram is introduced with
the two-way arrows. But is this ideogramatic poetry or is it a search for scientific
expression? I think that, at this point, it is an annotation in search of mathematics and
science.
What is the basic concept in this evolution? Bion, in his form of a poetry of abstraction,
seeking new materials for representation, brings in the concepts of alpha elements and
alpha function. Thinking is the basic element.
This goes back to Freud's first topic, since the founding concept of psychoanalysis was
dreams and dreaming. From there Bion formulates a hierarchy of thinking that goes from
beta elements to complex concepts and constitutes the thinking apparatus as a structural
concept. Then he introduces the Grid, and all this leads to a specific technique. New
equations are presented in his work, and we might even ask if this new abstraction is
desexualizing. In a certain sense, as a tendency, it is desexualizing, but sexuality is
implicit, at first by broadening the use of the concept of projective identification, and
then by formulating reverie and container/contained.
In this economic and emblematic poetry, only the male and female symbols are present ( _ ,
_ ). Is this poetic abstraction or decorporification? Is it pseudo-scientific abstraction
or fright? Bion was a courageous soldier, but was he more courageous in war than when
faced with the specter of sexuality?
This question is not out of order, because authors are not made of different stuff from
their readers. We need only to look at our clinical practice, our corporations and our
institutions to see that movements of aggression are more easily broached than movements
of loving union.
In any case, the relationship between male and female occupies a modest place in Bion's
work. Since it is hard to keep sexuality on the scene but also impossible to fail to
approach it, another particularity is Bion's strange migration from male-female and
container-contained to baby-breast.
Could pre-genital sexuality, through some strange mental operation, have ceased being a
conflictive concept and become a defensive concept? Wouldn't genitality then be even more
frightening? I recommend A. Green's excellent article, "Has sexuality anything to do
with psychoanalysis?" where this view is discussed at length.
Could these two systems - the Freudian and the Kleinian - have undergone a defensive
attraction to the phallic and to orality? Might the polarization to breast and penis be
concealing other anatomies?
Could it be that what is obvious at the level of anatomy and the poetry of humanity is the
axis of the psychic conflict? If this is so, we are back at the axis of our definition of
field: Oedipus, Generation, Birth and Death.
Among analysts the idea of the association between male and female, needed for forming a
conception, has been associated to a formulation connecting the unbearable (for the baby)
and therefore projected, to the receptive, feminine haven (the mother). The model is
feeding, and digestion is equivalent to working through. Where are projection and the
genital haven? Do these phenomena (container-contained) only occur in the area of the
early processes?
Let's get back now to the discussion of the period when Freud suggested that the female
genitals are perceived rather late. Analysts who followed him, such as Jones, Klein and
others, disagreed and suggested that there was something like a pre-conception of the
female genitals.
Later Ferenczi, in his book Talassa, theorizes on the sexual phases as seen by
psychoanalysis. Referring to the lack of a theory of genitality, he held that such a
theory should be defined. He refers to genital behavior and on it rests the projection of
oral, anal and urethral functions. He then treats of frigidity, premature ejaculation,
impotence, and studies these mechanisms in speech, including blocked speech, stuttering,
etc. But this view is still insufficiently related to behavior, and the same reference to
the sexual can be seen in other areas of behavior. Another insufficiency, now in his
psychic way of approaching sexuality, is in holding that genitality seeks the oceanic
feeling (talassa means sea in Greek). He holds that what is sought in
genitality is the loss of limits, the state of merging, the return to the uterus. Might
not this view be more exactly a deflection of orality onto genitality?
Might we not have here a view of a Ferenczi in love? Isn't the moment of orgasm just one
particular moment of genitality?
If this oscillation exists between the basic concept closest to the conceptualization of
what is sexual and the more abstract and more distant structural concept of the sexual
metaphor, aren't we in need of this return to the origins? Isn't this the moment to return
to the psychosexual?
At this point, how can we define genitality?
PART II:
"Les amoureux fervents et les savants austères
Aiment également dans leur mûre saison."
Les Chats
Les Fleurs du Mal - Charles Baudelaire
Let me begin by recalling the obvious, as A. Green suggests.
