Becoming Human

What’s the big deal? Thoughts on resistance

I’ve recently been led to reflect on the question of what it is that makes us so afraid of looking inside to the circumstances which lie historically at the origin of our neuroses – frequently to the point of utter terror and/or total blindness even to the fact or possibility of repression. After all, we frequently face much more objectively threatening circumstances in life, like major illness and operations, with much more stoicism.

It is not a question that I think standard psychoanalytic theory really has an answer for. Sure, we are afraid to dismantle the ego. However, this unremarked importance of the ego simply appears as exogenous or as a mere mediator between the pleasure and reality principles. Its apparent tendency to calcify very early on is not really explained. One might link this to a biological developmental calendar, but then the apparent successes of therapy in sometimes bringing down the edifice would be very surprising. Why then do we freeze emotions in the body and hold them down long after the apparent, original need to do so is past? Why can’t we (or at least why don’t we), like the animals, just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move on – years and decades after the event? When you think about it, it is really, really strange that humankind is the only species that appears to have this strange dysfunction of its innate healing capacity. And even if we have some idea of how to unblock it, we have little idea of what gets it blocked in the first place.

I can only offer some clues as to how it appears to me.

At the basis, we need to remember that our species has evolved in small, interdependent tribal groups, and what mattered for the survival of our puny organism was being smart and acting in concert. This has led, via mechanisms which I shall perhaps discuss on another occasion, to an unparalleled emotional attunement to other members of the group. Most of this, of course, is a deep mystery – we do not know why we have a spiritual instinct and in what ways it differs from other species, and we do not know why it is so important for us to receive and to give love. These things I will have to take as a given, at least for now.

The Rousseauian view, expounded also by Osho, and perhaps bought into by Reich – all for their own reasons which I understand – that “observed” man is the product of social processes which have perverted the pristine and beautiful natural state of man, has, I believe, to be dismissed as naive. Freud was not wrong in believing that civilization required a sort of suppression of natural drives. On the contrary, the mechanism of acculturation is innate in our species and even what most defines it; it is not maladaptive; it is just misfiring under the conditions of modern life.

If we are happy enough to trace cerebral patterns back to reptilian times, I believe we should be a bit more accepting of our less remote ancestors and what they have bequeathed us. A scientific view of our, or of any, species cannot consist in simply choosing (and idealizing) one forebear over others. Thus, we cannot identify with certain bonobo traits merely because we do not like those of chimpanzees. That we do not like the warlike, selfish part of our nature certainly tells us something, but it does not disprove its existence – only the lengths to which the acculturation process goes to redefine and rechannel this truculence through mechanisms which are entirely social – social learning processes which result in the transmission of norms of behavior from generation to generation and group to group, norms which constitute as important, though far more diverse, a part of our patrimony as what is chiseled on our DNA.

If Darwin, evolutionary psychologists and classical economists have all made a mistake, as argued in Sex at Dawn, it is a perfectly understandable mistake, deriving from first-order principles which one may not like (for the reasons I just mentioned) but must defer to. In all higher species we see collective behavior which is imposed by social mechanisms on instincts which are far more egoistic. And ultimately, this process of acculturation is what has led to the second stage of evolution and the emergence of a creature such as man. Indeed, only social learning processes can result in cooperative behaviour – it cannot be innate.

So: guilt and shame are primary emotions and manipulation of them is a primary process.

Seeing this helps enormously, because there is no need any more to feel – well – guilty about feeling guilty. It is hardwired into our species to feel guilty when we fall short of social expectations, as it is hardwired to manipulate this feeling in order to obtain and maintain group cohesion.

I guess we would all like our children to be generous and patient. But that is not their natural state. Even allowing for incipient neurosis at the earliest stage, I do not believe any child anywhere on the planet has ever been born naturally sharing and thinking of others. Indeed, this is implicit in the standard developmental model, and pretty much a logical evidence: the child first has to develop a concept of self before it can develop a concept of others; the concept of the other can never be ahead of the concept of self and there is thus always a self-bias. So, the younger child must learn, and the adult or older child must teach.

What drives the young child to accept the social yoke, and what approach to childrearing optimizes the transmission of needed social norms? On the child’s side, this can only be the need for love and acceptance. I do not see any other candidate. That the sense of self is impacted by social disopprobrium – for when being reprimanded, however patiently and lovingly, the child will feel such disopprobrium – is natural. From its standpoint, love and acceptance are maximized and guilt is minimized when the child is aligned to social norms. In fact, I would even go further than this – it is not just the sense of self which is impacted, but the very fact of self. A human being living in isolation is not human.

Trying to bring about such alignment must, however, take account of the child’s natural rebelliousness and nascent sense of self. If the primary motivation to align is love and acceptance, it is obvious that bringing about long-term alignment through fear and violence is an inferior and unstable recourse, because love and acceptance create bonds which fear does not. However, fear and authority are not maladaptive either – they are highly adaptive to situations of stress and highly effective in such situations. The balance has just been lost because the circumstances in which we have evolved to exist are no longer those in which we do exist – and this estrangement becomes self-reinforcing. The child learns to suppress aspects of its behaviour which are perfectly healthy and unthreatening to the group, just because the former-child-now-adult can’t handle them. This repression and these patterns of behaviour maximize its payoff in terms of acceptance under the circumstances which it is powerless to change. However, they do so at a tremendous cost in terms of vitality, which is passed on to the next generation.

