neurosis – Becoming Human

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.

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.

Tricks of the mind

I have just finished reading Daniel Kahneman‘s book Thinking, Fast and Slow. Kahneman is one of the fathers of behavioral economics, having won the Nobel prize in 2002. Thinking, Fast and Slow summarizes much of his work and the state of knowledge on cognitive biases in decision making. There’s a short summary of the book over on Wikipedia. But I encourage you to read the whole thing, which is a treasure trove of insight into how the mind works.

In recent years, Kahneman has been particularly interested in hedonics, i.e. the study of happiness. Experiments show that traditional utility theory cannot be squared with our evaluation of pleasure and pain. Objectively greater levels of pain may be evaluated and recalled as less painful if either the peak of pain is lower or the final parts of the experience are less painful than the experience as a whole. Conversely, the pleasure in an experience can be ruined by less pleasurable moments at the end of it; nonetheless, objectively the pleasure has been had. Kahneman talks of two selves: the experiencing self versus the remembering self. Yet even if the remembering self makes expensive errors, Kahneman cannot dismiss its judgment entirely. Memories are the afterlife of experience, and they matter to happiness also.

Kahneman’s work is of tremendous practical importance, but it raises some theoretical issues which he does not discuss in the book. Specifically, he appears to simply assume that the basis for all the behavior he describes is biological, and ipso facto it is universal. This is doubtless true in part, but it is unlikely that it is true of everything that he discusses. Indeed, the mind can be trained, showing that there is a sociocultural dimension to observed biases and that they are path dependent.

While some errors can be given a plausible evolutionary etiology (but Kahneman warns us to avoid the seductiveness of stories), others, especially the misevaluation of happiness, raise questions as to how the mind has been endemically conditioned by society. Does the remembering self simply get it wrong, or is the experiencing self not really present to its experiences? Our learnt attitudes to experience seem to get in the way.

Ultimately, Kahneman provides a lot of evidence that accidents of life have no long term impact on happiness. Happiness is not obviously generated by what we experience in (adult) life at all, but rather by how we experience it – which has largely been settled by the time we get there. If we experienced life in fullness, we would not be prone to imagining that environmental changes – in job, place, relationship – would generate massive shifts in our well-being. This illusion is a direct result of the lack of well-being we experience because of the bound state of our libido. Given this fact, if we are aiming at gross national happiness, avoidance of disturbances in childhood to our ability to abandon to the natural flow of life should be an overarching priority of public policy.

On the economics of therapy

The basic elements of effective personal development: bodywork, meditation and support.

In conceiving ones pathway to personal growth and healing, I think it is important to have a proper understanding of the processes involved, an understanding which is frequently lacking.

In a few words, my understanding is as follows. Within the bodymind there are two processes, both of which are needed because they depend on and reinforce each other and the end result is a product of the two. These can be characterized as a feminine and a masculine process. The feminine process involves softening of internal obstacles to the flow of energy, whether these be biophysical obstacles such as muscular hypertonicity or psychic obstacles in the form of existing representations at the conscious or subconscious level – such as the idea that certain behavior is wrong, that one should conform to certain norms, and so on. The masculine process involves increasing the quantitative level of life energy in the body so that these obstacles come under pressure from within, eventually leading to their crumbling or collapse. In terms of this masculine process there is no distinction between the body and the mind.

A simple physical model of this is as follows. We can think of water behind a dam, the release of which can be achieved both by weakening the structure of the dam and by increasing the weight of water bearing down upon it. Or we can think of the process of birth, where hormonal secretions soften the cervix which then opens under the weight of the embryo and the uterine contractions which increase the pressure applied to it.

As energy starts to flow, the process becomes self-reinforcing. We can think of water which, denied its route of least resistance, its natural pathway of flow, by the presence of the dam finds other pathways to bring rainfall to the sea. As the dam weakens, more and more of the rainfall will recommence flowing through its natural channel to the detriment of the diverted routes which had been previously established (this process of diversion is called in Freudian terms displacement).

