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.



REFERENCES



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