Obsessional Neurosis and the Use of Pornography

**The below piece is much longer than the items I usually share here. It is part of a presentation I will be giving in a reading group I participate in and thought I would share here. It is somewhat conversational and lightly edited, so take that for what you will. I also removed a paragraph due to its containing specific client content, hopefully the larger argument and text is still fairly coherent.**

Beginning with Chapter 5 of the text, having defined some of his terms and laid the foundation for his restructuring of anxiety as contributing to (rather than being a consequence of) repression, Freud takes up the question of how this process plays out in the context of the obsessional neurosis.  Fascinated primarily by what he refers to on page 37 as the “ambivalence”, or what we might be more inclined to call the dialectical nature, of this neurotic structure, Freud begins to tease out in greater detail defenses like undoing, reaction formation, and the isolation of affect.  For Freud, obsessional neuroses are characterized by an overabundance of super-ego, identifiable by a complex system which simultaneously attempts to prohibit and satisfy the urges and desires of the id.  In its attempts to repress the “unacceptable” nature of the drives, it yields an immense amount of anxiety and obsessive ritualistic routines.

Freud sees this particular structure as aligning with the anal position in his theory of psychosexual development.  The focus is on control and guarding against shame, which in the context of Victorian era Vienna was connected to sex in a manner that was consistent with the mores of the sociohistorical conditions that time and location would suggest.  However, as I read and re-reading this chapter, I found myself struck by the very different conditions we live in and a specific kind of client I often find seeking me out for therapy.  This kind of patient is typically young-ish (say under or about 30 years old), male, white, and reports, among other concerns, a compulsive tendency to engage in the viewing of pornography and masturbation.  What seemed apparent to me throughout these chapters, with regards to the specific sexual elements of the clients Freud describes, is that the conditions which frame his analysis have changed considerably.  Pornography is far more ubiquitous than it was in Freud’s era, or any other era it would seem, with many individuals, at least in the communities I am concerning myself with in this analysis, carrying around cell phones, tablets, laptops, and other pieces of technology which mean they can access pornographic material pretty much where and whenever they may choose to do so.  Additionally, though not universal and still oftentimes wrestling with the Puritanical origins of American culture, the ways in which we talk about sex and masturbation have changed considerably, with there at least nominally being much more acceptance of the idea that masturbation can be a normal part of development and sexual health.

However, despite all of that, there is something unshakably obsessive in the conditions that these clients are bringing to our work together.  Which is to say, I would seem the superego is still doing something.  And so, with my time today, I am hoping we can explore something about the shifting cultural conditions of the present moment in comparison to the era in which Freud wrote, and come to some understanding of what this new superego may look like and be doing in the context of contemporary presentations of compulsive sexual behaviors.

There is a particular profile that seems to come to my office voicing concerns about pornography use and the ways in which they feel it to be dominating their time and mental energy.  Generally they can be characterized by some combination—if not all—of the following features: overbearing and often angry fathers who were not necessarily abusive to them, but could be unpredictable and were capable of exercising emotional and verbal abuses upon the client’s mother; kind but reportedly passive mothers; romantic partners who are presented as being “demanding” and/or who have a clearer sense of their own needs and desires (erotic and otherwise); preoccupation with masculinity [this piece about gendered identity is often relevant regardless of sexual orientation]; in terms of my experience of them and the countertransferential elements of the work they often have a quality of seeming revealing and yet utterly inaccessible; additionally, I often feel myself being pulled into the objectifying matrix in which they try to place other subjectivities, while simultaneously feeling a condition of helpless longing that I might need to do or hold something on their behalf, while they engage in the masturbatory process of a kind of affectless pseudo-therapy.

Already we can see the Oedipal conflicts at play, while recognizing defenses like isolation and undoing. 

In terms of the oedipal organization, if we are inclined to read the Oedipal Complex in its traditional form, the intensity and anger of the paternal figure seemingly leaves many of these men in the position of wanting to avoid the dynamic of needing to take over that position in the triadic relationship between father, mother and son.  Similarly, the maternal figure’s passivity in this arrangement creates a sense of remoteness or inaccessibility related to this usually very dynamic system.  This dual process, dad’s overwhelming, unpredictable, and nakedly aggressive manner and mom’s passive receptivity of dad’s dominance and inability to fit into the expected role of the mother who is simultaneously seductive while also demonstrating an unavailability via a loving relationship with the father, creates—at least to my mind—what feels like, at best, a flimsy Oedipal structure which lacks the appropriate levels of tension and conflict that, though unpleasant, are in fact necessary for the developing male to carve out some sense of identity on the continuums of self-assertiveness and erotic desire.  Said in less starkly psychoanalytic terms: the father’s dominating and violent nature leaves these clients fearful of challenging him in any direct manner and unable to fulfill the developmental achievement of taking some sense of authority over their own lives; while mom’s timid nature, while kind and sometimes even doting in their descriptions, lacks the kind of intensity needed for the client to get swept up in and eventually differentiate from a kind of passionate loving that could serve as a template for explorations of a more involved intimacy later in life.

