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| Chapter 4.
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Chapter 4. Deviant Desires
“Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.”. - Oscar Wilde (1)
“Sexual morality as society - and at its most extreme, American society - defines it, seems very despicable to me. I stand for a much freer sexual life.” - Sigmund Freud (2)
“Sooner or later, happily or unhappily, almost everyone fails to control his or her sex life.” - Michael Warner (3)
Appropriating Psychoanalysis
We might now be beginning to see that a psychoanalytic perspective inevitably, and necessarily, complicates the violent simplifications of moralistic purism. A qualification, however, may be timely at this point: perhaps we need to be more specific about which form of psychoanalysis we are drawing upon. Whereas it once exerted a humane influence on orthodox psychiatry, staying the hand of those who tried to cure mental anguish by cutting bits of the brain out or sending neurone-frying voltages across depressed cerebral cortices, clinical psychoanalysis, at least in its more institutionalised forms, has also been shamefully complicit in the pathologisation of sexual nonconformity. For a discipline whose originator regarded sexual convention as a primary cause of mental suffering, this is a curious development. Whilst I think it is broadly true to claim that the world is all the richer for psychoanalysis, I am less convinced that the same can be said for psychoanalysts. The clinical institutes set up internationally in Freud’s name have, I believe, all too frequently betrayed (or at least compromised) essential Freudian principals, such as emotional neutrality and benign scepticism, in favour of a specious authoritativeness and normative moral ideology.
The psychoanalysis I find most inspirational abjures medicalising and normalising narratives of mental and sexual development. It begins with the premise that we are linguistic animals, whose bodies will never be fully at home in language. The best psychoanalytic writing - and Freud, despite his detractors, remains a most gifted and evocative writer - is less concerned with forcing people to conform with spuriously pre-ordained truths than it is with inspiring people to find new vocabularies to live by. Freud was a living paradox: a medically qualified scientist with a flamboyantly wayward poetic sensibility. He was, as his work shows, never able to reconcile these forces; those clinicians who have subsequently turned psychoanalysis into a form of medical treatment have done so largely by jettisoning what is most specifically Freudian in the process.
The Freudian tradition that I prefer happily engages in ostensibly non-psychoanalytic conversations; it is not so much a branch of psychology, which generally aims to redirect deviant individuals back to the straight and narrow path of normality, as a radical alternative to it. In this version of psychoanalysis, it is normalcy, or rather, our willingness to acquiesce in a dominant moral ideology that generates widespread unhappiness and illness, which in turn requires analysis. It is 'normalcy' which requires (radical, non-normative) psychoanalytic/political analysis, rather than deviance. A psychoanalysis which joins forces with a political critique of regimes of the normal is to be welcomed, not resisted. It welcomes conversations with political history and is sceptical of normalising narratives. Insofar as it is a ‘clinical’ practise, it is more a form of friendship than a method of treatment (if a friend is someone I can talk to without censoring my thoughts). Perhaps most valuable of all to those of us who have been abjected by fascist moralism, it offers a critique of coercive normativity on the basis that deviation is intrinsic to human sexuality, not merely the preserve of a bunch of perverts. In this respect it is universalising rather than minoritising; it suggests that even judges and senior policemen are subject to unbidden erections and ‘inappropriate’ erotic fantasies, just like everyone else. From a psychoanalytic point of view, what is normal about normality is not conventional morality so much as the myriad ways we fail to abide by it.
When psychoanalysis is freed from institutional ownership, it is capable of yielding radically emancipatory insights, not least because it plays havoc with all attempts to categorise and label. The Freudian unconscious, which no one is immune to, is the seat of ceaseless mobility and subversion; it cannot be petrified into a stable essence or an authoritative formulation. This applies as much to my words as to those of the ‘strategic enemy’ Foucault warned us of. When I talk of moralists, perhaps I am trying to describe something that infects us all, albeit to varying extents: a version of ourselves which requires authority and certainty to proscribe the threat of liberty and doubt. When we read Michael Warner’s opening sentence to his rousing little book of 1999, quoted above, our moralistic selves will dilate with censorious indignation, while our more pragmatic selves will acknowledge its unremarkable truthfulness. Perhaps we should learn to become a little more cautious when we find ourselves governed by our moralistic inclinations; from a psychoanalytic point of view, repugnance is a ruse we deploy in order to avoid engaging with perturbing insights.
