Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“Perversion in the context of multiplicity and discontinuity is a discursive construct that, when examined, begins to fall apart so that we must wonder: why do we still talk about it?”“Anxiety, Harry Stack Sullivan is said to have said, is like a blow on the head—it stops you from thinking. To write a coherent essay, you have to think in a straight line. To write notes, you jig and jog, zig along until you meet anxiety and then zag away in another direction, hoping to come back to that anxious spot from another angle, sparking this thought here and that feeling there and that idea way over there, hoping that this little bit of fireworks will end in a pattern of power and significance.”“. Perversion is a topic rife with anxiety. Tisdale (1996) was probably right when she said, “We all have an edge, a place where we are bothered.”“Our collective cultural relationship to perversion is, we might put it, one of projective identification. Perhaps perversion brews anxiety because, as Stoller (1975) sympathetically suggested during the “sexual revolution,” we depend on it to hold what we cannot bear to remember about ourselves. It fascinates endlessly because it serves psychic and social functions”“s. For the individual, Stoller opined, perverse practices redress the ancient humiliations of childhood. For the family, perversion siphons off aggression, serving as a scapegoat by containing the cruelty and hatred threatening family integrity and security. By thus preserving the family, it conserves a cultural cornerstone and, therefore, society itself. ““At the same time, Stoller contended, perversion, by soaking up the anxiety and aggression brought on by oedipal rigors, safeguards heterosexuality and, therefore, the species.”“In the matter of mind—as opposed to body—to pathologize is simultaneously to identify the illness that needs cure and to stigmatize the badness that causes shame.”-and the extreme anxiety that can occur as a result of this never ending cycle“There is something wrong with me” is a cry of shame, the narcissistic injury for which there are no words—the injury that, because it inhabits the Real and lacks representation, often turns concrete, mutating into psychical or physical harm to self or others.“The inability to sustain loss, inadequacy, castration, and death; troubles of identity, of the fusion of ego and non-ego, of the differentiation of self and other—these issues, unresolved, may find expression in perverse sexual practices.”“. It is as though the unsettlement is induced, solely the patient’s fault. Or at least Chasseguet-Smirgel neither entertained the utility of a two-person psychology to illuminate this impasse nor allowed that she had brought any feeling or idea or history of her own to it. Yet, if the message of her book holds—that perversion shakes civilization to its core—then the analyst herself must feel some uneasiness even before she meets the pervert patient. Perverse sexual practices challenge just those fundamental cultural values that orbit on the procreating couple and, in Chasseguet-Smirgel’s view, anchor Western civilization.”“Nowhere to be found, however, is the analyst who reflects on the personal and clinical (not to say cultural) meaning (Chodorow, 2000) of her feelings, who in the chaotic clinical mix of part-selves might be able to identify with the patient. Absent these dimensions of the analyst’s subjectivity, the patient’s subjectivity finds no purchase. Subjectivity is a shared state of mind.”“Benjamin’s (1998) proposal that recognition of that other subject is the point of the psychoanalytic process seems spot-on. That this recognition takes place through affect (Stein, 1991; Spezzano, 1993) complicates matters. Affects, to come at the problem from the other side, are by nature intersubjective”-love this“” What he did not see, and what the second wave of feminism, especially psychoanalytic feminism, did, is that the sexual order to which the aberrations and perversions were central is equally a gendered order. In psychoanalytic feminist view, gender is “no longer a consequence” (Goldner, 1998) of mind or body or culture but a principle informing all; it is “everywhere and nowhere” (Chodorow, cited in Goldner, 1998). Produced by patriarchy and heterosexuality, it is also always a matter of power—an argument too long and complicated for me to make here (Firestone, 1970; Millett, 1970)— but a fact that certain psychoanalytic applications of gender theory tend to forget.”-YES““The sexual perversions . . . are pathologies of gender stereotyping” (p. 196). Look at it this way: If gender as an elemental structure of dominance and subordination is so critical to psyche, soma, and culture, is it any wonder that we think of perversion as inevitably sadomasochistic?”“. If, as Goldner (n.d.), cofounder of the Intimate Violence Project at the Ackerman Institute, told us, “one-third of all [heterosexual] women will, at some point in their lives, be physically assaulted by an intimate male partner—slapped, kicked, beaten, choked or attacked with a weapon” (p. 6), that makes physical abuse almost normative for the culture in general and for heterosexuality, marriage, and (given that abuse is no stranger to homosexual households either) even attachment in particular. If aggressive sex and eroticized aggression are so at home in the nuclear family, can we say that the abnormal is at home in the normal? Freud’s joke about wife battering is a joke about power that also performs power, and the performance is patriarchal.”“It is difficult to comprehend the idea of perversion otherwise than by reference to a norm [Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 306”“Well, you can’t say it much more loudly or clearly than that. Perversion is culturally constructed. By this, I do not mean the crude misapprehension that psyche is culture’s clone. Rather, perversion links with a set of meanings and practices that render each other intelligible and habitable. To label something a perversion is simultaneously to identify something else not perverse. The normal, what does not need to be said because it goes without saying, serves in this discourse as a residual category”-exactly, when you set standards or label anything, everything else is impacted and thus, labeled in response““Every expression of [the sexual instinct] that does not correspond with the purpose of nature—i.e., propagation— must be regarded as perverse” (cited in Davidson, 1987, p. 39). The normal is the heterosexual, the coital, the reproductive. Abelove (1991), a European historian covering the topic of sexuality, called it “cross-sex genital intercourse” or “intercourse so-called”: “penis in vagina, vagina around penis, with seminal emission uninterrupted” (p. 337). I call it PIV—penis in vagina.”“If, in short, a perversion has the characteristics of exclusiveness and fixation—then we shall usually be justified in regarding it as a pathological symptom [Freud, 1905, p. 161].”“Indeed, it may be the details of desire, the particularities of pleasure, that most incite disgust, challenge sexual conventionality, set off the alarm.”“As what we may call the relational turn has taken place, a new psychoanalytic and probably cultural normality has been erected and, along with it, a new clinical goal—not the derepression of forbidden desire but the healing of the mutilated capacity to love. As a oneperson psychology has given way to, or at least moved over to accommodate, a two-person psychology, fetishism, like perversion, becomes interpretable in intersubjective space.”“With the early Freud, we postulated that sex comes first, attachment second, and therefore the de-repression of sexuality became the clinical telos, achieved by the authoritative if not authoritarian doctor pronouncing on the patient patient. Now, with the relational turn, we have flip-flopped. As Domenici (1995) argued, drive theory sees affective and interpersonal needs as “an overlay upon a more basic template of sexuality and aggression”“object relation and complementary sexual identification (p. 185). In this new, widely shared model, love and intimacy are the new signs and critieria of health, if not health itself. If you don’t have them, there’s something wrong.”Does psychoanalytic preoccupation, like stigma, jump from sex to love because of an uncontainable aggression?“Speaking from the center of psychoanalytic power, of disciplinary authority, it colonizes the sexual margins, allowing the conventional to own the unconventional without any of the risks of unconventionality”“. They exemplify the worst tendencies toward domination; toward naming, blaming, truth framing, and shaming; in effect toward stigmatizing and the participation of psychoanalysis in the cultural morality governing it”“What, after all, is pathology? If perversion can coexist with health, if its status as illness varies with cultural time and place, then, conversely, any sexuality may be symptomatic—or healthy. If all sexualities may claim wholesomeness, if all have a valid psychic place, then all are subject to the same psychic vicissitudes”