What Freud discovered was psychosexuality, and it is there that we will look for a
definition for genitality. Although Freud often theorized on sexual behavior, the rupture
and newness of his discovery are in the definition of mental movements impregnated with
sexuality. In his radicality, he defines that there is no psychic movement without some
sexual direction. It would be well to remember that Freud defines the structure of
symptoms based on his definition of the structure of dreams. Using a model of
psychopathology, he concludes that these same structures preside over the construction of
the entire psychism, and that they are organized around a synthesis of conflicts that are
governed by sexuality. Beginning with pathology, he arrives at a definition of a
psychology of his own. This becomes an explosive question because the problem of the
analyst's sexuality immediately comes to the fore. How is it to be included in the
analytic encounter?
This is the moment of the rupture with Adler's desexualizing theories and Jung's theory of
a single psychic energy. It is also the period of organizing analytic training to protect
the work of analysts, and it was in this period that the Berlin Institute was set up,
along with the theories of abstinence, which was deformed by being equated with absence of
the analyst. It is also the time of the theory of the mirror and neutrality.
But let us get back to genitality. In Klein's first system it is stated that genitality
exists from the beginning, with the other phases. But what is this saying? The phases of
sexuality can be understood as ways of being that, starting with the body and the silence
of the origins of the drives, become actions. If mastered through representations, they
become ways of being. They are forms of passions, forms of relationships and early ways of
being and understanding the world. This is how I understand the search for fusion of
orality, the control or search for relief of anality, the supremacy of the power of
phallic action, etc.
But what is genitality? How can one define the fertility of the relationship between
container-contained, male-female, ___ - ____?
One reading tends to hold that the containing mother digests what the child cannot and
returns the contents to it so it can absorb the unbearable. This is the model of
projective identification, a complex mechanism based on expulsive anality that, through
omnipotence of thought, believes it can expel what annoys it, and on retentive anality
that keeps the object where it wants it and, finally, orality, that re-incorporates. The
containing object's desire to contain is not usually referred to. In any case, in the
model of the "breast" or the "mother" that contains,
"goodness" is usually thought of, rather than desire. In my understand this is a
license for sanctified desire, since it is the sexuality that is possible to the Virgin.
The pleasure and grandeur of this position is avoided. It is oral passion functioning
without need for justification or presentation. Its greatness is a corollary to insecurity
and is thus the position looked for by beginning analysts. When analytic work becomes
impossible, a defensive disguise of goodness comes to the rescue, which is nothing more
than regression. In analytic work undisclosed goodness is anti-ethical.
So we cannot fail to point out the risk involved in defining the analyst's role as
containing. The analysand's containing aspect for the analyst should also not be ignored.
A little as a caricature, the analyst can be seen as penetrating, with his comments,
seeking reassurance of his own potency. This can become a relationship of power of phallic
passion with sadomasochistic components in action.
Bion proposed a Grid and suggested that others could define their own grids. This aspect
is intrinsic to his theorization and to the search for new words and the redefinition of
old words into new arrangements. The reading of his text allows multiple re-readings and
it seems to stimulate associations. It has a particular poetic quality and its proposal is
in total opposition to anything that should be taken as a paradigm. If we were to take his
concepts as clarifying and defining, this would end up reducing the complexity of a work
with a specific, stimulating authorship into a depersonalized user's manual. As an
example, I would like to quote A. Ferro, who speaks of a work of basic training of the
emotions, where creative use of terms and new associations is made.
Let us get back to the Grid. On its vertical axis there is a hierarchy of representations
beginning with beta elements and going on to the complexity of theoretical formulations of
great abstraction.
The horizontal axis has possibilities for use. The Grid is also a clinical instrument or,
better stated, a clinical exercise.
I will stick to the idea that the use of variation of representative quality is very
useful in the vertical category of these passages.
The beginning by beta elements, that, properly speaking, have practically no
representative value, appears in actions. We may think of them as the first leap based on
the hidden and silent face of the drives.