Whilst we might justifiably be sceptical about the entire project of identifying types of person – species of humanity – because of its inherent murderousness (‘bad’ types can be eradicated for the sake of the ‘good’), we may nonetheless hold that we can allow ourselves to identify strongly with specific political structures. One structure, the one favoured by our authorities, once believed that moral virtue was given to us by God; only the wilfully sinful would deviate. Secular versions of this replace God with Nature (or what we might call ‘innate decency’): sexual ‘propriety’ is directed by a ‘healthy’ genetic constitution – decency is in the DNA. ‘Straying’ from ‘appropriateness’ is a form of personal sickness or wickedness. In other words, deviants are genetically abnormal (and therefore inferior), or wilfully defying nature. At least when God was alive, there was a prospect of repentance, forgiveness and going on to live a good life. But when primitive secularists come to town, punishment and eradication become the name of the game.
Substituting one ‘God term’ for another does not necessarily enlighten. If we depose ‘the Almighty’ in favour of ‘normalcy’, where does this lead us? Normalcy is a vacuous concept so long as it remains purely statistical; it’s just what a majority of people do. A desire to be normal, as Warner notes, should lead all of us to clamour for outstanding personal debt and bad breath. Secular fundamentalism may not be a progressive alternative to religious obscurantism so much as a continuation of it, albeit in distorted form. To declare oneself secular without a familiarity with the great religions is to foster delusions of progressiveness based on the repression of religious credos. Whatever is repressed, as Freud so luminously showed us, will return in distorted form. Only ignorance could lead us to claim that religious texts are devoid of value; whilst we should rightly dismiss crude literalists, who think that God wrote the Bible, we might become enriched by enduring wisdom through an engagement with religious texts. Scandalously, Christ did not honour the honourable; instead, He reached out for the disparaged, the wretched, the lonely and the rejected. At its best, Christ’s vision offered solidarity to all who had been brought low by arrogant righteousness. To be righteous, from a Christian point of view, was to acknowledge that none of us are free from sin or temptation, even if institutionalised Christianity subsequently unleashed horrific torture and bloodshed on anyone it declared heretical.
Institutionalised thought, however, inevitably means conventional thought. Conventions conserve, we are supposed to accept, the wisdom of our ancestors. Freudian thought has some politely ‘inappropriate’ responses to these assumptions. Perhaps we might profitably continue to bring a Freudian perspective to bear upon the truth claims of raging righteousness.
Normotic Personalities and Freudian Slips
A number of prominent psychoanalysts, notably Christopher Bollas and Joyce McDougall, have described an almost totally irremediable state of mind found in some patients who seek nothing else than to be (seen to be) normal (4). They appear to be profoundly disconnected from any access to their own unconscious mental life. This does not mean that they do not have an unconscious: one would be floridly mad if one did not push most of one’s whims, impulses and fancies out of sight for much of the time. To be conscious of everything in our minds is to be overwhelmed and paralysed. But these patients are radically resistant to any form of contact with unconscious activity. Since it is the unconscious which devises our symptoms, or at least our preoccupations (which, from a Freudian point of view, are symptoms), this is a potentially serious handicap.
Psychoanalysis depends for its efficacy on facilitating receptiveness to the anarchic productivity of the unconscious mind. Freud had discovered that in conversations governed by conscious intentionality, conventional rules of grammar and syntax pertain. Words ostensibly refer directly to their referents, and the speaker speaks his mind. But consciously crafted words and sentences are not the only utterances that escape from our mouths. Take for example, the man waiting to buy airline tickets to Pittsburgh in a North American airport. When he finally gets to the front of the queue he notices an extremely attractive and well-endowed young woman behind the counter. To his dismay, he finds the words “Two pickets to Tittsburgh” falling out of his mouth instead of the intended request. It is as if two versions of him, with quite different aims and purposes, are competing simultaneously for the use of his mouth (5).
The Freudian unconscious is not a bizarre menagerie of wild lusts and irrational passions: it thinks and lives, and it is ingeniously opportunistic. It, too, has syntax and grammar, but of a radically different kind to that of conscious speech. If our conscious selves are our prosaic selves, our unconscious selves are more like subversive dissident poets. As Jacques Lacan discovered in his fabulous re-reading of Freud’s texts in the light of modern linguistics, the unconscious operates through the inventive deployment of metaphor and metonymy, substitution and combination, pun and rhyme. Far from being a hidden and obscure nether-region, the unconscious is there for all to see. It is more accurate to suggest that we are in unconsciousness, rather than the unconscious is in us (although together, both statements amount to a truer description).
