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| Chapter 7
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Chapter 7. Sexuality in 2D: Cartoon psychology and problem of human complexity.
“It is no accident that in the United States the phrase ‘sex and violence’ is used as one word to describe acts of equal wickedness, equal fun, equal danger to that law and order our masters would impose on us. Yet equating sex with violence does change the nature of each (words govern us more than anatomy), and it is quite plain that those who fear what they call permissiveness do so because they know that if sex is truly freed of taboo it will lead to torture and murder because that is what they dream of …”
Gore Vidal (1971/1999), (1)
“Police believe that up to 50,000 sexual predators are surfing the net at any time.”
The Daily Mail newspaper (UK), 6th August 2006 (2)
“Those who rule us have brilliantly applied the maxim that the best defence against truth is the unswerving repetition of lies.”
Leo Bersani (2008), (3)
Pleasure and Danger
i) Criminalising fantasy
If you believe that, today, children are imperilled as never before by sexual predators stalking the internet, that an overstretched police force is beleaguered by inadequate funding in its efforts to hold back massive high-tech child exploitation, that every child porn image is an image of abuse, a permanent record of a crime scene, and that every time it is viewed the child depicted is re-abused, that the police insistence that anyone who views these images will inevitably go on to assault a child must be accepted without question, and that this is why these individuals must be pursued and punished with the utmost ruthlessness - you should stop reading forthwith. There is little comfort, let alone confirmation, for you in what follows.
In the climate of a virtual wall-to-wall media endorsement of these assertions, it may appear certifiably insane to suggest a radically contrary view: that a far greater danger to the well-being of children is posed by the intrusion of police forces and law courts into the sacrosanct (and irreducibly ambiguous) space of intrapsychic erotic fantasy, that this violation is causing the most appalling and irreversible damage, agony and destruction in the lives of alarmingly large numbers of ordinary, harmless men and their loved ones, and that children are being horrifically traumatised by the invasion of the State into personal privacy. Even so, this is precisely the argument which forms the foundation for what follows.
To compound matters, I concluded the last chapter with Leo Bersani’s claim that the victim feminists’ analysis of sexuality can be used to advocate the precise opposite of the straight-laced sexual chastity they have been promoting; in other words, it gives us the grounds for advocating more promiscuity, more pornography, more sex. As is becoming rather customary, in order to prove that I am not simply unhinged, I find myself again with quite a bit of explaining to do – enough, I should forewarn you, to fill this chapter and the next.
What follows is not primarily based on the chilling information unearthed by investigative journalist Duncan Campbell in the UK that the British police catastrophically ignored obvious and unambiguous evidence that many of the men they were rounding up in dawn raids during the first wave of the witch hunt, Operation Ore, were innocent victims of credit card fraud (4). If true, this represents professional neglect and contemptuous indifference of breathtaking proportions (and appears to have resulted in multiple suicides amongst the accused); but I think the real crime of the ‘child porn’ witch-hunters is more malignant even than this.
The drive to elevate the private possession of some categories of pornography to the same level as sexual assault is closer to my concerns in this work. Lowering the threshold for the definition of serious crime is a relatively effortless way of creating the helpful illusion that the police are catching more criminals. It’s far easier, after all, to shoot fish in a barrel than to go to all the effort of angling or deep sea fishing; just label a bunch of hapless, net-surfing depressives who would never harm a child as ‘paedos’ and you’ve got a crime wave to crush. As for those who abduct, molest and assault children – well, they’re far too difficult to track down, too small in number to make a viable career out of and they require too much time and tedious donkey work to boot. Better by far to pretend that the two groups are the same; then you can round impressive numbers of people up and throw them in gaol to a great fanfare of media adulation. This is the lie which is authorising the devastation of many lives in the name of justice.
ii) Fantasy, Intention, Behaviour (FIB)
Gore Vidal manages in the single epigrammatic paragraph quoted above to say what has taken me six chapters to articulate: ‘words govern us more than anatomy.’ I’d like to stay with this theme and see where it leads us. Words seem to transmogriphy us from frail animals trying to survive the awesome power of nature’s contingencies into frail animals who can also compose symphonies and build fabulous bridges. Amongst other things: the dark side of our status as speaking animals is that we appear to be the only species on the planet capable of genocide (as Terry Eagleton once noted, there is a depressingly long list of human agents of massacre but we have yet to find the giraffe guilty of one). Despite our astounding capacity for good and evil we cannot escape the rude limitations of our animal bodies – as we saw in the last chapter, like penguins and antelope, we still have bowel movements and, ultimately, perish (we are, as Ernest Becker put it, gods with arseholes).
Language, which I believe should include all the means we humans deploy to convey messages to one another, both verbal and extra-verbal, has had a tremendous effect on our species’ sexuality, making it wholly incommensurate with that of any other living creature. One may draw similarities vis-à-vis anatomical structures or the mechanics of procreation by studying other species, but there all similarity ends. A dog may hump your leg with wild abandon, but it is doubtful whether he is having complex erotic fantasies whilst doing so. To put this another way, we humans may indulge frequently in what our ancestors called the sin of self-abuse but it is inconceivable that we are not entertaining all manner of imaginary sexual scenarios as a precondition for such debasement. Whilst it is not improbable to find one person turning to another after making love and saying, “I’ll tell you who I was thinking of if you tell me who you were thinking of”, it would be beyond the limits of credulity to suppose that such fantasmatic accompaniments adorn the sex acts of squirrels or rabbits, even though the latter reputedly go in for more sex acts than most.
If sexual fantasy is one of the most defining distinctions between humans and other animals, we might do well to explore it. Where do sexual fantasies come from and why do we have them? What are we to make of them? What are they? Wakeful dreams? Wishes? Thoughts? Child Salvationists claim, of course, that they already know: sexual fantasies are intentions. If this were so, the incidence of sexual assault, molestation and ‘inappropriate’ touching would probably rise to include every man woman and child on the planet, so it might be wise to ditch this ludicrous assertion without wasting too much time on it.
