Category: Articles

Cycles of sexual history

I was just listening to an episode of Chris Ryan’s excellent podcast, Tangentially Speaking, in which he talks with Tony Perrottet, who is a historian and travel writer one of whose main themes is sexual practices in times past. By the way, let me in passing rave about the podcast. Ever since leaving Cambridge I have felt deprived of the kind of intelligent and wide-ranging conversation committed to understanding and to changing the world which characterizes undergraduate life there. The podcast is like a window on a lost world which one day I hope to rediscover…

Anyway, in the discussion the theme comes up of whether the sexual mores of past civilizations were more liberated than our own and whether perhaps there is some cyclicality involved.  The most abrupt transition they discuss is that between a supposedly libertine 18th century and the Victorian 19th, epitomized by the difference in attitudes between the puritanical Charles Darwin and his paternal grandfather Erasmus, a social progressive and supposedly an avowed libertine (though this appears incidental to his biography).

Is this a correct characterization and, if so, what forces are at work?

I believe this characterization has the potential to be very misleading. The periods in question certainly were characterized by different attitudes to sex, which may have involved sex with more partners or in a wider range of styles, at least in certain strata of society, but leaping to qualify this as more liberated or less repressed is, I think, mistaken.

These styles of sexuality, at least the 18th century aristocratic one which may in large part anyway be accessible to us only through the vehicle of myth, are in many ways reminiscent of things to be found in today’s swinging and BDSM communities. In my opinion, it is problematic to qualify sexuality in these communities as, on the whole, less repressed; to do so rests on a misconception of sexuality which Ryan’s account invites us to reconsider, since it is clear throughout the pages of Sex at Dawn that sexuality plays in human evolutionary biology a social role.

What Sex at Dawn shows us is that this social role remains programmed into our biology and that, therefore, sex in forms which seem superficially to resemble the forms it took in the past are continually sought after. Ryan makes the point that many pornographic memes are likely to be remnants of this collective memory (many of course are not). However, reenacting orgies a la Eyes Wide Shut, where absolutely nothing other than lust drives the proceedings, may well, for a time, be liberating because one dimension of the social taboos on sexuality is momentarily lifted, but it is lifted at the cost of repressing the social dimension of sexuality to which monogamous institutions and their mythology give at least some expression. It is therefore hard to qualify one set of values and practices as more or less repressed than the other, though it is psychodynamically and therefore sociohistorically unsurprising that there may be an oscillation between the two.

The French revolution vectored egalitarian notions which were opposed to the corruption and decadence of the Ancien Regime. The revolutionaries were scarcely prudes, but partook of a widespread indignation at a ruling class which dissipated its sexuality in debauchery and nonetheless repressed the peasantry with great violence (evidence, if ever it were needed, that they were not really sexually liberated, because truly sexually liberated people, like their bonobo cousins, are by default peaceful and loving). The fate of women in this society (whose willing participation, lest I should need to recall this, is required for gratifying heterosexual sex) was a particular concern. Any romanticism regarding a supposedly lost Eden seems to me deeply misplaced.

When we look at classical antiquity we also need to be very careful. Greece and Rome were highly stratified, developed agrarian societies in which, by definition, sexuality no longer played the role it played in primitive societies but was taken up into the mesh of power and property relations upon which such societies were built. Bacchalian orgies were then no more than what they are now: a way to let off steam. The very need to let off steam is perfect evidence of the degree of repression from which natural sexuality suffered at that time.

It seems to me that countless males around the planet are still trapped in this primary patriarchal perversion when they evaluate sexual practices and norms. They display a preference for patriarchal practices and are deaf and blind to the sexual voice of the feminine, which in its turn seeks exasperated refuge in romantic fantasy. In none of these supposedly “liberated” periods did women enjoy anything like an equal voice alongside men in determining the expression of sexuality.

Men have still not ridden themselves of the idea that giving women such a voice would mean behaving in a way which was much less sexually gratifying. They seek to rebuild patriarchal sexual empires, in necessary opposition to an equally powerful social force pulling in the other direction. The primary social neurosis in all of this is the system of property and the violence which it does to our egalitarian tribal nature. In Ancient Greece that had been going on for thousands of years already; it is intrinsically unlikely we should look to such a society for clues as to how to live a more gratifying social life.