This dynamic resembles something like the structure Freud gives us on page 38 where he notes that in the face of a “feeble” and “insufficiently resistant” genital organization, the individual gets thrust back to the “sadistic-anal” level of Freud’s psychosexual stages.  Stated in more relational terms, the client’s potential for developing a manner of loving capable of mature interdependence is unable to be supported by the client’s internal objects, and so they remain fixated in early stages whose resolution is predicated on facilitating the transition from immature dependence to independence.  The idea of a mutually supportive loving relationship lacks a kind of internal structure to support such a fundamentally interpersonal or relational organization.

We can also see some of what Freud notes in terms of ambivalence and the attempt to deny while simultaneously satisfying some aspects of the Oedipal project by deflecting some of this project onto frequent pornography use.  For example, for a client who is drawn to these activities due to the powerlessness experienced in the context of failed oedipal struggles, whether we want to understand this as a failure to succeed in taking over the oedipal structure or a failure of the oedipal structure in being sufficient for allowing the taking over of itself, pornography might serve a dual function.  On the one hand, the achievement of arousal and ability to play that experience through to orgasm provides some temporary outlet for creating the illusion of having succeeded in taking over the quest for potency and intimacy which typically inform the foundation of sexual interest for these young men.  However, especially overtime, these episodes are more and more quickly followed by an exacerbation of the negative emotions it was intended to avoid and a pervasive sense of failure and inadequacy.  Without the proper internal or external structural supports to encourage the client to seek human contact outside of this simulated experience, the compromise function of this process provides some marginal relief of negative affect (primarily manifestations of shame, guilt, or both), while quickly veering into a repetition of exacerbated versions of the despairing attitudes which brought the client to seek out pornography in the first place.

The impact of this arrangement, at least in some respects, is the development of an individual who escapes even fantasy, to say nothing of real human relationships, to meet erotic needs later in life.  One of the interesting perspectives on pornography in the contemporary psychoanalytic literature is the ways in which it can either aid or inhibit the development of the individual’s sexual fantasies and understanding of their own desires.  The exploration and analysis of conscious and unconscious fantasies, and to a certain extent finding ways to help the client cultivate a richer and more meaningful connection with those fantasies, is one of the fundamental concerns of a number of psychoanalytic schools, with each of these schools having subtle differences in how those fantasies are taken up and examined.  When engaged in a certain kind of way, pornography can serve as a means for exploring new ways of making sense of one’s own erotic longings and desires.  For many of my clients, both those who find themselves compulsively using porn and those who have only cursorily used it throughout their lives, pornography, at one time or another, was one of the places where they first felt safest exploring certain types of sexual dynamics, such as same-sex sexual interests or various forms of fetishes and kinks.  The world of pornography was a place to enhance sexual fantasy, be curious about the expression and internal experience of their own desires, and get a better sense of what aroused or interested them.  Especially for a number of my gay clients who grew up in spaces where there was little sense that that part of who they were could be accepted, access to pornography was seen as a space where they could see aspects of their own longings mirrored, albeit sometimes in distorted or exaggerated forms, and helped to normalize and validate their sense of sexual identity and expressions of desire.

However, for the individuals I primarily have in mind for this paper, pornography came to serve a very different function, and I think this is where we see a bit of the obsessional neurosis start to emerge.  For the kind of clients I have in mind, what oftentimes ends up being the case is that pornography use and masturbation become ritualized and sterile routines, disconnected from personal erotic fantasy with the porn serving as a dissociative function, displacing the need to connect with one’s own sense of personal desire.  It’s almost as though—in becoming an outlet for the discharging of uncomfortable affects related to boredom, loneliness, shame, or guilt—excitement, desire, and longing also get sacrificed in the wake of this process.  All affect gets neutralized, making it all the more difficult to perhaps suss out some sense of personal erotic and/or emotional meaning in the exercise itself.  In fact, much of the work with these clients, as I have perceived it, is not about turning the dial down on their access to desire and sexual longing, but is needing to in fact reawaken that experience in a sincere and authentic way, while of course needing to make space for the disappointment, awkwardness, confusion, and potential rejection that can arise out of the process of trying to connect to another and the complex interpersonal matrix of cognitive, emotional, and bodily processes that comprise initiating and engaging in sexual experiences with another person who has their own very real set of needs, fantasies, desires, etc.

