Sexuality In A Couple. Male And Female

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

(Report read at the forum "Men's Longevity and Health" on February 25, 2015)

Human sexuality is inherently traumatic

Why am I beginning my talk with these words? Because as soon as we say "man", "woman", "couple", we immediately fall into the realm of the sexual. But today, social and technical progress, provoking the narcissization of society, is developing so quickly that psychoanalysts have to remind from time to time that there is no human being at all - there are only men and women who used to be boys and girls.

Our mental life from the very first moments is experienced as a conflict arising from the collision between the inner world of instinctive drives and the restraining forces of the outer world. In search of love and satisfaction, the infant opens the "breast-universe". “The first thing after God is the mother’s breast,” says a well-known proverb.

Gradually, knowledge is acquired about the “other”, as an object separate from the Self. This knowledge is born from frustration, rage and the primary form of depression that every child experiences in relation to the original object of love and desire - the mother. The bliss that each of us so longs for, but loses in the process of its development, remains forever an unconscious, and sometimes even a conscious desire to destroy and erase the difference between the Self and the “other” in all its dimensions.

Therefore, it is not surprising that in the course of analytic treatment we discover traces of what might well be called “archaic sexuality,” bearing the inseparable imprint of libido and mortido - love is indistinguishable from hate. The tension emanating from this dichotomy, with its depressive potential, compels an eternal search for its resolution and, indeed, represents a vital, omnipresent substrate for all forms of adult love and sexuality.

The discovery of the difference between self and the other is followed by an equally traumatic discovery of the difference between the sexes. And today we know that for the first time it occurs not during the oedipal conflict (which has its own specificity for each sex), as Freud believed, but long before this so-called classical phase. The principle of reality exists initially and therefore the very fact of the difference already awakens anxiety long before the child begins to struggle with the disturbing conflicts of the Oedipus phase.

An individual, be it a man or a woman, goes through a difficult path, on which, along with the universal inherent difficulties in everyone - the fear of femininity and masculinity, the vicissitudes of conscious and unconscious identifications, he is faced with a reality, the events of which, often rightly and sometimes wrongly, are perceived, as traumatic and leave an indelible imprint on his or her mastery of their sexual role. In the end, all children must accept the fact that they will never be both man and woman at the same time and will forever remain only half of the sexual constellation.

The initial presence of the parent couple - father and mother, as primary objects for identification, facilitate the path to acceptance of their body, anatomical and gender-role differences between the sexes, and the development of mature sexuality. The absence of one of the parents inevitably provokes difficulties in the development of gender identity and the child's mastery of his sexual role.

In foreign and domestic psychology, researchers of the problems of development and formation of gender identity attach great importance to the sufficient presence of male and female traits in the structure of personality - the formation of mental androgyny. It is understood that their successful integration in the structure of the personality of each individual, based on biological and mental bisexuality, leads to a more successful implementation of the sexual role, good social adaptation and greater pleasure in life.

With the change in social stereotypes, which are rapidly moving away from traditional gender roles, more and more demands and expectations are imposed on both women and men. We can say that the ideal of modernity is becoming a courageous, but at the same time gentle and attentive man, and an independent, but at the same time feminine woman. Thus, modern life actually forces both man and woman to explore and use both the feminine and masculine aspects of their gender identity.

Traditionally, female traits are considered submissiveness, compliance, fearfulness, accuracy, passivity, emotionality.

Traditionally male - activity, assertiveness, decisiveness, ambition, a higher degree of aggression in comparison with women.

A couple - a man and a woman, passing through different periods of their existence, has the more chances for a harmonious life, the more flexible each of them can use the traits of both his own and the opposite sex to solve both intrapsychic and real life tasks.

As for psychoanalytic studies of the vicissitudes of each of us acquiring the same gender, psychoanalysts go a little deeper and touch upon the unconscious aspects of this process.

Already at the beginning of his path, Freud proceeded from the fact that, without paying tribute to bisexuality, it is difficult and even impossible to understand the sexual manifestations of men and women. This concept lends itself to explanation, at least from three points of view: biological (male and female are characterized by somatic, bodily differences); psychological (masculine and feminine as an analogue of "activity" and "passivity"); sociological (observations of real-life men and women show that neither biologically nor psychologically there is no pure masculinity or femininity, each personality has a mixture of its biological characteristics with the biological characteristics of the other sex and a combination of activity and passivity).

Freud's discoveries about the importance of human sexuality in both childhood and adulthood are now over a hundred years old. However, not even that, mainly, was the revolutionary nature of his discovery of the unconscious and infantile sexuality, but that the etiology of the issues raised in psychoanalysis is always of a sexual nature. It is interesting to recall that it was thanks to women that Freud experienced those initial insights that led him to an understanding of the unconscious. His female patients were the source of his inspiration.

It is equally remarkable that he, at his time and at his age, really listened to women and considered everything they said significant and important. In Freud's phallocentric era, such receptivity was revolutionary in itself. Of all those who delved deeper into the study of the functioning of human consciousness, he was the first to take a serious and scientific interest in female sexuality. Obviously, he was fascinated by the mystery of femininity and the female sex itself (a trait that he said he shared with men of all centuries).