I venture to suggest, therefore, that we really are going through a period of transformation which is qualitatively different from what has happened before. I am under no illusion that it will result in a utopia or that it is irreversible, but it is important to see that this phase of sexual history is different from what has gone before for one simple reason. In the past, elevation of the feminine has implied more “repressed” sexual practices and elevation of the masculine, sexual practices which were more “liberated”. But the patriarchy invented sexual repression, even if it dislikes some of its consequences. As it has lost the power to defend its erstwhile islands of “sexual freedom” (brothels, geishas and similar institutions, based on objectivization of women in a state more or less close to slavery), its manifesto has become increasingly opposed to its basic interests. As feminism has made inroads into this system, it starts to reach the point where it can reclaim the primal right from which women have been excluded: their right to an authentic feminine sexuality.

This wave of deconstruction of sexual mores is therefore, using terms admittedly very grossly, led by women/the feminine and mistrusted by entitled males. In this lies the hope that it is really different from the past.

 

Grrl power

Their aims and methods can be discussed, but the activists of Ukrainian women’s rights organization Femen, which recently opened a “training camp” in Paris, have surely hit on a means of protest – female public nudity – which deserves, and will probably receive, more prominence in the future. This is one of those phenomena which, to me, captures a fundamental shift in the Zeitgeist and may prefigure important and long overdue social changes. For this to happen, however, there is a need for a further shift in feminist self-understanding. Due to recent advances in research into the ontogenesis of patriarchy and its social costs, such a shift, I believe, is at hand; all it needs are sufficiently eloquent advocates.

Femen got started as a means to alert young women in Ukraine to the dangers of the sex industry and to try to get attention from the authorities to this problem. With its move to Paris, a city which once had a global reputation as a cradle of progressive social movements, once wonders if this will change. The group (or incipient movement) has an enviable brand identity, but so far seems lacking in ideological focus.

Femen’s methods are hard to resist because they tap into some deep cultural veins. On the one hand, the patriarchy has, as part of its subversive strategy vis-a-vis female sexuality, offered women a trade-off whereby they have given up their rights to sexual self-expression in return for physical protection and, in recent years, increasing opportunities for personal (of course non-sexual) expression. This protection is far from having been universally effective, but it has entailed inculcating a moral code according to which it is widely considered unmanly to use force against women. Men accordingly, and society as a whole, therefore have difficulties in deflecting these women from their goals, and the more vulnerable they are and the more obvious it is that this is what is going on, the more encumbered is the response of the patriarchy to it, since repression generates greater and greater indignation, even on the part of those who normally tacitly acquiesce in the existing order.

In the past, public nudity might have been enough of a taboo that the fuss around it would have overwhelmed the reaction of solidarity; but it is likely that this is no longer the case. Female public nudity is, in the West, no longer a breach of social contract; violence against women is.

However, aside from this issue of social contract there is also, I believe, a much deeper and far more significant attitude to the naked female body on the part of men which renders this type of protest very powerful in the collective unconscious. This attitude is biologically rather than culturally determined or at least, if culturally determined, draws on archetypes which are much older than agrarian society.

The presence of such a pre-cultural representation of woman in the male imagination underlies Carl Jung’s theory of the anima. This representation portrays women as sexually empowered, strong, intuitive and wise; in many ways the polar opposite of the culturally constructed role – virgin, demure, weak, in need of protection etc – from which almost all seductive power has been eradicated.

Therefore men have created a role for women in which they no longer desire them. This may have seemed to matter little as long as part of the female population was reserved by men to stand outside this stereotype – prostitutes, courtesans, mistresses, priestesses, witches and so on. These women were permitted to don perfectly contrary attributes. And, as time has gone on, men, who have imagined themselves able to get by on images of women quite unlike the culturally manufactured real thing, have had no problem in going on doing so, in art, fiction and pornography. As the man often cares only about the congruence between the image and his anima, projecting this onto the screen of reality through the vehicle of erotic fantasy, this has given birth to a prodigious parallel oeuvre of imaginary social re-engineering.

The imaginary figures to which this oeuvre has given birth are, however, at least as potent a cultural force as their equally imaginary counterpoints. By donning the mantle of the superheroine, Femen rejects the “acceptable” role given to women by society and taps into a powerful erotic script over which the patriarchy is conflicted and to which it therefore has inadequate means to respond. Significantly, this seems almost inevitably to entail an attack on organized religion; consciously or not, the equation between religion, the patriarchy, and the repression of female sexual self-expression seems axiomatic to this new generation of feminist revolutionaries.

In hindsight it seems inevitable that real women would step up to the anima, since in substance it is not a mere projection of the male imagination but an actual, biological representation of innate feminine qualities, albeit (as I understand Jung’s thought) from a male perspective.