This neutralization of affect in the pursuit of sexual interest also seems to yield an increased intensity in the condemning qualities of the super-ego in the aftermath of the masturbatory act.  For these clients there are often powerful feelings of guilt and shame wrapped up in the completion of whatever this routine might look like, which are of course not separate from the act, but are an essential part of the act itself.  That is, guilt and shame, as being a part of the repetition, are a feature not a flaw or outlier.  But how are we to understand this superego?  Certainly, attitudes around sex have changed since the time of Freud’s Vienna, during which time something like masturbation was considered a taboo and morally questionable act.  These days, though maybe played for laughs in the occasional raunchy teen-comedy, there is much more of a sense of masturbation and some pornography use as being, if not a normal part of sexual development, at least unremarkable in comparison to the ways it used to be seen.  As a consequence, if the superego is in fact in part socially and culturally determined, it would stand to reason that something about the shame and guilt of participating in these activities should be seen as qualitatively less shame or guilt inducing than they had been previously.  Yes, some of the clients I see are having to make sense of this behavior in the context of a family of origin where sex was seen as taboo or was viewed through the lens of perversion, but many of them are quick to point out the confusion of never really having been fed negative attitudes about sex and yet still finding themselves struck by something painful and distressing in the wake of these activities.  And, again, many of these men come to me while finding themselves in a committed monogamous relationship with a partner who is quite interested in engaging sexually and romantically, cutting against some notion that the shame or guilt might be about otherwise not being able to find some way to find fulfillment in those domains in their day-to-day life.  So, what gives?  Why do these clients find it so difficult to enjoy without becoming trapped in an obsessional cycle of compulsive isolated sexual activity?  What is the culturally determined superego all about when framed by a cultural context that supposedly had its sexual revolution, is increasingly inviting of a divergent range of sexual interests, and frequently uses sex in pursuit of its capitalist projects to seduce and sell individuals on various material goods and services?

The contemporary philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek offers an interesting way of understanding this impulse.  Influenced primarily by Hegel and Lacan, Zizek is a philosophical figure who is obsessive in his own right in his analysis of the paradoxes of contemporary consumer culture.  For Zizek, the excesses of contemporary culture create a condition in which we have no choice but to seek pleasure where it is available, with the mechanisms of the economy and capitalism going to great lengths to sterilize the objects of our libidinal drives in order to make them impossible to deny.  Zizek, only half-jokingly, identifies objects in the world like decaffeinated coffee and non-alcoholic beer as some examples of the ways in which the world creates a condition for seeking “pleasurable” or hedonistic substances that have been stripped of the very qualities that made them hedonistic in the first place.  For Zizek, the superego no longer prohibits the possibility of enjoyment, but rather prohibits the possibility of choosing not to enjoy.  The imperative has gone from “You can’t!” to “You must!”  Working from Hegelian roots, Zizek acknowledges this process as being related to a foundational lack that is seeking fulfillment through activity.  But in keeping with psychoanalysis, the fulfilling activity is a distortion, it both discloses and conceals, satisfies and frustrates, keeping the aims and objects of desire intact in the structure Freud designates the compromise formation.

