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Fearful fantasies: sexuality as a response to love

Joel Backström1

Runebergsgatan 50 a 17, 00260 Helsinki, Finland

(Received 5 March 2014; accepted 1 April 2014)

"This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis as Joel Backström (2014)

Fearful fantasies: sexuality as a response to love, The Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review, 37:1, 48-59, DOI:

10.1080/01062301.2014.920629."

I argue that human sexuality, and in particular the difficulties associated with it, should

be understood as responses, expressive and repressive, to love. Sexual trouble cannot

be articulated in terms of a conflictual interplay between “nature” and “culture”, but

instead manifests a fear of wholly giving oneself to one’s desire for the other,

announced in arousal. I discuss the rôle of fantasies as defensive strategies through

which desire is depersonalised, and thus limited and perverted, show how Freud’s

attempt to sunder sexual desire from the “object”, the other person, misfires, and

problematize certain Lacanian dicta on the alleged “impossibility” of sexuality and

desire.

Keywords:

Freud calls psychoanalysis “a cure by love”, an attempt at “liberating repressed love”;

repression itself manifests an “incapacity for loving” (1907, p. 90; 1905c, p. 267). What one

makes of these striking characterisations depends, however, on how one understands “love”.

Freud famously claims that love is a repressed and/or sublimated form of sexuality.

According to him, “love for parents and children”, the “longing for proximity” and the

readiness for “self-sacrifice”, no less than “emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust

and the like”, have “developed from purely sexual desires” through a “softening” or

“diversion” or “inhibition” of the “sexual aim”; “Originally we knew only sexual objects

[and] people who in our real life are merely admired or respected may still be sexual objects

for our unconscious” (1912, p. 105; 1921, pp. 90–91).

I will turn the matter around, and present human sexuality as a response,

whether expressive or repressive, joyful or fearful, to love. Whatever we may say about

sexuality in animals, it is the presence of love, perspicuous often only in being avoided and

refused, that makes sexuality human; as emotionally and existentially charged, as terribly

difficult, as filled with promises of enjoyment and joy, and with endless pain and humiliation,

1 Email: jjbackstr@mappi.helsinki.fi

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as it is. I do not claim that Freud is excessively concerned with sexuality (he may be, but that

is not the point), or that we should talk about love rather than about sexuality. The point is

that in talking about sexuality we are in fact talking about love and its difficulties.

In what follows, I offer my reasons for saying this, partly via a critique of

certain specific Freudian theses and Lacanian dicta on desire, sexuality and love. Being a

philosopher, not a psychoanalyst, the only “case-material” I present are vignettes of various

everyday ways of relating to others ― mostly, attitudes found in people considered

“normal”, although I briefly discuss sexual perverts and rapists. As a philosopher, I bring no

specialist knowledge to these cases; rather, by the simple “method” of thinking, of spelling

out and reflecting on what is actually already given in our pre-theoretical understanding of

them, I try to bring out important but often ignored aspects of their meaning; to show, for

instance, how particular attitudes are connected to, or contrast with, certain others, or again

how they depend on one’s misrepresenting their character to oneself and on a denial of

certain possibilities. To my mind, there is a close kinship between philosophers and

psychoanalysts, which is often obscured by diverging academic traditions and conventions,

with their entrenched confusions and repressions. Philosophers and analysts alike are, or

should be, dedicated to questioning, rather than accepting at face value, our claims ―

whether “instinctive” or “official”, explicit or implicit, “naive” or “theoretical” ― about

the meaning of what we do. The focus should be on what is unwittingly revealed by the

tensions and self-contradictions, the fixations, confusions and apparently inexplicable

deficiencies and intensities of affect in our communication. With regard to our present topic, I

argue that pervasive aspects of everyday and theoretical discourses concerning sexuality

unwittingly reveal the denied or misrepresented presence of love.

The first section of the paper elucidates what I mean by “love”. I do not take

myself to be expounding some private theory or ideal of love; what interest could that have?

Rather, I sketch, and invite the reader to consider, a certain human possibility, whose

inescapable importance I try to indicate. Section 2 shows how certain forms of

destructiveness and perversion in sexual life can be seen as repressions of this very

possibility, and also answers an inevitable objection. Section 3 points to impasses in Freud’s

official theory of sexuality, and shows how his own clinical descriptions actually presuppose

a view of sexual life at odds with it, one focused on difficulties with love in the non-reductive

sense I sketch. The kinship between repressive and permissive social attitudes to sex is also

discussed. Section 4 analyses the defensive rôle of anonymising fantasy in sexual life, while

the final section reveals the confusion of the idea, expressed by Freud and insisted on by

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Lacanians, that love is somehow inherently “impossible”. On the contrary, it is the real, but

fearfully challenging possibility of love that makes life, including sexual life, so difficult.