But Freud also feared the object of his fascination. His metaphors again and again reveal the intrapsychic notions of female genitalia as a threatening void, absence, darkened and restless continent, where you cannot see what is happening. He also insisted that he owed the advancement in his research line to his knowledge of male sexuality. As far as is known, the idea that a boy would also be jealous of a girl's vagina and her ability to bear children, and that she would be attracted to men precisely because she did not have a penis, did not even occur to Freud.

But it was Freud, with his typical honesty, who first expressed deep dissatisfaction and uncertainty about his theories about women and the nature of their psychosexual development.

In fact, he waited until 1931 to publish Female Sexuality, his first article on the subject. He was then seventy-five years old. Perhaps he believed that at this stage of life there was already less reason for fear of a woman, her sexual riddle and the publication of his theories about her.

French psychoanalysts who have long been involved in gender issues (Société Psychanalytique de Paris was formed in 1926), and among them such famous names as Colette Chillan, Jeanine Chasseguet-Smirgel, Jacqueline Schaffer, Monique Courneu, Jacques André, postulate that male and female do not exist and cannot be determined independently of one another. The masculine and feminine are opposition, the poles of which, being both opposite and complementary, and between which there is constant tension, set the dimension in which mature sexuality is realized. According to Joyce McDougall: “The penis and vagina are complementary. In the absence of a vagina, the penis becomes a cruel instrument that rapes, destroys and maims everything around, and the vagina, not supplemented by a penis, becomes an increasingly devouring and consuming black hole."

From the time of Freud, who argued that a little girl is a castrated boy, to the present day, for both sexes, the “other sex” is female. "Feminine" here is opposed to "maternal". It is about a woman's erotic ability to experience joy and pleasure from a sexual act. The most repressed part for both sexes is the "feminine erotic" - a space where souls and bodies are mixed at the same time, boundaries are lost (which causes a lot of fears in subjects of both sexes), but also at the same time the difference between a man and a woman is learned - the difference between the sexes.

Difficulties in accepting the feminine in themselves are faced not only by men, but also by women. Both have their own reasons for this. The need to free oneself from the omnipotent and devouring mother provokes in men the fear of the feminine, which is confused in their consciousness and unconscious, mixed with the maternal. From here come deep fantasies of absorption, disappearance inside the maternal cavity, provoking hatred of the mother-woman, at the clinical level manifested in the inability to have an erection, premature ejaculation.

For both sexes during adolescence, the big discovery is the existence of the vagina. Not because girls ignore the fact that they have a cavity, or they lack sensory perception of their inner space, awakened by Oedipus disturbances; but at the same time, on the other side, there are archaic traces of fusion with the mother's body and seduction by the mother in the symbiotic period. Meanwhile, the real erotic acquisition of the vagina, the discovery of the deep erogenitality of this female organ, can take place only in the sexual relation of pleasure. Women do not say anything about their pleasure, because it is inexpressible, unrepresentable and, perhaps, too intense. So, in a sense, the female orgasm is a mystery.

The other gender, whether for a man or a woman, is always female. Since the phallic is the same for everyone. Until now, in some discussions, one can hear that the "masculine" insists on being assimilated into the "phallic", without any consideration that the "phallic" is an antagonism of the "masculine"!

A phallic, narcissistic being can only pair with a "castrated" being, and how can it be able not to turn away in fear, contempt or hatred from the "female"?

Indeed, since the time of Freud, where the definition of the female was repelled by the male, namely from the presence of a penis - a visible anatomical organ and therefore a more clearly defined castration anxiety, the female to this day is marked by a sign of defect and lack: lack of a penis, lack of specific libido, lack of adequate an erotic object (mother, not father, because the mother gives preference to her son), the need to "lack" the clitoris. To this, as you know, is added the relative insufficiency of the super-ego, the ability to sublimate, from which follows an insignificant contribution to culture and civilization. The only invention that a woman is supposedly capable of is weaving, following the model of pubic hair plexus, in order to be able to "disguise her original sexual inadequacy." Thank God, today there are opinions that the creative activity and fruitfulness of men owes its existence to their inability to bear children.

But upon a deeper study of the differences between the sexes, we find that Freud describes the development of psychosexuality through three binary oppositions: the opposition "active / passive"; all-or-nothing opposition (phallic / castrated); and, finally: the opposition of "distinction and complementarity" (masculine / feminine), the formation of which he places during puberty. And in 1937 he will revise this last opposition and make an important contribution to the development of the theory of sexuality - he will define the fourth opposition - "bisexuality / rejection of femininity" in both genders. Here one can recall the now so popular metrosexuality as the blurring of the boundaries between the sexes.

It is very important that both this opposition “bisexuality / rejection of femininity” and each of its poles, taken separately, refer to the denial of gender differentiation:

• on the one hand, the rejection of femininity, an amazing "riddle", according to Freud, is a rejection of what is most alien in differentiation of the sexes, the most difficult to integrate into anal or phallic logic - the female sex.

