Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“The affects around sex make it difficult to think about. So when examining sex, it helps to weave theory and feeling together by splicing theoretical and philosophical ref lections with clinical retrospection.”“Factor’s manifold and mingled aspects unfold when examined through the lens of sexual countertransference; sexual countertransference through affect, abjection, and intersubjectivity; and sex itself through all of them.”“Like all emotions, sexual feeling tends to be catching—I feel it, you feel it. Reporting on sexual matters in clinical space, Davies (1994), de Peyer (2002), and Samuels (1985), for example, record a profound if not surprising amount of personal discomfort. Among the many reasons for this unease, I want to emphasize affective contagion, which de Peyer’s case shows especially well. Like all emotions, sexual feeling tends to be catching—I feel it, you feel it. “On the deepest level,” wrote Steve Mitchell (2000), “affective states are transpersonal” (p. 61).”-why people usually add their subjective opinion to things“What makes sexual affect special? “Sexual speech is inherently performative in that it materializes what it aims to describe,” says Virginia Goldner (2003, p. 120), elucidating Foucault’s take on psychoanalytic and confessional speech as “inscribed in an erotic circuit of scrutiny and disclosure.” Because words are as visceral as psychosocial, and because, as Bakhtin’s (1934–1935) theory of heteroglossia has it, my parole, or speech, is always already permeated by yours, sex talk is also sexy talk”“Speaking sex, then, may threaten to violate ethics (Gabbard, 1989; Maroda, 1994) or catalyze the treatment (Samuels, 1985; Davies, 1994). You just don’t know. The ambiguity is, currently, inherent.”“It is necessary to maintain a tension between sex as emerging in object relation and sex as Other. Although I cannot argue the point here, I want to explain why I take this stance. One reason is political: I fear that, if we imagine we can locate everything sexual in everything we know about intersubjectivity, it would not be too difficult to reduce sex to familiar forms of object relation that are overtly blessed, or damned, by social norms. The other, psychoanalytical, reason is cognate: there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in normativity. Preserving sexuality as Other “stretches the clinical imagination about what patients’ inner worlds are like and, given the chance, could be like” (Dimen, 2003, p. 178).”Abjection appears to be a one-person, one-body experience of Otherness. Implicitly, however, it is part of an intersubjective and developmental process“Abjection’s position on what Freud (1905) called “the frontier between the physical and the mental” (p. 168) locates it close to narcissism, which thereby takes on a new look. Narcissism as I am using it denotes “less a psychiatric character phenomenon and more a developmental position” (Ken Corbett, 2003, personal communication).”““Abjection,” says Kristeva (1982), “preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be” (p. 10). Violence. Ungrounded affect. Loss. “The abject is the violence of mourning for an ‘object’ that has always already been lost” (p. 15).”“No wonder abjection registers in liminal substances that evoke fascinated disgust—feces, to take the prime example, but urine, semen, vaginal f luids, menstrual blood, snot, pimples, pus, skin excrescences. These border materials, neither fully alive nor fully dead, signify what must be rejected in order that life exist—death—but that must exist in order that life exist (pp. 2–3). Abjection inhabits the space between deprivation and signification, as the Lacanians might put it. Finally, abjection signifies the breast, mother, and femininity, the disgust they inspire, and their consequent repudiation (Grosz, 1994).”“Sexual desire, Freud (1941) thought, is inherently unsatisfiable: “‘En attendant toujours quelque chose qui ne venait point [Always waiting for something that never came]” (quoted by Green, 1996, p. 872). Concurring, Lacan (1977) saw satisfaction as a necessarily alluring impossibility critical to the crystalization of subjectivity, sanity, and culture.”“This equivalence between frustration, on one hand, and exclusion and hurt, on the other, obtains because an object is always already present in psychic reality: “If the child is essentially object-seeking, frustration is inevitably experienced as rejection on the part of the object” (p. 13). If rejection comes, can humiliation and its cognate affect, shame, be far behind? Frustration being usual— whether in object seeking, in selfing, or in sex—shame partners pleasure from the getgo.”“When shame attends frustration, then disgust, hatred, and other effects of aggression are not far behind. ““The depressive position, maturity, even sanity, and, as the Lacanians would have it, membership in the symbolic, human order, fail. We fall into dread and disgust”