So to return to the question with which I started, it must be that the energy which cathects the fear of confronting our inner traumas when we start to do so, i.e. the energy of resistance, is the same energy which holds the neurosis in place at other times, i.e. when it is unchallenged. In other words, our fear is our neurosis. It follows that it is functionally identical to the fear experienced in response to the primal events – ultimately, in almost all cases, the fear of losing the sense of belonging and thereby of what it is that defines our nature as human.

And yet: we will not. Objectively, no such risk exists as adults, certainly in a therapeutic situation, when all the traumatizing factors belong to the past. Why is this not obvious?

I think I detect the reason, and it is this. In fact, our desire for love and acceptance is never met. It was not met during our formative years, and it is still not met today, because the endemic character of neurosis means that there is almost no-one able to love as we are meant to be loved and as we need to be loved. This is why we cling on to the strategies we learnt as children, although in no absolute sense did they work either then or now – they merely optimized subject to inordinate constraints. In fact, we are not failing to substitute them by a better strategy: there is no better strategy available to us. We have also chosen partners subject to the requirement that our strategies to gain acceptance initially worked with those partners. We have grown up emotionally paralyzed because of a lack of nurturing and we realize that we, all of us, continue to face the same situation, and whilst the needs of an adult are not those of a child, the meeting of those adult needs is the only thing that can start to demine the unexploded ordinance buried in our past.

It’s Catch 22.

The notion that we as adults are sufficient unto ourselves and can get all the sustenance we need from our physical environment, with no need for comfort, touch, contact is just a perpetuation of the lie and the violence at the heart of humanity’s traumatized existence.

Love and compassion are necessary to our physical and mental health as a species, and they are necessary to the therapeutic process and personal growth. Our mind, that place where we feel in control, because it works so well without others, strives after technique, but such technique is meaningless and ineffective without compassion, and secondary when compassion is present.

Facing our traumas is terrifying because we are innately afraid, under prevailing and persistent conditions of emotional starvation, to lose the little acceptance we have won in the world, and with which we reluctantly content ourselves. We lose sight and faith that anything more is possible, even though we know, deep down, that this way of existing is impoverished, is not satisfying and is not human.

Sexual chemistry

In my last post, I think I broke some new ground – for myself anyway – in understanding polyamory vs monogamy and male and female attitudes to sex and relationships.

This theme continues to reverberate with me and become clearer. I think I can express it this way: women, the feminine principle, the earth, Shakti (let’s stick with Shakti) invites men, the masculine principle, the sky, Shiva into depth, uniqueness and emptiness, whilst Shiva invites Shakti into breadth, universality and expansion to plenitude.

Each, in other words, invites the other into the space where he or she is at home. Women tend to cling to monogamy because in the absence of commitment they cannot bring Shiva into depth; men tend to cling to keeping their options open because in an emasculated sexual role they cannot bring Shakti into plenitude. More concretely, men need total presence to receive Shakti, and women need total surrender to receive Shiva. A sexually realized man is totally bound to the earth; a sexually realized woman is totally released into the sky. The man, regardless of the number of his sexual partners, has a quality of connection with each of them which is infinitely tender and real. His natural polyamory is complemented with presence. A sexually realized woman experiences her sexuality directly, not vicariously through a male agent. She is available and present to all those who can recognize and honor her essence. Her natural sense of sacredness is expanded into infinite space. In this way, the infinite and the infinitesimal, the empty and the full, presence and surrender, devotion and celebration, earth and sky, come together and fuse as only seemingly opposite aspects of one single reality.

I absolutely get it.

The man’s task is to allow the woman to occupy a space in which she is completely sexually empowered. Women are afraid to go there, but it is where they need to go to realize their sexual destiny. And vice versa – men are afraid to plunge into the depths, but that is where the treasures for them lie.

I think we all know how men fall in love – what an infinite horizon opens up to them in a single woman at that time, so unexpectedly and so irresistibly. This is the feminine principle at work when it meets the male. But how do women fall in love? Do they? That this kind of question needs to be asked at all should, I hope, be shocking, but I do not think I am simply ignorant, I suspect I just dare to ask the kind of questions that no-one else does. I have read books written by women on the subject, women’s magazines, and experienced a fair slice of life myself, but still the content and very existence of an experience called “falling in love” on the part of women remains utterly evasive and unsure. I now think it is a chimera, a projection and distorsion, and that we need other words which meet and honor a woman’s experience on her own terms.

In fact, a man first feels sexual attraction, and then falls in love. A woman, however, first feels love. More rightly we might say that she then “falls in sex”. Men’s pornography is all about sex, but their experience is about love. Women’s pornography – romance novels and the like – is about love. But their experience is about sex. Women – I am talking of course in their natural state, when shame and repression are absent – are as overwhelmed by sexual feelings as men are overwhelmed by feelings of love. This shows that this is where we need to go to become complete. Men need to abandon to love, and women to sex. Indeed, there is nothing exceptional for a woman in feeling love for a man, and for this reason it may go unremarked and in any case is no marker of a necessary life change – however, falling into sex is clearly so marked – women who fall into sex will end perfectly viable relationships on the strength of their experience. For men it is the opposite – feeling sexual attraction to a woman is in no way remarkable, we feel it all the time, and it tells us nothing of permanence, nothing life-changing. But falling in love is different.

