What is it about sex?
Eros and psyche may have decent chemistry, but, simultaneously, are awkward lovers and their love affair, challenging. (Not to put too fine a point on it.)
One might legitimately accuse them of many things, which list does not include reason, harmony, or unity of purpose. Rather we might, not unfairly, recognise that, unlike few other things sex and sexuality have a capacity to knock us off balance, to displace our best intentions, to ruffle our plumage, and just generally to fuck us up.
Sex, coitus, lovemaking, fucking, fooling around, or even just flirting, constitute a moment of confrontation between the cultural symbolic self: that entity and identity your parents, schooling, cultural milieu, and you, have so painstakingly constructed, and the primitive instinctive primal dimension of your soul which is the character and telos of your sexuality. In Freudian terms, although this reductive terminology hardly captures the extent and depth of the issue, is the moment of violent confrontation between the Id and Superego.
In the terms of depth psychology, we would say our sexual self and its roots are deeply unconscious. And, this unconscious sexual self cares little for our cultural and moral sensibilities. The raging daemon it is, its singular drive is its own satisfaction.
My late father who remains my first and greatest teacher said two things on the topic of sex that have stayed with me.
The first is that “a stiff prick has no conscience.”
In other words, it is interested, and only interested, in its own satisfaction. And such satisfaction is frequently at loggerheads with the symbolic structure the subject finds him or herself embedded in.
As a species we have certainly exerted much effort trying to tame the beast, as it were, and contain it within an agreed social and relational structure. And, whilst such efforts, have not been entirely without results, they do for the most part fall woefully short of complete success. If success be measured here by the degree of human happiness it facilitates. Either being patently unsuccessful, or to the degree they are successful, being repressive.
The thing about sexuality – and one might love or hate it for this, is that it has a singleness of purpose that is characteristic of our instinctive drives. Unlike much of our mental life that is filled with ambiguities, deceptions, justifications, and rationalisations. Much of which is less than a wholly honest or authentic expression of our true character and subjectivity.
I’m not saying that sex or sexuality is entirely immune from deception and ambiguities. Rather, more modestly, that it has a barometer of honesty not typically available to us in other areas of our psychic life. Or to the degree it may be, certainly less clear and unambiguous. Put bluntly, one cannot fake a hard cock or wet pussy, nor an orgasm (at least not to oneself).
These experiences are psychically transparent in a way that is atypical for most psychological content. They are, to coin a phrase: psychic axioms.
If you’ll allow me a riff on Descartes’ Cogito ergo sum. (I think therefore I am.)
I would like to add here as advocate of sexual truth,
I am sexually aroused, therefore this (whatever indeed “this” may be in the context) is arousing. And further, that this axiomatic truth is true whether or not it is in accord with my other sensibilities.
Such arousal is quintessentially psychic – or, to tip the hat to the imaginal school, an expression of psyche. It is the meeting point of the instinctive drive, in other words, the primal, and the imagination – the form the desired object takes in our psyches. The symbolisation of the drive.
D. H. Lawrence, that iconic author of the erotic, has this to say,
“Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness…. It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.”
Yes, agreed, with the caveat that although non-ideal, it does have a “mental” and imaginal component, in that the “blood-consciousness” must find a direction, a channel, for its outlet within the subject’s symbolic structure and world.
It is precisely here though that we encounter the problem. The symbolisation of the drive – the imagined object and pathway of our sexual satisfaction. Inevitably – or if you wish to protest here over much, allow me then more modestly, frequently, disappoints. The drive is insatiable. As long as we are alive – and even beyond the limit of our physical capacities, the drive is hungry, it lusts after its elusive fulfilment.
“What sex is, we don’t know, but it must be some sort of fire. For it always communicates a sense of warmth, of glow. And when this glow becomes a pure shine, then we feel the sense of beauty.
We all have the fire of sex slumbering or burning inside us. If we live to be ninety, it is still there.
Or, if it dies, we become one of those ghastly living corpses which are unfortunately becoming more numerous in the world.”
— D.H. Lawrence
This is both a curse and a blessing.
Why it is a curse is perhaps self-evident. I’m pretty sure you’re as acutely aware of this as I am. It creates in the subject an insatiability, a restlessness, a perennial frustration, rarely (if ever) satisfied. It is the province of myth where its appetite is truly satisfied.
“…But when Bernada stopped waiting for him and slept in a nightgown and bolted the door, he came in through the window. The air in her room, rarefied by the ammoniac odour of his sweat, woke her She heard the heavy breathing of a minotaur searching for her in the darkness, she felt the sultry heat of his body on top of her, his hands of prey grasping the neck of her nightgown and ripping it down the middle while his husky voice intoned in her ear, ‘Whore, whore.’ From that night on, Bernada knew there was nothing else she wated to do for the rest of her life.”