Femen make this clear, calling themselves “new Amazons” and adopting a militaristic discourse full of (what is taken to be) characteristically male imagery. But they are equally the symbolic heiresses of historical figures like Joan of Arc, constructed icons like Marianne, and the pantheon of female superheroes so beloved of pubescent boys, from Superwoman through an army of her ever more buxom and unclad avatars: often decried by feminists as sexualized stereotypes and screens for male projection and objectification of women, but in reality not only that: also a hommage to another, indubitably more empowered idea of woman.

The empowered, wild woman is erotically charged for men in a way her tamed sister can never be. This means one simple thing: the male erotic imagination is on the side of this force for social change. And, as women know, this is a very powerful ally.

That they are no longer afraid collectively to appeal to it in defense of their own interests (and of course in reality also of male interests, because humankind has only one set of real interests) represents a sea-change in the balance of power between the sexes. Ultimately, the more authentically we are ourselves, the closer we will come together; this process is naturally self-reinforcing.

What we see at this point of history are social institutions in the eye of a tornado, battered and starting to give way under the accumulated force of our repressed biological nature; they are so weakened that the moment is ripe for something quite new. Beyond their specific social agenda, whatever it may ultimately turn out to be or not to be, Femen points to the coming into being of a fundamentally new space in which conceptions of society will inevitably be reshaped.

Smartphonitis

I just read this article on WebMD which discusses the endemic compulsive use of smartphones in modern society, its possible reasons, consequences, and how to deal with it. Here is a summary sentence: “the smartphone, more than any other gadget, steals from us the opportunity to maintain our attention, to engage in contemplation and reflection, or even to be alone with our thoughts.”

I believe this is true and it is a matter about which we should be concerned. Yet the question of why this compulsion arises is not satisfactorily answered in the article, though it gives a few clues. Therefore I would like to put forward an alternative explanation. Continue reading “Smartphonitis”

Somatic climatology

In a previous post, I discussed John Sarno’s ideas on the psychological etiology of pain and other pathologies. In this context I would like to add some further hypotheses on how emotional repression affects the body and the felt sense.

The repression of emotions from consciousness does not merely prevent their expression in the neocortex. Emotions are naturally linked to the much more ancient endocrine system, which affects the body by means of hormones produced in the glands and vectored through the bloodstream and ultimately the extracellular matrix. The nervous and endocrine systems are interdependent, with response coordinated by the hypothalamus in the brain. The repression of emotions is a process which affects both the nervous system and certain key endocrine functions related to the evolutionarily adaptive response to the emotion in question. However, the body’s natural response to these locked emotions is not altogether disabled – they continue to produce effects in parts of the somatic and autonomic nervous systems as well as in parts of the endocrine system. The key point to understand is therefore that repression from consciousness is not equivalent to complete somatic disactivation. Repression by the ego is an imperfect dam, around which the stored emotions must find routes in order to maintain homeostasis. Because these routes do not provide for a full discharge of the emotions, however, the body is under constant tension.

We may consider that the primary emotional response is the alloplastic one – the one which is directed to changing the situation at the origin of the emotions being felt – and that it is this alloplastic response which is suppressed (if we are anything like our bonobo cousins, the repressed instinct may frequently be to have sex; this response does not change the external situation as such but rather its social expression, and could be termed mesoplastic or socioplastic). In its place, an autoplastic response is favored – the organism tries to change itself.

The inappropriate and sustained nervous and endocrine response to repressed emotions is what gives rise to the pathologies discussed, and it is important to realize that this is not just a “trick of the mind” but rather that it takes place on a biochemical level which, while not fully autonomous, enjoys a degree of autonomy from the conscious functions which we tend to think of when we use the term “mind”. In reality, of course, it is our terminology and its intrinsic duality which is at fault, because the bodymind operates as an integrated system in which certain material may be withheld from consciousness, but the vast majority is unavailable to consciousness in the first place.

The same objection has to be raised in respect of a focus on pathological syndromes only. In fact, the repressed response does not produce candidate pathologies only, but directly influences the biochemical environment of the body, proprioception, and our mental somatic map. It is not only pain, allergy or disturbed bowel function which may be provoked by emotional circumstances, but more generally also our level of somatic energy, our self-perception and our sense of wellness: aspects which we may think of as an innate part of our personality, but in reality are no more so than these other more obvious disturbances.

This raises, from my perspective, the interesting question of how an undisturbed individual would experience the body and embodiment. If it was not immediately obvious to me that my pain had emotional causes, it was even less obvious that the same was true for my general sense of self, for my general sense of inhabiting the body I inhabit. If this experience can also be altered by an awareness of its etiology, then interesting times lie ahead.