Sexual love

Sexual arousal is often presented as an involuntary physiological reaction, some mere,

uncannily disconnected erection or moistening. This idea, famously and influentially

articulated by Augustine (1952, book XIV:15 ff.), is pervasive in everyday thinking, and can

therefore seem self-evidently correct, “simply the way things are”. I will argue, however, that

arousal appears in this light, feels like this, only to someone alienated from himself and from

the other; someone, that is, frightened by the desire, announced in his arousal, to get in closer

contact with the other. To him, it appears as though his body is betraying him, deviously

pushing him towards the frightening other; that is, in his anxiety he disavows his desire for

the other by projectively blaming it on his body, against which he presents himself as locked

in struggle. Thus, St. Francis de Sales, barely containing his own repressed excitement at the

imagined scene, tells us of a saint who, beleaguered by a voluptuous seductress, “having now

no part of his body under his command but his tongue, bit it off and spat it in the face of that

filthy woman who tormented his soul so cruelly by her lust” (1953, p. 265). The violence of

the disavowal here is extreme. But basically the same alienation reappears when, more in line

with our secular inclinations, someone presents their flagging desire for the other ― in fact

tied to fear and disgust, and manifest as impotence or frigidity ― as a bodily, quasi-

technical problem of “sexual performance”.

My suggestion is that arousal, like sexual desire and the relation to one’s own

body in sexual settings generally, do not have a given, neutrally describable, character or

essence, but rather they will be fundamentally different depending on whether, or how far,

they are experienced in love, or on the contrary in a repressive fleeing from love, from one’s

desire for the other. Theoretical statements about “the” character of sexuality, too, may

merely record the way sexual life appears to, or rather is repressively misrepresented by,

someone running from love. For discussions of how philosophical theorising generally may

be driven by defensive fantasising, see Backström (2011, 2013).

A desire and longing for contact, for knowing the other in openness, is

announced in sexual arousal. This desire for the other, I will say, is love itself. The character

of the sexual encounter is crucially determined by whether it is allowed to grow, or is

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fearfully thwarted in its development. A paradigmatic instance of love’s desire is looking

straight into the other’s eyes, quite unguardedly, giving everything, concealing nothing. In a

sexual encounter infused with love, this will be experienced as sexually arousing; the lovers

will keep eye-contact, they will not feel an anxious need to turn their glance aside. But

obviously, we often feel that need, with any attempt to keep contact resulting, very quickly,

in a kind of overwhelming panic of intimacy.

Whether love is present or not, arousal is certainly palpably bodily; an erection,

a moistening, a warm or hot feeling in one’s whole body. But it is not “merely” bodily. If

allowed to develop, it reveals itself as, the way desire for the other feels. Sexual desire in love

is the desire to feel the other, to be with her. One wants to make love, but also to look into the

other’s face and to talk with her, and the desire for these things cannot be separated. They are

all aspects of the same desire and longing for the other; to be with her, to get to know and to

be known by her in every possible way ― and so not in any particular way, only. Love is

not a specific desire alongside others, but a desirous orientation towards the other that can

express itself in other kinds of desire, transfiguring them as it does so. One could say that the

more love is present, the more one’s particular desires and interests cease to insist in their

particularity; one is no longer focused on, obsessed by, isolated “things”, e.g., by particular

forms of sexual activity that one either insists on having or avoiding. In love, sexuality does

not become less sexual; on the contrary, only then can its wild, joyful possibilities be fully

and fearlessly developed. But in a certain sense it ceases to have a specific “content” of its

own; as Dilman (1987, p. 91) says, it “takes on the character of the contact two individuals

make, or … long for and strive after”, and can thus “bring into play almost any part of the

person in his responses to the other”.

This is an aspect of love’s desire for sexual communion. In love, at issue is not

what I need or expect or experience or enjoy, but our desire to reach each other. Here, there

is simply no such thing as insisting on “having it my way,” or allowing you to have it “your

way”; in love’s arousal, there is no separate way “for you” or “for me”, there is just our

search for each other. To be sure, lovers will ask each other for anything, for love’s desire

conquers fear, but they will neither demand anything nor submit to anything. When arousal is

lived in love, what one is aroused by is the prospect of sexual communion, and if the other

does not want that, it kills one’s arousal. Or rather, one’s arousal ceases as soon as it

becomes, through the other’s withdrawal, merely one’s own. Thus, insofar as my desire to

caress you expresses love, I will not go on if you don’t want me to, because there will now be

no place for me to go. You were the “place”, and you have withdrawn. By contrast, if my

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caress is loveless, my response to your unwillingness may vary. If I want to ingratiate myself

with you, I will anxiously stop and apologise, perhaps; if I feel sentimental and cuddly, or

just impatiently horny, I might go on because I want to so much; indeed, in the egocentricity

of my arousal I may not even notice that you don’t like what I’m doing. The more I give

myself over to my sentimental or horny fantasising, the more I ignore you, on whose person I

stage my fantasy.