Free men, though, who have embraced and know what a women is, can freely fall in love, as I do all the time (though no-one believes me and many would label it a neurosis), experience all the emotions that go with it, and yet not feel in any way that it necessitates disruptive change in their life: just as free women can enjoy varied sexual experiences and not find that this destabilizes their attachment universe.

What women want

If I dare this most unassailable of subjects – which famously stumped even Freud – it is because I believe that the end of the war of the sexes is finally within our grasp. Thanks, in particular, to Sex at Dawn, we can now attempt a more fundamental answer, more purged of cultural contingencies, than the kind of trite, half-true compilations available in pop psychology.

According to the “standard discourse”, women would have such a daunting list of requirements from a mate that no human male could ever hope to be adequate. Apparently, plenty of men are busy studying and elaborating on this list in order to achieve their goal – sex without commitment – notwithstanding that this goal is intrinsically incompatible with it anyway. Here is a good example. Apart from this being a depressing exercise, it’s also self-defeating: according to that same standard discourse, presumably the last thing a women would want is a man who spends half his time trying to decipher her desires, especially if it’s all a trick anyway. That just ain’t manly. Whoops.

I don’t think this account, at some level, while a caricature, is descriptively wrong. It does, however, show a not very deep understanding, as well as being unhelpful, as it basically would require a man to be several incompatible things simultaneously, and all of them artificial, not flowing from his true and spontaneous nature. In contrast therefore to the Venus/Mars theory, I would like to list a few of my ideas on what women really want, or would want, if only the world were organized in such a way as to let them have it. These are my intuitions towards a general theory:

1. Women want to be recognized for their capacity to lead a man to love and ecstasy. Women are gatekeepers of ecstasy and spiritual beings deeply bound with the earth. They significantly facilitate the binding of men to the earth.

2. Women want to experience deep sexual pleasure. For this, they require safety, trust and reverence. These, however, are merely preconditions in order to enter the space of sexual pleasure. Any woman who is satisfied that these preconditions are met will abandon herself to pleasure at the hands of any man.

3. Women want to be a vehicle of collective well-being. They want to bring healing and peace into the world, and are disturbed by intermale and intergenerational tensions. Women very much value strong relationships between men and express their sexuality to this end, rewarding group-oriented behavior with intimate and sexual connection.

4. Women want to live in a social framework which makes them feel physically and emotionally secure and offers them scope for self-realization. Commitment is intensely sought after. Because in a monogamous situation there is or may be no fallback secure situation for a woman, the monogamous commitment is made to bear an enormous burden, and many methods have been developed to hold onto it, methods which, in practice and inevitably, run into conflict with male sexual instincts.

It is interesting how many aspects of contemporary sexual economics reflect the striving after these goals under the conditions of modern life. In this perspective, marriage, monogamy, religious rites and prescriptions, romantic notions of love and chivalry and other female-endorsed epiphenomena of pair-bonding, all have a deep sense. It is a sense, certainly, so far removed from its original expression that it is scarcely recognizable – but it is not an alien imposition. I view these institutions, critical as I am of them, as attempts to hold onto the deep, feminine truths of sexual experience in a world which has long been hostile to the sacredness of the female. The institutions we observe are simply a projection of what is general about female desire into a specific, contingent (and conservative) socioeconomic context. For men and women truly to connect, men cannot just dismiss and discard these social forms, seen by women as embodying a basic sexual instinct: they must reformulate them at a higher level of synthesis based on real insight into what it is that truly and eternally underpins them, versus what is contingent and based on fear.

Achieving relationships based on such a higher synthesis is important because it is only by rolling back the layers of cultural accretion that we can come to a place where we can realize this: that men and women inhabit the same planet and that their sexual instincts are perfectly compatible. Even if we cannot reconstitute the utopian sexual situation, we can find peace in a better understanding of each other and correctly interpret the signals we receive, seeing how they complement our own perspective and fundamentally strive at outcomes which we also seek but might otherwise have missed.

And men want?

To love women. We do not just want to “score”, as this crude and ugly stereotype of our sexuality would have it. We really want to dive in, to lose ourselves in the feminine, to bring pleasure and adoration, to nurture, comfort and sustain. Not just one woman. All.

I both believe and feel this to be the fundamental nature of men. Although each woman contains all women, we all know it is a nonsense to circumscribe our erotic intuitions. We want to bring new women into the tribe, not out of superficiality and fear of commitment, but precisely out of an astounding capacity and a limitless desire to commit and to love. This is no zero-sum game or sequential monogamy, but a polyamorous instinct we share with women but which modern life frustrates us in realizing.

I hope this vision can deconstruct some stereotypes and help us find common ground. Ultimately, it seems to me there is no difference in what women and men want, but only in the relative ordering of their goals – women want first of all security and connection, men want first of all to lose themselves in love.