In one of his lectures on the superego, Zizek notes that two of the kinds of “false acts” which psychoanalysis has identified are that of obsessional self-hindering and perverse self-instrumentalization, and perhaps here we can begin to make sense of the fascinating ways in which a structure like the superego can be recontextualized in a society that in someways seems more characteristically permissive than would be suspected to support something like a condemning superegoic-like structure.  Reading Zizek against Freud, what seems apparent is that though circumstantially the content may change, the structure remains the same.  In each of these clients you can see an obsessional self-hindering in the sense that rather than hindering the impulse to masturbate, they are hindering their ability to hinder the impulse to masturbate.  The compulsion to “enjoy!” arises at the behest of a superego which is demanding you participate in the practice that you suspect might fill the lack and provide a feeling of completeness, much in the same way that in Freud’s time the obsessional restriction was an attempt to answer the lack by anticipating and warding off the guilt and shame that came from the practice of masturbating by developing the compulsive and ritualistic practices around cleanliness and orderliness that would be anxiously taken up in its place.  Witnessed through the lens of castration anxiety, the practice psychologically literalizes the old adage of “if you don’t use it, you lose it”, with the practice potentially warding off the loss of a variety of objects, which on a self-object continuum may include anything ranging from a sense of one’s own sexual potency or desirability to an absence of intimacy that is too alarming or anxiety inducing to pursue in real-world relationships (potentially interpreted through the metaphor of the absolute maternal presence that seems to interest Freud in these chapters).  These various factors then come together to construct an experience that is bound up in the objectification and instrumentalization of both self and others, eliminating any capacity to find any pleasure in sexual dynamics predicated on an embrace of vulnerability, intimacy, and the structures of play that can arise of an acceptance of those positions.

Before concluding, I think it would be important to revisit the piece I mentioned earlier about the propensity for these clients to want to engage in something which to me often feels like a pseudo-therapeutic process.  As a point of fact, and not to pin it all on my clients who demonstrate an obsession with porn, I think this is something I’ve observed most clients are capable of slipping into (which is to say I am also guilty of slipping into this kind of dynamic).  My suspicion is that this kind of approach to therapy has something to do with the idea that abstraction can often be an antidote to the anxiety over ambiguity, an ambiguity that we are often seeking to locate and amplify in the therapeutic process.  That said, for this particular category of client, who are already so embroiled in their participation in a compulsive behavior which is about simulating experience, and for whom an authentical felt intimacy is believed to be too intense to bear, participating in something that looks like therapy without the charge of genuine connection is a consistent concern that needs to be tended to.

As I write this, I am thinking about a number of these clients and the manner in which they describe the attempts their partners make in trying to gain their attention, bring some passion into the relationship, and elicit something like genuine feeling and desire out of  the clients.  [This section removed due to its containing specific client details]

Indeed, I think the reason this anecdote comes to mind, is because the feeling I often get in the context of working with these clients (especially when it feels to me that we are struggling to connect) is that of the jilted lover.  The most telling signals that something of significance is happening in the therapeutic relationship are in the moments where I feel frustrated, bored, disappointed, or in a moment of emotional and intellectual infidelity begin “cheating” by thinking about other clients or other concerns regarding matters in my own life that can provide the kind of charge and stimulation that are actively being sucked out of the room.  In the same way pornography for these clients both reveals and conceals some aspect of their experience, creates a kind of “there; not-there” quality as it pertains to the sexualized aspects of their own being, therapy and our relationship within that therapy can often take on this paradoxical quality in which it might seem as though we are talking about exactly what it would seem that we should be talking about, and yet the therapy is so dispossessed of any sort of emotional intensity or feeling of liveliness, as to render it inert or dare I say flaccid.  I can often feel the fluid and almost intuitive way in which the isolating tendency takes over, sometimes even within the confines of a single idea or sentence, as the client seemingly keeps on talking on the same topic, whilst becoming lifeless and reporting as though from a distance of the whole experience.  A dynamic which replicates the reports I will often get regarding what it is like to have sex with their partners, where it is occasionally welcome and exciting, though eventually becomes too much to bear, inviting a dissociative commitment to completing the task.  These moments in the therapy often invite the kind of phenomenological interventions we discuss in this space, where the only authentic intervention is to say something like “Hang on…can you feel that?  Something shifted.  What was that?  I think we need to look at what just happened here.”

As a means of moving towards some kind of conclusion, I will say that on the spectrum of folks who come through my office, there is something sort of benign and uncomplicated about this type of client, at least as it pertains to the pornography and masturbation quality of the work and how it related to their primary romantic relationships (which is typically the primary “presenting concern” for these clients).  Though they arrive with a considerable amount of resistance, and the process does take months to years to play out, these clients are also often so hungry for the kind of relationship that therapy can offer that the resistances feel more born out of habit and a lack of familiarity in discovering oneself in intimate relationship than it does resistance born out of sense that some inherent or intrinsic quality is going to be destroyed through the therapeutic process.  The grieving is much more about grieving a kind of safety in the distancing effects of the behavior than it is about initiating some kind of drastic and unwanted structural relational and intrapsychic shift.  Oftentimes the clients are so desperate for what they stand to gain, that they are willing to bear the impact of the loss.