Tag: death instinct

Sex, pain, and the death instinct, revisited

As I mentioned in a previous post, I have been reading a book by Joachim Bauer entitled Warum ich fuehle, was du fuehlst (“Why I feel what you feel”), which is basically a mixture of science and conjecture about the function of the human mirror neuron system. It turns out that the same neurons fire when we perform an act ourselves and when we see it performed by someone else, and this, it is argued, lies at the basis of our ability to experience empathy and to intuitively read the emotional state and intentions of the other.

A leitmotiv of the book is the idea that social interaction performs an essential role in neurobiological development. Famously, though probably apocryphally, Frederick II is said to have conducted an experiment whereby children were raised without hearing human language; deprived of this stimulus, they are said to have died. Perhaps more believably, controversial experiments on macaque monkeys have shown that, deprived of social contact, they develop psychosis. This conclusion is not new, but it appears we are starting to uncover some of its neurobiological foundation.

Controlled scientific experiments cited by Bauer in the book show that social exclusion can generate pain in the same centers that register physical pain. We have for some time known that the perception of physical pain is not a simple function of external stimulus, but also factors in, and fundamentally, psychological aspects – what that pain means, or is thought or feared to mean, to the perceiver. Now further we know, and this is backed up in a 2005 paper by Naomi Eisenberger and Matthew Liebermann, entitled Why It Hurts to Be Left Out, that purely social factors can induce pain which is similar in all respects to “physiological” pain (indeed, it is physiological pain).

Interjecting a couple of points of my own here: firstly, pain is something we are wired to avoid. Indeed, we avoid it instinctively, even if we are consciously prepared to confront it knowing it has certain benefits (or more accurately, is a by-product of processes which have such benefits). The greater the pain we experience, the more we privilege its avoidance over any rational assessment of the benefits to ourselves of enduring it. Secondly, what is already true for physiogenic pain is true, of course, a fortiori for psychogenic pain (or perhaps I should call it “sociogenic pain”), namely the pain we actually experience is a function of our psychological state at the moment of the stimulus. There are common features, perhaps, but there is no standard human response to life events which modify our social constellation such as bereavement, loss of ones job, retirement and so on. Just as touch, which might otherwise procure pleasure, will feel painful when applied at a point where we have open wounds, so also the same life event will be experienced by some even pleasurably whereas it might have the most excruciating effect on others. In medicine this is called hyperalgesia.

Indeed, this is true to such an extent that it leads to a necessary qualitative distinction in any discussion of psychogenic versus physiogenic pain. Certain life events, such as bereavement, are probably universally painful in at least some degree, and therefore comparable to fractures, burns, stings and so on. In other words they signal to us a real and universal need to bring the healing resources of the body to bear on the wound inflicted. The vast majority of situations and events which cause psychogenic pain, however, are not like this at all – our reaction to them is intensely personal and someone else’s reaction to the same events could be totally different.

As I am in the business of giving personal development suggestions in this blog, and not just describing things, allow me then to say that it is extremely important to make this distinction. There are many things in the world in relation to which vast swathes of the population are in a neurotic state. It is thus statistically common to observe a similar reaction to these things in many people. Nonetheless, this does not make these things natural or inevitable sources of pain. They may even be natural sources of pleasure.

This is likely the case in many instances where many people – men and women – experience sexual jealousy. There are many grounds to suspect that observing ones partner and other people one loves being sexually intimate with others, or to learn about it or hear of it, is in fact naturally pleasurable, and was experienced as such in our Urwelt. Just to cite a few: there is the vicarious experience of pleasure which I mentioned before; the social bonds which it creates to the new sexual partner; the prospect of half-siblings improving the life chances of ones own offspring; the prospect of ones own enhanced sexual gratification as a result; and so on. Perhaps most convincingly, there are people who enjoy it. There are not many who enjoy objective sources of physical pain.

Nonetheless, many people experience this as pain. What to do? It is easy enough to say that one should stick out the pain and eventually it will die down and be replaced by pleasure. However, as any sufferer from chronic pain will tell you, this is not even necessarily true, much less is it a sufficient motivation to endure a potentially long and painful journey to a seemingly uncertain destination.

I do not have a simple answer either, but I think some reflection on what causes this hyperalgesia may point the way. Already when it is understood that the person suffering from jealousy experiences physical pain, it becomes clearer than it might otherwise have been that their reaction to this experience is, to a significant degree, outside of their control. Anger or recriminations in relation to it are pointless. Indeed, worse than pointless – such a reaction invites the sufferer to feel guilty, deny their pain, or submit to the other, refreezing and reinforcing the factors which led to the experience of jealousy in the first place.