Our bodies and our minds are always trying to rebuild the dams which we through our therapeutic endeavors wish to weaken. Many factors keep these dams in place. However, all of these factors are themselves due to displacement, because damming vital energy on a long term basis is not natural. (We can indeed restrain our vital energy over the short term by natural processes, under the force of the Reality Principle whereby expression is put off when its immediate expression would have negative consequences. We will also naturally channel that energy in different directions, partly by conscious choice and partly prompted by emotions, so that for example the energy is available to respond to a threat. This ability to control the flow of energy constitutes the biological basis for what is expressed pathologically in neurosis.)

It follows from this that there is always a weakest link in the line of defenses keeping the dams in place. This is the easiest and possibly only route to circumventing the process whereby the body heals breaches in its psychological defenses, and indeed builds stronger defenses if necessary. A direct confrontation of the front line of defense is quite counterproductive, but it may happen that when the underlying restorative mechanisms are weakened sufficiently, the whole edifice is at some point swept away.

At the deepest level, these mechanisms are representational. It is because we believe certain incorrect things about the world that we build inappropriate defenses. Only when we build new representations to replace these beliefs will we stop supplying the neurosis with the energy it needs to resist the energy naturally brought to bear on it by life processes.

All of this implies, I think, that we need to integrate two tracks in our work on ourselves.

Bodywork increases the quantitative level of energy in the body and corresponds to the masculine part of the process. All types of bodywork can help, but the most effective will be that which builds energy and allows it to circulate in the core life centers of the body, namely the pelvis where sexual energy is generated and which is at the crossroads of the flow of energy in the body and therefore the position which most naturally acts as a bottleneck.

Of course by bodywork I do not mean simply any physical practice. The practice must be appropriate, grounded and conscious to avoid being merely a vehicle to reinforce existing tensions. If it is not conscious, it will be manipulated by the mind to this end, or at least rendered inoperative.

The body will always reuse existing scripts if it can. Thus for example while a practice such as running may be marvellously energizing and, aside from its possible opportunity cost, is certainly not to be discouraged, it will not correct disequilibria in the body unless the body has really been deprived of this type of exercise before. Just as there are many ways to skin a cat, there are also many ways to run; the body is always going to use the method it already knows unless this method is not available to it. Thus if the physical movement relies disproportionately on certain muscle groups and inadequately on others, it will continue to do so because this is a perfectly viable, even if not the most natural, way to perform the task in question.

This means that running may be helpful, and there is no doubt that in principle it can lead to increased blood flow in the pelvis, but it is certainly not going directly to the heart of the problem. In order to do this you need to invite your body to do things which, while natural (if perhaps exaggerated for therapeutic purposes), it is not used to doing and therefore has no readily available script to deal with. Consciousness in this process helps to construct new neural pathways which can progressively replace, or remove the excessive strain on, the old.

Whilst bodywork is therefore an indispensable part of an effective therapeutic process, it is important to understand that it is really not adequate alone. I do not believe that bodywork is going to reprogram, in any reasonable span of time, representations in the psyche. Only the psyche itself can do this and in order to do so it needs to be exposed to a reality which is inconsistent with its prior assumptions, in a way which is safe enough to allow it to relax into the invitation which this situation provides to experience new ways of seeing the world.

This is, at a very general level, and as properly understood, the role of meditation. The choice of meditation is, however, hardly to be left to chance. Meditations should be, to a large degree, sexual and embodied. This is for the simple reason that the faulty representations are, to a large degree, sexual and disembodied. Where faulty representations are not directly sexual in nature, they are still sexual at a secondary level. Thus for example we may have a faulty representation of threats to our physical integrity, but as a result of this faulty representation a degree of sexual stasis has also resulted. Moreover, all such representations result in avoidance of behavior which sexual expression calls for, namely contact, intimacy, empathy and so on. I shall have more to say on this in a future post.

Again, both the problem and its solution are fairly easy to understand. We all know that if we are afraid of something in particular we will normally be able to overcome that fear by approaching the situation and becoming familiar with it, until we realize that our fear was not justified. If necessary, we start with baby steps or we take an indirect route. But eventually we become comfortable in the situation we had feared. Progressively, we change the internal representation that we have of the world, and the old one disappears.