(iii) Refused Questions
The salvationists appear to be exercised by just one question to the exclusion of all others: how can we stop people from having ‘inappropriate’ sexual fantasies? Unusually in the field of human sexuality, there appears to be only one sane answer: we can’t. Even the most avidly puritanical victimologist is unlikely to be able prevent herself from experiencing spontaneous and unbidden erotic stirrings toward a passer-by in the shopping mall, a work colleague, a friend or neighbour, or, heaven forbid, that colleague’s or friend’s adolescent son or daughter. A sane response to these unwilled imaginary scenarios might be simply to enjoy them while they last, speculate (free associate) about why they might have affected us as they did, and shrug them off afterwards; few of us feel compelled to act on everything that passes through our minds - an essential indicator of sanity is the ability to distinguish between fantasy and action. Those who feel dangerously close to acting on their fantasies may require aggressively enforced prohibitions, but just about everyone else can separate their private fantasies from their behaviour (the argument that ‘others’ might act out their desires in a ruthless and uncontrollable way is a displacement or projection: the ‘othering’ of desires we would rather not own up to having).
It would be more productive to explore the questions the victimologists would prefer us not to consider. “What are erotic fantasies and why do we have them?” is a rather more open-ended query than the porn police would like it to be. Rather than responding as though we were being interrogated by the sex inquisition, with the implication that there are right and wrong (straight and deviant) answers, we might instead try a more speculative approach. To do otherwise, to delineate definitive formulations, would be to distort and congeal an inherently enigmatic and mutable phenomenon (there is a limit to what we can learn about the lives of butterflies once they have become samples in a cabinet; like authoritative theories of sexuality, they may look impressive but they are, nonetheless, dead objects removed from their habitats). There are, I hope to suggest, good reasons for supposing that it is the free flow of speculation which makes sexuality at least liveable with, whereas all efforts to petrify it in formulation convert it into a dangerously neurotic symptom.
Our species has made pleasure dangerous, in more ways than one, and our masters have throughout the ages elaborated rigid and prescriptive rules about which pleasures are permissible and which are to be damned. This is not to dispute that some varieties of ‘pleasure’ are inherently malignant: few of us are blithely permissive toward those who take their pleasure at the expense of others, who thrill to another’s humiliation or pain (although victim feminists and their allies in the sex police seem to have made socially valorised careers out of such sadism). But the rules I am referring to have little relation much of the time to anything that might sanely be considered ‘harmful’. There may be a universal human disposition toward seeking pleasurable experiences, but when the neurotic moralism of our rulers intervenes, you can be sure that, wherever there is pleasure, there is danger. In addition to the queries raised so far, we might ask why this should be so – why should pleasure be so fraught with danger?
In posing these questions I am not pretending that definitive answers, in the sense of authoritative conclusions, can be reached because they clearly cannot. To ask ‘What is the meaning of sex?’ is necessarily to inaugurate interminable conjecture, conjecture which moral authoritarians would like to close down. It is more a psychoanalytic question than a test; it is free association, not formulation, which is likely to produce the most interesting (and emancipatory) responses. And it is free-associative speculation, rather than spurious oracular authority, which will keep us humane.
As has become tiresomely predictable, I find myself unable to proceed directly to a speculative reply without first taking the now customary detour. Before I can think about what a good sexual life might be, I find myself having to dispense first with what it is not.
“Learned Deviant Behaviour” and Cartoon Psychology
i) Perverts, perversion and preferred prejudices
During June 2009, the mainstream media experienced one of its perennial convulsions about child molestation as stories of women who sexually abuse children began to emerge. In the UK, a thirty-nine year old female nursery worker, Vanessa George, was arrested and charged with sexually assaulting and making indecent images of some of the children she was working with. Before Ms George was proclaimed guilty of the charge, a number of ‘experts’ came forward to give instant pronouncements on the phenomenon of female sexual abuse of children. Not untypical is the following excerpt from an article written by Dr Michele Elliott in the UK’s Guardian newspaper:
“Like most male abusers, female abusers tend to have been abused themselves as kids. Paedophiles … often try to claim their attraction to children is a sexual orientation, like homosexuality or bisexuality; … it isn't – it is a learned deviant behaviour.”
(The Guardian newspaper, 11th June 2009)
Dr Elliott is the founder and director of the ‘child safety’ UK charity Kidscape and a prominent child protection campaigner of many years standing. She and others like her have helped elevate the ‘danger’ of ‘paedophilia’ to such a degree that it has become a national panic out of all proportion to its actual extent: ‘promoting child safety’ almost invariably means ‘provoking parental paranoia’ by fanning florid and groundless paedohysteria. The British sociologist, Frank Furedi would, I suspect, classify Dr Elliott as an especially accomplished ‘fear entrepreneur’ – one of those who have successfully exploited the burgeoning market in irrational anxiousness which characterises our age. With that said, perhaps we might take her assertions seriously, which of course does not mean accepting them at face value.
We ought to be able to safely ignore her first sentence: it is just popular mythology, a kind of folk-psychology, but we can see from the casual way in which Dr Elliott uses it as unquestionable fact, it has come to form a foundational belief for most child salvationists. More precisely, we might X-ray Dr Elliott’s comment for its core fantasy: she cleverly inverts the line of causality, a well-established ruse of unconscious mental processes, because what she is actually saying is: “sexual ‘abuse’ causes sexual abuse.” This is the principal reason why ‘minors’ who have had ‘underage’ sexual experiences (who are automatically designated by salvationists as ‘abused’ or ‘abuser’, irrespective of their own experience of the activity) are compelled to undergo coercive and manipulative ‘treatments’ along with frankly abusive long-term surveillance, the principle, panic-stricken, aim of which appears to be to prevent them from ‘abusing’ others in the future. The evidence in reality is far more ambiguous – research by a team from Great Ormond Street Hospital (5) strongly suggested that large numbers of sexually assaulted children do not go on to sexually offend. Some do, but many don’t.
The most important and compelling inference emerging from this team’s work with 25 sexually abused adolescent boys was that early exposure to intrafamilial violence was a significantly more potent risk factor for future sexual offending than a history of prior sexual assault. Boys who had not experienced family violence did not offend sexually. This corresponds with the research of Rind, Bauserman, and Tromovitch which we looked at in Chapter Five. Perhaps its failure to correspond with the populist folklore the child exploitation industry has worked so hard to cultivate over the last few decades accounts for why it, like Rind et al’s research, has been largely ignored.
ii) Beastly baddies, narcissistic repair and transformational objects: 2-D psychology or psychoanalysis?