For those who continue to dismiss the agency of unconscious desire, here is Paul Keegan, in his introduction to the exhilarating new translations of Freud in the New Penguin Freud series:
“Doing nothing much is one thing; getting it wrong, suggests Freud, is something more interesting. Ordinary acts bristle with redundancy – with stumbling, slipping, falling; with dropping things, knocking things over, losing things, pouring things over ourselves, with forgetting each other’s names, addressing each other by the wrong names, mislaying the names of our husbands, of our cities; with forgetting what we intend to do, omitting to carry out tasks, mixing up dates. Our days are full of farcical detour and unscripted subplots. We cannot trust ourselves to post our letters, we make mistakes in the writing, we wrongly address them to those for who they are specifically not intended. We put calls through to the wrong people. We take the wrong trains, we register our children with the wrong names, we forget to sign cheques. No sooner do we receive presents than we mislay them. We are inept at dodging each other in the street, and we cannot be relied on to cross an empty thoroughfare without getting run over. More generally, we produce a constant unspecified static: we fiddle with our clothes and our hair, we scribble things, we jingle our coins, we hum tunes ‘thoughtlessly’, like Sterne’s Uncle Toby; we make meaningless gestures and movements; we are obscurely ‘impelled’ to perform odd acts, acts which are not quite actions. We are the landing strips for all these minor furies. And through it all we say – or rather we come out with – the wrong things, with hybrid utterance, with things concealed but struggling for appearance.” (6)
If our conscious selves try to nail down our utterances and fashion authoritative declarations, our unconscious selves mischievously pull the rug out from under our attempts at mastery and certainty. From a Freudian perspective, Everyman is found in our so-called errors and slips, not in our consciously articulated proclamations and public posturing. If most ordinary people can recognise themselves in Keegan’s summation of the ignored slips, bungles and accidentally blurted truths cluttering our everyday lives, we are already more dissident, and more Freudian, than our conformist selves would like to concede.
Normotic personalities, however, would be stricken; phenomena such as multiple meanings, sliding associations, metonymic mobility are terrifyingly destabilising to the lovers of certainty and enclosure. This is perhaps the main reason why policemen and poets do not make compatible soul mates. We might be experiencing, in the setting up of Orwellian Sex Crime departments (or, to use the officially preferred epithet in the UK, ‘MAPPA’ - Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements - a principal aim of which appears to be the policing of middle-aged men’s private erotic fantasies) an employment bureau for normotic personalities.
To analyse this particular incompatibility a little further, perhaps we may go so far as to wonder whether the decision to become a policeman might itself be a defence against extraordinarily powerful ‘poetic’ tendencies, especially if we are referring to those officers who have chosen to police the sexuality of others. Facetiousness aside, there is a serious, if not pivotal, point in this speculative assertion. Poetry is notoriously promiscuous in its use of metaphor and metonymy; it is unruly, iconoclastic and sometimes shockingly counter-conventional, rousing us out of conformist modes of thought and drawing us to view the world from entirely new perspectives. Unsurprisingly, for those who know that poems are not simply pretty verses (and that love is not merely a warm fuzzy feeling), what we are describing here as characteristics of ‘poetry’ can be seen to apply in all respects to human sexuality.
Human desire, no matter how pious the proclaimed intentions of the person it inhabits (and animates) may be, pays no respect to hierarchy or rank, gender or ‘race’, age or achievement. It is relentlessly impersonal in the midst of our most person-respecting efforts. Whilst we are doing our best to be decent and nice and holistic, our desire starts dancing to an accidentally noticed ear lobe, or the hollow of a neck, or the enchanting colour of an eye. A prince can desire a pauper, a racist a black man, a victim-feminist a misogynist. Perhaps most perturbing of all in our culture of compulsory paedohysteria, a schoolboy can lust after a favourite teacher. When Freud dislodged desire from the strangulations of joyless moralism and observed where it went, he noted that it was vagrantly experimental and prodigally wayward, ingeniously opportunistic and rudely irreverent. It can be mobilised by the curve of an eyebrow, the movement of a hand, the timbre of a voice, the dreaminess of a gaze, the lustre of eyelashes.
