Introduction

As strange as it might seem, psychology really cannot say much about human sexuality. It’s true that psychology can be used to treat sexual dysfunction, and psychologists know that coerced sex, such as child abuse or rape, leaves lasting emotional scars on the victims. But psychology really cannot offer much advice to consenting adults as to what sexual activities are appropriate or inappropriate. Not much, that is, except this: You can get into all kinds of trouble if you fail to understand something about the nature of perversion and love.

Perversion

Perversion. This is a word not heard much in today’s world. The verb to pervert literally means “to lead astray” or “to misdirect,” and perversion usually is used in the moral sense to refer to something that leads a person away from what is good or right. But I will be using the word in the psychological sense of something that leads a person away from a psychological goal.

As an example, consider the nature of alcohol abuse. Psychologically speaking, alcoholics drink in order to avoid the pain of facing up to and making amends for all the times they have failed to take responsibility for their lives. Hence the abuse of alcohol can be called a perversion because it leads a person away from the true aim of dealing with the guilt and into a drunken state of illusory well-being.

To be clever, we could say, then, that the point of a perversion
is to always miss the point.

With more direct language, we can say that a perversion leads you away from the true depths of your emotional pain—and from the psychological healing that could happen if you were to work therapeutically with that pain—by distracting you with something apparently pleasurable.

The connection between sex and perversions is found in love. But when talking about love we need to be clear what we are really talking about.

Courtly
 
Love

If you study the history of human sexuality and marriage through ancient and primitive cultures, you will find that communal sex and polygamy predominate. Communal sex tends to predominate in matriarchal societies—that is, societies in which power tends to pass through women, and property is more or less communal—where women mate with whomever they want, without any particular, or lasting, emotional attachment.

In patriarchal societies, where property passes through the male lineage, knowing a child’s father is of greatest importance; hence men tend to be promiscuous, while women are carefully guarded sexually.

And then there are those curious mixtures of elements, such as in cultures where a man would offer his wife for the night to a guest, as a token of hospitality.

Yes, there are occasional stories, some very poetic—and tragic—about men and women, each promised in an arranged marriage to another, who became passionately attracted to each other. But, as with most things in life, these exceptions only prove the rule: through most of human history, about the only thing that hardly ever seemed to influence mating was romantic love.

Yet, when we think about “finding a mate” we tend to think of romantic love. And one of the most enduring images of romantic love is the medieval knight in shining armor, the strong but pure man who rescued the lady in distress . . . and they lived happily ever after.

In reality, most medieval knights were anything but pure, and “marriages,” as in pagan cultures, lasted only as long as convenient. If you read medieval history carefully, you will find that feudal society, especially under the influence of the Albigensian heretics in the 11th to 13th centuries, was barbarian and chaotic, rife with murder, massacre, and cruelty. Knights, if they were anything, were nothing more than thugs and rapists who preyed upon any defenseless persons they came across. The knightly sexual ideal was to seduce a married woman, and, if she refused, to rape her. The literature of this “age of chivalry” essentially idealized adultery.

“Wait a minute,” you say. “That’s not what I learned about courtly love. Courtly love was pure and ideal. So what happened?”

Well, the troubadours and their Provençal poetry “happened.” 

In the later middle ages, the troubadours, under the influence of Christianity, transformed the earlier romantic literature based on hedonism into a new literature based on the idealization of love.^[1] Thus the knights went from lusting after their friends’ wives to swooning in love over a woman’s glove. The literature idealized “love” to such an extent, and set so many obstacles in front of it, that this love became almost impossible to attain. And so romance became a poetic quest for an unattainable ideal of wholeness.

The aristocracy upheld this ideal of courtly love on the surface—while doing what it wanted behind the scenes, of course—and it provided the underlying European moral influence for the masses, for the last several centuries. Consequently, bolstered by Hollywood cinema in the 20th century, romantic “love” became the obsessive secular quest of life. And then, with the collapse of sexual morality beginning in the 1960s, the final association was made: the long sought chalice of courtly love is filled with erotic sexuality. 

Notice, however, that this courtly “love” is not a pagan concept, and, though it was influenced by Christian morality, it has nothing in common with real Christian love either. Like the famous quest for the “holy grail,” courtly love is a medieval literary creation. 