One of the Great Ormond Street study’s most powerful features was the painstaking in-depth work undertaken with these young people (three of the researchers were psychoanalytic psychotherapists); unlike much of the research using larger sample populations, this data did not primarily arise from psychometric questionnaires but from careful analyses of the fine detail of psychotherapeutic conversations.
With a questionnaire, you can simply appoint your preferred self as respondent, the version of you which tries ceaselessly to show you in the best possible light. However, you can be sure of one thing: in this field of evaluation, as soon as you have been re-classified from human being to thought-crime sex offender, the questions fired at you in the test will be heavily loaded with the examiner’s presumptions: “You make a sexual pass at a child: will she/he be excited, frightened, proud, etc? Tick the answer you consider most likely.” The fact that by far the vast majority of the men rounded up for looking at pictures – most of whom are sane but slightly depressed individuals who have no difficulty in distinguishing between fantasies and behaviour - wouldn’t consider for a moment making a sexual pass at a child doesn’t have any place in such a ‘psychometric evaluation.’
Psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (whose extraordinary analysis of the fascist state of mind we looked at in Chapter 1.) repeatedly found in his clinical work that many people seemed driven to seek a unique kind of experience, an experience they could not readily formulate in words but yet intuitively had a deep familiarity with. For Bollas, when we find ourselves, as adults, seeking ‘objects’ which enable an uncanny sense of fusion with them, of an inexpressibly deep healing, we are re-visiting an early, pre-verbal experience. He notes the deep subjective rapport we sometimes have when encountering such an ‘object’ – a psychoanalytic term for anything that evokes powerful emotional responses in us, including aspects of other people, like eye colour, voice, mannerism, body shape (the list is endless). Bollas mentions other such objects: a painting, a poem, an aria or symphony, or a natural landscape (I would only add ‘an image’).
Bollas’ startling take on these uncannily familiar occurrences – which we can sense very vividly, even when encountering something entirely new, is that they simultaneously evoke early, pre-representational experiences of both successful and failed self-transformation. When Donald Winnicott insisted that there was no such thing as a baby, he meant that infants are born so helpless that they would rapidly die unless there was also a ‘primary carer’ (a mother) to nurse them, hold them, nurture them. Bollas develops this Winnicottian truism into the concept of the ‘transformational object:’ before we have enough of a self to relate to the mother as a complex person in her own right, when we assume that she is there solely to keep us going and fulfil our needs (and whims) on demand, we experience her ministrations as psycho-physical metamorphoses, as profound transformations in self-experience. Hunger becomes satiation, cold becomes warmth, wet becomes dry, loneliness becomes company, and helplessness gradually becomes agency.
The mother is the prototype of the transformational object: the provision of ‘good enough’ primary emotional and physical attentiveness facilitates transformative developmental integrations, including learning to walk and play, talk and think. Puberty and adolescence, also, are radically transformational self-experiences, a transition which may readily be imagined as a transformational object, wherein the infant-child body irretrievably disappears and a new, sexually-charged subjectivity begins to grow. The adult experiences of transformational object-substitutes Bollas describes are uncannily familiar to us precisely because, new as they may be, they are evoking something we have lived through before:
“Such aesthetic experiences do not sponsor memories of a specific event or relationship, but evoke a psychosomatic sense of fusion that is the subject’s recollection of the transformational object. This anticipation of being transformed by an object – itself an ego memory of the ontogenetic process – inspires the subject with a reverential attitude towards it, so that even though the transformation of the self will not take place on the scale it reached during early life, the adult tends to nominate such objects as sacred.”(6)
These are experiences, in other words, which are experientially known but may never have been represented in thought (the ‘unthought known’ in Bollas’ evocative terminology). These areas of ‘unthought known’ are not confined to a handful of psychiatric patients or ‘perverts’ but are present in everyone. For most psychoanalysts, and Bollas is no exception, it simply is not possible to get through infancy and childhood, no matter how loving and reliable one’s parents might have been, without accruing some degree of trauma, some pieces of parental ‘failure’, along the way. No parent can ever perfectly attune to infantile needs and states of mind; there is always at least some degree of mistuning, of the intrusion of parental moods and preoccupations, into the emerging space of infant and childhood mental development.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, these ‘failures’ (although, since they are inevitable, it seems a little punitive to refer to them as defects) always leave behind a mnemic trace. Thankfully, much of the time, most parents, and especially those who are rather cumbersomely termed ‘primary caretakers’ (and who most of us would refer to simply as ‘mothers’), get it right more often than they get it wrong. When we find ourselves driven to seek out these uncannily familiar aesthetic and psychosomatic experiences of fusion, we are attempting to re-find, to re-collect, successful transformational object experiences. But we may also be attempting to tend to, to nurse and soothe, faults and deficiencies in self experience. This is a symptom, perhaps, but a symptom which is itself an attempt at self cure, at self repair.
In our quest for ‘narcissistic-’ or self-repair, from a psychoanalytic point of view, we may seek images of youthful perfection in an attempt to restore and rejuvenate a deeply damaged, wounded or simply worn out and depleted self-image, a quest which has nothing to do with actually wanting to have sex with youths, even if it does involve an appreciation of their erotic beauty. Gazing at erotic images, just as much as gazing at art or natural landscapes, can frequently, in and of itself, be solely the seeking out of a transformational object-image. The sense of fusing with the image is the behaviour, the aim; there is no intention, wish or desire to stalk anyone, molest anyone, or sexually coerce or humiliate anyone.
In looking at erotica, most people are merely trying to re-evoke experiences of erotic transformation, like that of puberty itself, from the vantage point of the present. And this is especially likely if the present happens to be a time where the storyline we have been living seems to have ground to a halt, or become too boring, stressful or fraught (or all of these things). When there is precious little occasion for positive self-metamorphosis in reality, we may seek it in imagination, in fantasy. ‘Wishing to be’ (or to be like) in fantasy,- which allows for the impossible, is radically different to ‘intending to have’ in behaviour (human beings are the only species on the planet to conduct a vast amount of their sex lives in fantasy rather than in action). Those who insist that such imaginary experimentation always amounts to an intention to ravage a child are saying rather more about what is going on in their own psyches than they would really like us to be aware of.
