bonobo – Becoming Human

Ancestral sexuality: more clues from our erotic imagination?

In my last post, I alluded to some of the evidence from psychoanalysis which supports the position of primary sexual non-exclusivity taken in Sex at Dawn. In this post, I would like to throw out another idea. (*)

I have mentioned before Robert Stoller’s work on the erotic imagination (here and here) and have just now finished reading the chapter on erotic fantasy in Esther Perel’s superb Mating in Captivity, to which I shall return in a future post Reading this, it occurs to me that we have no good answer to the following question: why is the experience of repressed aggression or of humiliation sexualized even when it is not obviously sexual in origin? That is, why do we make specifically sexual fantasies out of these experiences and wish to reenact them in a sexual context? One could perfectly well reenact them in other contexts, and as a practical matter this may often be far easier to do; yet the erotic persona often seems diametrically opposed to the public persona. There is of course a Freudian, “developmental” answer to this question, but it is in this regard circular: it begs the underlying question of why exactly sex is so important to the ego.

So what is the link between sex, aggression and status and why is it so powerful? After all, in plenty of primate species sex has no particular importance: it is casual, episodic and short-lived. Given the insignificant role of sex in such species, it is hard to imagine that they spend anything like the proportion of their time thinking about it which humans do. In fact there is only one primate species for which it is easy to conceive of its possessing an active erotic imagination and one in which sex and aggression are closely linked: the bonobo.

For bonobos, sex plays a rich and unique social role. Let’s listen to Frans de Waal: “Bonobo sex often occurs in aggressive contexts … A jealous male might chase another away from a female, after which the two males reunite and engage in scrotal rubbing. Or after a female hits a juvenile, the latter’s mother may lunge at the aggressor, an action that is immediately followed by genital rubbing between the two adults.”

Just like “make-up” sex which anecdotally is a frequent occurrence in human dyadic relationships, sex for bonobos plays a role of reestablishing social connections after emotions have gotten a little out of hand.

Now let’s imagine a bonobo which for some reason (forced induction into human “civilization” for example) is not allowed to use sex to bring reconciliation in a certain range of contexts and is also sex-deprived generally. The experience of aggression in these contexts is still, presumably, going to provoke in him or her an erotic reaction. Absent the opportunity to act on this impulse, one can well imagine its becoming, by the standard mechanism, a neurotic script whereby the circumstances which originally sollicited the reaction non-exclusively, now become integral to it and required for it to take place.

That is, we may hypothesize that the ability to make aggression into a core element within the erotic imagination requires a significant primary link between sexuality and aggression in the social life of the species. Aggression and sexuality are in a subtle and continuous balance in bonobo society, the purpose of which is to sustain cooperation within the tribe.

My purpose, of course, is not to suggest that human sexuality is not much more sophisticated than that of bonobos: it clearly is. Yet it is appealing to imagine, even if it is only the embryo of an idea requiring further research, that we share this archetypal association, as it would illuminate what remains otherwise, to my mind, somewhat of a mystery.

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(*) Note: as readers of the book will be aware, the theme of a link between the erotic imagination and primary sexuality is already present in Sex at Dawn, where the authors discuss the appeal of multi-male pornography to men. This contribution is in a similar spirit.

Our tribal nature

Since Sex at Dawn, it is finally beyond doubt that humankind is not a monogamous creature. Nonetheless, there are lot of details still to be filled in as regards the exact role of sexuality in the social organization of our species, both past and present. In this regard, we are only possessed at present of a few, tantalizing clues. However, both brief introspection and sheer logic suffice to conclude that sexual behavior in our species does not serve simply or primarily as some kind of casual, diffuse and undifferentiated social glue. Such an extreme view appears to be a gross simplification even for bonobos.

What I have observed, purely from self-study and from listening to others who have similarly tried to understand themselves, is that there remains a fundamental difference between men and women as regards their emotional response to situations in which their sexuality comes to contemporary expression, at least when it is expressed within a holistic response to another individual where attraction is felt on a number of levels. This difference appears to me to be irreducible to purely cultural and contingent factors, and to play a plausible role in primitive societies as well.