Gabreil Garcia Marquez, ‘of love and other demons’, p. 22
In reality of course such satisfaction when it is known is at best fleeting. In this world we might take counsel from Shakespeare’s sonnet 129 ‘Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’ One my late teacher, the nineteenth Duc de Châtillon, from the school Little Athanor, was fond of making me recite in the vein hope of redeeming my own dark soul.
Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murd’rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so,
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Somewhat ironically, given the imperative of the sonnet 129, it was this same teacher who emphasised the role of our sexuality in the individuation process. That to ignore or repress one’s sexuality was antithetical to the individuation process.
The individuation journey, as Jung emphasised and as is clear in the alchemical metaphor that so impressed him, begins with the confrontation with the shadow. The repressed, unconscious and unlived life. Well, it is no great conceptual leap to recognise that when one starts to explore one’s shadow one very soon hits, arguably, the central vein, if we follow Freud, or, at least, the darkest core of the shadow, that is our sexuality. This daemon that drives us to do its bidding, and acts out horribly, cruelly, and often tragically when its imperatives and strictures are not observed.
Not that following such imperatives, as is clear from sonnet 129, is any guarantor of happiness either. Not exclusively, but at least in significant part, because of such impulse’s antithetical relationship with the symbolic structure and its moral code.
In other words, either way you’re fucked, whether you do or you don’t, and you know not like “fucked” in the good sense of the word, although that may of course accompany such an exploration. 😊
So, you may reasonably ask, how then can such an imperative also be considered a blessing?
Well, as any good Jungian will tell you, the devil is not without recompense. The journey into the shadow, into Hades, offers great treasure to one foolish enough to undertake the night sea passage. As one shines a light of these dark recess of the soul, one does not encounter only the repulsive but also the sublime. Not only agony, but also ecstasy.
More than that, the truth of the matter is the shadow is no less dense, malevolent or Machiavellian for its repression. It is rather that, what we learn from Jung is, the unconscious seeks expression and acknowledgement. That such damned up libido, can either direct itself with complete impunity and disregard for the sensibilities of ego consciousness, and frequently in contrast to its stated intentions. Or, if the value proposition of Jungian psychology is accepted, that it can be moderated and mediated by consciousness, as well as simultaneously elevating the otherwise prosaic to the level of the mythological.
The value of Jungian psychology is its de-pathologizing of the unconscious and its opening up the possibility of a conversation, and even ideally integration, between these two otherwise disparate and juxtaposed selves: the version of us that needs to exist in and negotiate the symbolic order, and our primal – and for the purposes of this post, sexual, – selves.
Another virtue if it can be so called, in this sexual appetite, is that it is a source of libido, and when we are able to tap into it, both animates and enlivens us in a way that few other things can do. Not something to be devalued. It can, in a very real sense, bring us to life, and this is one of the reasons that in many esoteric traditions there is an intimate relationship between the sexual and the sacred.
The other thing my father said about sex that stayed with me, seems at first blush like an anachronism of the sixties, “make love, not war.” However, his meaning was, as I came to understand, slightly more layered. It’s the recognition of the possibility of acting out some of our darker impulses in the bedroom or finding other ways to sublimate such drives, rather than having to shed blood on the battlefield, to satisfy our aggressive impulses. And of course, here we might usefully interpret battlefield to encompass the battlefield of or lives and relationships as well.
This is the segue into and motivation for our upcoming programme Dark Eros, based on the groundbreaking text by Thomas Moore, and featuring him in the faculty presenting the programme. Where we hope to think more on and work with some of the darker impulses that Thomas Moore writes about in the text, in his analysis of the literature of the Marquis de Sade.
Until we speak again,
Stephen Anthony Farah
Image credit: Robert Mappelthorpe
Comment (1)
Oh the moral conflagration that erupts within the psyche at the mere thought yet alone lingered contemplation of loosing those repressed primal desires long mired in the unconscious shadow of self. The juxtaposition of secular more violently tearing the fabric of the collective Christian archetype. The remedy to this psychic distress is not found in the liberation of innate wonton desire. These dark concupiscent projections beset upon humanity have now matured into unbridled pathologies of hedonistic abandon within the collective unconscious. The path of individuation not only requires a recognition of the tenebrous but a willful self discipline founded not in repression of expression of lustful base desire but through recognition and adoption of tension found in its opposite. This sangfroid is our guide to higher states of consciousness and liberation from the daemon.