Psychoanalysis – a body of work either wholly ignored or ignorantly cartooned by victimologist ideology - enables us to see that overt behaviour alone is a poor and most unreliable guide to true subjective motivation. Only a facile and crude empiricism would insist that manifest action is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. If victimologists had even the most rudimentary grasp of the concepts of narcissistic repair and transformational object seeking, they would find a gigantic hole blown in their good vs. evil view of the universe, with its saintly (if suspiciously sour-faced) sisterhood on one side and moustache-twirling molesters laughing maniacally on the other. But having ignored and avoided the complex psychoanalytic discoveries about erotic fantasy life, and therefore lacking any concept of the sheer drive for self-repair and the search for transformational objects, the impoverished two-dimensional psychology favoured by victim ideologues begins from the violently simplistic premise that, if you look at erotica of any kind, you’re a compulsive groper and molester. One might have thought that, if you’re about to irretrievably destroy someone’s life, the onus should be on you to prove an assertion such as this rather than merely assume it.
Returning to our questionnaire’s designer – charged with the task of measuring deviance from the vantage point of normative assumptions, in the field of sexuality at least – he or she will merely pose queries designed to confirm already preconceived beliefs, wrong-footing your preferred self’s responses along the way if possible. Two lines of mendacity, however, rarely result in anything truthful.
(iii) Approaching truth: psychometrics or free association?
With a psychoanalytic session requiring uncensored speech, however, things get rather more complicated. There is a radio show in the UK (BBC Radio 4’s Just a Minute), which invites a panel of celebrities to improvise for sixty seconds on a given theme without hesitation, deviation or repetition. It is virtually impossible to speak for an entire minute without erring in at least one of these categories. In psychoanalytic work, you are required to speak, improvisationally and truthfully, not for the impossible single minute of the radio show, but for forty-five or fifty minutes. This is free association, the principal method of psychoanalysis; unlike a State-appointed psychologist or apparatchik, the analyst asks no questions and waits calmly and quietly for you to begin reporting whatever happens to be in your mind at that moment. Like you, he has no idea of what you will find yourself speaking about. Over this extended period, your ego, your inner PR consultant, will inevitably fail to prevent the interruption of your intentional discourse by those versions of yourself you would prefer not to know about (and would certainly prefer others not to overhear). As the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips once deftly put it, the unconscious is the part of us which joins in without ever fitting in.
From a psychoanalytic point of view, human sexuality is irreducibly and insolubly enigmatic, making ‘knowing’ in this field a questionable project. By contrast, paedofinders and moralists seek to circumvent intractable mysteries like this with spurious omniscience (violent certainty). They appear to believe that they already know everything that needs to be known about the subject, a conceit which naturally leads them to suppose that they already know all that needs to be known about you – they’ve memorised all the training manuals and (selected, ideology-confirming) ‘research’ don’t forget - so it’s hardly worth you bothering to respond to their interrogations at all. All your statements will be assimilated to their theories about you, which they rigidly substitute for the more complicated (and messy) business of truthfully engaging with the ambiguities and nuances of your faltering narrative (of honestly trying to get to know you, in other words).
A psychoanalyst actively suspends his acquired theoretical knowledge during the analytic hour, in order to meet you in all your unique complexity and contradiction; paedofinder psych-technicians will, by contrast, cling like limpets to the theories and received wisdom they have swallowed and pounce on those small sequences of your speech (you will be questioned) which, when decontextualised, fit well with their rigidly predetermined concepts. It should come as no surprise to discover that they will wholly ignore the rest and rapidly pronounce you guilty of confirming their assumptions. By contrast to punitive-correctional psychological technologies, psychoanalysis cannot be compelled: it can only be offered (compulsion would pre-emptively kill its principle method, free association, rendering it unreservedly useless).
(iv) Fearful fantasies and fabricated fiends
I strongly suspect that it is fear which plays the leading role in the difference between the two approaches; we are inclined to become dogmatic and rigid when we are frightened of something, when we are doing our best to prevent that ‘something’ emerging in our conscious thoughts. ‘The paedophile’, as I hope to argue in Chapter Eight, is a lurid fiction of the moralist mind, manufactured by massive splitting and projecting, false accusation and malignant paranoia, and functioning as a kind of fantasmatic bogeyman whose purpose is to hold that mind’s deepest terrors at a distance. If we refuse an adequate language for desire, if we insist on using only the signifiers ‘abuse’ and ‘paedophile’ to discuss child sexuality and our adult relationship to it, dangerous delusions of righteousness and knowingness will replace the intrinsic uncertainty and ambiguity accompanying any true enquiry into the erotic imagination. Murderous scapegoating will be the inevitable result (converting a form of desire into a type of person is intrinsically an act of violence).
Returning to the Great Ormond Street study, my personal reservation about it is not the relatively small sample size – the wealth of data from psychotherapy sessions more than amply compensates for this – but the researchers’ failure to define precisely what they mean by ‘sexual abuse’. They asked for referrals from Social Services Departments of boys in the local authority care system who had been sexually abused in the past but it is not clear from the published work exactly what this ‘abuse’, or the subsequent abuse of others some of them allegedly committed, consisted of. Rape? Coerced molestation? Social workers’ inferences? Or ‘underage’ consensual sexual experimentation? Being coy about the term ‘sexual abuse’ leaves it full of unexamined assumptions and fantasised attributions; we are clearly all meant to know what it means without having it spelled out for us. But in the age of abuse hysteria, the spelling out is as indispensably necessary as it is systematically refused: this term is so often used by salvationists to refer to harmless, mutually consensual sexual play between minors. However, even if we assume that the term refers to coerced and intrusive sexual assault, the research remains a powerful rebuttal of the argument that being sexually abused causes further sexual abuse.
The most important issue arising from this discussion, however, is the relationship between sex and violence. It would appear that the attempt to purge sexual fantasy of passion, lust and aggression is itself an act of violence. And the attempt to purge childhood of sexuality, the insistence on discussing it only and always as ‘sexual abuse’, is perhaps the most violent and panic-stricken expression of this impossible purification process. Another deferred response awaits. We might need to consider deviant sex first.
