Living alongside frustration

Ponies survive the sometimes harsh environment of North Uist.

Masochism, sadism, sexual fantasy, voyeurism and mutual relationships

This blog charts a developmental journey living alongside frustration. Accumulating the coping strategies of masochism, sadism, sexual fantasy, voyeurism and mutual relationship. Inspired by psychoanalytic thought (Phillips, 2013, Benjamin, 2017 & Erikson, 2022.) A developmental journey beginning with infant experience.

Infant experience

'The early flood of sensations, the infant must passively experience, can be conceptualised as primary masochism' (Benjamin, 1995, p192.)

Masochism means learning to enjoy a painful experience. It's a way to cope with the helplessness of being an infant. So by making our helplessness pleasurable, it becomes tolerable. Moreover infants make themselves responsible for their submissive experiences in order to psychically survive them. For the infant :

'it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God, than to live in a world ruled by the devil.' -Fairbairn, 1952, p66-67

Believing themselves as deserving of, and so able to enjoy, their experience of helplessness. Simultaneously preserving a simple, benign, god-like interpretation of their caregivers (Phillips, 2023.) A coping strategy with limitations.

So in time, an infant needs to add to their repertoire of coping. This time coping by making the inflicting of pain on others pleasurable i.e. sadism. Initially in fantasy, and later in action. So an infant at first kisses, then bites, the hand that feeds it. All in order to live alongside their frustration.

Latterly, as children become both sexually mature and physically stronger, they are able to further add to our repertoire of coping. In particular, through the fantasised, and now real, possibilities of reproductive sex and lethal violence. A coping strategy that may include sadistic sexual fantasy.

Sadistic sexual fantasy

Sadistic sexual fantasy involves taking sexual pleasure from the imagined infliction of humiliation, fear, or other forms of mental harm, to a person. Aggression may be sadistically sexualised if it is not otherwise contained in a care giving relationship. For example, when our caregivers are absent, lost, or traumatically incomplete. In this way, sadistic sexual fantasies may conceal, deny, and allow the psychic survival of distressed adolescents.

Sadistic sexual fantasies can also be understood as a protest or a protection, against loneliness. An inner world populated by persecutors and victims. Transforming real grievances into fantasies of control and revenge. A retaliatory reversal of the omnipotent control, or absence, felt to be suffered at the hands of incomplete caregivers.

These sadistic fantasies are often targeted towards the female body. This is part of the misrepresentation of the responsibility for care. Ignoring the part played by men, wider family, community and culture in inadequate care. Ironically, another coping mechanism.

As we have established, coping mechanisms, like sadistic sexual fantasies, tend to become less useful over time. Making it more likely those fantasies may be problematically acted out. So another stage in a successful developmental journey may be the voyeuristic appreciation of the sexual representations of other people.

Voyeuristic appreciation of the sexual representations of others

Sexual representations are present throughout culture. Representations that can be appreciated voyeuristically. Voyeurism is the activity of gaining pleasure from secretly watching other people in sexual situations. People observed, and used, as objects to help us live alongside frustration. One example is pornography. 'Material deemed sexual, given the context, that has the primary intention of sexually arousing the consumer and is produced and distributed with the consent of all persons involved (Ashton, et al, 2019.)’

We may bring these representations in and out of our experience. These objects may provide new experiences with the potential to make us feel strangers to ourselves. Analogous to experiences with drugs, alcohol and/or love. As such, we can believe it happens without our consent or responsibility.

'The whole point of pornography is to make us feel excited. [As if] the devil made me do it' - Benjamin, 1995, p207.

So the sexual representations of other people can be experienced as intrusive. Undermining the repression of our own, previously unrecognised, fantasies. Experienced as coercive rather than representative. However, with graded exposure, we may come to recognise that we can contextualise and alter our response to these representations. In this way pornography (as defined here) can have a liminal status. Helping us to live alongside our frustration. Our final addition, to this coping repertoire, involves developing mutual relationships with other people.

Mutual relationships

Developing mutual relationships with other people means experiencing other people as subjects. People with their own, separate, minds and feelings. Learning to notice the change we create in other people. This awareness can satisfy our (sometimes aggressive) need for recognition. In the extreme, 'because I affect you, I don't need to kill you.' Other people who can survive the onslaught of our aggressive or sexual fantasies. Who are non retaliatory but affected. People who note the symbolic, as well as other properties, of our fantasies. In this context, the limits of our power become clear. Other people become transformational objects. Reliable escapes from ourselves (Bollas, 1987 cited in Benjamin, 1995.)

'Only a good that survives hate can be, experienced as, an unthreatened, unprecarious good and thus not requiring continuous defense' - Benjamin, 1995, p209

A good enough other means we can fully live alongside our frustration. Conclude that our experience of the world is enough. To accept, rather than seek to resolve, two paradoxes. That which fascinates sexually can also disgust. Secondly, that which is abominable in reality can also be pleasurable in fantasy. Allowing us to recognise what sex and violence are, as opposed to what we may fantasise them to be :

'Real violence cannot be limited to and contained by the specular [mirroring] relationship to sexual excitement; it exceeds representation' - Benjamin, 1995, p204

So from this place of hard earned maturity we have the opportunity to more fully experience adult life with all its pleasures and frustrations.

References

Ashton, S., McDonald, K., & Kirkman, M. (2019). What does ‘pornography’mean in the digital age? Revisiting a definition for social science researchers. Porn Studies, 6(2), 144-168.

Benjamin, J. (1995). Like subjects, love objects: Essays on recognition and sexual difference. Yale University Press.

Benjamin, J. (2017). Beyond doer and done to: Recognition theory, intersubjectivity and the third. Taylor & Francis.

Fairbairn, R, (1952, pp. 66-67) cited in Ludlam, M. (2022). Lost–and found–in translation: Do Ronald Fairbairn's ideas still speak usefully to 21st-century couple therapists?. In More About Couples on the Couch (pp. 141-155). Routledge.

Fennell, E, (2020) Promising Young Woman, unflinching journey into some of the sexually abusive experiences of women. Bystanders and all. Free trailer. CLICK HERE

Fennell, E, (2023) Saltburn, a visceral, sexual and violent study of psychopathy. Enacted as a narcissistic fantasy of destruction. Focussed on a family who became spoiled to death. Free trailer. CLICK HERE

Gaynord, A., (2021) All my friends hate me, viseceral film of a re-enactment of group gas lighting, sadism, paranoia & eventual suicide. Powerful and affecting (free trailer.) CLICK HERE

Mapplethorpe, R. (1982) Cock and Devil. National Galleries Scotland, https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/90698/cock-and-devil

Maree, J. G. (2022). The psychosocial development theory of Erik Erikson: critical overview. The Influence of Theorists and Pioneers on Early Childhood Education, 119-133.

Perry, A. (2023, April 9). Why would we put words to our desire? WIX. https://www.drandrewperry.org/post/putting-words-to-desire

Perry, A. (2022, October 11). How to have better sex, WIX. https://www.drandrewperry.org/post/better-sex

Phillips, A. (2013). The magical act of a desperate person: on tantrums. The London Review of Books, 35(5), 19-20. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n05/adam-phillips/the-magical-act-of-a-desperate-person

Phillips, A. (2023, April 3). Changing our approach to change. American library in Paris. https://youtu.be/7Mo4KJfXyO4?feature=shared

Phillips, A. (2024). Youtube interview discussing how our experiences of frustration may facilitate experiences of satisfaction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3uXdJWWMAI

n.b. I have also collated a list of other resources associated with intimacy & sexuality. You can access them here : CLICK HERE