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- Title
החידה שבמיניות.
- Authors
רות שטיין
- Abstract
At the heart of this paper stands the enigma of sexuality and the presence of an “enigmatic Other” who is being carried over, in some mental form or another, into adult life where it constitutes a bedrock for the sense of mystery and of the unfathomable in every intimate attachment to an other. Beginning with Freud’s (1856-1939) and Jean Laplanche’s (1924-2012) theories of primal seduction, the author stresses the role of the (m)other, who sends or radiates “enigmatic signifiers,” messages about her sexuality, to the child whom she nurtures. Stein claims that sexual experience has an inherent quality of “otherness” to it that distinguishes it from daily, habitual modes of experience (until, of course, these become aligned with sexuality). Sexuality plays many roles in formation of the self, as she states: As the opportunity for abandonment of the self, for immersing ourselves in the other, thereby intensifying the sense of self and of connecting with the other, and for the power it has to consolidate or protect the self or release the “true self” …People seek sexual experience in an attempt to reconstruct and heal trauma, to achieve affirmation and recognition, to populate one's inner world and charge one's inner objects with excitement and vitality or even to bolster a collapsing or fragmenting self. In the article presented here, Stein adds a new understanding of the nonsymmetrical and the un-mutual qualities of recognition that emerge between loving partners and the ways in which these imitate the primal pattern of mother and baby relationship. According to Stein, the mother’s ministrations provoke the baby’s erotic sensations, which in turn arouse the mother’s sense of pleasure and desire (even when these are unconscious to herself). She states: The enigma lies in the hidden fact that early relationships are sexual, and that sexuality itself is something that is characteristically known and not known, and even if already known, can still perplex and retain the power of an enigma. Furthermore, Stein articulates the links between early sexuality and the enigmatic message with different forms of transference and countertransference, to offer new possibilities of understanding various clinical phenomena within the analytic process. Stein’s approach to eroticism is embedded in the French psychoanalytic tradition, which has not ceased reflecting upon and investigating the erotic in psychoanalysis, in contrast to Anglo-American psychoanalysis that has tended toward displacing sexuality toward drives or object relations. Stein claims that the line between a loving, dedicated psychotherapeutic treatment and a harmful, offensive one is diminutive, reflecting basically the two faces of the original primal ‘treatment.’ In her words: The passage, or transference, from the nutritive to the erotic and from the excited body to the mystifying other, as well as the view of mother's sexuality as comprising that of her husband or partner and its dwelling in an inner world populated by diverse inner objects, all these combine to make, in my view, sexual object relations primordially and intrinsically transferential Indeed, the concluding part of her paper contributes to the understanding of the broader analytic process, and specifically the erotic dimension in transference and countertransference. Stein claims that the psychoanalyst should be aware not only of the “configurations of transferentially reconstructed fragments of situations of infantile erotic awakenings through mother’s transmission,” but also the way in which sexuality is embedded in the physiological-bodily dimension, by the presence of the body in the clinical situation. In order to explore the experience of awakening and creative mystery that the analyst evokes in his patient, Stein deduces the idea that the patient’s sense of the uncontrollability of erotic feelings may sometimes be reinforced by the analyst’s attitude that defends against intense feelings toward the patient, whether they are directly aroused by the latter or not. Such defensiveness may produce an overly rigid attitude that contributes to mystifying the patient and strengthening his or her erotic longings and to sexualization as a desperate attempt to get closer to the frustrating, opaque analyst. It is clear that with these words Stein is relying upon Relational and Intersubjective psychoanalytic theories that supplement and enrich the French psychoanalytic school of thought. For example, she uses Irwin Z. Hoffman’s (1950- ) relational and social-constructivist position, with its strong emphasis on mutual constructions of reality for both participants, and which focuses on the impact of the nontransparency of the analyst to himself/herself. Her discussion of the unconscious message which the analyst may transmit to the analysand is based also upon Jody Davies’ (1950- ) and Jessica Benjamin’s (1967- ) clinical ideas and ramifications. She quotes Davies as saying, “an organization of the experiences of self in relation to another in which love, shame, idealization, envy, and rage are not just words but systems of physical sensation, elusive, ever-shifting, and rarely, if ever, verbalized in interpersonal normal discourse.” At the same time, Stein expands and evolves these ideas regarding erotic countertransference, since “it always encompasses the combination of the other and the bodily aspects, a combination one has to be aware of, experience, and use for analytic purposes.” Referring to Julia Kristeva’s (1941- ) poetic testimonial question that a mother might have concerning her infant or one lover might have of his or her lover – “What value has my desire for you?” – Stein interpolates that the same question has to be asked within the analytic dyad. Stein adds that a patient’s sensitivity to the analyst’s personality and unconscious, and to what the analyst wants from the patient, arouses the patient’s transferential need to be a therapist to the therapist, repeating this basic infantile relationship with parents – that ancient sensitivity to any kind of excess that is similar to what the sexual part of the mother may have had toward her child – and may use this modus to create a false self that adapts to the expectations of others, including the psychotherapist. Finally, Stein draws concealed relations and associations between the poignant and enigmatic sexuality and the realm of revelation, and the desire to know the “mystifying [M]other.” By developing Laplanche’s well-known statement that “sexuality [from the start] is the perversion of the functional,” Stein claims that autoerotism is a state in which the milk qua “object of function” has been lost, such that the substitute objects of the sexual drive becomes a “phantasmatic” sexual breast. The concatenated figure of the mythological Sphinx represents an emblem of motherly enigma joining with sexual seduction and life beginning. The Sphinx may be seen as a hyperbolic, allegorical rendition of the ‘”phantasmatic”’ object that has been substituted for the original, familiar, and nutritive object, an uncanny object that confronts the infant and the preoedipal child’s distress at having to accomplish the arduous mental work of translating the enigma into a solution of its own. By so saying, the creative process of imagination and fantasy are shown as capable of being used in order to resolve the primordial riddle and the enigma of the “primal scene.” The enigma that is here created lies in the (hidden) fact that early relationships are sexual, and that sexuality itself is something that is characteristically known and not known, and even if already known, can still perplex and retain the power of an enigma. Human sexuality is based on mother’s temptation and enigmatic message to the infant, as a fundamental experience that reflects the growth of the self in a non-symmetrical and un-mutual environment. This mysterious experience is embedded in recognition of object loss, object displacement and object refinding, which is eternally, as Freud stated clearly (1905, p. 222), a refinding of an object other than the original – “the displaced and never identically attainable object has a crucial role to play in the inception of sexuality.” Thus, according to Stein, sexuality is an endless quest and mission built upon dependence and reliance upon the other, and hence a profound vulnerability, which is a condition of erotic concealment and revelation. Sexual object relation does not involve symmetry or maximal identification with the other all the time, but only at moments. More precisely, erotic mutuality depends on some form of non-mutuality and on areas where the other is revealed as well as on areas where he or she is not found and where there is a kind of “separated” experience where the other is hidden. There is the desire to uncover the other, and the reaching for achievement of deep mutuality in eroticism is a wonderful dimension of sexuality.
- Publication
Ma'arag: Israeli Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019, Vol 9, p387
- ISSN
2413-290X
- Publication type
Article