Which is why the brilliant French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, declared that courtly love “is an altogether refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relation by pretending that it is we who put up an obstacle to it.” ^[2]

In other words, the chalice of courtly love—and all the romantic sentiments and eroticism that fill it—is an illusion.^[3] It’s impossible to find love through sexuality. It’s impossible to use your body to hide your emotional pain. It’s impossible to heal your own emotional brokenness through the body of another person as mortal and broken as you are. ^[4]

This absence of a sexual relation, as taught by Lacan in his psychoanalytic concept of the impossible, can be approximated by the question, “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”   For example, I have seen both men and women who have tried to seduce a woman to get from her the nurturing and attention they never received from their mothers. And I have seen both women and men who have tried to seduce a man to get from him the protection and attention they never received from their fathers. And in the end it’s all an impossibility. The moral is simple, and cuts across the board, male and female, heterosexual and homosexual: You can never seduce your despair, and you can never find real love through any form of sexual activity.   Thus, one does not need a “sex life” to be a good person. Notice, though, that a good person is not the same as a good citizen. A good citizen is an empty-headed, insatiable consumer, and, because of the efforts of Madison Avenue and Hollywood, eroticism has become a prime consumer activity. So let’s give a round of applause to Madison Avenue and Hollywood. Ah, can you hear it—the pathetic sound of one hand clapping?

True
 
Love

Most persons don’t realize this, but the common, or popular, view of “love” involves an element of receiving something. “I love chocolate” really means that “I enjoy getting the experience of the taste of chocolate.” Similarly, “I love you” commonly implies “I enjoy playing with your body,” or “I enjoy believing that you will give me security or protection,” or “I enjoy feeling sexual pleasure with your body” (or “I want to have sexual pleasure with your body.” As a result, Lacan, in his teachings about love, described the typical act of love as “polymorphous perversion.” ^[5]

Don’t be put off by the big words. You already know what perversion means. Polymorphous simply means “having many forms.” So this amounts to saying, like the popular song from the 1980s, that we’re looking for love in all the wrong places. That is, we look for satisfaction in all the various titillating parts of the body but never find what is truly sought.

What is “truly sought” is something we all experience as painfully missing from life: some comforting sense of absolute belonging and acceptance. Those who are fortunate get a sense of this feeling as babies, under a parent’s protection. But the feeling is fractured more often than not by parental empathic failures, and it is lost entirely from ordinary sensory experience as children become older and independent and the awareness of our essential human isolation and mortality sets in.

Some people skip from one “partner” to another over the surface of existential pain, like a stone skipping over water. As long as they stay above the surface they’re perfectly happy; but when an affair ends, and they come crashing down, they’re desperate for the next leap, sometimes searching for a new partner even at the funeral for the old one. Yet sooner or later the stone loses vitality, and with a final splunk falls into the depths of tribulation.

Lacan points out that although “love”—that is, in its common, popular sense—is, in essence, a futile chasing after something that doesn’t exist, there is nevertheless a love beyond this “making love,” a love that exists beyond lack and limitation and that involves a sort of ecstasy of being,^[6] as a matter of soul,^[7] not of the body. The irony is that in the common act of “making love” we think we know what we want, but it turns out to be an illusion, while this other love touches on a real experience of which we know nothing. It’s a mystical sort of thing, as Lacan acknowledges.^[8]

Now, although Lacan doesn’t say it this way, the difference between these two kinds of love—common “love” and true love (or real love)—can be conceived of as the difference between receiving and giving.

Note carefully, though, that giving does not refer to the mere sharing of material objects or wealth; it refers to the expression of profound emotional qualities such as patience, forbearance, compassion, understanding, and forgiveness.   This all goes to show that it’s easy enough to “love” those who “love” us: parents who protect us, “partners” who make us feel received, animals who never threaten us. But can we love those who annoy us . . . irritate us . . . obstruct us . . . scorn us . . . hate us? Can we love our enemies? That’s the real test of real love.

And it was out of a true understanding of the difference between common “love” and true love that a man such as St. Francis of Assisi was led—led right to the point, actually—to pray that he might seek “not so much to be loved as to love.”

Imitations
 
of
 
True
 
Love

As shocking as it might sound, most of us who claim to be loving are not giving selflessly. Instead, we are addressing a covert psychological desire either to avoid being abandoned or to feel powerful.