For clinical use, this categorization of representations leads to conception. This can
easily be seen in clinical experience. But a question comes up with the horizontal axis,
using a magnifying glass to define truth and lies. This is a problem that implicitly and
inevitably puts the analyst in a position of power and criticism. It also implies the
development of an epistemology that the practical analyst is far from carrying out. This
then gives rise to what can be called naive arrogance. From the sexual standpoint it is
analytic phallicism, a rigid phallicism without malleability for the multiplicity of
sexual positions proposed in a relationship. Our training has to allow not only sexuality,
but polymorphism as well.
To work more with these ideas, and as an exercise, we can propose another grid. In fact,
this a suggestion of Bion's, that each analyst set up his or her own grid. We begin on the
vertical axis, based on the territory of the drives, the border between the biological and
the psychic, and then the same chain proposed by Bion, all the way to conception, that
could also be called meaning. The change is in the horizontal axis, no longer comprised of
abstract functions or questions dealing with reality or lies. I would also put the drives
at the beginning, as the starting point for everything, and then the different sexual
positions that I suggested as ways of being. This is no longer projective identification,
but its splintering into the basic sexual components. We would then go through the
horizontal axis to genitality.
But here we have a problem. If pre-genital ways of being have numerous definitions and
descriptions, genitality will have to be redefined for our purposes here. Another aspect
to be kept in mind is that there is no way to be sexual without a partner. The unit is
therefore the pair, as Bion said. Each element on the horizontal axis is comprised of the
male-female pair in its various configurations (oral, anal, phallic, urethral, etc., up to
genital). These pairs undergo separations at points of misunderstanding in analysis.
If we reject Ferenczi's definition of the search for fusion, and if other definitions of
genitality slide into behavior, we have to look for a psychosexual definition. It should
also be recalled what has been classically shown, that genital behavior is the synthesis
of tendencies under the primacy of the genital. So I intend to go further into this aspect
of primacy.
I will define male-female, container-contained, in its genital aspect as the movement of
one subjectivity thrusting itself upon another, losing its identity in the movement,
becoming fused to another and returning to itself full of meaning. In this movement, the
urgency to acquire meaning, that is, to acquire psychic life itself, becomes mixed in with
the urgency or desire to give meaning. There is risk of libidinal investment, the fear of
losing oneself or of there being no return, etc.
In this movement of subjectivities there is an interchange of roles and bisexuality, as
defined by Freud. The image that at least four participants are present in every
relationship is quite suggestive. I think that the drives could be understood as basic
tendencies, such as the life drive, the tendency to union and, in this movement, creation
of psychic life, or creation of representations. The construction of psychic
representations as creators of mental life causes anxiety and, under the aegis of the
death drive, a movement of separation appears, or of destruction, non-construction, of
meaning. This implies the non-construction of life, the death of the soul. It can also be
seen how far we are here from life and death as corporeal events. These corporeal
descriptions can only be understood as metaphoric images.
In any case, subjectivity, in its interchange in genitality, returns to itself, with a new
meaning that does not depend on, nor even re-articulate, subjectivity. It renews its
self-view and its self-love. If psychoanalysis is a search for meaning, an expansion of
humanity, then, in terms of the grid, disease is to remain in the concreteness of sexual
action and remain distant from the possibility of fertile interaction of genitality.
In this proposed grid both the axis of representations and the axis of psychosexual
interactions begin in the same area the container of the drives. Obviously a graph with
ordinates and abscissas is not enough to make metaphors about the soul, but we should not
forget that this is a mere exercise in writing and an attempt to put some order to things.
Let us try to get down to a clinical reference. Two subjectivities come into contact.
Immediately a "precipitate of abandoned object cathexes" goes into suspension.
We are in crisis and turbulence (to use a term of Bion's) comes on. Both are frightened.
We should hope that the analyst is the less frightened, but this is not always the case.
We see analysands waiting patiently, without realizing it, for the analyst to be able to
move along pathways that need company. At other times patients help their analysts to
become able (see Harold F. Searles's article, "The Patient the Therapist to his
Analyst"). Action is barred, social rituals are abolished, visibility is reduced, as
is movement. If the urgency is really greater in the analysand, something begins to
happen, because what has led this person to that situation is an impasse, and the
analysand's questions are about psychic life and death.