(v) Learned Deviant Behaviour
To return to Dr Elliott, who we rudely interrupted with this impolite questioning of her first assertion’s validity: the next most obvious thing to note is what she fails to mention. The ‘learned deviant behaviour’ which she condemns so vehemently and wishes to exempt normal folks and cuddly gays from, was precisely the same language that her predecessors in the moral righteousness movement deployed in order to justify the entrapment, hounding, imprisonment and destruction of homosexual men. Maybe the entitlement to an unchallengeable ‘sexual orientation’ depends on what era you were born into. Like those who are today being ruined by ‘child porn’ and ‘paedophile’ accusations, many of these men committed suicide after arrest rather than endure the imprisonment and social vilification they would inevitably face upon appearance in court. Today, gay-bashing is unfashionable: it has (rightly) become rather distasteful. Homosexuals and bisexuals, after all, have a ‘sexual orientation’ like normal folk, albeit a different one. And like normals, their ‘sexual orientation’ was bequeathed them ‘naturally’ as part of their constitutional make-up; moralists of yore were, it seems, wrong to hound them as pitilessly and murderously as they once did.
This, however, leaves our moral guardians with a problem: what’s a neurotic, erotophobic bigot to do with all that surplus sexual hate now that gays are considered as normal as anyone else? The answer, of course is: manufacture a new monster - the all pervasive paedobeast. Hence the statement: “Paedophiles … often try to claim their attraction to children is a sexual orientation, like homosexuality or bisexuality; … it isn't – it is a learned deviant behaviour.” Homosexuals were routinely presumed to be seducers and molesters of children in the all too recent past; today, they are permitted a measure of respectability – they have a ‘sexual orientation’ – on the strict condition that they never experience (openly at any rate) forms of desire which blur the line splitting compulsory innocence from sexual sin: the great, arbitrary age divide (which I believe is far more violently policed and frantically enforced than the former great ‘hetero’/’homo’ divide ever was).
(vi) Compulsory Innocence and the Denial of Desire
The fraught adult need for children to be innocent of sexual desire is, as James Kincaid has lucidly argued (7), quite probably the single greatest cause of ‘paedophile’ fantasising ever to have been conjured in human history (in Jacqueline Rose’s words “…childhood innocence [is] … a portion of adult desire.”) (8). In a searing little passage, which is worth quoting at length, Kincaid notes,
“Childhood in our culture has come to be a largely coordinate set of set of have nots: the child is that which does not have. Its liberty, however much prized, is a negative attribute, as is its innocence and purity. Moreover, all these, throughout the nineteenth century, became more and more firmly attached to what was characterized as sexually desirable, innocence in particular becoming a fulcrum for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ ambiguous construction of sexuality and sexual behavior. Innocence was what came to you in heaven, or in marriage, as a kind of prize. Innocence was that which we have been trained to adore and covet, to preserve and despoil, to speak of in hushed tones and bawdy songs. … The construction of the modern ‘child’ is very largely an evacuation, the ruthless sending out of eviction notices. Correspondingly, the instructions we receive on what to regard as sexually arousing tells us to look for (and often create) this emptiness, to discover the erotic in that which is most vulnerable to inscription, the blank page. On that page we can write what we like, write it and then long for it, love it, have it. Children are defined, and longed for, according to what they do not have.” (9)
As I will attempt to argue shortly, calmly recognising children’s sexuality, along with its corollary, a pervasive, ordinary adult erotic investment in children, would, I suspect, largely eradicate the malignant wishes of those drawn to defile and spoil the pristine and pure. It is the adult fantasy of solicitous innocence which excites villainous spoiling, a fantasy which represents a terrible failure of interpretation, a mistranslation of a fundamentally enigmatic sexual message. My argument, outlined later, is that it is largely the refusal of any symbolic elaboration of this benign, non-pathological erotic interest in children’s sexuality which actively promotes child abuse, which inflames the madness of those who seek to abduct, molest and even kill children.
Real children are far more complex, far more charged with passionate impulses, including rage, jealousy and desire, than sentimental adult wishfulness can accommodate (anyone who has experienced the cruelty and spitefulness of children in their own childhood should know that they’re not all that innocent).
The adult insistence on childhood pre-sexual innocence is itself a form of cruelty because it is founded on massive denial: children are punished severely for their inevitable failures to live up to this unattainable ideal, and especially so when they betray evidence of their sexuality. It is the insistence on this impossible innocence which inevitably generates its own inherent ‘perverse dynamic’, to use Jonathan Dollimore’s perceptive notion (i.e., oppressive and coercive social norms generate the seeds of their own subversion) (10). Of course, as we have seen, such internal dissidence is quickly re-imagined by those embracing oppressive beliefs as an external threat (eternal paranoia is the price of oppression). Kincaid continues:
“… the major point and dilemma is that we are instructed to crave that which is forbidden, a crisis we face by not facing it, by becoming hysterical, and by writing a kind of pious pornography, a self-righteous doublespeak that demands both lavish public spectacle and constant guilt-denying projections onto scapegoats. Child molesting becomes the virus which nourishes us, that empty point of ignorance about which we are most knowing. It is the semiotic shorthand that explains everything, that tells us to look no further: having been on either side of the child-molesting scene defines us completely. Lawyers know this, as do politicians and storytellers.” (11)
(vii) Scepticism or splitting?
If normative assertions about ‘learned deviant behaviour’ were being enunciated on a psychoanalyst’s couch, as opposed to in a quickly shelled newspaper article, the speaker would find herself meeting a slightly impertinent response. Instead of the adulation and crude, populist affirmation she canvasses, she would meet with robust scepticism: ‘Why, I wonder, do you feel the need to be so emphatic, so rigidly foreclosing of all other interpretations, at this point?’ I suspect she would find it difficult to answer this question after exhausting the predictable moral grandstanding and ‘defence of innocent victims’ sermons, without engaging with her own disavowed fantasies. And heaven forbid that a moralist should be faced with this option; better by far to trot out banal tracts for newspapers, trumpeting tired old prejudices as though they were divine revelations.
We are again faced with the question of what, precisely, is a paedophile? Moralists would prefer us not to dwell too long on this, and reply instead with an apparently visceral, common sense reaction: ‘evil beast!’ They would, in other words, prefer us to adopt the educational horizons and moral coordinates of a medieval peasant. But we are not medieval peasants, and we might productively question such terms and assertions.