To take a trivial (if for me painful) example, I for a long time was afraid to urinate with someone watching. This impeded my ability to use public urinals and was beyond my conscious power to change. This type of blockage is only going to be released by actually engaging in the activity in question under circumstances which are safe enough to relax and drop the subconscious conditioning at the root of the problem. Even if we frequently avoid doing so, it really is very easy in principle. You just find someone you trust, name the problem (by itself an important step), and ask them if they would be willing to observe you urinating. If it is too hard for you, you could ask them to start by watching from behind a curtain, or using a webcam, or merely be present while looking the other way, or whatever you can think of that is sufficiently below the blocking pain threshold not to activate the unwanted reflex. And you take it from there. To actually do this encounters some psychological resistance, but it is not really difficult if you want to.

This is where the methods of tantra come in. These methods may seem physical, and you may even be tempted to label them bodywork (correctly, of course, for a part of the methods). Yet these methods are really working on our false representations of the world in order to replace them with more flexible psychic structures which allow us to experience the world naturally, whilst still safely, especially in the dimension of sexuality and intimacy. Experience of the world as it really is naturally builds trust in our instinctive nature, because we see that this nature is in fact consistent with possibilities in the outside world, and not, as we had always supposed, inconsistent. This recreates the bridge, which in fact becomes an increasingly permeable membrane, between our inner world and the outer world, so that we can recognize these as two aspects of the same reality and move between them fluidly. In this way we have an embodied presence in the world, and not a disembodied antagonism to it. Our needs for intimacy are met and we become increasingly confident that they will always be met. From this reestablishment of trust is borne compassion.

Therefore I think it is really important to recognize and acknowledge ones needs and blockages in relation to sex and intimacy and of course not to hurtle in to situations which may be retraumatizing, but to find a way back to this source of ones being.

In this process, an exclusive preference for bodywork, which I encounter not infrequently, reveals enduring resistance to psychic change and only underlines the need for a complementary approach targeting the heart, emotions and senses. Bodywork is psychologically easy because it typically confronts nothing in ones relation to the other. It is an individual practice. Meditation can only be relational in nature, because psychic representations are relational in nature. Psychic representations, unlike physical representations, do not concern the organization of our body in its physical autonomy, but rather how we relate to others around us. This framework is largely a sovereign abstraction of the mind. It has some use in regard to real threats, but is dysfunctional in relation to imaginary threats. If we wish to change it, we need to allow ourselves to perceive their imaginary nature and reestablish the trust which we have lost.

As we move, of course, along this path, psychic material which underpins these representations may surface, together with the corresponding emotions (i.e. the affect). I am not trying to suggest that it is easy (or even appropriate) simply to plough ahead at such moments. Special talents are needed to help people safely and quickly through these occurrences. It is important to understand that there is not, as such, any psychic danger from this happening, at least in the vast majority of cases which are short of psychiatric in nature. It is only a question of the rate at which one makes progress, because these are critical moments in which either breakthroughs can be achieved or, conversely, one can slip back and have to start again (not of course from scratch, but the material will recede into the subconscious and this is evidence that it has not been processed and continues to affect the psyche). Whence the benefit of an experienced facilitator, coach or therapist.

So that’s the recipe: conscious bodywork (including breathwork), embodied and sexual meditation (once this type of meditation has reached its goal it can be replaced or complemented by others), plus ideally someone you can rely on to help you through the more challenging moments.

Good luck everyone 🙂

Better food, worse sex?

I have just completed Jared Diamond’s at times fascinating account of how the economic geography of today’s world came into play. Predictably, the major culprit (or hero if you will) is the same agricultural revolution which Ryan and Jethá in Sex at Dawn blame for the human race’s unnatural fate of sexless monogamy, in turn both blamed by Reich for giving rise to endemic neurosis and feted by Freud as a precondition of civilization. This inevitably raises the question of whether it is actually possible for the human race to buck this secular trend and live a natural existence of any sort under by now fundamentally transformed social conditions.