Identifications, marks of relationships, and marks of passions appear. But what are they?
Those that are nearest death or those that keep it from emerging. From the standpoint of
the drives, it is those that are most in need of representation, that is, those most
submitted to the death drive. Since they are not grasped by representation, they have no
limits and come on as action. How can this action be conceived without movement? As sexual
action. And how can it be seen and with what instruments? We are using words, but these do
not grasp the event because analytic interaction is not literary. I suggest a model which
doesn't have much status, the comic book. The patient talks and the analyst talks -
bubbles contain the speech of each. You have to look at the drawings to find out what is
going on. In recent years cartoons have become a recognized art form and drawings have
been more widely accepted. In this modality there is action without representation. As
there are no limits to representation, representation is spread throughout the happenings
in the session. This is a beta experience hoping to encounter an experience that will let
it inhabit psychic life. The hope is to seek and find meaning and to encounter a
subjectivity that will thus attribute conceptual limits to it. I cannot conceive analytic
experience without at least some primordial genitality. This is obviously a very personal
conception since it will not stay in consciousness. Along its path through alpha elements,
dreams, etc., it will stay on the border between consciousness and the unconscious. It
will not only be contents of the psychism; it will also be a creator of its architecture
(we are dealing with Bion's definition of the contact barrier). This will necessarily be a
poetic conception: a meaning.
The primacy of genitality is due to the fact that, through its action, it can give meaning
to other phases of sexuality. Here the grid bites its own tail, because sexuality and
meaning come together. Meaning must include genital sexuality that will in turn form the
meaning of pre-genitality.
Once this meaning is attained, it's time to light a cigarette. Subjectivity folds back on
itself and there is a coffee break. This is the point of neutrality in analysis.
Sometimes meaning is such that it becomes manageable and overflows into a realization that
will be developed during an entire lifetime. How many children are generated in an
analysis? After they are born there is still an entire existence to raise them.
It is time to re-think the use of the grid, because life does not accept being captured,
much less on a grid. It has to be disguised in poetry. Otávio Paz said that all peoples
have had poetry. Some have tragedies, others epics, others yet have romances, but all,
without exception, have produced lyrics. Through poetry a people fashions its past in the
present in a way that points to the future. Only poetry has this strength. It is this
element that we look for in analysis, and it is produced in pairs.
The dichotomy between thinking and sexuality is undone since thinking is like an internal
sexuality acting in container-contained. It needs to be continuously expressed externally.
Fertilized by exteriority it returns with added meaning or generates meaning that goes
beyond it.
PART III:
Let's take a look at some clinical examples:
A. A middle-aged male patient talks on and on about his marriage. He describes his wife as
a difficult person who complains continuously and who drives him crazy with insistent
demands. When I try to find out more about his role in the matter or to get more
information about what is going on, I find him impermeable. He is a very intelligent,
cultured man, interested in his analysis, so why all this repetition and sterility? This
situation continues for many sessions.
So as he talks on I ask myself what the figuration is? What does all this talk convey of a
proposal for relationship? From my standpoint, as I said, I find him impermeable. He is
unapproachable, either for penetration to engender, or to feed. Obviously he is not asking
for the analyst's oral and genital way of seeing things.
He goes on and his description of his wife becomes more unpleasant to me. He tells me
about her anti-Semitic comments, and talks about Jungian analysis with clear undertones of
disdain for the way her analyst works. I begin to feel that our conversation is like
friends chatting in a bar. He presents himself as a rationalist and therefore Freudian,
and a man of culture. As a result he is a cosmopolite like me. The proposal of an alliance
becomes clear. Summarizing, I try to sound drunk and say: "Well, then. Let's you and
me go and beat the hell out of both of them!"
He laughs, looks surprised, and the climate changes.
He feels some acceptance in what I say and, from my irony, a possibility for reflection.
The figuration becomes clearer, friends at a bar in complicity that excludes women. A
reassuring alliance.
A tranquilizing proposal of homosexuality. What sexuality or way of being is present here?