Desire and Deviancy (the Paradox of Prohibition)
Michael Warner gives a vivid summary of normotic moralism in his intelligent, urgent quarrel with sexual normalcy:
“The received wisdom, in straight culture, is that all of its different norms line up, that one is synonymous with the others. If you are born with male genitalia, the logic goes, you will behave in masculine ways, desire women, desire feminine women, desire them exclusively, have sex in what are thought to be normally active and insertive ways and within officially sanctioned contexts, think of yourself as heterosexual, identify with other heterosexuals, trust in the superiority of heterosexuality no matter how tolerant you might be, and never change any part of this package from childhood to senescence. Heterosexuality is often a name for this entire package, even though attachment to the other sex is only one element. If you deviate at any point from this program, you do so at your own cost. And one of the things straight culture hates most is any sign that the different parts of the package might be recombined in an infinite number of ways. But experience shows that this is just what tends to happen. If heterosexuality requires the entire sequence, then it is very fragile. No wonder it requires so much terror to induce compliance.” (7)
There are striking resemblances between what Warner here calls ‘straight culture’ and what we have been calling ‘politically correct moralism’. Perhaps it accounts for why so many victim feminists, allegedly radical and ‘anti-patriarchal’ women, have felt wholly at ease in the company of fascist religious fundamentalists who would still like to burn every non-hetero at the stake. This might itself be a result of their naïve and facile (non)analysis of the politics of the State. As Camille Paglia once noted, women who want to run to the State as a kind of husband every time an impolite male offends them are more than flirting with crude authoritarianism (does anyone really want a policeman and a social worker adjudicating on their erotic fantasies?). I don’t think Warner would dissent from the view that there are large numbers of people who regard themselves as ‘hetero’ sexuals who harbour no malice or paranoia toward ‘non-hetero’ sexuals. But those who have adopted a militantly ‘heteromoralist’ stance - the devoutly ‘heteronormative’ - will find the fight against fascist modes of thought incredibly difficult to resist. “Nasty types of people (i.e., anyone we don’t like) must be eliminated!” appears to be the popular front behind which victimologists and fascists have united.
Whilst Warner does not develop his arguments in a specifically psychoanalytic direction, even though he is by no means hostile to Freud, we might start a certain psychoanalytic speculation on his thoughts. Contrary to the conventional view that prohibition comes into play in order to block deviant impulses (originally, the devil’s temptations), Freud’s radiant texts show us that desire and repression are complicit rather than opposed. He was the first to recognise that not only do the forces of repression grow ever stronger with every successful act of prohibition but the prohibition itself creates what it is supposed to prevent (Foucault would undoubtedly have agreed, even though he was often less than generous to Freud). From a Freudian perspective, when society introduces impossible moral proscriptions, deviation is desire.
When James Jackson Putnam, an analyst from Harvard, wrote to Freud expressing his view that analysts should take a stronger moral line with their patients, he received the reply which forms the second epigram to this chapter. Henry Abelove, the gay American historian in whose superb essay this quotation features, notes that Freud ‘knew, despised and opposed’ moralistic strains such as Putnam’s (8). Freud’s published writing can be superficially misleading - at times he appears to be siding with social conventions, only to politely blow them apart a few sentences later, or more immediately in a footnote. In his famous Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (a work he could not leave alone, returning to it and adding footnotes for a decade and a half after its first publication in 1905) for example, he writes:
“By demonstrating the part played by perverse impulses in the formation of symptoms in psychoneuroses, we have increased the number of people who count as perverts to a quite extraordinary level … [We] are forced by the extraordinary distribution of perversions to assume that even the predisposition towards perversions must not be something rare and special but is part of the constitution that is considered normal.”
- Sigmund Freud (9)
As I suspect he knew very well, even in 1905, this definition makes perverts of us all.
But he is not simply saying that what he continues to call ‘perversion’ is more common than many people would like to think; he is going much, much further, as Jonathan Dollimore brings out in his scintillating book of 1991 (10). Politely admonishing fellow (non-psychoanalytic) doctors for their customary expressions of personal revulsion whenever they discuss ‘the confusions of the sexual drives’ - an attitude of moralistic disdain he clearly regards as contemptible (‘superfluous’ and ‘not appropriate’ are the more courteous terms Freud uses) - he draws attention to ‘the vagueness of the boundaries of what might be called a normal sexual life in different races and different periods of time’ in order to ‘cool the protestors down.’ He is thinking of the Greeks, ‘a people culturally far superior to ourselves’, who not only tolerated men loving boys, but who saw such love as ‘endowed with important social functions.’(11) Imagine a group of child psychiatrists today being asked to comment on male pederasty: it would be virtually impossible for them to avoid loading their words with mandatory expressions of moral disapproval and indignation. We have not moved on from Freud so much as regressed to a pre-Freudian world of obligatory revulsion.
Most radically of all, Freud refuses to regard ‘the perversions’ as either ‘bestialities or degeneracies.’ While one may want to take issue with his continuing use of a word - perversion - that he is systematically draining of all the assumptions it customarily holds, it is abundantly clear that he is neither disgusted nor outraged when discussing it. He goes on to say, in the same text, that the perversions are “… the development of germs that are all contained within the undifferentiated sexual predisposition of the child … ”(12). For Freud, as he directly states immediately after this comment, we do not become perverse so much as remain so: a Freudian view of non-normative sexual expression not only refuses both moralistic condemnation and pseudo-medical pathologisation, it insists that normalcy is a deviation from original ‘perversion’. For Freud, ‘perversion’ was a relatively new, scientific word, which he preferred to the moralistic and anti-scientific term widely circulating in his day, ‘degeneracy.’