 
“Love” as Bribery

Most men who give flowers to women, for example, are either saying, “I desire to use your body for my erotic pleasure,” or they are trying to satisfy the woman’s demand for recognition—and to avoid her anger and rejection if the recognition is forgotten—on a birthday or anniversary.

Similarly, many parents who give excessive money or presents to children or grandchildren are unconsciously trying to buy allegiance and favor. Unable to accept and understand the child’s deepest emotional experiences, the parent will offer an easily procurable object to make the child feel happy. And the child, unable consciously to express the covert cover-up occurring under his or her very nose, will accept the present under the assumption that “this must be love.”

Sad to say, therefore, the apparent generosity of common “love” is really an act of bribery.

 
“Love” as Power

We commonly believe that the desire to erotically arouse another person is a sign of love. The deep psychological truth, however, is that such a desire masks a more hidden desire: to gain some control over our own helplessness. That is, because we as children felt the helplessness and resentment of having our bodies controlled by our parents, as adults we unconsciously compensate for this helplessness by seeking out ways to control others. We can do this with wealth, we can do this with education, we can do this with social status, we can do this with physical strength, and we can do this with eroticism.

Sad to say, therefore, the thrill of arousing lust in another person is really an act of self-serving power over that person.

Child abuse, too, is a form of power over another gained through common “love.” But whereas most common “love” takes the form of willing manipulation, child abuse is coercive: the abuser preys upon a child’s moral and intellectual helplessness. The abuser gets all the self-satisfaction he or she wants and in the process leaves the child with a life-long emotional scar of having been exposed to the manipulative aspects of eroticism well before having developed healthy defense mechanisms to cope with such psychological assaults. The abuser walks away smacking his lips, and the child is left as bones for the garbage.

 
Summary

Therefore, those who have the most to gain have the greatest desire to deceive. Those who have the least to gain—and who want nothing, and who give everything, like the saints—can love perfectly. And this perfect, true love is no imitation.

Most persons today will say, “Oh, come on. As long as I love my partner, it’s OK.” Yet consider all the orphaned children around the world whose parents—now dead—became infected with AIDS while saying “I love you.” So does saying I love you make it OK?

Fear
 
of
 
Love

Believe it or not, most of us are brought up in modern culture to fear love. This is a radical statement, so pause a bit and consider it.

How often were your deepest human needs for comfort, protection, and guidance as a child ignored or stifled by your parents? How often were you, as a child, criticized and laughed at for expressing your honest feelings? How often are you now used, in our culture of merchandising, as an object to be manipulated in order to satisfy some other person’s desire for profit and power? How often do you shape yourself—with fad diets, implants, cosmetic surgery, workouts, jewelry, tattoos, makeup, hair dye, and clothing—to meet the expectations of someone’s desire?

And how often, in the midst of all this exploitation, has anyone ever done anything for your own growth and welfare, without thought of what could be had in return?

So what does a person learn from such experiences other than that this is a world of competition, strife, and conflict, geared toward the survival of the “fittest”—or in today’s world, the meanest—in which honesty and compassion are foolish weakness?

Is it any wonder, then, that when denied the comfort and respect of true love, the fear and panic can be so blinding that children will blame themselves, believing that they don’t deserve love, and will fall headlong into self-loathing and masochism? 

In contrast, true love is an act of will, not something that you “fall” into. You can fall into desperate desire, and you can fall into fatal attraction, but you can’t fall into love. Love is a sacrifice of sorts, and it’s a sacrifice of all the illusions that our culture expects from us. To offer true love—to will the good of another ^[9]—is to stand against the culture—not as a revolutionary or terrorist, but with a humble offering of understanding and compassion, something better than what others “see” in their blindness.

True love, therefore, forsakes the prestige offered by the culture in its illusions. And, when we have been taught from childhood to covet this prestige as our very identity, is it any wonder that we fear love?

Far easier—and safer—isn’t it, to hide behind illusions and games of wealth, power, violence, intrigue, and seduction?