One important consequence of the above is that love understood as desire for

openness and communion with the other, and sexual desire where it expresses love rather

than repressing or subverting it, have no need for, and leave no place for, external, “moral”

regulation. Violation does not have to be “forbidden” by some external authority, but is

excluded by the dynamics of love’s desire itself. It is not, for instance, that I have also to

“respect” the other whom I desire sexually, to ensure that my desire does not lead me to

violate her, for what I desire excludes every violation. What I desire is that you turn to me, or

join me, in the openness, the unguarded vitality and joy, in which I turn to you. This has

nothing to do with mere willingness on your part to “give me what I want.” Such

obligingness does not express love, but all kinds of other motivations; perhaps a wish to

flatter or to be “kind”, to fulfil one’s “obligations”, to make someone else jealous, to be

humiliated, and so on. If one desires the other in love, one will be turned off by consent of

this kind, no less than by the other’s unwillingness or fear. But if one’s own sexual desire is

deformed by destructiveness, the other’s destructiveness will turn one on insofar as it

“answers” to one’s own, “fits” one’s fantasy. Thus, your masochistic wish to be humiliated

turns on the sadist in me ― if there is a sadist in me; your wish to be “kind” speaks to my

self-pity, and so on.

“Naivety” and banalisation, nature and culture, perversion and joy

The view of love sketched here ― extensively elaborated and compared with other views

in Backström (2007) ― will inevitably strike many as simplified, idealised, perhaps

unbelievably naïve. It seems to ignore the complexity and ambivalence of human

attachments, the fact that, as Freud says, “almost every intimate emotional relation between

two people”, however loving it may appear, “contains a sediment of feelings of aversion and

hostility, which only escapes perception as a result of repression” (1921, p. 101). But I do not

dispute Freud’s observation. I make no empirical claims about how often one actually finds

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people wholeheartedly loving each other. I am asking what love is; what one means to evoke

or refer to in using that word, “love”, as opposed to some other. Whatever one’s substantive

views on love, they imply some idea about this, and the task of philosophical reflection is

precisely to become clear about these implied ideas, which may well turn out to be quite

confused. For instance, the sense of “love” one evokes may be corrupted by cynicism or

sentimentality, to name two sides of the same difficulty; cynicism being the loss of illusions

of sentimental idealisation without fully realising that they were indeed illusions, i.e., that in

giving them up one has not lost anything of real value, and so has no cause for

disappointment and bitter resentment ― which, however, is precisely the emotional

response underlying cynicism and providing its passion. And note that those who insist on

the constant intertwinement of love with hostility, too, must rely on some notion of love “in

itself”, for their claims presuppose that love is distinguishable from the hostility it is

“intertwined” and “mixed” with. Furthermore, the central point about love and

destructiveness is that they cannot be “mixed” in a harmonious way, as black and white can

be mixed to create shades of grey, but rather they “mix” only like cats and dogs: through

conflict.

Freud’s basic instinct as a thinker ― and this I take to be his great strength

― is always to search out the existential conflict, the acute, irreconcilable contradiction that

hides beneath, or rather in, the surface hurly-burly of everyday busyness, satisfactions,

frustrations and inconstancies. Of course things are often not clear-cut; our reactions are

complex and ambivalent. But that does not necessarily reflect “the essence of life”; it may

also result from our working very hard to blur our awareness of the reality of our situation.

Freud, wisely, took his cues from the mad. And no-one is driven mad by an insight into “the

ambiguity and complexity of it all”. On the contrary, madness is a response to something so

pressing and terrifyingly distinct that, to escape it, the person feels compelled to descend into

desperate incoherence, self-destructiveness and perhaps suicide.