When he refers to the ‘undifferentiated sexual predisposition of the child’ he is suggesting that we are all born with a potential for sensual pleasure not yet channelled into what we might call heteronormativity. This early sensuality, which Freud regards as on a continuum with later sexuality, is perverse only in the sense that it has not yet learned the social prescription ‘man is for woman and woman is for man.’ It is an innocent repertoire of pleasures that can be mobilised by vivid colours, by touch, sound, non-nutritional sucking, the sensation of the faeces in the anus, rocking, diapering.
None of this is to suggest that everyone should become a devout Freudian, any more than reading Proust should make you a Proustian or Seamus Heaney a Heaneyian. But perhaps it is to suggest that we might do well to drop both reverence and rejection in favour of reckoning: not ‘Is Freud right or wrong’ or ‘good or bad’, but, now that we have his thought, how do we want to use it? This is Dollimore’s approach, which I think most can accept: Dollimore insists that he is not a Freudian, even though he is equally insistent on using Freudian concepts in his cultural materialist argument. We do not have to accept Freud’s notions of a pre-social libido in order to preserve the radical promise of his thought. We can read him as saying, which he does quite explicitly in his essay Civilised Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness (13)(and even more so in Civilisation and its Discontents (14), published 22 years later), not merely that the renunciation of pleasure required by society sets up a conflict between civilisation and our ‘instinctual’ nature, but that civilisation itself, as it ‘advances’ and accelerates its demands, generates its own internal subversion. In advancing itself, it becomes its own saboteur, generating both misery and the desire to evade misery with every successive request for more abstinence. When people are preoccupied with dilemmas like this, they are less free to produce, to contribute, although they may appear to conform superficially. I think Freud more than hints, with the second argument, at a radical alternative to politically correct moralism, which, as we have seen, masquerades as decency and righteousness whilst being increasingly unable to conceal its horribly soiled underwear (vicious, intolerant vindictiveness and proliferating paranoia).
If you tire of those who want to ban everything they feel offended by and imprison all whom they feel slighted or defied by (anyone who allows themselves to be groomed into a life of indulgent victimhood will invariably be limitlessly vengeful), the conflict-laden world-view offered by Freud at least allows some promise. Conflict can bring deadlock, although it more usually brings domination: those with power simply suppress those without. But it can also sponsor dialectic. And, to the lovers of domination, dialectic is deeply unsettling: if superior power is forced into an encounter with its subordinated terms, a transformation rather than a stalemate might take place. That superior power has resorted to terror and overwhelming force throughout history to secure its ascendancy does not vitiate subordinate arguments, even if it may result in the imprisonment, extermination or torture of dissident voices.
As Dollimore argues, Freud can be interpreted, from a cultural materialist perspective, as suggesting that authoritarian social norms are not threatened by external deviants: they generate their own inevitable resistance and subversion. The perversity such regimes so viscerally condemn are inevitable products of their own repressiveness. Perversity, in the sense of doing something improperly, might also be translated as doing something differently. The first definition employs notions of biblical wickedness to deter waywardness; the latter, an innocent, experimental curiosity.
To be commanded is, no matter how convincing the subsequent display of obedience, inevitably also to be incited. No matter how many times we hear the overt decree “Thou Shalt Not!” there is always a part of us which registers the obscene - off-scene, occult - commandment hidden in the prohibition itself (“You must!”). The Freudian super-ego, having got you to renounce a pleasure, continues to punish you for simply imagining the pleasure you have just given up. One is not rewarded for one’s conformity so much as made even more miserable by it. Whilst we are the animals who (have to) have consciences, super-ego conscience is always bad conscience: it obscenely enjoys the suffering it is promoting and grows more powerful with every act of compliance. Whilst it is never an easy or straightforward manoeuvre to move from the individual ego to society as a whole, the super-ego (‘over-I’) does sound uncannily like our modern day child salvationist movement. Every time it succeeds in instilling a fear, in ratcheting up paranoia, it swells in power and influence. But the paradox of prohibition is that it produces desires rather than suppresses them.
This has, of course, major implications for modern prohibitionists. “Don’t think of ‘under-age’ erotic scenarios” has precisely the same effect as “don’t think of a pink elephant.” In the latter case, your mind is ineluctably filled with puce pachyderms. In the former, you are inevitably incited to picture images which could well lead to your imprisonment and symbolic murder (for symbolic creatures such as human animals, symbolic murder is murder).
