Sex as Evacuation

Abstract

This article focuses on the representation of sexual activity in the film Shame, directed by Steve McQueen (2011). I concentrate on the sexual encounters of the film’s male protagonist Brandon within the broader context of his relationship with his sister Sissy. I consider how psychoanalytic understandings of the paranoid-schizoid position can help us to think about how Brandon is represented in the film and, by extension, what a Kleinian psychoanalytic approach might contribute to clinical discussions about sex addiction. I argue that the film presents a man incapable of experiencing psychic pain. Instead, he concretizes it, splits it off, and projects it onto and into those around him. His bodily activities serve, unconsciously, as desperate attempts to stave off thinking and feeling through action.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to Nicole Murray, Berna O’Brien, and Mary Pyle, each of whom helped me, in different ways, to think through the themes in this article.

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Notes on contributors

Noreen Giffney

Noreen Giffney, Ph.D., MSc., is lecturer in Psychoanalytic Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She also works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice in Dublin, Ireland, and is a member of the Clinical Training Committee in the Irish Institute of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy.