Sensuality and Sexuality Across the Divide of Shame

Joseph D. Lichtenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781135469085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Placed in a historical context, sexuality was once so prominent in psychoanalytic writing that sexual drive and psychoanalysis were synonymous. The exciting discovery of childhood sexuality filled the literature. Then other discoveries came to the fore until sexuality slipped far in the background. This book evokes the excitement of the original discoveries of childhood sexual experience while linking childhood sensuality and sexuality to adult attachment, romantic, and lustful love. This revised perspective offers the general reader insight into contemporary psychoanalytic thought, and presents clinicians with a perspective for exploring their patients sensuality and sexuality with renewed interest and knowledge.

CHAPTER 1

Looking at Sensuality and Sexuality Across the Divide of Shame

INTRODUCTION

Contemporary revisions in self-psychology, relational, and other psychoanalytic theories leave analysts with the question: If sexuality is not the product of a sexual drive, then what is it? The question can best be approached by observing infants and caretakers and conjecturing on the embodied minds of each as they engage in specific interplay. This exploration revisits the sensual–sexual motivational system (Lichtenberg, 1989) with a greater appreciation of the developmental role of intersubjectivity. I emphasize the central role of shame in distinguishing what comes to be experienced as either sensuality or sexuality. My inquiry begins with an appreciation of an infant and developing child’s body sensation pleasure interacting with cultural values mediated by caregivers who indicate sanctioned forms through approval and unsanctioned forms through shaming. I suggest that transgressing into unsanctioned forms of body pleasure and fantasy becomes a universal component of sexuality. The interplay between desire and prohibition creates an experience of tension in sexuality not present in sensuality. Whether an individual’s form of sexual expression follows or deviates from practices acceptable to that individual’s society is important to the degree and quality of shame and guilt that person has to bear. Likewise, an analyst’s tolerance or revulsion in response to an analysand’s forms of sexual expression will influence the treatment, as I indicate from my clinical experience.

When she gave birth to her first child, my daughter requested that I be in the delivery room with her and her husband to back them up on maintaining their breathing exercise. After the delivery, the obstetrician handed the baby to the nurse, who plunked the crying neonate on the medication table. After administering to her, the nurse handed her to me, and in my cradling arms her loud “protest” crying reduced to a whimper. I placed her on her mother’s chest, and the whimpering stopped as soon as the baby heard her mother’s heartbeat. I asked my daughter if she would like to try to initiate a feeding. I knew that no breast milk would be available 5 minutes after birth, but it would serve as priming for the first feeding. My daughter agreed and asked me to position the baby. I put the baby’s head near the nipple and chucked her cheek to elicit rooting. The baby turned her head, clasped onto the nipple with her mouth, and began to suck. A beautiful smile came over the mother’s face that was shared immediately by me and other onlookers.

This vignette is a story of multiple levels of attachment: a newborn baby to her mother and her mother to her; my daughter to her husband and her husband to her and their baby; my daughter to me and me to my daughter, her husband, and their baby. It could also be described as a continuation of the baby’s intrauterine attachment based on her familiarity with her mother’s heartbeat. The vignette is also a story of the beginning of physiological regulation of feeding as a priming episode and the beginning of the capacity for self-righting from an aversive state (crying) to a calm state. My principal reason for relating this cherished memory is to delineate the powerful presence of sensuality. A small example occurred the moment the nurse handed the baby to me and I lovingly nestled her into my arms. This was certainly a sensual moment for me as I felt the baby’s skin and possibly for the baby as she shifted from crying to whimpering. Then, with skin-to-skin contact with her mother, a definitely sensual moment emerged for each of them. The level of sensual enjoyment of tactile stimulation was further increased for the baby through nonnutritive sucking and for the mother through the stimulation of her nipple and areola.

A second example of shared sensuality also involves breast-feeding. Sammy, an infant observed in a study, at 3 months and his mother have established a comfortable feeding rhythm. As he sucks, his little fist against her breast slowly opens, and with his small fingers he strokes her soft skin. Experiencing the pleasurable tactile sensations, she looks down lovingly at him as they jointly enjoy the sensuality. Her affectionate glance down may be a tiny bit quizzical if she felt aroused by an implicit or explicit association to fondling or feeling “felt up.”

Now, move ahead to Sammy at 3½. His mother allows him to climb up next to her as she breast-feeds his baby sister. Calming from his initial fussing at exclusion, Sammy begins to look with fascination at the sucking baby and his mother’s breast. Sammy starts to reach for her breast, and his mother rebukes him, saying: “No. No. Sammy you mustn’t.” His interest-excitement inhibited, Sammy looks downcast and crushed before he begins to protest again.

