So often in my life, my body breaks out into an urgent sexual response when a woman I am attracted to embraces me, even simply holds my hand. These responses are always kept under control thanks to mental fortitude, but usually JUST BARELY. This powerful experience emanating solely from a reaction to human touch makes more sense when Freud describes how the skin is the ultimate erotogenic zone, with its networks of mucous membranes and near-indivisibility from our inner organ system, including the sexual organs. Neurotics, of which I, still holding residual fears of sex, may well be one, love the skin. The exhibitionist shows it off, the voyeur looks at it intensely, and the sadists and masochists enjoy torturing it or having it be tortured. Pulling all of Freud's analyses together, my conclusion is that the neurotic's superego creates a repression in the id of the ordinary sexual desire and fetishizes the closest thing we have to genitalia without actually being an organ itself. The skin is the natural substitute, and since we can't have sex with the skin, we practice the other behaviors as compensation. It may not be as satisfying, but there's still nothing like making close contact with a nice girl in a black dress.
One of the major breakthroughs Freud made was his understanding of infantile sex drives, a condition we long wanted to think was non-existent. In infancy we develop our first inklings of sexual pleasure and form the impressions which will one day become our tastes and fetishes depending on future psychological evolution. Freud's insistence that the ego represses such knowledge into the vast domain of the id is weakened, I think, with refusal to give an explanation into WHY we repress. The suggestion that humans en masse do not want to accept the conclusion of childhood sexual instinct is too after-the-fact and general for my taste. My own thoughts are that as infants, we form strong attachments to various people and things in fostering the instinct, from our parents to pacifiers to stuffed animals. As our perceptions and intellect grow, our superegos feel shame that someone with intelligence could have ever been attracted to immature objects or created ideas which were just plain wrong (incest) from the perspective of the moral adult self. From sheer embarrassment, then, we engage in suppression, only to have these desires re-emerge when the id wants to have its way. Freud felt that an explanation of this force can explain hysterical amnesia as well…and again, isn't it sensible to conjecture that hysterical amnesia is rooted in embarrassment and guilt for what we have done or failed to do?
This above tendency in the mature adult mind may be reflected in a particular instant: the taboo against and punishment of thumb-sucking and similar practices by juvenile educators. Thumb-sucking is a recollection of using the mouth to take mother's milk and is often the first sign of a person's sexuality…Freud called it the first step towards masturbation. The authority figure for a child witnesses this behavior and the id, by sudden recollection, conjures up the memories of their childhood sexuality which prompt their shame, but now the ego recognizes they are in control of a situation where they can, through displacement, punish themselves by punishing others, and the superego approves.
When Freud goes on to discuss similar examples of auto-erotisim, he uses the following sentence: "Many (originally all) of my women patients who suffer from disturbances of eating, globus hystericus, constriction of the throat and vomiting, have indulged energetically in sucking during their childhood." Children suck to feed their sex drive through a symbiosis between the sexual instinct and the hunger instinct, both vital to our life force, and sexual repression may prompt disgust at food. It makes one wonder if anorexics and bulimics were thumbsuckers in their infancy, and if their tendencies may have joint roots with nerves about sexual identity. Have there been studies about this? If so, I would love for a reader to point me in that direction.
Freud describes how a variety of childhood instincts are components of the overall sexual instinct, among them cruelty. Children are cruel because they have not yet developed their egos and cannot fully understand how others are oppressed by pain. Cruelty comes from a desire for mastery which relates to the sexual life, where we all wish to be masters of our sexual destiny and, male and female alike (aggressively in males, defensively in females), we quake at the thought that our sexual self-possession may be taken away. Anyone who ever read Charles M. Schulz knows how thoughtless and cruel children can be…so much of the poignancy and situations of Peanuts were based around one character or group singling out another for derision or unknowingly hurting another through self-centered desire (usually Charlie Brown) or the uncontrollable aspects and randomness of existence weighing down on someone (again, usually Charlie Brown). No wonder Bill Watterson called it an amazingly melancholy, tortured cartoon, but one rooted in real life: we all have felt as hopeless as Charlie brown, as railing against life as Lucy Van Pelt, as misunderstood as her brother Linus, as eager for escape as Snoopy, and anyone who says otherwise is a born liar. But there may be more to childhood cruelty than a tie-in to simple sex. Freud's theories are mostly based around dialectical opposites, the ego and id and the pleasure principle most notably, and if much of our lives are organized around the pursuit of pleasure, we must be able to experience pain as well for symmetry. Only sensical.
The following two notes came, appropriately enough, on page 69…couldn't help but smile during my annotations. When I was in kindergarten at Paul C. Bunn, I enjoyed a game at recess where we would organize into teams and chase each other in aggressive, man-on-top-of-man tag. There was a girl named Venice with long, flowing blonde hair, and I especially loved to chase her and catch her, my arms wrapped around her torso and the edges of her locks. Freud found that in the glorious romping of childhood when we exert our muscles, many "experience the first signs of excitement in their genitals" when in close contact with playmates, often in wrestling, or in tag…I know that was the first time I, a child who loved swimming and baseball and games with other boys, ever found pleasure with a girl. (I ran into Venice eleven years later by complete chance at the YSU English Festival. She did not remember me or the game…possible repression?)
This part goes out to all the Emerson L.A. gang. Freud has much to say about what he did not know would one day be the horror movie. Anything which strongly affects children, he says, creates sexual excitement in the developmental stages, including sensations of terror. These sensations, thanks to the id, often continue into adulthood, and people ENJOY apprehension, fright, and horror and seek opportunities to feel them in situations where they will be kept under some restraint (unreality of the cinema, for instance) and thus translate to pure pleasure without pain. This may stem from our fascination with the "other," in this case the opposite sex. Horror films are all about the others, as the two competing sources of pleasure, sex and fear, are placed in opposition using a by-now well-honored code (brilliantly referenced in Craven's post-modern exercises in the genre). By increasing the taboo against sex in this matter, it leaves the pleasure, and the sex, that much more exciting.
Freud was very concerned about sexual tension, not in how we understand the term today (though he would have a field day with describing the dynamics of mutually felt but denied sexual attraction, and I wonder if there are any writings from him on the subject), but the actual physical tension which builds through arousal and indulgence and dissipates only with the sexual act itself. He did not know for sure how tension arose in a pleasurable circumstance like the satisfying of the erotogenic zones. The simplest explanation, for me, is that the ego creates the tension from nervousness that the id is in full alignment with our behavior, of taking pleasure to the extreme.
Finally, there is the superego's role in this. Sexuality involves energy, which the id is bursting with beyond all seams. The superego, as the great modifier of behavior, harnesses energy and in the neurotic will extinguish what it sees as the worst uses of it, creating unhealthy repressions. But on the other hand, if the superego is responsible for our guilt and shame, it MUST also be involved in creating the tension necessary for the act of sex itself! We all have our opposites.
I think I've written enough about sex for one week…and I'm sure whoever's reading this blog is also more than satisfied. So I move on to other researches. But I hope I've come across as a nice enough guy here…single, straight, and looking!
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