• on the other hand, to the extent that psychic bisexuality plays an organizing role at the level of identifications, in particular, cross identifications of the Oedipus conflict, the phantasm of bisexuality is a defense against the development of gender differentiation at the level of genitality and heterosexual relations.

Unfortunately, the achievement of gender difference does not establish a platform of stability and security, and it would be appropriate to assert that what Freud calls the “riddle” is the differentiation of the sexes - the recognition of differences.

If, according to Simone de Beauvoir, "a woman is not born, she becomes", then it can also be said that neither "femininity" nor "masculinity" of the genital level has yet been achieved even in puberty during the first sexual relations, but are an incessant conquest associated with a constant libidinal onslaught.

The differentiation of the male and female sexes at the level of the mental apparatus is by no means produced by bodily transformations and not by sexual arousal that occur during puberty. Teenage fantasies of constant penetration set the stage. But it will be necessary to wait, as a woman waits for a lover for pleasure, so that genital "femininity" was awakened in her body - awakened by a man. It is then that the real experience of sexual differentiation will appear, the creation of both "femininity" and "masculinity."

However, the powerful libidinal impulses and erotic life, rooted in the very essence of human sexuality, and it is to them that gender difference owes its heyday, there is an enemy. This enemy nests within envious defenses, especially the one we call "fecalisation" to distinguish them from the "anality" so necessary for the organization of the "I" instance. People with fecal defenses humiliate women and offend the female sex, which is an object of contempt and disgust for them. These defenses "fecalize" the drive and its object in perverse practices. These are defenses that devalue the female sex, and also banalize and belittle the sexual act, reducing it to consumer activity.

But the erotic attitude demands, and the interweaving of life drives with death drives obliges! - as much violence, and even cruelty, as desire or tenderness. If we root out the aggressive dimension and deviations in the sexual act, it will have detrimental, sometimes disastrous, consequences for sexuality. Today we can observe a loss of sexual desire, an increase in craving for regressive sexuality, multiple addictions and responses, anxiety of defallusization, and an exacerbation of anal defenses. In our clinical experience, we come across people suffering from sexual pragmatism, vaginismus, lack of sexual relations. We have an excessive tendency to consider many phenomena only from the point of view of the evolution of morals, an evolution that gives women more independence and even power, but at the same time, deprives men of their male privileges and power.

It is important, therefore, to insist again on the mental work required by the meeting and preservation of lovers and the erotic relationship between man and woman. The work that needs to be done in our craft hundreds of times - because of the constancy of the rapid libidinal growth and the violence done by the defenses over the Self. In contrast to the phallic logic generated by castration anxiety and existing only to deny, dominate, destroy or escape from the feminine, the male-female pair is formed in co-creation, in the discovery of the feminine, which can be brought into existence in no other way than only through the conquest and pulling of anal defenses from a man, and from a woman - phallic defenses. The masculine in the lover who grants pleasure, if he himself has managed to let go of his anal and phallic defenses, can allow him to dominate his constant rapid libidinal growth, and carry it into the woman's body. If this happens, men can no longer be afraid of women.

But why is there a violence of instincts? Let's dare to say: because there is a feminine scandal, this scandal - erotic masochism - a feminine request addressed to a man - a request for violence, an abuse of the master's power.

He makes the Oedipus girl fantasize: "Daddy give me pain, beat me, rape me!" (similar to the repressed fantasy of the Child being Beaten, which Freud theorized in 1919). And the woman-lover says to her lover: "Do with me whatever you want, possess me, defeat me!" Anything that is intolerable to the self and to the superego may be exactly what contributes to sexual pleasure. It is the price that both woman and man pays to be able to weaken their defenses before facing genitality.

Modern women know, or feel, that their “feminine anxiety” cannot be appeased or resolved in a satisfactory way with the help of the realization of the “phallic type” of money, career, and phallic omnipotence. They know or feel that not to be desired, or not to be desired by a man from now on, sends them back to the painful experience of genderlessness, or denial of the female sex, as a result of which the childhood wounds of little girls who are forced to organize in a phallic way in the face of the experience of perception come to life. differences between the sexes. This is where female castration anxiety is located.

At the end of his life, in 1937, speaking about the Charybdis of the death drive, opposed to life and love, Freud assigns Scylla the rejection of the female, inherent in both sexes. It is the rock against which all therapeutic efforts are broken. "The rejection of the feminine … is part of the great mystery of human sexuality," he writes in The Endless and Endless Analysis. And to this day we have to admit that this "rejection of the feminine gender" creates a general law of human behavior and takes part in the formation of his mental development.

Freud postulated a "phallocentric theory" of psychosexual development - a child's sexual theory of a single sex, the phallic penis. This theory creates defensive tactics that protect the individual from discovering the difference between the sexes and the Oedipus situation. We can say that many men and women prefer not to know that they are not perfect, so as not to face their own limitations and the need for something else - to realize their mature, adult sexuality, fraught with many dangers, but giving pleasure.