Sexualities and Identities:

It is the fate of collections to be often wildly uneven, and that is true with Sexualities: Contemporary Psychoanalytic Perspectives, eds. Alessandra Lemma and Paul E. Lynch (Routledge, 2015), xiii+244pp. There are two outstanding chapters, and two very good chapters; and then a great deal of other material some readers might find interesting or helpful but I did not. 

I read this book first for general interest, then because I work with adult and adolescent sex offenders ordered by the courts into treatment, and finally because I am working on an essay about the erotic in transferences and counter-transferences. 

I begin with Part III, "Homosexuality" and the first essay in this section by Peter Fonagy and Elizabeth Allision, "A Scientific Theory of Homosexuality." To my mind, this is the most outstanding essay in the book both for the cogency of the writing and for the challenging arguments it offers. The entire chapter--or at least the first half of it--plays something of a trick on the reader who, under that title, is led to expect something the authors very severely put to the question in the chapter's second half. That is, the first part is a brief review of the history of attempts to conjure up a theory of homosexuality (that history has recently been treated more expansively, but not entirely successfully, in a book I discussed here). 

Fonagy, of course, is the founder of the tradition of mentalization-based therapy, about which see here and here. He has also published on possible connections between infantile experiences and attachment, and the development of sexuality. 

With Allison, the burdern of the second half of their co-authored chapter is introduced and encapsulated by the claim that "normal sexual desire is inherently unknowable....Part of the essence of desire is that there is something anti-conceptual, something indefinite and unknowable about it" (p.133). This, in turn leads to one of the other major claims by these authors: "neither homosexuality nor heterosexuality are 'normal' and...neither can be an identity."

I rather imagine that both claims will immediately set some teeth on edge, but both are for me so straighforwardly obvious and true they cease to require additional argumentation. 

These claims are not, of course, entirely original to these two authors. Adam Phillips, for one, has argued something similar about the inherent unknowability about sexual desire and identity, especially in his 1997 book Terrors and Experts, where he has repeatedly noted that "there is nothing like sexuality...for making a mockery of our self-knowledge. In our erotic lives, at least, our preferences do not always accord with our standards." Later in the book he continues by arguing that "from a psychoanalytic point of view, nobody can know about sexuality" in part because "we are never one thing or another, but a miscellany. (For how long in any given day is one homosexual or heterosexual, and can you always tell the difference?)" 

The, uh, desire to have definitions and identities clearly nailed down is, Phillips suggests, an expression of our "wish to be defined [which] is complicit with the wish to be controlled." Additionally, the ham-fisted insistence on clear and sharp definitions runs the very real risk that "too much definition leaves too much out." Too much definition, in other words, undermines mystery and freedom alike. 

This, too, is very similar to what Fonagy and Allison argue: "the essence of desire is its indefiniteness." Indefiniteness means that we can have no legitimating theories of human sexuality, and these authors end their essay by suggesting that such theories in the past have functioned in an anti-mentalizing fashion, shutting down the ability to think about ourselves in ways that take account of our complexity and messiness: "it behooves us to be suspicious of ourselves when our wish for simplicity begins to override out respect for the complexity of subjective experience that our patients engender and bring with them in relation to their experience of their sexuality" (p.135). 

Anyone who has done clinical work for more than a week will immediately realize the profound truth of that last statement. And it shows up in several other essays, as well, including the moving and somewhat melancholic "Intimacy and Shame in Gay Male Sexuality" by Paul E. Lynch: "the beauty of working with patients instead of theories is that they are not so determinedly insistent on conclusions about their own sexuality, and are more often trying to find some way to make sense of themselves, their bodies, their pains and pleasures, and their relationships" (p.146). (Briefly towards the end of his chapter, Lynch suggests that "transgressive sexual behaviors may be an enactment or embodiment of un-represented, un-symbolized, or unformulated early experience," a theme that Adam Phillips has also briefly touched on, and before them both found in the works of Robert Stoller, including Perversion: the Erotic Form of Hatred.)

Earlier in the collection, Mary Target suggests that "fully expressed adult sexuality, regardless of dominant gender identity or orientation, incorporates unconscious bisexuality and bluring of the gender role of self or other." All of these authors, of course, are merely echoing what Freud first postulated in his infamous 1905 Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality:

Since I have become acquainted with the notion of bisexuality I regarded it as the decisive factor, and witout taking bisexuality into account, I think it would scarcely be possible to arrive at an understanding of the sexual manifestations that are actually to be observed in men and women.

Lynch's claim about un-represented forms of sexual desire and behavior shows up in the last two chapters of this collection, the first written by Avgi Saketopoulou, who has also recently published Sexuality Beyond Consent, which I hope to read over the Christmas break. Her chapter here is entitled "On Sexual Perversions' Capacity to Act as Portal to Psychic States that Have Evaded Representation." 

She grapples with the continued use of the word "perversion," before arguing that we might retain it because it "captures the phenomenology of sexuality that blends anguish and/or pain with pleasure." Those who work clinically, as I do, with patients whose desires have been judged (often by courts, but sometimes by parents or themselves) as perverse and illegal know well this unique, and uniquely difficult, blend of anguish and pain: the desire that is unwanted, that has brought such trouble and left a streak of such devastation, is also a desire not without a certain frisson. Rather than condemn all such desires a priori and totally, we must, if we are to be of any help clinically at all, recognize that in some cases there may be real attempts to grapple with things that were unthinkable to the developing mind. As she puts it, "some sexual perversions...may be understood as proto-attempts towards figuration" (p.214). In the process of trying to figurate such experiences and desires, we must, she concludes, "always be aware" that some things are "eternally inaccessible to us, impossible to bring into knowable experience." Once more those with even modest clinical experience will at once recognize this as true.

Finally, Heather Wood concludes the book with her "Working with Problems of Perversion," and takes a much more practical approach, showing how many and how often perversions function as defensive measures to keep at bay the ever-threatening peril of intimacy and its possible engulfments. Drawing on Glasser's earlier work, Wood argues that "sexual perversions have very little to do with sex...but are about the use of sexualization as a defence to deal with primitive terrors in relationships" (p.224).  Such terrors include an uncertainty about whether the patient's own aggression can be controlled in a relationship or whether it will give rise to sadism and destruction. 

Wood also offers some helpful counsel about working in the transference with such patients, and dealing with counter-transference reactions. Many of us are anxious about sexualized transferences, and perhaps even more sexualized counter-transferences (a topic I'm writing a paper about just now), but she calmly suggests that if we keep in mind her claim above--that sexualization is a defense mechanism like other defenses--it should help us be less anxious about it. We must still, however, examine closely our own reactions as well as the transference to see whether they are about: control? sadism? anxiety? intrusion? seduction? taming a frightening object? fear of abandonment? a defense against destructive urges? a desire for merger which is intolerable and must be defended against? 

In some cases, Wood suggests, after the above forms of sexualization have been worked out, one occasionally might then begin to see less defensive sexual feelings emerge toward the clinician: "it may be important that these feelings are tolerated rather than viewed as defensive if true integration of sexuality and dependency are to occur" (p.228). 

This note has only touched on some of the essays in this rich collection. Anyone interested in sexuality and psychoanalysis will want to have this book on their shelf.