The
 
Love-Hate
 
Flip-flop

One of Freud’s early disciples, Melanie Klein, took up the task of applying the techniques of psychoanalysis to children. She considered her work a natural extension of Freud’s theories, rather than any sort of innovation in psychoanalysis; still, she met considerable criticism from her psychoanalytic colleagues. And rightly so, for her work is characterized by speculative and fantastic explanations of, well, infant fantasy.

Nevertheless, Klein did bring to light the “ugly” side of infant development, for she saw in infants a mass of angry and hostile impulses toward the mother when the infant did not get its needs met. In essence, the infant constantly flip-flops between love and hate: love when its needs are met, and hate when its needs are ignored or frustrated. In her work, Klein tried to explain the process by which the infant seeks to repair the damage of its hostility to its mother. In fact, the titles of two of her most significant collections of works, Envy and Gratitude and Love, Guilt, and Reparation, tell the story almost as well as the writings themselves.

Ultimately, though, Klein’s theories—through their influence on the subsequent psychoanalytic theory called object relations—can lead to a grave error in psychological treatment, for they tend to make the psychotherapeutic process a dyadic process between the psychotherapist and client. At its worst, this makes psychotherapy into a mothering process of caring for the needs of the client, and it reduces the “therapist” to a paid friend—or nanny. 

Lacan saw through these errors and taught that psychoanalysis must involve “three” persons: the client, the analyst, and the unconscious. Just as healthy emotional development depends on a father coming between the mother and child, to sever the child’s emotional enmeshment with the mother, good psychotherapeutic work must let the unconscious come between the client and psychotherapist. This means that the psychotherapeutic process must always involve a symbolic “fathering” ^[10] by which clients are led to recognize and overcome the illusions of their unconscious identifications with others and, in the process, to heal the aggression and hostility that underlie those identifications.

This explains why “lovers,” friends, and blog readers, with all their personal needs and desires, cannot function psychotherapeutically. And it explains philosophically—above and beyond any laws or professional ethics—why psychotherapists cannot be friends or “lovers” to their clients. If they try, it will lead to psychological disaster, for without the “third person” of the unconscious in the consulting room the psychotherapy can degenerate into all sorts of perversions.

And, of course, this all explains the ultimate “kink” in human sexuality: the love-hate flip-flop.

As unpleasant as it may be to admit it, eroticism is based on infantile needs to be received, accepted, and satisfied. When a person feels intensely received, accepted, and satisfied, then he or she is “in love.” But sooner or later that intensity will be broken. The break doesn’t even have to be the result of malicious neglect; it can simply be the result of a need to attend to other obligations in the world, and, in the person feeling neglected, intense jealousy can flare up.

Often people fear that someone or something they love will be stolen from them by someone else. But in true love there is no jealousy. When you have nothing to lose, and nothing to gain, how can you fear a “rival”?   But, because romance is not based in true love, romance is, in technical psychological terms, a game—and to play this game, you must put yourself in competition with everyone else playing the same game. This explains the essence of jealousy: in your fear of losing what you desperately want, you hate any person who might come between you and what you want.

So, regardless of how it happens, as those primitive needs are not met, then the “love” flip-flops into hatred and aggression. If you don’t believe it, take a look at the ugly process of our divorce courts for a perfect example. The world is cluttered with broken relationships that began in sweet love and ended in bitter anger and hate.

And all of this proves that true love, which is based in giving, not receiving, is pure and eternal, is never fleeting, and can never flip-flop into hate.

It’s just a shame that true love—the only true reparation—is feared by most families and is hardly ever taught to anyone, children or adults.

Abusive
 
“Lovers”

A client suffering in an abusive relationship will often look up through streaming tears after describing the abuser’s behavior and say to the psychologist, “But I love him.”

Fair enough, you might think. Offer love in spite of the abuse. After all, aren’t we told since childhood to “Do to others as you would have them do to you”? Isn’t that what love is?

Well, it is true that many saintly individuals have patiently suffered through difficult marriages. But saintly individuals do not need psychologists. If the abuse gets violent, police protection may be needed, but no one who understands true love will ever have to sit in front of a psychologist offering excuses.

Excuses serve to justify repeated behavior. And, as Freud discovered, repetition is the return of the repressed. What, then, is this repressed which keeps getting repeated? It can’t be love because true love can never be repressed.