Resistance

I’m reading Olaf Jacobsen’s book Ich stehe nicht mehr zur Verfuegung (literally “I’m no longer available” – not a good translation though; the book seems to be available in French, Spanish and Italian, but I haven’t found it in English). I will review it separately (this is not intended as a recommendation), but I just wanted to quote and translate this passage, which makes a really good point, affirmed by my recent experience:

When someone makes a dogmatic assertion, the perception by others of his or her position in the social pecking order changes. The person making the claims becomes a “repository of truth” and puts him- or herself above the others. The relationship of equality with the others is lost. In order to recreate this situation of equality, the others need to express resistance to the claim and perhaps make a contrary or different claim or distance themselves from it.

Behind the feeling of resistance is often the desire to be treated as an equal, whereby both people have the same rank and the same value and their realities and convictions are equally valid.

In the feeling of resistance, I see the message that “something wants to be recognized, valued and integrated”, whether we are talking of children, adults – or me myself. If I am aware of the fact that my resistance derives from my wish for recognition or inclusion, then I can also reflect on whether or not I might be willing to forego this wish. Florence Scoval Shinn [a pioneer of the New Thought movement] explains impressively in her book The Game of Life and How to Play It that struggling against something tends rather to keep the situation in place than to resolve it. Bert Hellinger [the founder of constellation theory] also says, “What we struggle against we will never get rid of. Only what we love sets us free.” Shinn proposes the perspective that “every person is a golden link in the chain which ultimately serves my wellbeing”. [Stephen] Wolinsky [founder of so-called quantum psychology] recommends to stop struggling against the person who has generated resistance in us, but rather to concentrate on the energy within us, the feeling of resistance itself. In this way the feeling may gradually disappear or be transformed into something more pleasant. When we tell someone that we are no longer available for his or her assertion, we achieve the same result. We look less at him or her and more at ourselves. The feeling of resistance starts to dissolve. The origin of this feeling was our attention to the other person, linked to our desire for recognition or change. That is why we first made ourselves available to him or her and experienced the resulting feelings. When our desire and our attention shift, so does our feeling.

This account skips all too glibly over the conditioning inherent in the reaction of resistance, seeming to imply that contemporary factors explain everything and not delving into where the desire for attachment, to this particular person at this particular moment, comes from and to what extent, if at all, I can exert conscious control over it. It also fails to acknowledge the pain in my repeated experience of rejection as an unnatural, toxic state of being engendered by the contemporary world.

Still I like it because it often happens to me that therapists (who may mean well) wade in with offhand interpretations of my personal story to which I cannot relate. It chimes with the constant declarations my mother would make as to how I was feeling, which apparently she thought she knew better than me. I am happy to be challenged, but only from a position of vulnerability and compassion where I feel a common bond with the person in the therapeutic role. Doubtless there is such a thing as a natural authority of which I could be accepting, but in practice it is often the case that therapists (and would-be therapists) are more like “therapests” – they derive pleasure from sitting in a position of power over others. And this never works at all – it immediately neutralizes the power in the encounter. Sure, I may be oversensitive, I may be unable to see certain truths – but fundamentally I am just refusing to be manipulated and expressing faith in the ability of my own organism to regulate its problems. Only people who work with this drive for emancipation can help me and befriend me. The others are just making the problem worse and isolating themselves. I can, indeed, withdraw and not suffer needless pain. This, however, does not alter the profound tragedy of disconnection.

“Sex at Dawn” – a review

I have just finished reading Chris Ryan and Cacilda Jetha’s Sex at Dawn. The book is such a revelation that it is hard to know where to start. This is not only one of those books that will change your life. It’s going to change a whole lot else too.

The experience one has reading it is much akin to the one I had five years ago when I attended my first tantra workshop. A whole load of stuff that previously existed as isolated islands, unconnected, suppressed or misunderstood, suddenly falls into place – in this case not only things I have felt inside, but numerous aspects of the contemporary world as well. Reading the book launches me into filling in many of the gaps it leaves open, as well – something I will no doubt be doing over the next series of posts.

For those who don’t know, the books central thesis is that humankind evolved as a group-living, cooperative species in which sexuality was shared and played an important social role in building and maintaining group ties.

I am totally convinced. Not just by their breadth of argument, though it is impressive. Above all, it just. makes. sense.

There are enough summaries of the book elsewhere, from every conceivable viewpoint, so I won’t attempt another (though I would advise you to read it yourself). In this post, I want to try to qualify the book and give a preliminary assessment of its importance.

Although basing itself widely on earlier work and despite its conversational tone – which heaps ridicule on conventional thought – this is a book which is likely to be as fundamental to humankind’s self-understanding as was Darwin’s On The Origin of Species. In a way, it is a completion of Darwin’s thought. The voyage of self-discovery on which Darwin launched our species has now come into port; and whilst there is surely much still to be discovered and said and plenty of meat to put on the bones, the essential features of that destination are now known.

Coming to terms with them under the conditions of modern life is going to be more of a challenge. In the first place, Ryan’s and Jetha’s conclusions are going to be subject to a bitter rearguard action. Far too many vested interests, many of them household names, are going to find it difficult to climb down from the positions they have taken; and especially when assailed with so little pity. Such vested interests are not only in academia of course, but across the spectrum of society. It looks to me like we are in for the last, and I fear not universally peaceful act in the culture wars which started with Copernicus and Galileo.

