The Illusion of Parental Celibacy

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Notes

The Dora case has been reviewed by Glenn (1980, 1986), Deutsch (1957), Decker (1982), Jennings (1986), Krohn and Krohn (1982), Muslin & Gill (1978), Rogow (1978), Scharfman (1980), and others.

U.S. newspapers abound in stories of the alleged sexual exploits of President Clinton, members of the British royal family, the Canadian prime minister, the highest grade enlisted man in the U.S. Army, a woman bomber pilot in the U.S. Air Force, the Navy’s “Tail Hook” scandal, adultery issues among top U.S. officers, various homosexual issues (gay pride parades, comings out, legislation for/against homosexuality), as well as the spate of reports of incest and childhood sexual abuse at home, in day care, in schools, as well as in civic and religious organizations.

Nowadays, we would use the term “gaslighting” (Calef & Weinshel, 1981) for the concerted attempt not only to deny a reality but to undermine and invalidate Dora’s sense of reality testing.

Her mother’s sexual acting out further deprived the daughter of any model for self-control and thoughtfulness.

The effect of such disruption will depend not only on the age and emotional development of the adolescent, but on whether it is from both parents, the sex of the disrupting parent, the availability of other desexualizing adults, and the adolescent’s earlier sexual and psychological development.

Perhaps a fruitful area for research would be to review the adolescence of the sexual boundary violators with a special emphasis on the vicissitudes and pathology of the desexualization process.

Whether an adolescent’s overt behavior eventuates in early peer sexuality or in sexual inhibitions will depend on many additional factors beyond the scope of this paper. Here I wish to emphasize that an early or overwhelming breakdown of the illusion of parental celibacy can be an etiological factor in an adolescent’s ensuing sexual life.

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Notes on contributors

Moisy Shopper

Training and supervising psychoanalyst (child and adult), St. Louis Psychoanalytic Institute, and clinical professor of child psychiatry and pediatrics, Saint Louis University School of Medicine.