In both of the observations, Sammy is drawn to the tactile pleasure of touching his mother’s breast. In the first instance, his touch is welcomed by a mirroring glance of his mother, who is pleased and happy to share their rising pleasurable exchange. I suggest it is as if she were saying to him: “Sammy you are a sensual little boy, and I am a sensual woman, and together we can enjoy sensuality without shame or maybe with just the tiniest hint of embarrassment on my part.” In the second observation, a similar interest in tactile pleasure is no longer responded to with pleasurable acceptance and sharing. As with most experiences, the motives are complex. Sammy’s initial fuss is anger and envy at his mother shutting out and replacing him, and his mother tries to respond by offering him inclusion. The component of the experience I am centering on is Sammy’s hand reaching to touch his mother’s breast. The motivation behind his gesture includes having what his sister has, but mainly, I believe, he is reactivating a somatic memory of a pleasurable sensual experience repeated many times over before his weaning.

So, what has changed? Probably outside of her awareness, Sammy’s mother is influenced by two different value systems prescribed by her culture. One evaluation concludes the young baby’s touching, exploring, and fondling are innocent of intentions regarded as naughty, dirty, or even perverse. Innocent intentions to arouse pleasurable body–mind experiences, intentions I refer to as sensual, are not regarded by Sammy’s mother as threats to excite her or Sammy. She does not attribute to herself or Sammy an intrusion of lustful desire into their personal Garden of Eden so celebrated in portrayals of Madonna and child.

Sammy’s mother uses a different value system to evaluate the actions and intentions of the 3½-year-old, who she sees as wanting to play with her breast, demarcated at this point as a sexual body part. Collateral annoyance at Sammy for interfering with the ongoing feeding may have accentuated her irritability but is not central to the message: “You may not fondle my breast.” More precisely, the message was: “Curb your excitement, curb that kind of action and the arousal it aims for and will generate. Your intention, if not impeded, will lead to actions and excitement that are shameful. You, and we, will have crossed the line that divides what is ‘innocent’, acceptable, containable, affectionate sensuality from what is unacceptable, dangerously arousing, lustful sexuality.”

Shameful is a moral or ethical evaluation of an action and the actor. Shame is an emotion that has the effect of blunting initiative and curbing interest-excitement. Shame is also an emotion that may be activated when, for whatever reason, initiative is blunted and interest-excitement is curbed. Sammy has his interest and arousal suddenly curbed by his mother’s prohibition that signals bad action, bad intention, bad boy. Once shamed, Sammy casts his eyes down, his body posture slumps, and his lips turn down at the sides. He does not remain long in a shame state but moves into an irritable sulk. Climbing off the chair that holds his mother and sister, he begins to throw his toys. This brings on another, now-angry, admonition from mother for him to stop. “Bad boy” now combines sexual badness (actually a gentle movement of his arm to fondle the breast) with angry destructive badness (the more violent movement of his arms throwing his toys). In Sammy’s lived experience, the relatively straightforward “innocent” sensually motivated gesture is converted first into a mildly conflictual “naughty” sexual desire through mother’s shaming restraint and second through the subsequent temper protest and mother’s intensified shaming prohibition into a conflict over willfulness.

To summarize, sensuality involves a pleasurable body sensation shared with another who looks on (mirrors) the activity benignly as participant or witness. Sensuality may also involve a pleasurable body sensation when alone, accompanied by an afterimage of a mirroring other implicitly conveying approval. Sensuality originates as body-generated experiences in the presymbolic period. Once symbolic processing begins, body-generated experiences can activate imagination, fantasies, and dream imagery. Imagination, fantasy, and dream imagery can activate or intensify body-generated sensual experiences.

Sexuality involves a pleasurable body sensation that, when sought, is interrupted by a prohibiting response. For a developing child or adolescent, sexuality is a “package” that combines a desire based on memory of a prior pleasurable sensation or an immediate body sensation urge (itch) and an authority who, rather than mirror, share, and comfortably regulate the flow of the urge, prohibits its fulfillment. The view stated here is similar in some regard to Fonagy’s depiction of the affirming effect of mirroring and the contrasting effect of its absence in establishing sexuality as “alien”(Fonagy, 2006). As with sensuality, sexual desire can originate from two sources. The prohibited body-generated experiences can activate imagination, fantasies, and dream imagery. Alternatively, imagination, fantasy, and dream imagery can activate or intensify prohibited body-generated sexual experiences.

To understand the role of shame as a critical element in this package requires an examination of shame as a primary regulator-inhibitor of interest-excitement.