Jealousy is felt as alienation – a withdrawal behind the defenses of the ego and a loss of the sense of contact with the world, a sense which was clearly tenuous to begin with. Alienation in childhood becomes self-fulfilling prophecy in adulthood. The cycle can only be broken by showing empathy and connection – not by withdrawing it and leaving yet another victim abandoned carelessly on life’s highway.

And this really brings me back to the essentiality of social contact, of touch and of sexual expression also. It appears that there is nothing in humanity’s basic repertoire of interaction which is merely “nice to have”, which we can ignore or neglect without fear of consequences. The idea of freedom without community – cultivated the world over as a spiritual value – is in fact a nonsense, or at best something which is only possible on the basis of a very strong foundation of community in the past.

Bauer tells familiar stories and some less so. That the passage into retirement is an explanatory variable for mortality rates. How couples seem so often to die in close proximity to each other. But also of how persons condemned for their crimes by the community to expulsion, voluntarily take on themselves the duty to die. The biological stress engendered by social exclusion is a self-destruction program, eerily like (though Bauer does not make the connection), Freud’s posited death instinct (Reich’s response to which I discussed here). And I guess this makes some sense, both because there does, after all, appear to be such an instinct in the animal kingdom* (though this certainly does not mean that Freud’s treatment of it was correct) and because it is something that many character types may intuitively understand – not only masochists.

Persons experiencing jealousy have an injured sense of connection to the world, such that they need to hold on to symbols of that connection and turn particular people (often partners, but also kids) into such symbols. They respond to perceived threats to those symbols – perceived through a magnifying lens of paranoia – with self-destructive behavior, just like those on whom the tribal shaman has pronounced a curse.

All too often, fearful of the intensity of this reaction – which is truly akin to a reaction to a life-threatening situation – and burdened anyway with their own sense of shame and guilt, their partners will apologize, try to reassure, try to salvage the fragile trust which existed, or seemed to, before. It is in the nature of things that this is not possible. This type of connection to the world is too tenuous and artificial to be anything more than a band-aid on a gaping wound. What the jealous partner needs in such moments is empathy, grounding, and connection – not desperate attempts to re-become a shattered symbol, but the shattering of the symbolic and its replacement by the real.

Genies do not go back into bottles. In such moments we can meet as demons to each other, or both decide to meet as humans. Almost everything in life that generates emotional pain has great potential for healing, but it is a potential which almost always goes unexploited because the insecurities are not just on one side, but on both. When we decide to meet as vulnerable, hurting beings it may just be that we finally realize we are not, and cannot be, alone.

Notes

* Illustrated at cellular level by the process of apoptosis, and also observed in many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder where the underlying monotrauma results from a direct human agent.

Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (1 – from Freud’s libido theory to character analysis)

Although the work of Wilhelm Reich in relation to what he called sex-economy lies at the root of many contemporary approaches to psychotherapy and personal development, it is widely misrepresented, caricaturized and misunderstood and a summary of it for the educated layman is, to my knowledge at least, difficult to come by. I am often asked to explain Reich’s thought which has very much influenced my own, and so I thought fit to attempt such a summary. In this and the next article, I propose to set out how he arrived at, and the basis for, the character-analytic approach to psychotherapy and his later vegetotherapy which aimed at directly working on what he called the “biological core” of neurosis. In a subsequent article, I would like to offer a review of his theories in the light of current knowledge, and particularly in what one would hope could be described as a somewhat more accommodating social environment than prevailed at the time of his work. (UPDATE: since I wrote this article, a very good overview of Reich’s life and work has been written by Jason Louv, see here. My own treatment is a bit more technical.)

Reich’s developments of psychotherapy all draw root in Freud’s early work. Subsequent developments of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which Reich viewed as a capitulation to social conservatism, took their work in different directions. They share, nonetheless, a substantial common bedrock, and Reich remained deeply admirative of Freud’s labors even when he disagreed with him on fundamental matters.

As is well-known, the various phases of Freud’s thought never resulted in a single synthesis and different strands within it remained in tension with each other. Freud thus never arrived at an integrated theory of psychic functioning. Reich took his lead from Freud’s libido theory of neurosis; neurosis was thus the result of a binding of sexual energy as a result of developmental factors in childhood. Freud never elucidated how this binding took place or how psychoanalysis was precisely supposed to work in order to dissolve the binding and thus resolve neurosis, but he developed different models of psychodynamics, in each case essentially of a mental nature. The blocking factors in neurosis were thus mental representations and the prescribed route to their dissolution ultimately also mental, although it proceeded from the unconscious, which for Freud could not be directly observed.