The fact that modern ‘paedophobe moralism’ can talk of nothing other than paedophilic imagery ought to alert us to the possibility that something intensely symptomatic is animating the morality police’s discourse. Could it be that our contemporary moralists, our orchestrators of murderous witch-hunts, are the only true paedophiles in town? Freud, I suspect, would have little difficulty in at least considering this hypothesis as worthy of further research.
Inadmissible evidence?
Whilst I think that scepticism is the wisest policy when considering any new research, there is nonetheless some ingenious work which might permit us to question the violent hierarchies - the decency/indecency, normal/abnormal binaries - that govern our lives so coercively. The penile plethysmograph is a brutally intrusive device used by the righteous – those who never have ‘inappropriate’ erotic feelings - to prove that perverts get aroused by dirty pictures of underage genitals (amongst other disgusting and vile things). Of course, the erection detectors are worn only by the identified perverts, never the investigators. But in one study, published in the impeccably respectable American Psychological Association’s Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1996, Professor Henry E. Adams of the University of Georgia’s Department of Psychology persuaded a group of ardently homophobic men to view gay porn with their militantly hetero-penises nestled securely in the notorious plethysmograph. Another group of heterosexual men who expressed no homophobic sentiments were also included in the study.
As you might have guessed, only the homophobic plethysmograph volunteers persistently demonstrated the most engorged penises whilst viewing gay erotica; ordinary heterosexual men with no animosity to homosexuality were unaroused. As the study calmly states: “Homophobia is apparently associated with homosexual arousal that the homophobic individual is either unaware of or denies.” (15) One cannot help wondering what the researchers would have found if their question had been “Is paedophobia associated with paedophilic arousal?” Militant paedofinders would perhaps prefer us not to speculate about this too much. From a psychoanalytic point of view, our most trenchant terrors, our most fervent fears, signpost our disavowed desires, the insistent longings we dare not acknowledge as our own, not real bogeymen.
When Freud was questioning (and politely obliterating) moralistic norms in nineteenth century bourgeois Vienna, the world he inhabited contained three basic categories of humanity: gentleman, ladies and degenerates (the Jews, of course, of which he was one, were shortly to be designated non-human). He did much to disorient these spurious categories. However, today, in the Department of Sex Crime, at any rate (which is perhaps one of the most enduring achievements of that grotesque mutation known as ‘New Labour’ in the UK), the joyless, life-blighting categories Freud did so much to deconstruct, live on with renewed vigour in the ‘progressive’ project of ‘protecting the vulnerable’. Our new, progressive fascists think that gays are tolerable; old-fashioned bigots got it wrong - it’s the pervs (those who find the beauty of the young enchanting) that we new, enlightened bigots are here to annihilate. Of course, a gay adult, even if he is an adult by a mere few minutes following his eighteenth birthday, will become officially a perv if he desires a boy one pubic hair short of the age of majority. He is the kind of gay who doesn’t count – a paedogay. As for those vile monsters who find young girls erotically beautiful, well … these monsters are paedobeasts who must be liquidated.
It should be clear by now that the signifier ‘paedo’ authorises murder and vigilante violence. But, if Freud is to be taken seriously, we are perhaps no more murderous than when we are condemning desires that are most proximate to us, that lie most immediately behind the line of prohibition we have just drawn (“Everywhere in sexuality, the highest and the lowest are most profoundly attached to one another (‘from heaven through the world to hell’ [Faust]).” (16) The police tend not to set up specialist coprophilia units (although I hesitate to suggest ideas) largely because turd idealisation remains an interest of an immeasurably tiny number of individuals - who could build a viable career out of hounding a handful of *bleep* worshippers? But if successful professional futures, and massive government funding, can be secured on the back of paedohunting and paedohysteria, might this be because, behind the obligatory disgust and revulsion, somewhere - oddly, uncannily - a large number of people can sense a twinge of paedocuriosity? From a Freudian perspective, this is less than surprising. Aggressive banning is an act of incitement: whatever you do, don’t think of what I’m about to tell you is prohibited. Even if this evoked curiosity is immediately othered onto a (fictional) type of person – the paedomonster - the continued fascination with paedohorror should suggest to even the most superficial Freudian sensibility that a malignantly pathological phenomenon is in full sway. Quite apart from the violent suppression of childhood sexuality involved in the ideologies of ‘innocence‘, ‘purity’ and ‘decency’, the war against the ‘sexualisation’ of childhood is the sexualisation children.