Mystics often float the idea that our species is engaged in a spiritual evolution. It is quite hard for me to buy into this notion. Evolution in any case is not a one-way street: organisms also get simpler to adapt to their environment, not only more complicated. Indeed, both Diamond and Ryan document instances of this happening in our own species. We tend to assume we in the West are smarter than hunter-gatherers, but it turns out that the opposite applies. Intelligence is much more predictive of the chances of passing on ones genes in primitive societies than it is in post-industrial ones, and in keeping with this, the average native of Papua New Guinea is more intelligent than the average Englishman. He also has a larger penis and significantly higher sperm count.

It seems to me that we basically live in a state of alienation which we have some idea now how we got into, but no idea how to get out of. Not only is the Enlightenment myth of constant progress dead, but we perhaps have to get used to the idea that we have regressed instead. And even if we do believe that human societies are getting fairer, less violent and generally less neurotic, then clearly there has at least been a period, presumably until fairly recently, when the contrary was the case. Moreover, Freud’s Faustian bargain might even have been acceptable if it was only about sex. But if the cost of adapting to modern civilization is in fact a large loss of enjoyment in life and atrophy of both body and spirit, then might we not really be better off abandoning much of what we have built and starting over?

I do not have an answer to this question other than to observe it is not an obvious or even well-defined option. The myth of the Golden Age is omnipresent in our collective memory and wildly opposing views on the quality of prehistoric life pitted philosophers in the iconoclastic, naturalist tradition of Rousseau and later Nietzsche against the likes of Burke, Hobbes and Voltaire. The so called “paleolithic diet” is a controversial attempt to restore an analogous nutritional environment to the one that existed in hunter-gatherer times, and the barefoot movement shares similar aims. But primitivism, it seems, whilst it can be a source of inspiration in trying to uncover some of the ways in which modern life does not serve our health and happiness, can hardly be an agenda.

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.

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

The psychopathology of sexual response

18 Jul 2007

I have climbed another mountain.

Reich’s critique of Freud, though apparently unknown in mainstream discussion of the Freudian legacy to Western thought, is poignant. Freud made a pact with the devil: although he knew, he did not say; and as a result his theories are distorted ones, they are half-truths, packaged to take account of the world into which they were born. Although aware of the origins of neuroses in childhood sexual development, and how social conditioning removed spontaneous behavior, he nonetheless accepted that sexuality was dangerous and needed to be channeled into more socially “acceptable” forms of behavior. He called this “sublimation”, and for him, this was a natural stage of adult development. It was not a pathology.

Reich called his bluff. He stated that a fully satisfying genital sexual life and the absence of neuroses were two sides of the same coin. And although Reich has been rebuffed and ridiculed – and quite rightly when it came to his later attempts to create a theory of everything – his position has also deeply affected modern attitudes to sexuality in the West, whereby a woman is not quite normal unless she has three orgasms before breakfast.

But – with all respect to Reich – this focus on genitality is insane. It is just another artefact of the warped world into which both Freud’s and Reich’s theories were born.

Experiencing deep and full orgasmic pleasure does indeed characterize the natural state of man and woman. But it is a consequence of psychic health, a manifestation, it is not a recipe for achieving it or a cosmic status symbol.

In The Function of the Orgasm, Reich argued that orgasm serves to regulate bodily energies, essentially to release energies which otherwise would become stocked in the body and generate neuroses and psychosomatic phenomena.

Now, this is partly true, but it is not the end of the story.

Reich’s account of the orgasm appears to exclude that it may, itself, be used as a mechanism, perhaps even the most powerful mechanism, to rigidify the body and freeze neuroses into place. But a moment’s reflection suffices to see that this is how sexuality functions for many people. Such sexuality is labeled morbid and dismissed, it is not “real” and “healthy” sexuality and hence it is not what Reich is talking about. But this misses the point.