It’s time to take sides in those culture wars, or as the authors challenge us in their closing chapter, very aptly, to “come out”. If you recognize yourself as a member of the species they describe, now is the time to say it. Subgroups defined on the basis of sexual orientation or preferences have fought numerous partial wars in the past (and go on, of course, doing so today). Now, though, we have an overarching label for all these struggles: human being. We should, and will likely need to, combine our forces.

What else is new? Closest to the epicenter, is the need to reevaluate love and its associated emotions. I want to say more on this in a future article because it is where I find the book most liberating and hopeful. Then, of course, there is the need to reevaluate and reimagine social institutions suited to the “sexual exiles” we now know we are (to use a term coined by Stephen Snyder, featured in an earlier post). This is already an agenda of unimaginable breadth – but it does not stop there. As an economist (yes, I am in reality an economist), I find an enormous set of related challenges in the need to reassess the fundamental and highly useful simplifying assumptions of mainstream economics regarding so-called “rational” behavior. Of course, this is not an entirely new agenda; but it is lent a great deal new weight by these insights into a model of human nature quite at odds, at least within a defined sphere, with neoclassical assumptions. The use of the term “households” to define the basic unit of consumption was already a (reluctant and awkward) concession to the commonsense understanding that there existed individuals within the boundaries of the welfare-maximizing economic unit other than its (presumably) titular head, whose welfare was part of the objective function that this “head” would endeavor to maximize (we are not told with what discount factor). Now, I think, we know that we are capable of being cynical – but not wired for it. Whatever the exact form is that such “wiring” takes. (This is a matter I have frankly no understanding of – if anyone can enlighten me).

In fact it is difficult to conceive of any area of the social sciences which will not now have to question its basic assumptions – from anthropology to (even) psychoanalysis: how do Oedipus and Elektra complexes look once we redefine the family unit?. (A problem with the standard discourse of psychoanalysis which has always, of course, been quite a challenge to adequately theorize).

What Ryan and Jetha have achieved is what is correctly known as a paradigm shift. The course which human history is about to take has been set out by the seminal philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn. It will not be easy and it may not be nice: but there is no turning back until, eventually, the fact of our polyamorous ancestry is as much a part of our mental universe as the theory of evolution itself.

It’s my hope, of course, that in the inevitable onslaughts which will follow, the fundamentally beautiful human insights which follow from the book’s findings will not be lost from view. This is no crude defence of marginal sexual lifestyles. We are all a part of it, and all estranged from our core natures by no fault of our own. This calls for courage and conviction, but also empathy and compassion. Something, it turns out, we as a species are actually quite capable of.

Nine rooms of happiness?

I have recently discovered Stephen Synder’s very thought provoking blog on sexuality at Psychology Today. Warmly recommended to interested readers.

In this article, he describes a common situation (at least in his therapy room): women who feel their men are interested only superficially in their erotic potential, and that this never gets discovered.

As a rule, I tend to be very sceptical of the glorification of women by men – often by men who have a low image of themselves or of their sex. Whenever I have encountered it, it has had a strong flavor of mother-projection, under which lay plenty of mother-related grievances. Anecdotal evidence also suggests to me that women are as responsible for childhood neuroses as men. Why would they be better lovers than they are parents? So quantitatively I do not see a lot of difference.

I can hardly sit by and accept, either, the portrayal of men as one-dimensional erotic retards. Descriptively, Snyder doubtless identifies a real pattern. But not to dig somewhat under the surface seems a major abdication. Looked at over time, what is going on? I believe it is not so, and I suppose Synder would agree, that male disinterest in the whole woman already typically characterizes the early stages of a relationship. On the contrary, the experience of falling in love is typically one in which there is a high degree of consciousness of the woman in many of her aspects, not merely her propensity to have sex. So we are talking here about a feeling and a pattern of behavior which establishes itself over time; women feel the initial erotic promise remains unfulfilled while men feel that it loses importance.

If this is so, one is entitled to ask why. Part of the reason lies, perhaps, in our social biology. Male/female encounters are not supposed to be characterized by enduring and deepening enchantment. That’s just a myth. Men are resigned to it (even if the less sedentary may prefer affairs to baseball), while women are not. Because women feel they have no chance of full sexual expression except with the one man they married ages ago, they go on building up a greater and greater degree of resentment towards that man, whose fault it is not really.

And therein lies the rub – for while women hope for men to blossom as erotic creatures, they at the same time deny the basic precepts of male sexuality – and indeed of their own. The legitimate aspiration to delve deeper into their erotic being then turns into guerilla warfare against the forces of nature. This leads to deepening estrangement rather than rapprochement, and an eternal, dull and doleful stand-off ensues. Both allow their erotic natures to wither in the wasteland they have created.

Having said which, I am not quite as fatalistic. I think we have been repressing our true nature as a species for far too long to be anything other than ignorant about what would be possible between men and women if we stopped. It is a vast, unexplored frontier. Let us therefore be modest.

The image of all those cold and unexplored rooms is a compelling one. I’m more than willing to believe there are vast spaces inside every woman which neither I nor any other man has yet penetrated (pun intended). I would just like my female readers to understand that there are similarly vast spaces inside me.

The Art of Living

(Freely translated from a German original by Dirk Liesenfeld, tantra teacher in Berlin)

The Art of Living is learning how to write on water.

