Adolescent Boys and Pornography: Notes on a Complex System

ABSTRACT

Adolescent boys’ engagement with pornography serves multiple developmental functions. Like other external supports of developent it can contribute to problematic development. Understanding these multiple functions and their interrelationships as they function as part of a complex system leads to a fuller picture of this aspect of boys’ development and its multiple potential pathways. It supports a clinical exploratory attitude that starts with an appreciation that use of pornography is not best thought of as a symptom and continues as an outline of potential meanings and functions of this activity, particularly as it interacts with the broader field of the adolescent’s sexuality.

KEYWORDS:

• Pornography; adolescent male sexuality; adolescence; sexuality

Notes

1. It is notable that, even while rejecting this extreme centrality of a Freudian developmental line of sexuality and explaining human psychology, the vocabulary associated with this conceptualization continues to be widely used. The study of the psychology of the self and its pathology continues under the rubric of “narcissism,” despite its rejection of sexuality of any kind as the central theme of human psychology, while common usage refers to persons who seem overly preoccupied with details as “anal” without an awareness of the connection of the term to psychoanalytic theory.

2. While the sexuality of public figures and politicians has long been the subject of public discourse, it is only within the last 15 years or so that explicit references to first the President’s physique and then his genitalia have been a topic considered appropriate for news coverage.

3. Although some of the dimensions investigated, e.g. more sexual arousal, might appear to be value neutral, the absence of positive outcome from the studies, e.g. more sexual satisfaction, clearly points to built-in biases.

4. Throughout this paper clinical instances are either sufficiently disguised to protect the patients identity or are quoted with the explicit permission on the patient.

5. Although it is unlikely that this individual will be identifiable from the information provided here, it should be noted that for this person, this information was collected in the course of a psychiatric evaluation for the courts with his explicit understanding that it would not be held in confidence.

6. This, of course, immediately leads to the realization that in thinking of the neuroscience of sexuality as though it could be isolated from social and other environmental factors and its evolutionary history, one risks ignoring central features of that overall system. In order to study phenomena involving systems, it is often necessary to simplify their relationship to larger systems of which they are a part. This parallel’s Plato’s to “carve nature at its joints” when trying to understand natural phenomena and like that recommendation carries with it the acknowledgment of the possible brutality done to a reasonably full understanding of phenomena and the recognition that the tools used to make things comprehensible may simplify them in ways that lead to misunderstanding.

7. Psychoanalytic formulations of such experience often suggest that the subject is unconsciously aware of a situation and that the apparent accident is no accident at all. The view that all psychological happenings reflect an unfolding of psychic determinism is not only likely mistaken (accidents do happen) but also removes from consideration some of the most interesting possibilities for development. In particular, when a system or person is near the edge of chaos or otherwise close to a bifurcation, chance events may reshape the course of development profoundly.

8. It should, at this point, be obvious that most unconscious mental processes are not unconscious because of repression and are inherently not open to being known through introspection.

9. This description is oversimplified in the sense that it ignores the likely multilayered system of updating that is characteristic of neural networks Spitzer (1999).

10. The notion that “infantile sexuality” involves the more mature persons reinterpretation of past experiences, rather than early manifestations of sexuality, is consistent with the formulation found in House (2017).

11. For a first systematic attempt in this direction has been undertaken by Linsson and Friston (2019)

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Robert M. Galatzer-Levy

Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, M.D., is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Chicago and Faculty, Training, Supervising and Child & Adolescent Supervising Analyst at Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.