I think it is the dread of castration. This alliance, on the one hand, protects him from
my penetrating potency and therefore from the possibility of a dispute with me which could
result in the loss of his power, in castration. According to his phallic concept, there is
a danger in a relationship with a woman because at each intercourse or at each
relationship the question of his potency in put into doubt.
Let's take another look at the grid we have suggested. On the horizontal axis there is a
phallic mode that posits the question of the potency, or the power, of the one who
penetrates. This danger is presented by the penis function and the nipple function.
Originally this is the fear of dependence. Power belongs to the one who possesses what is
desired. There is insufficient representation on the vertical axis, which makes this
configuration spread as action throughout the setting and into his life.
I tell him that in intercourse, or in other terms, in a relationship, he always has to be
on top. With me he proposes a compromise to avoid a dangerous dispute. We are buddies,
neither is in need.
If he can hear me, genitality is present. The projection of his subjectivity over mine and
of mine over his will result in the return to production of meaning. If this happens, my
next intervention will be to name this genital moment.
I could say we work well together. From this angle, the first moment of neutrality is in
the encounter that generated meaning. Pre-genital passion rests "under the aegis of
the genital." Perhaps now a moment of respite. Sexuality and thought have met.
In this example I want to discuss two questions. To the extent that my interpretation is
part of the sexuality present in the session, I think it is useful to call it an intervention.
There is no pretension of neutrality nor even of sexual absence. This analysis will also
have my genetics. Obviously if what is being sought is meaning and therefore genitality,
my presence will not be kind, or "good." It will not be equated with the breast.
It will only be expecting. We know that when subjectivity is bared, it immediately seeks
to press against another nudity. If this does not happen, if the analyst is wearing a
"smock," the session will be like a gynecological examination. We will talk
about facts, but nothing will happen.
As a consequence, I should have an attitude of being unarmed, ready for interaction.
Neutrality will tend to be a moment after meaning is attained. The reality of the drive
immediately puts us in search of new interaction, in search of new meaning. What a
distance from biological "being in heat" and from a strict instinctual sense. It
is not only in the springtime that we desire.
B. This is a woman patient who has been in analysis for about six years. She is going
through a period in life where perspectives for financial growth and power are emerging.
She is surprised at this fact, and it bothers her that her husband says she has "all
she needs" to move ahead. She keeps complaining of the lack of communication in her
life. She talks about her mother who doesn't listen to her, but describes her as a normal,
adequate woman. Her husband doesn't accompany her in her interests. The sessions begin in
a climate of discouragement and depression as she complains about life. Then she begins to
feel better and our encounter ends on a pleasant note. After years of fertile work I feel
that the analysis is spinning its wheels. Nevertheless, something happens to me in these
encounters. I come out of the sessions with a feeling of depth and esteem for the patient
and her analysis. I go through long periods without knowing how to approach this fact,
because I'm afraid of seeming seductive or being held responsible for cutting off our
analytic contract. Finally I decide to approach the fact and tell her I feel that I profit
from the sessions with her and that there is pleasure in these encounters. This same week,
surprised and concerned, the patient says she dreamed that she had a penis. In the dream
she is wearing her usual nightgown, but as she passes in front of a mirror she sees the
silhouette of a penis in her profile. She thinks it's big. Then the scene changes and she
practices oral sex with her sister. She comments that she does this with great delicacy
and pleasure. She doesn't "tucha" her penis.
I conclude that something is worked through by this dream and that there is a change in
the situation of the analytic relationship. The repetition and feeling of sterility seem
to have dissipated. As there is no psychic representation of her genitality in a male
form, this male form permeates the situation in the analysis and comes to me through the
climate of fertility and pleasure. I come away feeling laden with meaning. Her resources
and emerging financial strength and psychic resources, to the extent that they are felt as
phallic potency, or sufficiency, do not satisfy her (she has all she needs), and bring her
to analysis with the feeling she has no place in the world. My formulation opens up space
for a broader presentation of herself, and the dream that follows is the mark of
representation, allied to the meaning that is forming in her.