THE ROLE OF SHAME AS REGULATOR-INHIBITOR

Tomkins (1987) regarded shame as an innate affect present in early infancy. In Tomkins’s view, shame becomes activated when a barrier to an ongoing experience of interest-excitement or excitement-joy dampens, but does not eliminate, the interest or enjoyment. If Tomkins’s hypothesis of the triggering effect of interrupted interest and enjoyment is correct and shame is an innate response present at birth, then shame must be frequently experienced by preverbal children. As each motivational system becomes activated, as each intention mounts, interest is triggered. In many situations, varying degrees of excitement and joy follow, sometimes generated principally by the infant’s own activity, more often by the added participation and encouragement of a caregiver. A parent’s active participation in feeding, social contact, toy play, or rocking will support the infant’s interest. Further, a mother or father’s indications of approval of touching, fondling, sucking, or cuddling with blankets and soft toys will enhance the child’s sensual experience and vitalize a feeling state. But, often parents need to interrupt a feeding, social contact, toy play, or rocking to take care of another of the baby’s needs or of a need of their own. When an activity is interrupted, infants can easily be observed having an aversive response. Some infants evidence anger and thrashing about in efforts to resume the activity. Many infants evidence a postural change, slumping body, lowered eyes, or averted gaze that may be experienced as the affect of shame or shame-sadness.

In contrast to Tomkins (1987), Lewis (1992) argued that shame begins as an affective response of verbal children (aged 18–24 months) who can recognize their caregiver’s view of them and then view themselves similarly. “Success or failure in regard to abiding by standards, rules, and goals provides a signal to the self. This signal affects the organism and allows individuals to reflect upon themselves. This reflection is made on the basis of self-evaluation. The self-attribution one makes determines the nature of the resulting emotion” (p. 66).

Integrating Tomkins (1987) and Lewis (1992), I propose the following schema for shame as a preverbal and verbal contributor to the divide between sensuality and sexuality:

1. Shame as an affective, nonreflective, non-self-attributive experience frequently occurs in the daily lives of infants and young toddlers. Shame as a reflective self-attributive experience frequently occurs in the daily lives of older children and adults.

2. Caregivers often interrupt an infant’s rising interest in sucking his or her fingers, mushing their food, touching and fondling their genitals, and playing with their feces and thus automatically trigger an affect that many times may be experienced as shame.

3. Caregiver’s choice of what body pleasure seeking to encourage and what to inhibit is often an expression of procedural memory. In this way, caregivers introduce a “ghost in the nursery”—their own infant lived experience. Thus, parent– child interactions reflect a transgenerational influence and the impact of culture on what is acceptable (= sensual) and what is to be censored (= sexual).

4. Shame, especially acting as a regulatory signal, is an important contributor to the socializing and acculturating of infants and toddlers during the period when the sense of self is forming.

5. Whether shame as a lived experience makes an adaptive contribution to a relatively flexible regulation of undesired body pleasure-seeking behaviors or results in pathological inhibitions and a lowered sense of self-worth will be determined by the vulnerability of the child’s temperament and the frequency, severity, and empathic or unempathic manner with which caregivers activate shame and the length of time infants are allowed or required to remain in a shame state before reparative efforts occur.

6. Sexuality carries with its emergence an inevitable quality of conflict and tension between “I want to” and “I must not.” To carry forward with “I want to,” the child, adolescent, or adult must assert varying degrees of agency, ranging from mild defiance to angry transgressive determination.

7. An affirmation–shame balance may be generalized from the lived experiences of the preverbal period and will influence fundamental nonconscious and conscious mentation and the quality and form of symbolization of both sensuality and sexuality.

8. At any time during life, an established affirmation–shame balance may be pathologically disturbed if caregivers, peers, teachers, or strangers exploit the infant’s, child’s, adolescent’s, or adult’s body for their transgressive aggressive desires.

9. In this schema, I understate the dyadic, bidirectional nature of the relationship between caregivers and infants. Infants, especially toddlers, are lively contributors to the interplay between prohibition-shame and the retention, intensity, and persistence of the desire for bodily pleasure. The outcome, that is, the qualities of sexuality, are coconstructed by child and mother, child and father, and child and mother and father, all within the context of a particular culture. Likewise, the involvement of other caretakers and siblings sought by the child or seeking the child with their sexual needs and values may be significant.

10. I also understate the unpredictability of any single or repeated prohibition and of any self- or interactive attempt at regulation. As symbolic play and verbal communication come into play after 18 months, the self-attributive nature of shame adds further unpredictability through the ambiguity of inference making and imagination. A prohibition may be elaborated in fantasy as far more or less threatening than intended. The violation of a prohibition against masturbating or voyeurism may evoke combinations of shame, guilt, shyness, fear, or anger or, alternatively, satisfaction, pride, and defiance.