Child salvationists, it seems, would have us to believe in a simplistic, stripped down, good-guy vs. bad-guy, this-causes-that psychology: bad people with bad desire freely and knowingly choose to do nasty things, whereas good people with good desire decide to do good things and stay on the straight and narrow path of righteousness. In this cartoon psychology, which armies of prosecution lawyers have grown fat on, sexual desire is a simple behaviour, like driving, which can be practised more or less considerately. It is, in other words, a form of pathological splitting, an attempt to separate what cannot in reality be separated. And maintaining massive splits requires massive ongoing violence. Substituting anodyne fantasies of the way the ‘real’ ought to be for the way the ‘real’ happens to be inevitably entails suppressing, with the utmost force, each and every manifestation of reality which threatens the fantasised utopia.
From a Freudian point of view, sexuality is the seat of the most intractable and insoluble conflicts inherent in human life, which no mortal is immune to (and no mortal can escape). The crude, reductionist psychology embraced by victimologists sees ‘learned deviant behaviour’ as a failure to conform to prevailing social norms, and it presumes that what is normal is what is healthy. For Freud, learned deviant behaviour is conformity to joyless social norms, a pathological constriction of the polymorphous pleasurable potentials we come into the world with. Paranoid sexual moralism leads all too frequently to lethal stigmatisation, incarceration, psychological torture and endless social vilification. Professor Freud’s ethics could lead us instead to a kinder, calmer and more free-thinking autonomy.
Cartoon psychology and the question of evidence
(i) Cartoon psychology and compulsory ‘treatment’
The psychological ideology embraced by the child salvationists of our world is resulting in appalling numbers of non-violent men – men who have never sexually abused another person let alone a child - being imprisoned, compelled to undergo degrading ‘treatment programmes’ and placed permanently on sex offender registries on the basis of what they might do in the future. Most will never find employment again, unless you feel that highly educated and greatly skilled professionals like university professors or medical doctors are most usefully deployed in picking up litter for the rest of their days.
Forcing sane and capable people, against their will, to undergo compulsory ‘treatment programmes’ (rigidly formulaic psycho-behavioural conditioning regimes) as though there were no ethical dilemmas to consider in dragooning intelligent human beings into highly questionable forms of conformity, as though, in other words, there were no differences between people and performing bears or circus seals (which are at least protected by animal rights campaigners), would in any other context be seen for what it in fact is: assault. The coercion I am referring to is mendaciously packaged as consent – only those voluntarily complying with these programmes will be included on them. But since refusal will certainly result in your official classification, without further ado, as a high risk offender, with imprisonment (or re-imprisonment) as a very real possibility, this is a curious form of consent. It is rather like volunteering for something you despise, knowing that the alternative is to be shot. Is consent still consent when it is backed by terror? If a doctor forced medical or psychological treatments on sane, competent patients in the face of their refusals, he would shortly find himself behind bars. Probation officers and other porn police officials get promoted instead.
Any refusal or defiance of these harshly administered ‘treatments’, which amount to little more than rulebooks for pathologically normative sexual moralism, could result in imprisonment. Clearly, when you get labelled a ‘paedo’ your status as a human being is officially removed. You become instead the embodiment of the disowned projections which have been violently lodged in you, a sub-human, Caliban-like brute, powerless to resist your deviant sexual demi-urges. To dispute this attribution is presently to invite scorn and derision: trying to present contrary evidence in the face of violent projective processes is as useless as trying to explain a joke to someone who doesn’t find it funny.
If your ideology insists that ‘this causes that’, in this case, looking at erotic pictures will cause you to sexually assault someone, you can be as draconian and merciless as you like to the ’offenders’. But if the belief is wrong, no matter how sincerely you embrace it, you end up needlessly destroying armies of essentially peaceful, gentle individuals and condemning them to a life of permanent denigration and social abjection. As there is no credible research finding, despite more than half a century of zealous attempts to prove one, to support the moralists’ claim that viewing is equivalent to doing (or will lead to assault), we appear to be firmly in the ‘needlessly destroying’ camp.
(ii) Constructing pathologies to fit the treatment: the case of depression
The aficionados of cognitivist psychology typically claim that the compulsory treatment programmes and ‘profiles’ of offenders their disciples manufacture are scientifically evidence-based and that the ‘treatment’ derived from this psychology, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), is highly effective in producing desired results. We might, however, pause for a moment to wonder what, precisely, counts as evidence, and just what a desirable result is. In his superb critique of medicalised (or dogmatically empiricist) approaches to the human experience of depression, for example, the Lacanian psychoanalyst Darian Leader notes that the (largely unelected) managers of today’s anti-risk society seek swift and predictable results, absolute transparency and the removal of unwanted behaviour. And it is CBT which claims to offer precisely these solutions. The price to be paid, as Leader remarks, is “… a cosmetic treatment that targets surface problems and not deep underlying ones.” (12) I think it is worth staying with Leader’s critique a little longer, as it has strong resonances with the line of reasoning we are trying to articulate here.
He quotes an estimate by the World Health Organisation that by 2010, depression will be the single largest public health problem after heart disease, affecting between 25 and 45 per cent of the adult population, with rising rates in children and adolescents. But back in 1950, the picture was startlingly different – only 0.5 per cent of the population appeared to be affected. What has produced this epidemic? Leader identifies a convincing cause (and, after all, causes may not be reasons, or even remotely reasonable): depression was actively created as a clinical category in the second half of the twentieth century by largely commercial forces. He writes:
“There was a pressure to package psychological problems like other health problems, and so a new emphasis on surface behaviour rather than on unconscious mechanisms came to the fore; … a new diagnostic category – and remedy for it – had to be popularized to account for and cater to the malaise of urban populations; and new laws about drug-testing favoured a simplistic, discrete conception of what illness was. As a result, drugs companies manufactured both the idea of the illness and the cure at the same time. Most of the published research has been funded by them, and depression came to stand less as a complex of symptoms with varied unconscious causes than simply that which anti-depressants acted upon. If the drugs affected mood, appetite and sleep patterns, then depression consisted of a problem with mood, appetite and sleep patterns. Depression, in other words, was created as much as it was discovered.” (13)
For Leader, the corporate manufacture of this ‘illness’ is a dangerous fiction, because it ignores the multiplicity of ways in which debilitating sadness is always an array of symptoms deriving from complex and always different human stories, rather than a checklist of behaviours or biochemical alterations. Whilst of course we are a species of animal, and neurotransmitters like serotonin are part of our biological make-up, to suppose that low serotonin is the cause of ‘depression’ is to make a potentially fatal category error. If a loved one dies, my serotonin levels may plummet, but it would be madness to attribute my grief to a chemical deficit. Bereavement is not an illness. Anti-depressant drugs like Seroxat, which aim to increase the amount of serotonin in the brain by inhibiting its re-absorption, received a good deal of publicity a few years ago because they seemed to increase the risk of suicide. Leader’s view is that this is not so much a defect with the drug as a major flaw in the diagnostic approach. Depression can for some people serve a protective function, which, if removed, makes a desperate action more likely (he notes that some studies suggest that mild depressions may actually protect against suicide) (14).
