pleasure – Becoming Human

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.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading a book by Joachim Bauer entitled Warum ich fuehle, was du fuehlst (“Why I feel what you feel”), which is basically a mixture of science and conjecture about the function of the human mirror neuron system. It turns out that the same neurons fire when we perform an act ourselves and when we see it performed by someone else, and this, it is argued, lies at the basis of our ability to experience empathy and to intuitively read the emotional state and intentions of the other.

A leitmotiv of the book is the idea that social interaction performs an essential role in neurobiological development. Famously, though probably apocryphally, Frederick II is said to have conducted an experiment whereby children were raised without hearing human language; deprived of this stimulus, they are said to have died. Perhaps more believably, controversial experiments on macaque monkeys have shown that, deprived of social contact, they develop psychosis. This conclusion is not new, but it appears we are starting to uncover some of its neurobiological foundation.

Controlled scientific experiments cited by Bauer in the book show that social exclusion can generate pain in the same centers that register physical pain. We have for some time known that the perception of physical pain is not a simple function of external stimulus, but also factors in, and fundamentally, psychological aspects – what that pain means, or is thought or feared to mean, to the perceiver. Now further we know, and this is backed up in a 2005 paper by Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Liebermann, entitled Why It Hurts to Be Left Out, that purely social factors can induce pain which is similar in all respects to “physiological” pain (indeed, it is physiological pain).

Interjecting a couple of points of my own here: firstly, pain is something we are wired to avoid. Indeed, we avoid it instinctively, even if we are consciously prepared to confront it knowing it has certain benefits (or more accurately, is a by-product of processes which have such benefits). The greater the pain we experience, the more we privilege its avoidance over any rational assessment of the benefits to ourselves of enduring it. Secondly, what is already true for physiogenic pain is true, of course, a fortiori for psychogenic pain (or perhaps I should call it “sociogenic pain”), namely the pain we actually experience is a function of our psychological state at the moment of the stimulus. There are common features, perhaps, but there is no standard human response to life events which modify our social constellation such as bereavement, loss of ones job, retirement and so on. Just as touch, which might otherwise procure pleasure, will feel painful when applied at a point where we have open wounds, so also the same life event will be experienced by some even pleasurably whereas it might have the most excruciating effect on others. In medicine this is called hyperalgesia.

Indeed, this is true to such an extent that it leads to a necessary qualitative distinction in any discussion of psychogenic versus physiogenic pain. Certain life events, such as bereavement, are probably universally painful in at least some degree, and therefore comparable to fractures, burns, stings and so on. In other words they signal to us a real and universal need to bring the healing resources of the body to bear on the wound inflicted. The vast majority of situations and events which cause psychogenic pain, however, are not like this at all – our reaction to them is intensely personal and someone else’s reaction to the same events could be totally different.

As I am in the business of giving personal development suggestions in this blog, and not just describing things, allow me then to say that it is extremely important to make this distinction. There are many things in the world in relation to which vast swathes of the population are in a neurotic state. It is thus statistically common to observe a similar reaction to these things in many people. Nonetheless, this does not make these things natural or inevitable sources of pain. They may even be natural sources of pleasure.

This is likely the case in many instances where many people – men and women – experience sexual jealousy. There are many grounds to suspect that observing ones partner and other people one loves being sexually intimate with others, or to learn about it or hear of it, is in fact naturally pleasurable, and was experienced as such in our Urwelt. Just to cite a few: there is the vicarious experience of pleasure which I mentioned before; the social bonds which it creates to the new sexual partner; the prospect of half-siblings improving the life chances of ones own offspring; the prospect of ones own enhanced sexual gratification as a result; and so on. Perhaps most convincingly, there are people who enjoy it. There are not many who enjoy objective sources of physical pain.

Nonetheless, many people experience this as pain. What to do? It is easy enough to say that one should stick out the pain and eventually it will die down and be replaced by pleasure. However, as any sufferer from chronic pain will tell you, this is not even necessarily true, much less is it a sufficient motivation to endure a potentially long and painful journey to a seemingly uncertain destination.

I do not have a simple answer either, but I think some reflection on what causes this hyperalgesia may point the way. Already when it is understood that the person suffering from jealousy experiences physical pain, it becomes clearer than it might otherwise have been that their reaction to this experience is, to a significant degree, outside of their control. Anger or recriminations in relation to it are pointless. Indeed, worse than pointless – such a reaction invites the sufferer to feel guilty, deny their pain, or submit to the other, refreezing and reinforcing the factors which led to the experience of jealousy in the first place.

Jealousy is felt as alienation – a withdrawal behind the defenses of the ego and a loss of the sense of contact with the world, a sense which was clearly tenuous to begin with. Alienation in childhood becomes self-fulfilling prophecy in adulthood. The cycle can only be broken by showing empathy and connection – not by withdrawing it and leaving yet another victim abandoned carelessly on life’s highway.

And this really brings me back to the essentiality of social contact, of touch and of sexual expression also. It appears that there is nothing in humanity’s basic repertoire of interaction which is merely “nice to have”, which we can ignore or neglect without fear of consequences. The idea of freedom without community – cultivated the world over as a spiritual value – is in fact a nonsense, or at best something which is only possible on the basis of a very strong foundation of community in the past.

Bauer tells familiar stories and some less so. That the passage into retirement is an explanatory variable for mortality rates. How couples seem so often to die in close proximity to each other. But also of how persons condemned for their crimes by the community to expulsion, voluntarily take on themselves the duty to die. The biological stress engendered by social exclusion is a self-destruction program, eerily like (though Bauer does not make the connection), Freud’s posited death instinct (Reich’s response to which I discussed here). And I guess this makes some sense, both because there does, after all, appear to be such an instinct in the animal kingdom* (though this certainly does not mean that Freud’s treatment of it was correct) and because it is something that many character types may intuitively understand – not only masochists.

Persons experiencing jealousy have an injured sense of connection to the world, such that they need to hold on to symbols of that connection and turn particular people (often partners, but also kids) into such symbols. They respond to perceived threats to those symbols – perceived through a magnifying lens of paranoia – with self-destructive behavior, just like those on whom the tribal shaman has pronounced a curse.

All too often, fearful of the intensity of this reaction – which is truly akin to a reaction to a life-threatening situation – and burdened anyway with their own sense of shame and guilt, their partners will apologize, try to reassure, try to salvage the fragile trust which existed, or seemed to, before. It is in the nature of things that this is not possible. This type of connection to the world is too tenuous and artificial to be anything more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. What the jealous partner needs in such moments is empathy, grounding, and connection – not desperate attempts to re-become a shattered symbol, but the shattering of the symbolic and its replacement by the real.

Genies do not go back into bottles. In such moments we can meet as demons to each other, or both decide to meet as humans. Almost everything in life that generates emotional pain has great potential for healing, but it is a potential which almost always goes unexploited because the insecurities are not just on one side, but on both. When we decide to meet as vulnerable, hurting beings it may just be that we finally realize we are not, and cannot be, alone.

Notes

* Illustrated at cellular level by the process of apoptosis, and also observed in many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder where the underlying monotrauma results from a direct human agent.

Tag: pleasure

Self-doubt and the other