I wish all my readers a happy 2013!

The new blog

As my readers will have noticed, I have decided to rename the blog “Becoming Human”. This is the fruit of a long process, and it is already a long time that most of my writing has moved beyond at least the obvious sense of the original theme of “Sex and Spirituality”, even if I still view the world in much the same way as I did when I began writing in 2008. I have done an extensive rewrite of the home page of the blog, so if you want to check out how I now see what I am trying to write about, check it out.

When I chose the new title, which was quite some time ago, I was unaware that Carl Rogers, one of the great pioneers of humanistic psychology, had entitled a collection of his essays, back in 1961, On Becoming a Person. Sadly, psychological science has not advanced nearly as quickly as it might or should have done since Rogers formulated some of his seminal insights. This disappointingly slow progress should not, however, discourage us, for it is still true, as Rogers wrote, that “it is not upon the physical sciences that the future will depend; it is upon us who are trying to understand and deal with the interactions between human beings” (p.57 of the London 2004 edition)

Paraphilia

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Dan Savage, whose work I generally respect, sometimes really grates on me. One of the subjects on which he clearly has no idea whatsoever is sexual paraphilia. In this letter, someone writes to him clearly tortured by extreme violent sexual fantasies (“EVSFs”). Although he does at least urge that person to see a therapist, he also writes:

You could be seeing causation where there is only coincidence. There are a lot of people out there who didn’t suffer the kind of abuse you did—or any kind of abuse at all—but who nevertheless have EVSFs.

This statement is typical of Dan’s views on kinks, but he has never to my knowledge made any attempt to justify it. And, quite honestly, what does he, or does any of us, know about the life experiences of people who may well themselves have repressed all recollection of early childhood trauma? Whilst I support the position of accepting paraphilia and the safe exploration of paraphilia, I entirely disagree as regards its etiology; paraphilia is obsessive-compulsive and it is always attributable to a disturbance in natural sexual development. Persons with a paraphilia, even if they do not experience it as suffering, would have a lot to gain from the path of inquiry to which it invites.

The psychodynamics of paraphilia, predictably misinterpreted by the American Psychiatric Association, have been explored in the path-breaking work of Robert Stoller. As I have mentioned before, Stoller’s view was that paraphilia was ubiquitous but neurotic. He argued for its tolerance, but not for missing its psychoanalytic message. As more recent work has emphasized, the primary biological role of human sexuality is group bonding. Scripted sexual behavior, on the other hand, attempts to discharge ego trauma; it is not oriented to the other but to oneself. This should be only a transient phase in sexual development, but persons with paraphilias are stuck there. (It should also be emphasized that paraphilia is a narrower category than kink – sexual behavior is acquired, in part also cultural and a question of fashion, and interest in certain forms of behavior, even if it may have been formed in somewhat unnatural circumstances in childhood, should not be labelled paraphilia if it is merely a part of repertoire and not an obsession. The neutral label of kink is often misapplied to paraphilia.)

Paraphiliacs will argue that they can be in loving relationships, in which bedroom fantasy does not spill out into all other domains of life. I accept this. We all know that it can be compassionate to indulge another’s addiction, and uncaring constantly to point out that they would be better off without it. Nonetheless one lives a freer, fuller life when addictions are overcome.

Paraphiliacs will also tell us that they are happier than the rest of us. That may also be true. Many of us are walking around with an entire buried world of fantasies in our preconscious, unavowed and unbefriended; they are sought outlets for drives which instead have to find less healthy outlets elsewhere. Embracing this submerged shadow world would make us all healthier and happier.

Nonetheless, Dan makes categorical and unsubstantiated statements in his attempts to normalize kink. Why? It seems this is because, at root, his position on homosexuality tends often to be unreflectingly nativist. He presents matters as if no homosexual has any choice as to their sexual orientation and that it is for this reason that it must be respected. The more other socially frowned upon forms of sexual behavior that can be found and similarly labeled innate, the more he can rally voices behind the (laudable) gay rights agenda.

This is not only unscientific; whilst understandable, and possibly good tactics in the past, it is at this stage in our collective social development a grave mistake. Without loss of generality, I believe it is obvious enough that some people’s homosexual orientation is innate, whereas others engage in homosexual behavior rather because it is, for them, in the nature of a paraphilia. Whether consensual, victimless behavior is native or elective should not matter from the standpoint of the law. After all, religion is the ultimate elective fantasy; if its exercise is protected, all other rights must follow.