Insisting that Freud was right in his observation that crippling sadness is a product of undigested loss, and emphasising the necessity of exploring the less visible, less immediately accessible (contingent and idiosyncratic) factors in human suffering, rather than the superficial and obviously describable, Leader writes:
“When we lose a loved one, we have lost a part of ourselves. And this loss requires our consent. We might tell ourselves that we have accepted a loss, but acquiescence and true consent are fundamentally different. Many people, indeed, go through life obeying others while harbouring a burning resentment within themselves. They say, ‘Yes’ without meaning it, in the same way that a small child might follow the demands of potty training out of fear, without ever having really agreed to them. In mourning, we have to consent at the deepest level to the loss of a part of ourselves, and that’s why … it involves an additional sacrifice. It implies logically that the only way to give up the image we took on for someone else is to question the way they looked at us.” (15)
The consent Leader writes of is, of course, far more difficult to reach when the loss one is suffering is the result of a violent and deliberately inflicted trauma. If we transpose Leader’s analysis to the rampant paedo-obsession of our times, we see some striking resemblances. Powerful vested interests have the means to construct perception – we are inclined, by suggestion, to see what they tell us to see. In this case, we are dealing not with transnational drugs companies but with transnational factions within police forces. If ‘depression’ has come to mean merely ‘that which drugs acts upon’, ‘paedophilia’ has certainly come to mean ‘those whom the sex police act upon.’ And for the most part, this does not mean those dangerous individuals who long to abduct and rape children, but slightly depressed and harmless men who have turned to the internet for a temporary escape from the intractable (but ordinary) problems in their lives.
As for effectiveness, the browbeaten conformity with the conditioning programme amongst men forced to undergo this treatment, often under threat of re-imprisonment for failure or refusal to participate, may be discernible, but it hardly represents successful ‘reprogramming’. Coercion rarely results in fulsome endorsement – superficial compliance, which can of course be behaviourally measured, is often a shield for simmering underground resentment and rage, which of course cannot be so easily calibrated. The latter are the inevitable (and humane) responses to what amounts to organised humiliation and bullying intimidation. Cruel and unusual treatment rarely produces happily ‘corrected’ citizens.
Writing about fascism, the historian Robert Paxton noted the following:
“Fascist regimes tried so radically to redraw the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labour Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep. For some observers this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is the very essence of fascism … Although authoritarian regimes often trample civil liberties and are capable of murderous brutality, they do not share fascism’s urge to reduce the private sphere to nothing.”(16)
Whilst it would be somewhat excessive to describe the entire State in these terms, Paxton’s description of fascism bears striking resemblances to child protection fanaticism, with its paranoid belief that ‘abuse’ is taking place everywhere, that people are looking at porn in the privacy of their homes and contemplating assault as a result, that all accused are guilty and must be crushed in order to deter others, and that privacy must be severely compromised for the good of the children. That our allegedly independent and free media, as well as more august bodies such as the Sentencing Guidelines Panel, have for the most part rigidly endorsed victimologist fanaticism and exaggeration suggests to me that something overwhelmingly pathological is occurring at the heart of democratic free debate.
In Defence of Humility
Perhaps now is a good moment to make a plea for the place of the irreducibly ambiguous and the unknowable in psychology, instead of the crude fiction that a singular experience – deed, desire, fantasy, or contingency – can reveal some defining and irrefutable truth about the individual concerned, or predict a future act. The former position goes with an outlook of humility and provisionality: we’ll sceptically believe such and such for the time being, until we are persuaded it is no longer sound to do so and we’ll always accept that whatever we provisionally believe, we could easily be wrong. The latter stance fosters a spurious and delusional knowingness: if I am an expert on something, I am full of authoritative certainty.
The salvationists might do well to take heed of the fact that such specious claims to positive knowing have led to death camps and gulags, ethnic cleansing and pogroms. Matthew Hopkins, Britain’s first self-appointed ‘Witchfinder General’, with no experience, qualification or particular wisdom in the field he established his authority in, just ‘knew’ how to detect witches in seventeenth century England, using a battery of techniques which, like today’s witchfinders, he shared with others in the war against sin. In other words, he trained people into becoming, like him, experts in humbug and delusion, torture and paranoia. And his inquisition slaughtered many innocent and vulnerable people (chiefly eccentric elderly women whose arthritic joints meant that, after physical torture, they often had to be assisted to place their necks in the noose at the gallows). Their crime, we now know, was to be noticeably oddball or to have crossed another vengeance-driven villager in some way in the past; in their day, these were sure signs of witchcraft, the work of the devil. Like ‘paedo’ today, the signifier ‘witch’ all too frequently meant a death sentence for those to whom it was applied. What we believe about the words we use to describe people determines what happens to real people.
In contrast to positive knowingness, we might prefer a more humane and humble starting point for any enquiry into the human soul: a simple acceptance that we fallible humans cannot possibly know all and the attempt to do so only too easily makes us cruel and tyrannical. It is the certainty arising from delusions of god-like knowingness that leads us to believe that witches, Jews, paedos, whatever our culture throws up as the dominant scapegoat term, have to be wiped out. Keats ‘negative capability’ – to ‘be in doubt and uncertainty without irritably reaching after fact and reason’ – provides us with a far kinder, gentler and more realistically human alternative to the spurious knowingness of rigid ideologues.
For the brilliant Kleinian psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion (17), this was what psychoanalytic neutrality, the listening position suggested by Freud for clinical practise, actually meant. Bion’s take on Freud’s suggestion was this: in order to truly meet another human mind, eschew all memory and desire. Only when you have suspended your memory (of what the patient said last time, of what you have read about him in referral letters or reports) and desire (for the patient or miscreant to ‘get better’, to gratefully accept your ministrations and live in moral virtue) - only then can you hear what you weren’t expecting to hear, only then can you be taken by surprise and learn something new – something, indeed, which might shake all your other beliefs to their foundations. This is perhaps what makes a good psychoanalysis more like a form of friendship than a doctor-patient relationship: few of us would stay friends for long with someone who thought he or she already knew everything we were talking about and couldn’t actually hear a word we were saying. If your mind is already crammed with certainties, you can’t hear or learn from experience: you have to go on courses instead. To be stupid is not to be empty; it is to be full of unshakeable prejudices.
