Sex Makes the World Go Round

Colette Chiland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429918940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

It is well known that Freud laid great emphasis on sexual matters. In the years that followed, a distinction was drawn between sex and gender, and the idea of gender identity was introduced. Human beings do not spend every minute of their lives copulating, but at every minute of their lives their gender identity is present. Sex Makes the World Go Round implies that sex is everywhere, provided that we take into account both sexuality and gender identity. This book continues to develop the author's work concerning sexuality and gender identity. There are two main themes which run through the whole of this book. The first is the distinction, established by Freud and based on clinical data, between the two currents of sexuality: tenderness and sensuality. The other is that women have always been treated as inferior beings. They have always lost out whenever sexual wanderings have been uppermost.

CHAPTER ONE
The heart of the matter¹

As I write these lines in the year of grace 1998, no one can doubt that sex makes the world go round, for it is all-pervasive in the press, the broadcast media, and the Internet. One of the planet’s leading politicians, President Bill Clinton of the United States, risked his public career for the sake of a private sexual affair. The barrier between the private and public domains has crumbled under the onslaught of a moralism that barely conceals the political interests lying behind it. The sexual antics of the great and famous as a rule occupy the minds only of “little people”, who momentarily assume princely status by identifying with their joys and sorrows as reported in a sensationalist media that brings tears to the eyes of consumers of romantic pulp novelettes. This time, fact and fiction came together. The historical event mentioned above shows that the sexual appetite for seduction makes men throw caution and discretion to the winds. However, the subject-matter of my book transcends this consideration and concerns the personal life of every individual.

When I say that “sex makes the world go round”, I am referring not only to sexuality—i.e., sexual relations—but also to gender identity, which denotes an individual’s sense of belonging to one or other sex or gender. Rather than compile an encyclopaedia on the subject, I wish to discuss the importance of sexuality and gender identity in human life—for they are so important that sex may indeed be said to make the world go round.

Aside from schizogenesis in single-celled organisms, cloning, and parthenogenesis, all three of which result in the reproduction of an identical individual, life is perpetuated by innovative sexual procreation. Hence sex, life, and death are interconnected. Some organisms die in the process of mating, having seemingly lived through the stages of growth, metamorphosis from egg to larva or caterpillar, and then to butterfly or adult insect, solely in order to reproduce in a single act and to die. Others reproduce throughout their lives, but at certain times only.

Although human beings are not subject to oestrus and can have sexual intercourse outside the ovulation-related period of heat, there is still a “biological clock”, for the menopause marks the end of the human female’s reproductive capacity. Even if humans can come together at any time simply for pleasure, the complications of their psychic life have led them to invent ideological connections between sexuality and procreation. Liberated in their bodies, they remain the prisoners of their individual and collective representations, their personal fantasies, and their cultural myths. Human sexuality is always a psychosexuality, a source of abundant riches and of harsh vicissitudes alike.

Because our culture has developed the sense of individuality to an extent unparalleled in any other, the individual insists on the right to gratify his or her demand for pleasure, often at any price. Even though sexuality has become dissociated from procreation in many ways, it encounters prohibitions: since man is a zôon politikón—a social animal subject to the constraints of civilization—human beings must sacrifice some of their “savage” sexuality (the “sexual life of savages” is not the same as savage sexuality).

I wrote this book on the basis of my experience as a psychoanalyst, my meditation on the writings of Freud, and my reading in a variety of fields. Freud, of course, is one of those who did most to draw attention to the importance of sexuality, with the result that he has been—wrongly—accused of pansexualism, whereas it seems that many of the psychoanalysts who came after him have forgotten about the importance of sexuality (but see McDougall, 1995; Green, 1997). Nor, perhaps, have psychoanalysts written much about love (those who have include Person, 1989, and Kernberg, 1995).

Some seek to minimize or even to forget the fact that man is an animal. Man is admittedly a special animal, but an animal for all that: the most gifted of animals in the spheres of mental representation, communication in language, toolmaking, and attempts to conceive of the universe as a whole, in terms of its origins, meaning, and purpose, as well as the invention of worlds beyond worlds. Man is also the most tortured of animals—a “denatured animal” in the words of Vercors (1952)—who has lost the capacity to experience the immediacy of satisfaction, and can rediscover how to live the instant to the full only through a spiritual, ascetic quest.