Because each sentence, each word, each letter is no sooner written than it is immediately gone. Reality can only be tasted when it is fresh.

The art of living is the absolute awareness that nothing endures or has meaning, and the ability, nevertheless, to make a conscious gift of each sentence, each word and each letter, simply for the pleasure of writing. To fill each moment with love and beauty, flowing out of a pure joy in existence.

When you do this, transience and meaninglessness are transformed into eternal experience and deep meaning.

Take each step, accomplish each gesture just for the present moment and you will recognize the godly in each grain of dust.

If you look for salvation, fulfilment, God – or whatever else you can come up with – somewhere other than in yourself and anywhere else than in the present moment, you will be eternally unfulfilled and your search will never end.

True freedom consists in changing your perspective on life: in recognizing that all things are transitory and moving therefore from doing into being.

To allow things just to be and to wish to live a full life is a brave step. There is no more courageous approach to life than to live it as if there were no tomorrow. Is this irresponsible? Selfish? Godless or sinful? You must discover it for yourself – for who else has the right to judge?

And you will discover, to your surprise, that your own realization of complete freedom opens a path to freedom for all beings on this planet

And maybe even further afield… 😉

In love,
Dirk.

Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (2 – the biological core)

Following his discovery of the link between sexual repression and character, Reich inquired into the nature of the mechanism underlying this link. His starting point was the observation that there existed, even if they were hard to codify, characteristic postures and facial expressions which allowed the most unlearned observer to decipher the character disposition of his interlocutor. Reich hypothesized that these resulted from, in the main, hypertonicity of certain functional muscle groups. Almost all muscles display in equilibrium or at rest a natural level of contraction called tonus. When this equilibrium is disturbed by a constant perception of threat, muscles become pathologically hypertonic. The attitude habitually assumed, be it of aggression, mistrust, helplessness etc, then becomes anchored in the muscular economy with attendent effects (though Reich does not discuss this) on skeletal development as well. Reich contends that the somatic and psychic expression of neurosis are functionally identical and mutually reinforcing. The somatic expression he calls the “biological core” of the neurosis. It is similarly this pattern of muscular spasticity which disrupts the orgastic response.

Reich goes on to make his central conjecture, laid out in Function of the Orgasm, that the natural orgasm serves a purpose of discharging vital energy and thereby regulating the energy economy of the body; this is thus a direct somatic parallel to Freud’s libido theory. Disturbances of the orgastic function compel the organism to regulate its energy economy otherwise, whether by reduced energy production (lethargy) or by other, imperfect mechanisms such as compulsive behaviors which only kick in when the tension has reached an unbearable level and then only partly resolve it.

The hypothesis of the “functional identity” of the neurosis and its somatic expression allows Reich to complement then-existing psychoanalytic techniques with a body-oriented approach and, he claims, achieve more consistent results, more rapidly, as well as penetrate some types of neurosis which were less amenable to traditional methods. His espoused technique advocates alternating opportunistically between addressing psychic and somatic blockages. This he called “vegetotherapy” in an allusion to its effects on the vegetative, or what we would now call the autonomic (i.e. involuntary) nervous system. How he did this in practice seems to be less well documented, perhaps because his discovery of the biological core of psychic neuroses leads him into more speculative areas of inquiry and the period of his interest in psychosomatic therapy is as a result relatively condensed, leaving methodology to be developed by others.

This new period in Reich’s life is underscored by a realization that sexual repression has not only somatic effects with psychic correlates – neuroses – but also that these primary somatic effects have in the long term direct secondary chronic effects at the somatic level in the form of illnesses such as cancer, dementia and rheumatic arthritis. This takes the hygienic challenge a long way from treated self-reported actual neuroses with anecdotal curiosities in turn-of-the-century Vienna to treating major plagues of contemporary civilization, both psychic and somatic.

Part 3: Reich’s legacy

Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (1 – from Freud’s libido theory to character analysis)

Although the work of Wilhelm Reich in relation to what he called sex-economy lies at the root of many contemporary approaches to psychotherapy and personal development, it is widely misrepresented, caricaturized and misunderstood and a summary of it for the educated layman is, to my knowledge at least, difficult to come by. I am often asked to explain Reich’s thought which has very much influenced my own, and so I thought fit to attempt such a summary. In this and the next article, I propose to set out how he arrived at, and the basis for, the character-analytic approach to psychotherapy and his later vegetotherapy which aimed at directly working on what he called the “biological core” of neurosis. In a subsequent article, I would like to offer a review of his theories in the light of current knowledge, and particularly in what one would hope could be described as a somewhat more accommodating social environment than prevailed at the time of his work. (UPDATE: since I wrote this article, a very good overview of Reich’s life and work has been written by Jason Louv, see here. My own treatment is a bit more technical.)

Reich’s developments of psychotherapy all draw root in Freud’s early work. Subsequent developments of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which Reich viewed as a capitulation to social conservatism, took their work in different directions. They share, nonetheless, a substantial common bedrock, and Reich remained deeply admirative of Freud’s labors even when he disagreed with him on fundamental matters.