It is unquestioned and unintegrated knowledge of this kind, fostered in salvationist conferences, courses, training programmes of many kinds, which has led to the groundless but widely believed notion that children ‘disclose’ sexual abuse when placed in the right setting (i.e., when interviewed by a child salvationist). There are some major problems, however, with the whole concept of ‘disclosure’, or, as I prefer to call it, ‘revelation.’
Revelation or Truthfulness?
(i) Recollection or redescription?
“The truth that interests me is problematical, partial, modest – and still breathing. It is not normally dramatic or revelatory, and its attainment depends far more on thinking hard than feeling freely. To put it another way: I think that speaking truthfully is a more fitting ambition than speaking the truth.”
Leslie H. Farber (18)
Psychoanalysis is often thought of as a ‘depth psychology’, probing the hidden recesses of the human psyche. On the analytic couch, you find yourself speaking about all the things you never intended to say. In the bowdlerised version of psychoanalysis commonly privileged by counsellors and therapists, in this way you draw ever closer to the painful experiences you’d walled off, buried and fled from long ago. In this rendering of psychoanalysis, cure is revelation: speak the truth about whatever you have been on the run from all your life and never dared acknowledge, and you will be healed.
Whilst I would not wish to wholly repudiate this enterprise, I am also deeply sceptical about it. None of us can be wholly transparent to ourselves, as Freud discovered, because we inevitably come up against that intractable limit to introspection he called ‘the unconscious.’ Whilst another mind can help us to become aware of those fleeting manifestations of unconscious communication we might otherwise ignore – dreams, unintentional slips of speech and the innumerable bungled actions that clutter our lives – it would be a colossal error to conceive of the unconscious as a kind of warehouse or museum storing experiences like a video-recorder stores images. It is less a thing than a process, a living mental activity accompanying conscious thought but quite other to it; most of us are familiar with sudden and bafflingly spontaneous flashes of insight or inspiration (or panic and dread). We frequently feel that these intense moments have come into our thoughts from somewhere else, a place curiously other to the site of our conscious deliberations. As Richard Rorty has put it, the unconscious, the other place within (and between) us all, sometimes feeds us our best lines.
It is to the lines we speak and live by, including the unconscious messages which keep emerging between these lines, to which we might usefully turn. The lines I am referring to can aim at truthfulness or deceit: Freud knew that most of us prefer the immediate comfort of our own lies to those awkward intimations of truth the unconscious keeps sending us. Minds come with words (we could even say they are made of words) and whilst we are the creatures who can use words to speak truthfully, we just as readily use them to tell lies, both of the trivial kind and with big, shiny bells on.
The moment we introduce the word ‘lie’ we are inclined to impute a deliberate, even inherent, character flaw to its spokesman. That some lies are malignant is beyond reasonable doubt – as we have seen, the lies Nazis and other racists have told about Jews and ‘blacks’ fall unambiguously into this category. My contention is that we are often – too often – unaware that we are lying, and that psychoanalysis may be one of our wisest allies in assisting us to think and speak truthfully. But this is a psychoanalysis which has been mislaid, with some honourable exceptions, by many of its clinical practitioners.
Abjuring the depth psychology model, this psychoanalysis favours the possibilities of redescription and translation. By eschewing the notion that we are wholly determined either by our biological constitutions or our personal histories, this scandalous psychoanalysis suggests that we may be the only creatures who can recast our pasts into more generative, open-ended futures. It is deeply suspicious of those models of ‘therapy’ which invite you to find an epiphany, a revelatory moment which defined the rest of your life (simply asking this question manufactures the notion that such moments could, or ought to, exist). It favours instead a quieter accumulation of incompatible, ambiguous and polyvalent possibilities. Human memory, as Freud knew, is treacherous. It is inclined to select, de-emphasise, and exclude. And it (or what it means to us) is mutable, changing according to our current circumstances. In this respect, contemporary cognitive psychology and neuroscience is belatedly catching up with the Viennese professor. Freud’s abandonment of his original ‘seduction theory’ of mental suffering owed less to a wish to conceal the awful truth of pervasive child abuse, the theory favoured by today’s ignorant, Freud-despising child salvationists, than to his painful discovery that we lie, even when we’re doing our best to tell the truth.
(ii) Farber’s epiphany
An almost painfully candid example of how lies can appear as truth in therapy (and, it has to be acknowledged, in everyday life) appears in the work of Leslie Farber, an extraordinarily wise but generally unflamboyant American psychoanalyst. He died in 1981, and his work appeared to be forgotten thereafter. However, it lived on in creative and intelligent practitioners of psychoanalysis, such as the veteran American analyst Stephen Mitchell and the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. This psychoanalysis is sceptical about dramatic revelatory moments, favouring instead small, incremental insights and precious, if momentary, glances of truthfulness. It sees human lives as far too complicated, far too messy and conflicted, to be reduced to a singular parable or preferred story.
In a characteristically sagacious essay, Farber recounts a moment from early in his training analysis (all psychoanalysts are oblige to undergo lengthy personal analyses with a senior analyst). He admits that his concept of free association was akin to watching a kind of mental movie and describing it as it played out. Shortly after the beginning of one of his early analytic sessions, he became distracted by the sound of a scratchy violin being practised in a nearby room, obviously by a beginner. Unable to even begin his ‘mental movie’ because of the discordant noise, he asked his analyst if she would mind ensuring that the young would-be maestro could practise his or her instrument at a different time to his therapy hour. Out of politeness, he added that even the virtuoso violinist Joseph Heifetz would have got in his way. The analyst quietly left for a moment, whereupon the sound ceased – her son or daughter quickly complied with the request for silence. Upon her return, she mentioned to Farber that she hadn’t realised he had been interested in music.
Go to Chapter 7. Part 2.
Copyright © Inquisition 21st century
Created on 08/17/2009 03:25 PM by Editor
Updated on 08/18/2009 08:01 PM by Editor
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