Persons with EVSFs have them certainly because they have suffered some form of abuse – they are not innate. Being able safely to avow and explore these fantasies may well be a crucial stage in the process of emancipation from the collective consequences of this abuse in their adult life, which doubtless goes way beyond the fantasies in question. Whether, unaided, BDSM is sufficient as therapy is, to put it mildly, much more open to doubt. Compassion requires us to recall the broader picture and to support the individual in all aspects of their healing process.

 

John Sarno’s work on the etiology and treatment of psychosomatic disorders

I have been troubled all my adult life by disorders termed, which generally meant dismissed as, psychosomatic. These are disorders for which no physical etiology can be found, although they may have observable physical manifestations. From a psychological point of view, they have also recently been classified as somatoform disorders. As such, I was very interested to discover recently John Sarno‘s work on the subject.

Sarno’s basic premise is that just as emotional conflict can give rise to neuroses, so it also can give rise to pain and other physical conditions. This linkage may be direct, with Sarno positing that localized pain is a result of ischemia ordered by the central nervous system. Such emotional conflicts may also, via mechanisms which are presumably diverse, but which Sarno does not elucidate, result in afflictions to which non-psychological factors also contribute, whether in terms of their etiology or their clinical development. A key feature of Sarno’s posited diagnosis of tension myositis syndrome (TMS) is the variability in its lifetime expression. As such, it is an umbrella diagnosis or metadiagnosis for a variety of syndromes which have in common a non-progressive character. For a fuller discussion, read his 2006 book The Divided Mind.

I suffered in my early teens from clinical depression and situational urinary incontinence. By my mid-teens, this was replaced by muscular fasciculations, which I was convinced for a long time had to be a manifestation of a degenerative condition. Muscular function remained mechanically and electrically normal however, and much later this was officially classified as “benign fasciculation syndrome” (although it has receded, I am not fully free of it to this day). I went on at college to develop chronic fatigue syndrome, which at one point resulted in my being almost unable to walk. I also suffered at that time from migraines and back pain, and peri-orbital migraine was a regular occurrence for many years afterwards. During all this time, there have been no notable biochemical abnormalities observed.

Now I have not been monitoring bodily symptoms against my emotional state for many years and so I cannot provide a full account; it has changed immensely for the better, but I have still had my share of annoying things, in particular abdominal pains, and six or seven years ago Achilles tendinitis. Around May last year I developed plantar fasciitis on the left foot; it took a year to heel but then almost immediately the right foot developed the same symptoms. It has been quite debilitating as strenuous effort has tended to worsen it. All this led me to seek effective relief from the pain in various ways, a subject to which I will return.

Sarno’s notion, therefore, is very appealing. Indeed, given the importance of physical complaints, so called “hysterical conversion“, in the early development of psychoanalysis, it is not quite clear why attention has mostly been subsequently restricted to behavioral neuroses, especially outside of the Reichian tradition. Even if the mechanisms remain obscure, it is attractive to view psychosomatic disorders as somatic forms or expressions of neurosis.

However, I suspect the brain is less involved in mediating this relationship than we think. Sarno claims that the pain is directly generated by the brain as a diversion from unwanted emotions which threaten to break through into consciousness. I fancy this is otherwise: the brain is involved, certainly, in the repression of emotions, and by preventing their expression it prevents their discharge. The bodily symptoms, however, do not necessarily require neurological involvement and may arise on the basis of pure biochemistry. This is illustrated by research on the role of myofibroblasts in the mechanic regulation of connective tissue (see here). To me, the idea that the brain is busy, like some cranky old Wizard of Oz, devising ways to present consciousness with ever-new diversions seems crude, and it is not required to explain Sarno’s clinical outcomes. Variation in the site of pain may have simple biomechanical explanations.

So Sarno’s work is pathbreaking and liberating, definitively contributing to a shift in understanding of psychosomatic disorders, but it nonetheless needs to be taken with the necessary pinch of salt. Sarno offers, in The Divided Mind, no epidemiological data to back up his claim that the syndrome chosen by the brain is a matter of fashion (in a Kuhnian perspective, it is of course much more plausible that it is the diagnosis and corresponding collection of statistics which is driven by fashion, rather than the patient’s symptoms, especially since many of these diagnoses are evidently imprecise). He also offers no evidence to back up the conjecture that local ischemia explains the pain or that this is cerebrally induced (and if so, how). Indeed, the locus of pain is not discussed either, and some statements suggest Sarno does not have a deep understanding of myofascial biochemistry.