Even if human sexuality is a psychosexuality, it is nevertheless rooted in biological reality, as Freud was always aware. I disagree with Laplanche (1993) that Freud was guilty of a “biologizing sidetracking of sexuality”. Following in the footsteps of others who have studied gender identity—a subject not tackled by Freud as such, given his concentration on sexuality—I (Chiland, 1997) came to realize the extent to which the ultimate foundation of all differences between the sexes is the sexual difference. By this I mean everything, based on the difference between the genital organs, that comes to govern the relations between the sexes: the experience of one’s body, the sexual cycle, the position in intercourse, and the role in procreation. Every society imposes an interpretation of the sexual difference on the individual, defining female and male in such a way that it is quite hard work to identify the elements that cannot be obliterated or denied in the sexual difference.

A child’s discovery that there are other human beings who are both like and unlike him- or herself, is a trauma that underlies such manifestations as castration anxiety and penis envy. To make this trauma bearable, humans feel a need for the support of a peer group, and one group tends to disparage the other in order to sustain the sense of its own worth. Men’s disparagement of women has outweighed women’s disparagement of men. Even if this has not always been so—who can say what the situation was in the beginning?—it is certainly the case throughout our present reality, giving rise to what Héritier (1996) calls the “differential valence of the sexes”. This difference has always been interpreted as an inequality in women’s disfavour, leading to their demeaning, subordination, and even ill-treatment. We may—indeed should—ask (yet we seldom do), why women put up for so long with this attribution of inferior status; why the “great revolution” (Abensour, 1921) of feminism took place only yesterday. If feminists neglect to pose this question in all its implications, it is because the idea that women might have internalized their devaluation is repugnant to them; not only men, but women themselves, need convincing of the absurdity of devaluing women.

The differences have indeed often been studied on the basis of the paradigm of man, vir, the male human being. As regards the genital organs, for a long time the female genitals were regarded as nothing but male organs turned inside out like the fingers of a glove (Laqueur, 1990). When it comes to sexuality, interest focuses on that of men; if homosexuality is proscribed, attention is directed to male homosexuality. Freud himself confined his studies to what happens in boys and men, extrapolating from the results to the situation in girls and women.

Some even deny the existence of any difference between men and women, as if “difference” were bound to be synonymous with “inequality”. Whereas differences relate to the level of fact, equality and inequality are a matter of law. The struggle to secure equal rights for women is legitimate and can be waged without succumbing to the absurdity of disavowing all differences between the sexes or engaging in self-censorship on the grounds of political or sexual correctness.

However, the sexes not only confront each other but also seek each other out, for sexuality has two currents, a tender one and a sensual one. The vagaries of translation of the German word zärtlich—the only correct rendering is surely tender—have obscured the importance attached by Freud to these two aspects.

Every individual’s erotic arousal is subject to demands of its own, and the origins of these “lovemaps” are difficult and sometimes impossible to determine. Can this arousal ever completely dissolve in sublimation? In a couple, it both binds the partners together and holds them apart, perhaps, as Stoller (1979) suggests, because of the hostility inherent within it. The capacity for intimacy presupposes overcoming the fear of interpenetration not only of bodies but also of souls.

Some individuals are turned on by the opposite sex and others by their own. Why are some people attracted exclusively to one sex while others have an insuperable aversion to it? Whereas it is not easy to explain homosexuality, is heterosexuality self-evidently the norm, as many would like to believe?

The exaltation of individual pleasure and the disparagement of the opposite sex lead to sexual wanderings in the form of perversion, prostitution, and pornography. What human needs do these cater to? Are they erotic forms of hate or hate-imbued forms of love?

The search for erotic gratification is not devoid of the wish to exert mastery over the other, just as there is no love without hate. Can ambivalence be neutralized—and overcome? There can be no love of the other without self-love, and self-love (healthy, happy narcissism) can arise only out of love for the other.

Love is Eros, Philia, and Agapè—three Greek words people like to use today to denote, respectively, the erotic search, friendship, and the selfless love invoked by Paul the Apostle in Corinthians 1, chapter 13. Without Agapè, in which Eros and Narcissus disappear, there may be sexuality, but can there be love?

Notes

1 Translated by Philip Slotkin MA (Cantab.) MITI

CHAPTER TWO
Freud and the importance of sexuality

Queen Victoria, whose name will always be evocative of an era of prudishness,¹ was still on the throne when, at the close of the 19th Century, Freud began treating patients and listening to what they had to say. Just a few years after she died (in 1901), Freud published his seminal work, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905d)², which marked a turning point in his ideas on sexuality.