Reich’s own approach is quite at ease with Freud’s model of the three stages of consciousness, being the system unconscious, the system preconscious and the system conscious. According to this model, drives which arise in the unconscious undergo a sort of filtering process in order to arrive at the level of consciousness, during which their associations and objects change more or less radically. Thus, for example, the infantile desire to suck, if insufficiently satisfied in infancy, persists in the unconscious and is satiated, though never ultimately satisfied, through ersatz means which could involve actual sucking (thumb, lollipop), other oral actions (obesity and bulimia), fixation with oral sexuality, or other forms of clinging behavior not immediately oral in their manifestation. In order to achieve satisfaction of these ersatz or secondary drives, individuals would develop typical strategems which are in a direct line of descent from those they employed successfully in childhood – all essentially manipulative, solliciting one or other emotion on the part of the caregiver which would then elicit the desired response. Some would focus on solliciting pity, others fear, still others admiration, or benevolence through humor, or distraction, etc. Whilst Freud did not feel he had a social mission and confined himself to the therapy of those cases who presented themselves for treatment, it is easy enough to see how the learning process in early childhood coupled with certain not immediately definable characteristics of the child would lead to characteristic dispositions in adulthood, a starting-point for Reich’s work.

Reich’s interest in character was at first prompted, however, by considerations of methodology. Freud and many of his close collaborators had never taken a systematic interest in determining and assessing what worked in the therapeutic context. It was supposed that individuals needed to “cooperate” in the therapy. If they failed to do so, there was no alternative approach available. Reich realized, however, that the fact of cooperation or of failure to cooperate was endogenous to the therapeutic setting. It itself needed to be interpreted and worked through. The manifestation of resistance was evidence that one was reaching carefully repressed material. To dismiss a patient for refusal to cooperate was to admit defeat, perhaps at the moment when one was closest to achieving a breakthrough.

Reich started with a layman’s concept of personality, but soon progressed it to a developmental model in which typical frustrations of infantile libido led to a freezing of certain character responses, which were then overlaid on each other. In the therapeutic setting, the therapist would work backwards through these layers, to arrive at, and liberate, the earliest material.

Reich also noted that all patients presented with actual disturbances of “natural” genital sexuality. These disturbances were of various sorts but fundamentally there were only a limited number of variables. Decreased or absent pleasure in the genital act could be due to (i) diminished sensitivity of the genital apparatus itself, (ii) its failure to respond to conventional stimuli or at all or (iii) a failure of genital response to (sufficiently) engage adjacent muscles involved in the natural orgastic response. Persons with diminished sensitivity were often, in the male, erectively potent or, in the female, highly flirtatious, but derived little pleasure from the sexual act. Reich saw this as an instrumentalisation of sexuality in the service of a secondary drive. Persons with erectile dysfunction or vaginismus were disinterested in sexuality or conventional sexuality because it conflicted with defense mechanisms they had developed. Persons, finally, with a flat orgastic response curve (premature ejaculation in the male, muted or no orgasm in the female) encountered during the process of sexual arousal psychological obstacles which made full sexual expression impossible. This typology of genital response, Reich was able to correlate, albeit loosely, with the stages in the development of the libido posited by Freud as well as with contemporary character. Frustration prior to the oral stage led to a withdrawal of sexual interest and to schizoid character. Frustration at the oral stage led to oral fixation and a lack of autonomy, expressed as sexual passivity and a capacity for surrender but a diminished response. Frustration at the anal stage led to rigidity and inability to surrender, whilst frustration at the genital stage expressed itself as individuals with strong seductive powers and sexually active, but reporting a lack of pleasure in the sexual act and as seeking it for secondary, narcissistic purposes. In Reich’s view, the vast majority of people presented with some form of neurosis and it had both character and genital expression.

Reich’s approach felt little need for Freud’s later ego theory, but remained compatible with it. In addition to his methodological work, Reich’s greatest breakthrough was his solution of the problem of masochism, discussed at length in Character Analysis. Freud had posited a primary masochism, fruit of a biological drive he termed the death instinct (Todestrieb). For Reich this had no parallel in the animal kingdom and was unacceptable. He derived masochism as a secondary drive when the pleasure principle was frustrated by overwhelming violence to which the individual as a small child was powerless to respond. The frustrated drive first sought an outlet in sadism, turning this sadism against itself when it was further repressed. Constant juxtaposition of pleasure and punishment led to a state where they became psychically interlinked. Reich pointed out that no-one took pleasure in actual pain, only in the expectation of it. Pent-up energy which could not be channeled into pleasurable activity led to tension and anesthesia and the need for more extreme stimuli to break through to the core of the sexual drive.

Whilst Freud brokered a peace with society and seems to have viewed sublimation of sexual drives as in some degree necessary to civilization, Reich presents an uncompromising faith in the natural order reminiscent of Rousseau and Nietzsche; for him it is axiomatic that to recover the natural functioning of the human organism is the one and only path to happiness. Natural man is capable, for Reich, of the highest moral qualities and it is his sexual repression that brings evil and suffering into the world.

Part 2: The Biological Core