Sarno follows the usual path of airbrushing Reich out of the history of psychoanalysis, although it should be obvious that Reich was the first to look at the body and mind as a whole. However, his major error is to follow Freud’s mistrust of the id and misplaced trust in the superego. Freud, as we know, viewed repression as in many ways akin to a virtue upon which civilization depended. Sarno also paints a picture of the “childish, primitive” unconscious as the enemy within, even referring to it, with patent ideological bias, as the “dregs of evolution”, contrasting it to the “ethical and moral” conscious mind, a view hardly conducive to integration and well-being, and one which even Freud would have struggled to maintain (Nietzsche of course having demolished it comprehensively). His negative views of the moral quality of children are particularly depressing in their Calvinist overtones.

Several of Sarno’s statements in relation to brain neurology seem completely wrong: for example he attributes “rational, civilized” behavior to the neocortex, labeling it “that part of the human brain that has been added in the process of evolution”, even though the neocortex developed in the first mammals. The attempted equation between brain structures and Freud’s threefold division of the mind is presented as fact, whereas it is not a notion entertained by any mainstream psychoanalyst or neurologist. Indeed, Sarno oscillates gaily between the unconscious/preconscious/conscious model and the id/ego/superego model as if they were the same thing.

All this aside, this is a book which opened my mind to what now seems like an obvious fact but has long gone unnoticed, namely that the mind does not simply affect the body in vague, unspecified ways but perhaps in very specific ways where a direct link can be drawn between emotional circumstances and pain. It is pretty clear now to me what the circumstances were which led to both episodes of plantar fasciitis, and I am inclined to agree with Sarno that this knowledge is immensely emancipatory.

Self-doubt and the other

When I was 19, I had my first real intimate relationship with a girl. She was 17, we were not really in love, but I liked and cared for her a lot. We lived in different parts of the country, so I didn’t get to see her a lot. We had spent a few evenings kissing, cuddling and petting, and an evening came when we took it a bit further. For me it was a beautiful and very pure experience, it had seemed to me that she felt the same way, and so I was shocked when, a few days later, I got a letter from her which was angry and bitter, in which she said she had felt violated, that it was disgusting and dirty and so forth. This outburst of shame took me quite by surprise, as there had been no hint of it before, and it really knocked me for six, undermining my anyway precarious self-confidence vis-a-vis the opposite sex for many years to come.

Today I know how to give pleasure to a woman and have done so with many different partners. I believe I have a sense of boundaries and of tempo and can tune into what is going on in the body and mind of whoever is receiving my touch. I feel female arousal in my own body. This sense is not infallible, but even with persons who have difficulties articulating their desires and boundaries, it rarely happens that there is such a breakdown in communication that, ex-post, I and my partner have totally different assessments of what has gone on. Yet something similar happened recently, and it exposed this old pain. It is not simply the pain of rejection: much more important is the existential self-doubt engendered. How is it possible that I was so wrong about what was going on? If I cannot trust my own instincts, how can I navigate relationships with the openness, tenderness and respect to which I aspire? Am I doomed to bring pain when I want to bring pleasure, and suffering when I want to bring healing? Is my caring self-image just in fact, as perhaps the other accuses, a rationalization of cynical pursuit of my own desires?

A certain degree of skepticism in this regard is undoubtedly healthy. There are always moments when we misread signals and are caught up in our own discourse. The experience of the other is a vital reality check and it is precious when there is enough trust and openness that neither party feels compelled to distort their experience out of fear of the sensitivities of the other.

Nevertheless, the notion that there can be one event, but two different experiences of it, is to be mistrusted. Experiences of intimacy go largely beyond the boundaries of the self. When we think like this, we are unaware that we posit a notion of mind and will which is absolutely culturally determined and very clearly wrong. People are not, as we are assuming, atomic actors with single points of view: they are, as we know, complex and self-contradictory.

Sexual arousal does not bring us into an altered state of reality in which we cannot make safe judgments; it brings us into a state where we abandon to our desires. Whether the judgments we make in this state are the ones we rationally should wish to make really depends on how integrated our personality is, or to put it another way it depends on our level of consciousness. Although in sexual arousal we are more authentically and fundamentally us than how we are likely to behave under other conditions, this does not mean that this authenticity cannot generate fundamental conflicts in the psyche which lead us to view, and even to recall, an event ex-post in a way inconsistent with how it was lived in the moment. Nor, of course, does it mean that momentary consent morally suffices; a caring and compassionate partner should always form their own view of what is in the best interests of the other and allow this view to override, if necessary, even the perfect harmony which the moment may engender.