As is well-known, the various phases of Freud’s thought never resulted in a single synthesis and different strands within it remained in tension with each other. Freud thus never arrived at an integrated theory of psychic functioning. Reich took his lead from Freud’s libido theory of neurosis; neurosis was thus the result of a binding of sexual energy as a result of developmental factors in childhood. Freud never elucidated how this binding took place or how psychoanalysis was precisely supposed to work in order to dissolve the binding and thus resolve neurosis, but he developed different models of psychodynamics, in each case essentially of a mental nature. The blocking factors in neurosis were thus mental representations and the prescribed route to their dissolution ultimately also mental, although it proceeded from the unconscious, which for Freud could not be directly observed.

Reich’s own approach is quite at ease with Freud’s model of the three stages of consciousness, being the system unconscious, the system preconscious and the system conscious. According to this model, drives which arise in the unconscious undergo a sort of filtering process in order to arrive at the level of consciousness, during which their associations and objects change more or less radically. Thus, for example, the infantile desire to suck, if insufficiently satisfied in infancy, persists in the unconscious and is satiated, though never ultimately satisfied, through ersatz means which could involve actual sucking (thumb, lollipop), other oral actions (obesity and bulimia), fixation with oral sexuality, or other forms of clinging behavior not immediately oral in their manifestation. In order to achieve satisfaction of these ersatz or secondary drives, individuals would develop typical strategems which are in a direct line of descent from those they employed successfully in childhood – all essentially manipulative, solliciting one or other emotion on the part of the caregiver which would then elicit the desired response. Some would focus on solliciting pity, others fear, still others admiration, or benevolence through humor, or distraction, etc. Whilst Freud did not feel he had a social mission and confined himself to the therapy of those cases who presented themselves for treatment, it is easy enough to see how the learning process in early childhood coupled with certain not immediately definable characteristics of the child would lead to characteristic dispositions in adulthood, a starting-point for Reich’s work.

Reich’s interest in character was at first prompted, however, by considerations of methodology. Freud and many of his close collaborators had never taken a systematic interest in determining and assessing what worked in the therapeutic context. It was supposed that individuals needed to “cooperate” in the therapy. If they failed to do so, there was no alternative approach available. Reich realized, however, that the fact of cooperation or of failure to cooperate was endogenous to the therapeutic setting. It itself needed to be interpreted and worked through. The manifestation of resistance was evidence that one was reaching carefully repressed material. To dismiss a patient for refusal to cooperate was to admit defeat, perhaps at the moment when one was closest to achieving a breakthrough.

Reich started with a layman’s concept of personality, but soon progressed it to a developmental model in which typical frustrations of infantile libido led to a freezing of certain character responses, which were then overlaid on each other. In the therapeutic setting, the therapist would work backwards through these layers, to arrive at, and liberate, the earliest material.

Reich also noted that all patients presented with actual disturbances of “natural” genital sexuality. These disturbances were of various sorts but fundamentally there were only a limited number of variables. Decreased or absent pleasure in the genital act could be due to (i) diminished sensitivity of the genital apparatus itself, (ii) its failure to respond to conventional stimuli or at all or (iii) a failure of genital response to (sufficiently) engage adjacent muscles involved in the natural orgastic response. Persons with diminished sensitivity were often, in the male, erectively potent or, in the female, highly flirtatious, but derived little pleasure from the sexual act. Reich saw this as an instrumentalisation of sexuality in the service of a secondary drive. Persons with erectile dysfunction or vaginismus were disinterested in sexuality or conventional sexuality because it conflicted with defense mechanisms they had developed. Persons, finally, with a flat orgastic response curve (premature ejaculation in the male, muted or no orgasm in the female) encountered during the process of sexual arousal psychological obstacles which made full sexual expression impossible. This typology of genital response, Reich was able to correlate, albeit loosely, with the stages in the development of the libido posited by Freud as well as with contemporary character. Frustration prior to the oral stage led to a withdrawal of sexual interest and to schizoid character. Frustration at the oral stage led to oral fixation and a lack of autonomy, expressed as sexual passivity and a capacity for surrender but a diminished response. Frustration at the anal stage led to rigidity and inability to surrender, whilst frustration at the genital stage expressed itself as individuals with strong seductive powers and sexually active, but reporting a lack of pleasure in the sexual act and as seeking it for secondary, narcissistic purposes. In Reich’s view, the vast majority of people presented with some form of neurosis and it had both character and genital expression.

Reich’s approach felt little need for Freud’s later ego theory, but remained compatible with it. In addition to his methodological work, Reich’s greatest breakthrough was his solution of the problem of masochism, discussed at length in Character Analysis. Freud had posited a primary masochism, fruit of a biological drive he termed the death instinct (Todestrieb). For Reich this had no parallel in the animal kingdom and was unacceptable. He derived masochism as a secondary drive when the pleasure principle was frustrated by overwhelming violence to which the individual as a small child was powerless to respond. The frustrated drive first sought an outlet in sadism, turning this sadism against itself when it was further repressed. Constant juxtaposition of pleasure and punishment led to a state where they became psychically interlinked. Reich pointed out that no-one took pleasure in actual pain, only in the expectation of it. Pent-up energy which could not be channeled into pleasurable activity led to tension and anesthesia and the need for more extreme stimuli to break through to the core of the sexual drive.