11. I also neglect to describe explicitly the impact on selfobject experience of my conception of sensuality and sexuality. Sensuality easily originates from the sharing of selfobject experiences of pleasant bodily and aesthetically arousing experiences that vitalize or soothe as needs for each arise. Sexuality is more complex. Shaming and the arousal of other related aversive affects means the temporary loss of a feeling of self-worth following Morrison’s (1989) felicitous phrase that shame is the underside of narcissism. In a generally empathic setting, the person easily recovers from narcissistic injury, and the acculturation provides a useful guide. When admonishments and prohibitions are delivered without sensitivity to the child’s subjectivity, roots are planted for difficulties for later selfobject experiences to emerge from sexual expression. However, even a basically positive selfobject experience during sexual activity does not mean that sexuality can ever escape a degree of tension related to prohibition and the transgressive nature inherent in sexual expression.

Freud’s (1924) linked the Oedipus complex and a desire for genital excitement with its prohibition (see chapter 2). The prohibition was based on three sources: an incest taboo, the opposition of the opposite sex parent, and the immaturity of the child. Considering the tragic frequency of trauma from sexual exploitation of children by parents, siblings, and parental surrogates (babysitters, priests, teachers), we can no longer accept Freud’s belief in the universal power of an incest taboo prohibition through the overpowering guilt it engenders. Fear of retaliation from the rival parent, symbolized as castration or body damage anxiety, is a factor, but so is respect for the parental relationship and shame at the child’s inclination to rid him- or herself of a loving and supportive mother or father. An additional source of inhibition arises from the shame and embarrassment children experience from the immaturity of their general body-mind and genitals and the limitations of their ability to perform when confronted by the mysteries and goals of adult sexuality. This source of narcissistic injury, genital inferiority, and performance anxiety must be overcome in adolescence and the early adult years.

Beginning at age 5, and increasingly by age 9, children can express in words the features they associate with shame and guilt (Ferguson, Stegge, & Damhuis, 1991). Feelings of guilt are aroused by moral norm violations and are associated with remorse, a desire to make amends, and fear of punishment. Feelings of shame are described as resulting from both moral transgressions and social blunders. Younger children associate shame with embarrassment, blushing, ridicule, and a desire to escape. Young teens also characterize shame as feeling stupid (not knowing the “facts of life”), incapability of doing things right (wearing the right clothes, making the right “moves”), and feeling too shy to look at or approach opposite sex children.

Although I am implicating shame as the principal affect that the pre-verbal and verbal child experiences in response to the prohibition of his or her body pleasure seeking, shame is often experienced in conjunction with other negative affects, such as shame-fear, shame-anger, or shame-sadness. Embarrassment, humiliation, guilt, and shyness are shame-related affective experiences. All these varied affects may be associated with an initial prohibition, a reactivation of the desire, a suppression of the desire, or a transgressive break through of the desire into a sexual expression.

THE BOUNDARIES OF THE DOMAIN OF SENSUAL AND SEXUAL EXPERIENCE

When sensual body pleasure in infancy and childhood is mirrored approvingly, sensual interest and satisfaction are easily integrated with motivations that are not based in body sensation pleasure. The interest-excitement triggered by the sensual pleasure of viewing an affirming smiling face and the vocal tonalities of affectionate caregivers provides a precursor for the sensual pleasure of viewing nature and art and listening to music. The cross-modal perception and integration of one sensory modality (touch, sight, sound, taste, or smell) opens the way for experiences of sensual pleasure to cross all perceptual modes. Rhythms of sensuality can range from slow soporific rocking to a lullaby while clutching an odor-filled blanket to the fast pace of a swing and a hand clapping a patterned song. All this blends easily into attachment experiences and contributes greatly to a sense of intimacy with others and self.

Shame, the innate affect activated when an ongoing experience of pleasure in body sensations is inhibited, as I noted become...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Dedication
• Contents
• CHAPTER 1 Looking at Sensuality and Sexuality Across the Divide of Shame
• CHAPTER 2 The Oedipus Complex in the 21st Century
• CHAPTER 3 Intimacy With the Gendered Self
• CHAPTER 4 Veronica A Clinical Example of Achieving Intimacy With the Gendered Self
• CHAPTER 5 Fathers and Daughters, Mothers and Daughters
• CHAPTER 6 Middle Childhood and Adolescence
• CHAPTER 7 Attachment Love, Romantic Love, Lustful Love, Lust Without Love, and Transference Lofe
• CHAPTER 8 Coda
• References
• Index