Whilst I am deliberately deprivileging the bits of Freud which authorise conservative renditions of sexual normativity, this has less to so with facile eclecticism than with the irreducibly paradoxical and revolutionary contributions he persistently made. I think Freud’s texts reveal that he spent his life in a struggle between his desire to build all-encompassing, teleological narratives of ‘normal’ development, and his acute awareness of a narrative-wrecking, insistently non-compliant unconscious dimension to human existence. He generally allowed the latter to (almost) invalidate the former. Here is that most supposedly Enlightment man of science at his all too typically post-Enlightenment best:
“Conditions permitting, even a normal person can replace the normal sexual goal with … a perversion, for some considerable time, or allow the two to coincide. In every healthy person a supplement that might be called perverse is present in the normal sexual goal, and this universality is sufficient in itself to suggest the pointlessness of using the term ‘perversion’ in an accusatory sense. It is precisely in the area of sexual life that we encounter particular and currently insoluble difficulties if we wish to draw a sharp distinction between mere variation within the physiological range and pathological symptoms.” (17)
Whilst using terms like ‘perverse’, ‘normal’ and ‘healthy’ he simultaneously erases the distinctions between them. As Robert May has put it, in “variations” we have not perversions but simply versions.”(18)
But if there are only versions rather than (per)versions, how do the guardians of normalcy justify their curious hierarchy of evil, in which ‘inappropriate’ erotic fantasies are regarded as far more deserving of intensive criminal investigation and public retribution than owning a third world sweat-shop in which huge numbers of small children’s lives are shortened by excessive over-work? Could it be that the former involves processes Freud would regard as pathological, whereas the latter is simply business as usual?
Normal moralism in 4-D: Desire, Disavowal, Displacement and Demonisation.
In his extraordinary essay of 1987, Leo Bersani opens his argument with the comment: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.” (19) Bersani is drawing attention to the gulf separating the experience of sexual intimacy as pleasure with the widespread sense of sexuality as violent, uncontrollable, abusive and dangerous. Citing the example of a family in an American town who had their house burned down by local residents because their three haemophiliac children were infected with the HIV virus (this was at the height of the moral panic generated by AIDS in the 1980s and early 1990s), he calmly makes the case that the arsonists were not simply maniacs.
Media representations of AIDS were almost without exception, from broadsheet coverage to tabloid, from ‘serious’ news and current affairs to talk radio, vituperatively terrorising and rampantly homophobic. Gay men, far from being depicted as the principal victims of a terrible public health tragedy, were consistently represented as the agents of their own death, and a threat to the ‘general public.’ HIV infection became a signifier of immoral gay evil (even if you were simply a haemophiliac who got infected through a contaminated infusion). Bersani’s essay is remarkable for his efforts, as a gay man, to calmly understand this representation.
Quoting the British sociologist Stuart Hall on the distinction between simple reflection and the much more elaborate processes of ‘representation’ - “the active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping, not merely the transmitting of already existing meaning, but the more active labour of making things mean” (quoted on p. 203) - Bersani shows how easy it is for people to build up deeply sedimented beliefs about those the media have ‘othered’ (represented) for them, beliefs which reflect irrational prejudice rather than measured analysis. With the violent hierarchy operating between ‘good’ (monogamous, family-protective) sexual intimacy and the dangerous (disavowed and projected) sexuality of ‘others’, he writes “An important lesson to be learned from the representation of AIDS is that the messages most likely to reach their destination are messages already there. Or, to put this in other terms, representations of AIDS have to be X-rayed for their fantasmatic logic; they document the comparative irrelevance of information in communication.” (20)
We need little encouragement, in other words, to vent visceral revulsion on those who symbolise our disavowed fantasies about sex because this is a displacement authorised by the factories of representation which virtually constitute the air that we breath from the moment of our arrival on the planet onwards.
If Freud is right, we can only register the existence of a deeply repressed desire in the form of its negation; where do our fantasies of dangerous ‘other’ sex come from? Bersani, perhaps surprisingly, follows some of the arguments of the principal architects of today’s victim feminists, such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who have militantly (and, it has to be said, eloquently) argued that pornography is simply a reflection of the pervasive male domination of women and, as such, is intrinsically violent, even where ‘overt’ violence is not depicted. It is violent, from their perspective, because it eroticises a politically entrenched inequality. As Bersani notes, the ultimate logic of MacKinnon’s and Dworkin’s critique of pornography is the criminalisation of sex itself until it has been reinvented.