The repressed is desire, and in abusive relationships it is a desire often hidden in plain sight. It’s the desire to receive what you are futilely trying to give away. It’s the desire to be wanted. And it’s such a desperate desire that you will suffer almost anything—from one failed “lover” to another—to maintain the illusion that someone wants you.

To bring this illusion to light, just consider the case of a person “involved” with (that is, not married to) an abusive alcoholic “lover.” Then ask this question: If you weren’t having sex with him or receiving monetary support from him, would you still stick around? If the answer is “No,” then you have the lie in plain sight. And if the answer is “Yes,” then why not take in every bum in the neighborhood and be a real saint?

So there you have it. “But I love him” really means you don’t understand love at all.

Sexual
 
Addiction

If you look in the DSM-IV,^[11] you can find a Sexual Desire Disorder called Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder which refers to “deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies or desire for sexual activity.” The fact that the DSM-IV does not have a Hyperactive Sexual Desire Disorder says quite a lot about our culture. Apparently, we seem to believe that “not enough” is a bad thing, but “too much”—at least, in regard to sex—is never too much, even if it provides much of the grease (or perhaps in this context I should say lubrication) on that proverbial slippery slope to hell.

Psychologically, all the addictions have roots in some pain or ugliness that a person wants to push out of awareness with the illusory thrill of intoxication. This intoxication doesn’t have to be chemical—even gambling can provide quite a “high.” Why else would we talk about any kind of arousal as getting “turned on” by something? 

In the 1950s, psychological researchers began to experiment with the intensely pleasurable effects of electrical stimulation of the brain on animal behavior.[12] One study [13] allowed rats to press a lever that stimulated the pleasure area of the hypothalamus; the rats pressed the lever continuously, several thousand times per hour, even to the point of collapsing from fatigue. Another study [14] found that female rats would even abandon their own newly born pups for the sake of the brain stimulation.

And so it is with erotic pleasure. The psychological problem with the intoxication by real or imagined sexual stimulation, therefore, is that the pleasure becomes an end in itself.

In the clinical setting, many persons addicted to erotic pleasure will confess that, in their childhood and adolescence, they lacked a clear sense of what they wanted to do with their lives. As a way to cope with the frustration of being overwhelmed by the obligations of a life to which they don’t feel any commitment in the first place, they turn to a preoccupation with sexual stimulation divested of any reproductive responsibility or commitment. Thus they get caught up in the meaningless euphoria of an impossible quest for a lost meaning.

Thus pornography takes on the excitement of the search for a stimulating image. Dating takes on the excitement of the search for a stimulating body. Masturbation takes on the excitement of the search for stimulation itself.

Now, some persons might try to justify their unconscious quest by saying that erotic pleasure is “natural.” That’s the real underlying philosophy to the Marquis de Sade’s writings, for example. And his name—de Sade— provides the underlying origin of our word sadism. It all comes down to saying, “Any body—man, woman, child, or animal—is as good as any other body. And anything goes—even someone’s pain—if it serves your pleasure.”   So there’s the “natural” for you.   And so, like all natural disasters, a sexual addiction leaves nothing in its path but a barren swath of sadistic or masochistic emotional destruction.

Which is why, for the sake of human dignity, sexual activity cannot become a recreational sport but must be contained with strict limits. If you don’t believe my words, maybe you will believe AIDS.

Then again, maybe you won’t.

So it is that in the obsession with erotic pleasure, as in all the other addictions, you don’t want to see the human destruction it causes. And, as long as you’re intoxicated, you can’t see it.

Speaking of intoxication, some persons wonder what effect alcohol has on sexual desire. Well, actually, it has no effect. Alcohol simply deadens the inhibitory function of the frontal lobe of the brain. So while the frontal lobe is trying to tell you, “Stop! This isn’t right!” the intoxicating effect of alcohol intercepts that message and substitutes its own subversive message: “Hey, if it feels good, do it.”

“Victimless”
 
Sex

I have seen parents who say to their children, “If you are going to smoke, I don’t want you smoking in the house. If you are going to drink alcohol, I don’t want you to bring alcohol into the house. If you are going to have sex, I want you to use protection. If you are going to have your boyfriend stay overnight, I want to see him sleeping on the couch in the living room when I get up in the morning. If you have a car accident, I want you to get it fixed yourself.” And then they turn to me and say, “See? We’re teaching our children responsibility.”

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