To Suffer Pleasure: The Shattering of the Ego as the Psychic Labor of Perverse Sexuality

Abstract

In this article I advance an alternative exegesis of perverse sexuality that permits an analyst to regard it not from within a state of alarm but with the capacity to recognize perversity’s generative potential. Pleasure and pain are often approached as independent experiences that become soldered together under the aegis of trauma or pathology. In this essay, I argue that pleasure and pain are developmentally coextensive phenomena. I rely on Laplanche’s theory of infantile sexuality to suggest that the sexualization of suffering is developmentally installed in sexuality’s very ontology. Although frequently and reflexively conceptualized in psychoanalysis as a demise of the sexual function, perversity can be, I propose, oftentimes sexuality’s aspiration. Through its interembodied transgressiveness, perversion recruits the body’s materiality to perform meaningful psychic labor: to facilitate the transformation of intergenerational debts we have inherited from others in the form of enigmatic parental and cultural implants into a relationship to oneself.

Notes

¹ Revulsion, the philosopher Georges Bataille (1934) and the anthropologist Mary Douglas (1966) tell us, issues from the impulse to purify oneself. Disgust establishes a taxonomy of cleanliness versus contamination that positions the self as untainted by locating the dirty (psychic) contaminants in the other. For an excellent critical discussion of the important ways in which racial and class difference are constitutive of this dynamic see Tyler (2013).

² Despite its nosological baggage, I insist on retaining the term perversion in our psychoanalytic lexicon to capture the phenomenology of sexual experience that involves anguish as well as pleasure. The term perversion maintains vigorous ties with the exuberant physicality, with the perplexing and inscrutable dimensions of sexuality in a way that other terms do not. My commitment to this term is a luxury I have only because others have already highlighted that psychoanalysis has not approached perversion with disinterested objectivity (Corbett, 2013) and have strongly critiqued the term’s pejorative misuse (Foucault, 1980; Dimen, 2001; Žižek, 2003; Blechner, 2009).

³ For an in-depth discussion of how Freud’s ambivalence in fully abdicating the centrality of perversity in psychosexual life is relegated to the footnotes of the Three Essays see Dimen (1999).

⁴ This approach has now also widely soaked into popular culture (see, e.g., James, 2012; Perkins, 2012) inflecting patients’ own narratives regarding their perverse practices. As such, they should therefore be treated with caution when they emerge in the consulting room.

⁵ Obviously, not all clinicians become defensively pathologizing of their patients or affectively dissociated from their own experience when dealing with perverse sexual practices. Countertransference responses to such material are polyvalently mediated: for instance, in treatment milieus (e.g., forensic settings), when the regularity of contact with perversity is encountered by the collective holding of a sensitive clinical team, thoughtful reflection of patient dynamics can be greatly facilitated.

⁶ On the psychic productiveness of transient fragmentations see also Frommer (2006) and Ghent (1990).

⁷ Surely, it is in this lacuna that one encounters sexual boundary violations (Dimen, 2011).

⁸ The Law here is not used in its juridicolegal sense but references a set of socially inscribed directives deviation from which invite collective sanctions and which can, in the individual, generate primal levels of anxiety.

⁹ This statement is less true of the work of Jacques Lacan, who was quite interested in the amplificatory effects of limits on desire.

¹⁰ Laplanche (2011) posits that the biological vectors of sexuality only emerge in puberty.

¹¹ Bataille, in fact, named this inner experience but his concept is, for our purposes, analogous to what Foucault later named limit experience and I retain it here to maintain a uniformity of referents.

¹² On this point see also Dimen (1999).

¹³ Unraveling is not a property of sexual experience alone. The sociologist and ethnographer Stephen Lyng (2004) has systematically researched a wide range of behaviors generative of limit experience (e.g., extreme sports, drug use, delinquency). He posits that ego dissolution offers possibilities for the modification of not only psychic states but also embodied experience.

¹⁴ It is important to acknowledge that although the depersonalizing effects of suffering facilitate the kind of unraveling that lends itself to new self-elaborations, unraveling may also, at times, produce malignantly destabilizing possibilities. To locate the self’s unraveling exclusively in psychic transformation—as I focused on in this essay—is to overlook that it is not just capacity but also fragility that inheres in limit experience (Tobias, 2005).

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Notes on contributors

Avgi Saketopoulou

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D., is a psychoanalyst based in New York City and a graduate of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. On the editorial boards of Studies in Gender and Sexuality and Psychoanalytic Dialogues, she has published several articles on gender, class, race, sexuality, and consent. In 2011 Dr. Saketopoulou received the Ruth Stein Prize and in 2014 the Ralph Roughton Award from the American Psychoanalytic Association.