If I got it wrong all those years ago, it was not in the way I long supposed. My first girlfriend gave consent, and the experience was beautiful, for both of us, in that moment. Knowing what I know now, I could have detected the fragility in her psyche which was to force her subsequently to reevaluate that event in a way inconsistent with the truth of her own experience, and thus negate her own authenticity. This is anything but uncommon: it is, indeed, a frequently reoccurring pattern of events. We all feel shame ex-post and a need to project the responsibility for that shame onto the other. I could have said, at that time, yes, we are perfectly in tune and I perfectly perceive what in that moment she desires, and yet chosen another and wiser path. Except of course that I was totally unprepared by my experience of life to exercise such wisdom and far too caught up in the beauty of my own creation of the moment, as contingent intimacy fused in my perception with cosmic oneness. Even still, had I at least perceived her later reaction for what it was – one which her psychological integrity fully required of her, and which had nothing to do with me at all, I could still have both salvaged my own self-confidence and, perhaps, the relationship. My instinct could be trusted, but it also had limits only wisdom could overcome.

Many of us deeply desire to be great lovers, or therapists, or fathers, or leaders in whatever walk of life. We deeply care about the well-being of others. This is our highest goal in life, and we are totally dedicated to it. But we are brought up with the notion that only perfection is enough and we are deeply insecure. We do not realize that this desire of the heart is its own perfection, and so the reaction of the other challenges our sense of self, we become defensive, and create walls between ourselves and the other. What is imperfect about us in that moment is only our wounded ego – not our technique, sensitivity or value as a human being. If we aspire to be true healers, we should acknowledge and heal that wounded ego in ourselves with at least the same compassion as we would do so in the other.

Monogamish

I don’t agree with Dan Savage on everything: occasionally listening to his podcast drives me nuts. But most of the time it is a real breath of fresh air. In this video, he very eloquently gets across the message on why responsible non-monogamy is a deeply humanistic, respectful and appropriate ethic which salvages, rather than threatens, the mess we have made of the social institution of marriage when, around the 1950’s and with the rise of feminism, popular culture fundamentally redefined it by, as he puts it, “instead of extending to women the same license and latitude that men had always enjoyed, … impos[ing] on men the same limitations and restrictions that women had always endured“.

The new paradigm was not of course drawn from nowhere: the church had been preaching it for centuries. The point, however, is that we had always allowed ourselves double standards and endured the feelings of guilt and shame that went with them. Those double standards kept some lid on the extent of extramarital sex and the social consequences to which it could lead, but they did not, and could not, eliminate it.

The asymmetry in society’s standards which had slumbered beneath the surface for hundreds of years (ever since the counter-reformationist Council of Trent outlawed divorce in 1563), was clearly articulated in the first version of Napoleon’s seminal civil code, considered (for other reasons rightly) by him as his lifetime’s greatest achievement. The provisions on divorce are worth citing: article 229 states that “the husband may demand a divorce on the ground of his wife’s adultery,” article 230 by contrast that “the wife may demand divorce on the ground of adultery in her husband, when he shall have brought his concubine into their common residence.”

Such discriminatory provisions, of course, could not stand the test of time. Though divorce was again outlawed in restorationist France in 1816, when it was reinstated by the law of 1884, the clause on common residence (itself inspired by canon law, which seems to have been more ambivalent about extramarital relations as such) was struck out, thereby consecrating, for the first time in a legal text, the religious condemnation of adultery (whatever is the correct understanding of that term), paradoxically enough together with a facilitation of divorce on such grounds, which the Council of Trent explicitly excluded.

Dan is right when he says that the myth according to which extramarital desire is proof of lack of love and commitment is not only evident nonsense, but also pernicious to the very institution it seeks to associate itself with. If we go round pounding such notions, which are so obviously at odds with our biological nature, into everyone’s heads then it is no wonder relationships and families are a mess and it is no wonder that affective trauma gets passed from one generation to another. It is not easy to reconcile social monogamy with sexual non-exclusivity, but only because it requires a great deal of deconditioning and the demasking of a great deal of inherited suffering. Attempts to do so, under the likely conditions of asymmetric incentive between the partners, may often end in failure and acrimony or worse. Nevertheless, the idea that there is anything natural in the association between these two ideas has been comprehensively disproved by the accumulated experience of vast numbers of couples for whom it is, by now, a complete non-issue, indeed for whom open sexual boundaries have meant much greater, not less, intimacy.