Freud had dreamt of a research career in neurophysiology, but at the time circumstances in Vienna made that option quite impossible. As a clinician, he would listen to his patients in a particularly attentive manner. Between 1890 and 1900, he published clinical papers that clearly show how his thinking was developing. The neurotic patients who came to him for treatment were suffering from a psychic conflict, and Freud gradually became convinced that sexuality was necessarily one of the poles of that conflict, whether it be the patient’s actual or infantile sexuality. When he published his magnum opus, Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) in 1900, Freud still believed that only neurotics have an infantile sexual life characterized by its precocity. However, in 1905, in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, he argued that infantile sexuality was in fact universal (manifestations of sexuality do not wait for puberty; as soon as they are born, children have a sexual life characterized by certain specific parameters), and he established a connection between infantile sexuality and perverse sexuality (the sexual life of children is not genital in nature, they do not have intercourse; their satisfaction is linked to other pleasurable zones [mouth, anus] that, in adults, are treated as pleasures preliminary to actual sexual union—or, if they are inflexibly and exclusively the focus of all their sexual activity, are called perverse).

Sexuality is always conflictual

In declaring that sexuality is all-important, Freud simultaneously defined the term in a much wider sense. For him, sexuality is present whatever a person’s age, and begins as soon as the infant begins to suckle. That argument was sufficient for him to be accused of pansexualism. Yet at no point did Freud claim that the only factor to be taken into consideration was the sexual instinct. He argued simply that sexuality is one of the poles in a conflict that, when resolved, leads to mental health and well-being, and, when it perseveres, results in mental illness; thus, sexuality is one of the components that go to make up the psyche, the personality and mental disorder. As to the other pole in that conflict, Freud did have occasion to change the manner in which he described it.

Initially, Freud thought that this conflict—from which every human being suffers—took place mainly between the internal and external worlds. Although there was indeed an internal conflict between the sexual instinct and the ego (self-preservation) instincts, this internal conflict gave rise to an external one, because the sexual instinct (libido) brought the individual into conflict with group morals and civilized morality; the ego instincts required submission to the rules established by society. In an article written in 1908, “‘Civilized’ sexual morality and modern nervous illness” (Freud, 1908d), he developed this point of view. That paper stimulated Wilhelm Reich’s thinking and led him to believe that, in their sex life, human beings were subjected to repression by society at large.

However, Freud soon came to argue that the conflict was fundamentally an internal one, and as such inevitable. He discovered that the libido—love—was not directed exclusively towards some external person; there exists a form of self-love that is quite normal. There is a conflict between narcissistic love, in which the ego is its own love-object, and object love, in which the ego loves another.

In the final development of his theory, the internal conflict becomes much more deep-rooted. The protagonists now are Eros, the sexual instinct that impels an organism to unite with another—the life instinct—and Thanatos, a negative and destructive force—the death instinct. The mythical quality of the manner in which Freud formulated this final version of his theory has often been criticized. Yet it does have the merit of encouraging us to go beyond clinical data as such and think about the human condition itself.

The libido

With his initial grounding in biology, Freud saw human beings as related to animals. What some have seen as a “biologizing sidetracking of sexuality” (Laplanche, 1993) is, to my mind, absolutely fundamental to his way of thinking. Every human being is an animal—a particular kind of animal, complicated, of course, but an animal nonetheless. It is true that human beings have the power of speech, and that their language is incomparably more sophisticated than any means of communication that animals possess—but it remains a fact that human beings are animals. They are born, they suffer, and they die. Nothing can be experienced in the mind that is not to some extent rooted in the body. Freud attempted to think about mental life and culture without resorting to transcendence, going as far as to ignore the fact that culture is handed down through our social heritage and not by biological heredity.

Like animals, human beings are driven by impersonal forces. Freud called them Triebe, instincts;³ this is the word, he says, that is used in biology to refer to needs, Bedürfnisse. A group of French translators of Freud’s writings thought it better to invent a neologism—pulsion—for Trieb, even though over the centuries classical literature and philosophy had rendered Trieb by the word inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• PREFACE
• 1 The heart of the matter
• 2 Freud and the importance of sexuality
• 3 Gender identity
• 4 From difference to equality
• 5 Choice of partner
• 6 Sexual wanderings
• 7 Love
• 8 Sex makes the world go round
• REFERENCES
• INDEX