Radically dissenting from this utopian conclusion, Bersani argues that power and powerlessness, mastery and subordination, are not statuses belonging to types of people, or to genders, so much as rhythms, intrinsic to human sexual experience from early life onwards. If we could learn to resist putting one side of this dialectic into a separate species of humanity, if we could live a truly reciprocal sexual life - not a reciprocity between persons, but a reciprocity between the erotics of power and its thrilling relinquishment dancing in us all - we may become less paranoid, less needful of imaginary scapegoats and less drawn to utopian projects of sexual purification. As Bersani notes:
“The panic about child abuse is the most transparent manifestation of this compulsion to rewrite sex. Adult sexuality is split in two: at once redeemed by its retroactive metamorphosis into the purity of an asexual childhood, and yet preserved in its most sinister forms by being projected onto the image of the criminal seducer of children. “Purity” is crucial here: behind the brutalities against gays, against women, and, in the denial of their very nature and autonomy, against children lies the pastoralizing, the idealizing, the redemptive project … More exactly, the idealization is identical to the brutalization.” (21)
Using real children as repositories for our wished for innocent ‘inner child’ is itself an insidious form of child abuse. Bersani’s work suggests that, whilst it may never by possible to make sex completely safe, and the effort to do is likely to be both tyrannising and counterproductive, we may yet be able to make it saner. It is to this possibility, in the form of an ethic of sexual autonomy, that we might usefully turn next.
(1) Oscar Wilde (1891/2001) “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” in Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, p. 1081, St Helens: Collins
(2) Letter from Sigmund Freud to James Jackson Putnam, quoted in Henry Abelove (1966) ‘Freud, Male Homosexuality, and the Americans’ Dissent (Winter 1966), p 63.
(3) Michael Warner (1999) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life New York: The Free Press, p.1
(4) See Christopher Bollas (1987) “Normotic illness” in Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known” London: Free Associations Books and Joyce McDougall (1990) “Plea for a Measure of Abnormality” in Plea for a Measure of Abnormality London: Free Associations Books
(5) This example is taken from Phil Mollon’s concise and enlightening little book of 2000 ‘The Unconscious’ (p. 3) in the “Ideas in Psychoanalysis” series, Cambridge: Icon Books.
(6) Paul Keegan (2002) “Introduction” to Sigmund Freud (1901/2002) The Psychopathology of Everyday Life p. viii, (The New Penguin Freud series, General Editor: Adam Phillips) London: Penguin Books Ltd
(7) Michael Warner (1999) The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics and the Ethics of Queer Life New York: The Free Press, ibid., pp. 37 - 38
(8) Henry Abelove (1966) “Freud, Male Homosexuality and the Americans”
(9) Sigmund Freud (1905/2006) “Three Essays on Sexual Theory”, republished in Sigmund Freud (2006) The Psychology of Love, p.145 (The New Penguin Freud series, General Editor: Adam Phillips) London: Penguin Books Ltd.
(10) Jonathan Dollimore (1991) Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault Oxford: Oxford University Press
(11) Sigmund Freud (1905/2006) “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora)” in Sigmund Freud (2006) The Psychology of Love p.39, (The New Penguin Freud series, General Editor: Adam Phillips) London: Penguin Books Ltd
(12) Sigmund Freud (1905/2006) ibid. , p.39
(13) Sigmund Freud (1908/2002) “‘Civilised’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” in Sigmund Freud (2002) Civilization and Its Discontents (The New Penguin Freud series, General Editor: Adam Phillips) London: Penguin
(14) Sigmund Freud (1912/2006) “Civilization and Its Discontents” in Sigmund Freud (2002) Civilization and Its Discontents (The New Penguin Freud series, General Editor: Adam Phillips) London: Penguin
(15) Henry E. Adams, Lester W. Wright, Jr., and Bethany A. Lohr (1996) “Is Homophobia Associated With Homosexual Arousal?” Journal of Abnormal Psychology Volume 105, No. 3, pp440-5.
(16) Sigmund Freud (1905/2006) “Three Essays on Sexual Theory”, republished in Sigmund Freud (2006) The Psychology of Love, p.137, (The New Penguin Freud series, General Editor: Adam Phillips) London: Penguin Books Ltd.
(17) Sigmund Freud (1905/2006) “Three Essays on Sexual Theory”, republished in Sigmund Freud (2006) The Psychology of Love, p.136, (The New Penguin Freud series, General Editor: Adam Phillips) London: Penguin Books Ltd.
(18) Robert May (1995) “Re-Reading Freud on Homosexuality” in Thomas Domenici and Ronnie C. Lesser (1995) Disorientating Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Reappraisals of Sexual Identity, p. 161, New York and London: Routledge
(19) Leo Bersani (1987) “Is the Rectum A Grave?”, originally published in October, No. 43, Winter 1987; re-published in Douglas Crimp (ed.) (1988) AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, p.197, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: October Books
(20) Bersani, ibid., p.210
(21) Bersani, ibid., p. 221
Copyright © Inquisition 21st century
Go to Chapter 5.
Created on 04/10/2009 08:43 AM by Editor
Updated on 04/10/2009 09:01 AM by Editor
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