Yes-Saying, No-Saying, and the Places In-Between: Seduction and the Psychoanalytic Exploration of Sexual Consent

ABSTRACT

Our capacity to give or withhold consent is intrinsically related to our felt sense of agency, and yet complexity theory and the social-constructivist ideas that inform new developments in relational psychoanalysis trouble and unsettle reified definitions of consent. This article explores the phenomenological experience of yes-saying and no-saying in psychoanalytic treatment. What does it mean, for example, to be a choosing subject who isn’t fully conscious, autonomous, and agentic? How are our definitions of consent altered if we make room for thinking about individuals as composed of multiple self-states or dissociatively organized? Furthermore, if all analyses begin with a sense of “hope and dread,” in Mitchell’s terms, and are marked by (as Butler wrote) “ambivalence and an abiding sense of anxiety,” then all analyses begin in a place between yes and no. This has implications for how analysts think about the patient’s explicit and unspoken “no’s” and suggests that perhaps implicit in our concept of empathic attunement is the idea of psychoanalytic seduction. “If you can think yourself appropriately into the inner life of another person,” as Kohut somewhat daringly proposed, “then you can use this knowledge for your own [therapeutic] purposes.” Borrowing from sexual scenarios and clinical vignettes to illuminate some undertheorized areas in psychoanalytic theory and practice, this article posits that there are significant corollaries between sexual seduction and what happens in any given analysis.

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Ginna Clark

Ginna Clark, Psy.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice in Santa Fe, NM, where she also serves as director of the Human Sexuality program at Southwestern College. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Psychology and Integrated Studies Department at Northern New Mexico College and teaches master’s-level clinicians in the art therapy and counseling program at Southwestern College.