It is clear how the oscillation of positions in the analytic function is indispensable.
She then begins to work through her inverted Oedipus complex, in the sense that
bisexuality is needed for the full use of her strength.
In this patient, then, there is a path from action to a representation that acquires
meaning. She then goes on to have limits set up and lets new actions appear in the
following sessions - seeking representation.
C. A young professional man comes to analysis saying that he needs it to practice his
profession. Today I would not start an analysis on this basis, but I did so in that case
because the patient visibly seemed maladjusted. In one of our first sessions he brought me
an album with cutouts from magazines to show to young ladies when he went out with them.
No loving or sexual interest seemed involved. He really seemed not to want more than to
use it to communicate. This patient made it impossible for me to intervene, and since, at
that time I imagined that I had to exercise the role of interpreter, I sometimes insisted
in this attempt. The patient would then have an attack of sinusitis with abundant
secretion lasting the entire session and would use up several boxes of paper tissues.
Soon after, this patient, in his own work as analyst, had sexual intercourse with his
first two patients. This fact shocked him greatly, partly because they were women who did
not particularly attract him and were both much older than he. The episodes made him so
unnerved that he abandoned not only the profession, but his own analysis as well.
I think now, looking back on this patient of many years ago, that he needed to act out
sexuality with, or on, an object that was despised, then mastered, possessed and
collected. His sexuality has sadistic aspects, colored by anality.
On the other hand, I was constrained by my insecurity, and thought that I should carry out
some active intervention, either to feed him or to perform something fertile. Possibly the
patient, in his perverse sexuality, felt this as an intrusion, or rape on my part, and
tried to protect himself by getting rid of me. Compelled by his need and unable to have
this need accepted in the analytic situation, he acted out violently in another setting.
One question to be discussed then is ethics, because to be ethical is to practice
analysis. The analyst should therefore be able to allow the expression of sexuality. In
the way suggested, sexuality is obviously virtual and tends to seek meaning. Because of my
analytic incapacity at the time, not only did I not let the patient express his sexuality.
I insisted on expressing mine. I don't think this situation is all that rare, as it
doesn't lead to a crisis when complicity is attained and the pair fails to recognize the
need to work it through in representation. An analyst must always observe the kind of
interactions he proposes to participate in, in his clinic. We need to take a closer look
at our pleasure in being receptive, fertile or penetrating. Obviously concrete sexual
action is a direct path from this virtual situation to psychosis. The phenomenon is the
same, but when acts become concrete the situation becomes psychotic. This is an absence of
ethics. There is no moral question involved, and this leads us to the question of
supervision and maybe to questions of training and formation.
D. Situations from Supervision:
I would like to finish by pointing out that it is useful for supervision to be performed
within the limits of the presence of two sexualities. The inequality needed for
psychoanalysis, I insist, is not the same as invisibility of the analyst.
Analysts frequently ask for help on cases that are not going well. One often hears the
complaint that "the patient doesn't listen to me," "I sit there paralyzed
the whole session," in its various forms, or else the therapist feels sleepy,
powerless, etc. One approach could be to consider that the analyst's sexuality is going
through a moment of great frustration without it being able to be thought about.
Experience shows that in the great majority of these cases the patient displays a mode of
being centered monochordially in anality, either in its expulsive or its retentive form.
We have produced very few studies on the perversions as a clinical structure, and have
tended to reduce the modes of being to neurotic and psychotic.
I reaffirm that when sexualities are compatible the analytic encounter does not come to an
impasse. There might not be a work of representative construction, but no crisis appears.
The capital sin in analysis that can lead to a rupture is to block the figuration the
patient needs. In this case the analyst seeks an interpretation that can change the
patient's way of acting and not a figuration that could make action conceivable. To
propose that the patient change sexualities is an impossible task, because for the patient
this action is vital, and besides having no alternative, he needs to present himself, and
this act of presentation takes on conception and meaning. This is the point, therefore,
that an analysis can be interrupted.
I only make mention of these points because I feel that supervision at these stages, or
moments, in an analysis deserves fuller treatment and specific elaboration.
LEOPOLD NOSEK
September 1996.
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