In the sequel, I will explain how the apparently “idealised” and “unrealistic”

perspective I propose can make sense of the conflicts and destructiveness of sexual life,

which supposedly more “realistic” accounts banalise and so render incomprehensible. Notice,

for instance, the banalisation inherent in the standard approach to sexual life in terms of the

nature/culture- problematic; an approach shared by social constructivist and biologistic

accounts, as well as by the majority who see sexuality as somehow combining the “animal”

and the social (Butler, 1990/2006; Foucault, 1990; Lear, 1998; Paglia, 1991, Ryan & Jethá,

2010). This approach also informs Freud’s account (1933, p. 57–80) of the psyche as

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partitioned into id, ego, and super-ego, with the individual torn and pressured by two equally

anonymous forces: on the one hand, the demands of social morality and normality; on the

other, the demands of sexual and aggressive drives issuing from the id. The super-ego’s guilt-

inducing, prohibiting and enjoining voice originally comes from “outside”, it speaks in me

but is not my own, and while the drives pressure me from “within”, I simply find myself

driven by them, as though by alien forces from some “internal foreign territory”.

This view certainly chimes with how people often experience, i.e., present to

themselves, conflicts involving sexuality; people speak of “lust welling up inside” and feel

restricted by socially induced feelings of guilt and disgust. Notice, however, that what is

missing from this picture is the other person, the desired one. Apparently, the difficulty is all

about the individual’s relation to social expectations and to her own bodily, privately felt

desires and needs ― while the other person and her relation to him disappear from view.

Nonetheless, sexual relations are precisely relations to another. One does not simply kiss or

caress, one kisses or caresses someone; it may be a chance acquaintance, a stranger, but it is

not no-one. Clearly, people often respond to their desire for others in an alienated,

anonymising spirit, but such responses are not inevitable and do not show “the essential

anonymity of sexual desire.” As I have suggested, and will explain more fully below, they are

defensive manoeuvres of depersonalisation provoked by the fear of personal contact through

sexuality. They are, in short, ways of withdrawing from love.

I have suggested that, frightened by the prospect of sexual communion, we

often try to deal with the situation by privatising and depersonalising our desire, thereby

thwarting and perverting the course of mutual sexual exploration intimated in arousal. I

would agree with Stoller’s (1985, p. 43) broad definition of sexual perversion as “using an

erotic act for the purpose of avoiding intimacy ― intimacy of personhood, not just of

anatomy ― with another”, although I would rather speak of an avoidance of openness and

communion, as real contact is often avoided precisely through a certain kind of symbiotic

intimacy, in which one is simultaneously very close and very closed to the other. In any case,

Stoller suggests, quite rightly, that “normal” sexuality too is largely perverse, even if the

dynamics at issue are strikingly illustrated in commonly recognised perversions such as

fetishism. The fetish is not an object as such, but something associated with human beings

(e.g., shoes, nails, cigarette holders) or, more often, an actual human being, although only if

they fill certain specifications; short men, amputees, policemen, a woman pulling a toilet

chain ― to pick some specimens from Stoller’s (1985, pp. 16-17) ad hoc list.

Another fetish he mentions, “trodden grass rising”, perfectly exemplifies the

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fetishist logic: the grass is exciting, but only because a human being has walked past on it,

just as the shoe is only exciting because of the foot that was or might be in it. But it is equally

important to the fetishist that the foot, that is, the human being, is now absent. As Stoller

notes, the point is that her real presence would be too threatening: that’s why the fetish is

needed. As Stoller (1985, p. 32) says, the fetishist “dehumanises” his sexual object “in order

to feel safe enough to get excited”, and essentially the same dehumanising-for-safety

characterises many “normal” forms of aestheticizing in sexual contexts, such as assessing

others as in certain respects “sexy” or not, whereby to “avoid anxiety or, even worse, despair,

we deprive others of their fullness”. A different aspect of the same problematic is the

perverse focus on a certain staging and surrounding of sexual activity. To turn me on, it’s not

enough that you are there. No, everything must be done in a particular way. Perhaps there

must be candle light, or no lights at all, perhaps a certain kind of music must be there to “put

me in the mood”; perhaps the actual sex must or must not include certain positions, and so

on. As Devereux (1967, p. 54; emphasis added) says, “Perversion is centred not upon the

partner, but upon the ‘sexual’ act”.

The fear of full humanity, of the intimately responding, and so challenging,

other, can be seen in an extreme form in rape. A convicted rapist says that his total

dominance of the women he raped allowed him “to have sex without caring about the

woman’s response” (Scully 1990, p. 150). The rapist mischaracterises the situation, however,

for he actually cares very much about his victim’s response; the point is that he wants it to be

of a particular kind: submissive fear, which allows him to feel in control, to feel safe enough

to get excited. This is confirmed by another rapist, who says that raping gave him the

“confidence” he otherwise lacked: “I’m bashful, timid. When a woman wanted to give in

normal sex, I was intimidated. In the rapes, I was totally in command, she totally submissive”

(Scully, ibid.). This illustrates how not just the other’s possible rejection, but her very desire

to give herself can be experienced as threatening; no doubt partly because of the possibility of

future rejection it entails, but also because the self-revelation entailed by a welcomed bid for

contact is felt to be threatening as such.