Whilst Freud brokered a peace with society and seems to have viewed sublimation of sexual drives as in some degree necessary to civilization, Reich presents an uncompromising faith in the natural order reminiscent of Rousseau and Nietzsche; for him it is axiomatic that to recover the natural functioning of the human organism is the one and only path to happiness. Natural man is capable, for Reich, of the highest moral qualities and it is his sexual repression that brings evil and suffering into the world.

Part 2: The Biological Core

What is “falling in love”?

I have just had an intense experience of falling in love with a beautiful woman. Her kiss is still on my lips. I am relaxed and melting into the feeling. It feels precisely like every other time this has happened to me – the same sense of youthful joy, of unlimited possibility, of new beginning.

Who is this woman? She is me. It was all a dream. And yet, having woken up, she seems just as real.

Needless to say, I would not have expected such an experience; although with hindsight it feels very natural. It got me wondering, for the first time, what actually the experience of falling in love consisted in, what was necessary to it and what was not, and what role the other really plays in an experience which clearly can be generated purely by oneself, for there can be no clearer case of projection than a creature generated in a dream.

So I went on line, imagining I must find something intelligent having at some point been said by scientists about this universal and tremendously important human experience. Now, I only did five minutes of research, so I may well have missed something, but I was very surprised to find so little, and in particular nothing which recognized that this experience could be entirely self-generated. It seems to be a commonplace that all kind of feelings become mixed up within falling in love, which may distort or denature it, and which are explained by the individual’s personal history, but everyone who has written about it seems to have been tenaciously attached to the idea that the core experience went past the self, required and was shaped by the other, and therefore that it had meaning in relation to that other. I see now that this is wrong. Yes, it goes past the normal boundaries of the self; but it does not require the other in anything more than a numinous sense, and clearly has implications only in regard to the self, implications moreover which are unanchored in time and space.

All I found on Wikipedia was a reference to one Francesco Alberoni, an Italian popular philosopher with whom I was already a little acquainted, but unimpressed by. According to that article, falling in love “is a process of the same nature as a religious or political conversion”. That seems to ring true. Alberoni emphasizes the power of the experience to dismantle the previous boundaries of the self and to remake them around a new (and social) project with a new sense of meaning. However he goes on to plunge into a long recital of his own metaphysical preferences, the self-indulgent character of which is patent. It seems to me that the boundaries of the imagined collective he refers to are just an attempt to salvage the lost sense of self – and, if successful in this project, they result typically in distorting, perhaps violently, the same sense of others – or ones own sense of reality. Rather, it seems evident, both existentially and philosophically, that beyond the psychic borders of the self, there is no collectivity. In that place, there can be only compassion.

Another thing I’m conscious of is the autoerotic character of the dream. It was erotic in the true sense, not attached to any fantasies of form, and it felt and feels very much like it was of a single piece with the wet dreams I would have as a young adolescent. The same energy and striving is present, only the projection is much more concrete, in that it feels really like another person entered into my life in that moment – perhaps not to stay, that doesn’t matter: but certainly to change it.

And so falling in love is a faculty of my self momentarily to allow its frightened borders to dissolve and to reach out into the space it naturally occupies. Falling in love is recognizing ones own nature as love, whatever the contingent factors, the congruency of drives and interests, which may, at a particular moment, open the door. But falling in love is also to become aware of ones insecurities and the immense weight of aspirations dammed up behind them. In such a moment, it quite literally feels like everything is possible, but one scrambles, in a frantic and chaotic way, to make sense of it all, to cash in on those possibilities, and to create an external world in the image of ones soul. When we see the light, the first thing we look for are sunglasses. And this is understandable, but it is not the summit of the experience. Rather, falling in love is just succumbing to the desire to become oneself. It is just being woken up by something important and primal enough, within oneself, to overcome ones ego defenses.

As usual, of course, Osho has had something to say about it in which I can recognize my experience.

Love is the shallow space in a swimming pool, for those who cannot meditate. But that is the place to learn meditation. And it is the same pool, it is the same water, it is the same kind of phenomenon. You are just unable to go deeper because you have been made afraid even to enter into it. The shallow part has been condemned, and you have been told to jump into the deeper part without knowing how to swim.

So they disturbed your love life by condemnation and they disturbed your meditative life by sheer strategy: because you don’t know swimming, you cannot go so deep. And you don’t have any experience of silence, peace, sheer joy, a little bit of ecstasy, something orgasmic — these will give you the hints how meditation is not a myth. You have tasted it a little bit. It is the same energy field, just you have to go deeper into it.

WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS when one couple moves into the realm of orgasmic experience? What actually happens? Every point has to be understood. Time stops. For a moment the pendulum does not move, and that single moment seems to be almost eternity. The two persons are no more two — for a moment. They have melted into each other. There is no thought in the mind, for a moment. It is all empty and silent, and these are the things which have to be deepened in meditation.

And once you have tasted them, you will be surprised that it does not depend on the other person. Something happens within you. Something happens within the other person. But it is not dependent. If you can sit silently, if you can manage, by watching your thoughts, to bring a gap, a stop, you will suddenly see time has stopped again. And now it is in your hands, not in the hands of biology. You can keep this time stopped as long as you want. And once you know the secret key….

The key is: no thoughts, no ego, no time — you just are.