Dan’s is no self-interested male agenda, of which, being gay, he anyway cannot be suspected; it is a plea for relationships based on real respect, commitment and love between adult and equal human beings. The kind of relationship in which children prosper emotionally, and each partner feels more empowered in going about their life due to the love and stability they enjoy. It is surely high time for society to cast off the vestiges of shame around sexuality which objectively stand in the way of making the institutions work which they purport to defend.

The Will to Power

I have recently been thinking about what Nietzsche referred to as the Will to Power.

Nietzsche’s concept expresses, glossed in modern terms, the intuition that there is, in our biological constitution, a source of self-becoming which is identifiably and subjectively moral and yet individual and innate.

Nietzsche was dissatisfied with Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to live and with the Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest. For all that he challenged in German moral philosophy, he remained convinced that man had an innate, if often latent, moral drive and that this was biological in nature. Had Nietzsche lived later, he would surely have found Freud’s “pleasure principle” just as reductionist. The Will to Power itself is amoral in nature and its biological foundations are not really explored: morality is a second order effect that Nietzsche expects to emerge from affirming this basic drive rather than repressing it. What a world would look like in which people lived in accordance with the will to power is not Nietzsche’s concern, and at first sight the notion seems as compatible with altruism and benevolence as it does with despotism and misanthropy. On closer reflection though, the charge of misanthropy must be a misunderstanding, because the superman derives no benefit or pleasure from subjugation of others; he speaks “badly of man but not ill of him”. As for subjugation of nature, Nietzsche views it as an intrinsic folly.

So the question is, what is the biological basis of the will to power? It seems to me that Nietzsche misunderstood Darwin in imputing to him a necessary dependence on utilitarian notions. From at least a modern perspective, this seems not really to underlie Darwin’s discoveries. All that really would seem to matter is that I pass my genes on, and not that I am happy with my life.

Nietzsche posits that vitality is the root of man’s creativity and the best of which he is capable. As such, the will to power seems to rest, biologically speaking, upon the drive to procreate. It is this, seemingly so basic, drive, and which can undeniably also be experienced as entirely trivial, that at the same time is so inextricably linked to our most compelling experiences of dissolution and ecstasy. Whereas Freud thought that moral effort was needed to channel sexual energy into the achievements of civilization, Nietzsche is much more trusting in the natural propensity of this creative energy to overflow into the entirety of man’s social and inner experience: it does not need to be directed, it only needs to be unleashed.

The will to power and the drive to procreate or to experience dissolution are not, however, precisely the same thing. If this were so, the will to power would be everywhere; it is hard to imagine how societal forces would keep it in check. Descriptively however, few people seem to embark on the journey to which their vitality invites. For those people, and I count myself among them, allowing societal forces to prevail over ones inner sense is simply an impossibility; it is inherently immoral, however noble might be that to which one is exhorted.  The only moral being one possibly can be is the one that one is. Of course one exercises judgment, discernment, in practical action but this is really not very difficult because one is not at war with the outer order of things, one is simply awake to the opportunities to change it that may arise. All else is tension, and counter-reactions to it are assured. If morality arises from the natural state of man, moral crusades can never lead anywhere. All I need to do and all I can do is to take you, if you are ready, by the hand and lead you to places which can trigger your own awakening. Force is available to me, but it is useless. As I have written before, meditation is my only moral imperative.

But, you may protest, if I see injustices of which I am not the author, do I not have to act?

No. But at least I may. If I embrace the will to power, I am no longer powerless, no longer trapped in knee-jerk reactions to external events, reactions which are almost entirely determined by my own inner struggles. I am serene. I can act. My power is available to me and I have clarity as to the potential rewards of my action. And as such, I am finally a moral subject. Certainly, good deeds may contribute to mankind’s well-being, but they do so proportionately to the inner serenity of their authors.

Ultimately, it remains a mystery why most of mankind, like the animals from which we are descended, is in a state of more or less deep sleep. The will to power, in conscious form, seems to characterize only the few and at this stage of our social and perhaps biological evolution it is a pure leap of faith to imagine it as potentially characterizing the many. We are left with the mystery of consciousness, this quality which suffuses nature and yet is distinct from it, seemingly, in an evasive sense, superordinate to it; which erupts into human minds and human history more as a messenger from another realm than as an expected basis for our being. It is alien to us, yet our deepest nature; we long for it, but have mostly no idea where to look. Humanity as animal plus consciousness is an aspirational equation, even a self-delusion at times. Grounded in our biological nature, the will to power necessarily impels us not simply to recreate the conditions of a more natural life, although this is a precondition, but to be something which, so far and with rare exceptions, humanity has not been.