(Imagining) Erotic Mutuality: Negotiating Difference in Sexual Orientation in an Analysis

Abstract

This article explores the clinical limitations of an exclusive adherence to the oedipal paradigm for the understanding of erotic material in the transference/countertransference in analytic treatments where the participants identify with differing sexual orientations. Its central argument posits that possibilities for recognizing developmentally significant, evolved connections with patients of all genders and sexual orientations is subtly circumscribed when understanding of these phenomena is partitioned chiefly by the “either/or” of a positive or negative form of oedipal desire.

The argument goes on to query and challenge formulations of a universal bisexuality as a satisfactory resolution to this conundrum, again, particularly when the 2 analytic partners claim different sexual orientations. Part object relations as residue of an early and ubiquitous polymorphous perversity are proposed as useful theoretical and clinical alternatives. Case material is also provided.

Notes

¹See particularly Layton, 2000; Elise, 2000; Bassin, 2000; and Benjamin, 1995, for varying perspectives on the position of bisexuality in contemporary analytic theory.

²See, for example, Dimen, 1991, 2003; Harris, 1991, 2005; and Goldner, 1991.

³For example, fetishists, people engaged in Bondage/Domination/Slave/Master (BDSM) relations, and so on.

⁴“Every new arrival on this planet is faced with the task of mastering the Oedipus complex; anyone who fails to do so falls a victim to neurosis” (Freud, 1905, p. 226).

⁵Most of us are now familiar with the postmodern turn in psychoanalytic developmental thinking that focuses less on a linear trajectory culminating in genitally based heterosexuality and procreation (see Dimen and Goldner, 2005, for detailed summary; also see Harris, 2005) and more on preoedipal phenomena and the role of the mother in psychosexual development. Also see Corbett (2001) for a discussion of the vicissitudes of linearity.

⁶“There exists in each person a complicated multi-layered interplay of fantasies and identifications, some ‘feminine,’ some ‘masculine.’…In essence, conscious [gender] unity and unconscious [gender] diversity co-exist” (Person, 1999, quoted in Dimen and Goldner, 2005).

⁷For a more complete discussion of the unconscious role of the parent/analyst in the oedipal drama, see Davies, 2001, 2003; Searles, 1959.

⁸“Lust means not the conclusion of discharge but the penultimate moment of peak excitement when being excited is both enough and not enough, [and] is [thereby] paradoxically satisfying…. Whereas libido puts a distance between need and gratification, Lust posits their simultaneity” (p. 431). In other words, as Dimen interprets it, Freud's use of the German word Lust imparts the doubled meaning of “both the longing for pleasure and pleasure itself—a meaning unavailable in the English homonym, lust” (pp. 424–425).

⁹See Klein, whose use of “part object” “is endowed in phantasm with traits comparable to a person's” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973, p. 302).

¹⁰Casting the female body as an erotogenic zone has long been a principle of French feminist thought. For example, see Irigaray (1985), “But woman has sex organs more or less everywhere” (p. 28).

¹¹“On the other hand, this pleasure in looking [scopophilia] becomes a perversion…if, instead of being preparatory to the normal sexual aim, it supplants it” (Freud, 1905, p. 157).

¹²“The component instincts of this [pregenital] phase are not without objects, but those objects do not necessarily converge into a single object” (Freud, 1916, p. 327).

¹³For Freud, the adult sexual instinct “gradually develops out of successive contributions from a number of component instincts which represent particular erotogenic zones.”

¹⁴“As relatedness…may nurture desire, so the suspended state of unconsummated desire might reciprocally hold relatedness” (Dimen, 1999, p. 432).

¹⁵See Davies (2001) for a comprehensive discussion of these phenomena.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Debra Roth

Debra Roth, LCSW, faculty at Institute for the Contemporary Psychotherapies, is a contributing editor at Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She has a private practice in Manhattan.