Now, I fully admit to being an amateur with only a limited background on these things, but I still think I’m on to something here. So here is my conjecture on the psychopathology of sexual response. Of course we now know much more than Reich or Freud ever could about the reality of human sexual behavior and it is time to retheorize psychotherapy based on this knowledge. Reich’s theories are based on a very crude metaphysics of bodily energy.

I believe that when our sense of self is under stress, the primary channel of psychosomatic repression is genital. Such repression may manifest itself in the sexual response – whether it is impotence or (exclusively in men of course) “premature” ejaculation. But it also manifests itself in sexual behavior, both direct behavior (what we are accustomed to calling “perversions”, though it is an obviously unsatisfactory term) and in sublimated behavior patterns such as violence, anger and so on, as well as in bodily phenomena playing a role in the ontogenesis of illness. The omnipresence of degraded genital sensitivity, in both sexes, which I have been able to observe in my own experience is ample indication that the primary locus of psychosomatic repression is the pelvic floor. I also believe that most therapists working in the Reichian tradition would agree with this and operate accordingly, but at an intellectual level, as a system, I am unconvinced that the Reichian account itself is complete or coherent.

A satisfying genital sexual life (as, presumably, self-reported) may even have nothing to do with the maintenance of mental health, it may, once again, simply be a manifestation of a satisfying emotional life, which is the primary cause of partial neurotic resolution, and indeed this seems rather more likely.

So the genitals are a battleground. On the one hand, the wounded sense of self directs energy against them and seeks release through them; on the other, reality intrudes by this channel too in the erotic response.

It is important to realize that what we are talking about here is “normal” sexuality, not (only) morbidity. In other words, it is the sexuality which Reich viewed as homomorphic to mental and physical health. Freud argued for sublimation, and Reich for dissipation of sexual drives. But the reality is that the sexual drive which Reich wished to dissipate through the orgasm, is itself stubbornly neurotic and the remedy Reich prescribed merely anchors this neurosis. If it does anything else, then that is merely by chance. It is entirely possible that it is better to dissipate certain energies in this way than to channel and manifest them in available alternative ways, although I am not sure about this because the genitals are at the origin of many psychopathologies and the apparent release may therefore be only temporary – moreover, sex typically involves two people and this release may therefore be, and probably often is, at the expense of the other. In any case, this does not by itself determine that Reich has described healthy sexual behavior. Of course, Reich’s findings are indelibly influenced by the clinical context of his and Freud’s work, even if he went on to well understand, in his most important work on child psychology, the social generation of psychopathology which determined the passing on of neuroses from one generation to the next.

When we observe sexual neurosis, we have not merely to prescribe genital release as a means of managing it; we have to look, in full Reichian logic, at what is generating this neurosis. And what is generating it is the wounded sense of self. In order to heal this, we need to step out of this subjectivity and observe objectively.

Here, sexuality can help, but only if we let it. Instrumentalizing sexuality closes all possibility that it will awaken us. It is merely another manifestation of the defense mechanisms that the wounded self has mastered. Rather, we must seek to deinstrumentalize it, just to experience it, to allow it to surprise us, to ensure it is placed firmly outside of our control so that it may be a gateway to challenge our self-construction and make us confront the fact that reality is other. And this is not only true of sex; it is true of all sensory phenomena. They are either a way out or a way in; and we must make them a way in. When our constructed self, our psychophysical armor, is permanently exposed to contradiction and cannot escape, only then are we free of it and living authentically.

I recognize that some may find this account of sexuality too remote from their own experience. Given that real sexuality has a dual character as both affirmation and effacement of the self, how to enjoy it fully in the present moment and not at some irrealistic future date? Indeed, may not the self-affirmatory aspects of sexuality, and not only the self-effacing ones, have a true therapeutic or energy-management function and value, in addition to being fun? Yes. Certainly. I also reject an ascetic view according to which only sex according to the purest (imagined) tantric canon has any value. Sex is fun, and I revel in all its variety and the humanity of it (though I certainly do not condone actions which are unilateral and predatory). But this is a subject for another blog entry.