Sticking to bonobos, and we should be careful in extrapolating too naively to our own species, we know that they live in philopatric groups. This means that the male composition of groups is constant over time, whilst females migrate into groups other than that in which they were born. Whilst homosexual behavior takes place in both sexes, it appears to play more of a bonding role amongst females, whereas amongst males its role is more as an outlet for sexual tension and to reinforce mating hierarchies: males exhibit markedly less intra-sex solidarity than females.

Now I have not read anything about this, applying either to bonobos or our own species, but the question obviously arises of the factors which come into play in inciting a female to join another group. There is clearly a push factor – the desire to avoid incestuous pregnancy – but it is still necessary to choose the new host group. It is hard to believe that this choice is entirely left to chance.

Looking at our own species – methodological rigor is not claimed – and trying to think a little bit how this would have worked in primitive tribal societies (though contemporary evidence should also be available), I have remarked and postulate that men, when they feel a high degree of attraction to a new female (“fall in love”), seek to bring her into the tribe. “Falling in love” does not cause men to wish to abandon their existing family and other social ties, though it may be so strong on occasion and encounter such opposing forces that this less-preferred option nevertheless comes out on top. Essentially, male sexuality is inclusive. Males also have a strong wish for new females to bond with existing females and will make efforts in this sense, however fruitlessly and apparently, perhaps, naively. Bonding with existing females will be a factor in the ultimate inclusion or otherwise of a new female in the group. Translated into contemporary society, the bottom line is that men do not want to leave their wives (never mind their children), but at the same time do wish to offer protection and security to new sexual partners as well.

On the female side, other forces are at work. A woman who feels a deep attraction to a new man is likely to feel a desire to be with him, and to consider abandoning her existing social roles in order to realize that goal. The frustration of this desire can result in dramatic behavior, à la Madame Bovary. It is nonetheless held in check by certain factors, principal amongst which are children and female friends. To leave her existing mate is less inconceivable for a woman than for a man and sentimental ties are less important relative to the force of her new passion.

In bonobos, for a female to leave a group would mean to leave her immature children behind. The males will never rejoin her, and the females, once they enter into adulthood, are unlikely to. I do not know if females ever produce children in more than one group but am guessing it is most uncommon. It’s likely that a female who has become a mother remains henceforth with the group in which that event has occurred. Romantic attachments to extra-group males, whilst they might still happen, would not achieve the critical momentum necessary to sever existing ties. Female sexuality eventually settles into a more nurturing and more inclusive form, but the initial choice of group is made on the basis of a single male considered as a desirable mate – not on the basis of an assessment of the group as a whole.

This postulate shows us how what we now consider as “monogamous” sexual attraction may have existed and played a role in the social processes leading to the formation of primitive tribal groups, in particular to resolve the problem of choice of group faced by the newly adult female. In this perspective, it is not something anomalous grafted onto a fundamentally polygamous nature. When, however, it encounters contemporary social structures, it misfires for several reasons.

Our existing “tribes” are tiny nuclear families or, at best, kinship groups. Woman have been given legal rights (without my taking any view on these rights) which make it likely that separation from children will not be a cost of divorce. Under these circumstances, leaving the “tribe” is much easier. This creates a risk of breakdown in the tribe which a man’s efforts to strengthen the tribe by bringing in new females and new children may only hasten. The same drives which developed, in other words, to generate stable social structures under the constraint of maintaining genetic diversity, now generate unstable social structures in which childcare inevitably suffers.

This picture is not, perhaps, as hopeless as it sounds. In primitive times also, many factors would have frustrated the wishes of many individuals, and yet these factors would not have led to massive neurosis and social breakdown. We are far more robust to disappointment than we perhaps realize.

That certain desired outcomes cannot be realized is not in itself the problem. The dramatically dysfunctional outcomes that we see all around us are rather due to the fact that we cannot even own the truth of our nature and respect that of the other. Under these circumstances, it is not only particular wishes that cannot be accommodated, but the whole prospect that such wishes will be accommodated, ever and to any degree. This systemic, existential frustration generates ill-feeling and potentially violence and abuse which goes on to undermine our tiny tribes from inside, making their undermining from outside ever more probable.

As ever, a wise and adaptive response can only come through awareness and empathy.

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.