The fear of the revelations of openness also largely explains the demand for

prostitution. Someone who gives sex to anyone for money evidently has no special interest in

you personally. Of course, the prostitute’s rôle prescribes flattering the client so that he can

sustain a fantasy of himself as desirable, thus blurring his awareness of the mercenary,

humiliating aspect of the situation. Equally important, however, for client and prostitute alike,

is to remember that this is an impersonal business-transaction. If they “forget” it, and matters

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become personal between them, the very difficulties prostitution promised to bracket will

reappear. For instance, a man may ask a prostitute for things his wife would find him

disgusting for wanting (and that he might find her disgusting for consenting to). Disgust is

the refusal, in revulsion, to pursue a contact one feels has already become too close; too

revealing. By adopting a business-like attitude, the prostitute is supposed to make herself,

even in her apparently unlimited “availability”, personally untouchable by the other, and so

immune to disgust. If her defensive posture breaks down, and her client senses disgust in her,

the fantasy-game is ruined.

The game is equally disrupted, however, if the good possibility ― never

absent in human encounters, however unlikely it may seem ― is realised, and the sexual

encounter becomes excitedly joyful, which means that both parties open up and give

themselves to the joy, to each other, with no anxiously set end in sight; for instance, no

“time’s up, if you want more, you have to pay more”. In sexual as in other settings, joy is not

a passive state of bliss, but a joyous exploration of one’s being with the other. Joy is not

abandon or ecstasy, it is not a “being beside oneself” or “losing oneself” in which “anything

can happen”, and so is wholly different from Lacanian jouissance, understood as “surrender

to the impersonal machinery of pleasure” where, “yielding to a stronger force”, one “vanishes

into the anonymity of the flesh”, abandoning oneself to a “a pleasure that satisfaction cannot

quench”; a pleasure sovereignly indifferent to the “transgression of boundaries”, sometimes

even “taking delight in evil” (Moyaert, 2010, p. 32). There cannot be joy in evil, precisely

because joy is about opening oneself to others in a movement which is the opposite of

“anonymous” and “impersonal”, while abandoning oneself to evil means closing oneself to

them, even as one turns on them, attacking them in frenzied abandon to destruction. In sexual

terms, evil ― e.g., rape ― means not allowing oneself to feel aroused by and with the

other, but only by the fantasy of what one may do to them or get them to do.

Surrender to jouissance is obviously “beyond control”, and will therefore

appear frightening to those anxiously set on self-control, that is, on controlling their

encounters with others. They will be frightened by joy, too, but that does not make joy and

jouissance the same. Generally speaking, conceptions of subversive desire that ignore the

fundamental distinction between openness and closure to the other, and between good and

evil in the sense of that distinction ― think of the allure of de Sade, or of Kierkegaard’s

fascination with the “absurdity” of faith exemplified in Abraham’s readiness to murder his

own child ― remain wedded to the very perspective of “respectable” social morality they

appear to subvert. For only from that perspective will someone’s acting “subversively” or

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“excessively”, “as no normal, respectable person would”, overshadow the question of

whether their act was good or evil, an act of love or destructiveness. And actually, respectable

people are often quite willing to “give up control” and “go wild” precisely in anonymous,

depersonalised contexts, say in the collective euphoria of a ballgame, a garage sale or a

lynching.

Theory versus practice in Freud’s treatment of sexuality

On the view I have sketched, perversions, including those characteristic of sexual

“normality”, arise as defences against the fear of the other, whom one nonetheless also longs

for, sexual desire being different from all kinds of private desires and urges ― e.g., the

desire for sweets, for intellectual stimulation or for scratching an itch

― precisely insofar as it essentially involves desire for another person, with all the

difficulties this potentially involves. By contrast, Freud claims that perversions, along with

other sexual phenomena, serve precisely to undermine the notion that sexuality is essentially

a “striving to unite ... in love” (1905b, p. 136). According to him, the sexual “object” (i.e.,

the person desired) is “merely soldered together” with the sexual drive, which is “in the first

instance independent of its object” and later often ― as in fetishism, according to Freud

― more-or-less disconnected from it; “What is essential and constant in the sexual drive is

something else” (1905b, pp. 147–149). While it remains unclear what exactly this “something

else” that defines sexuality is supposed to be, Freud presents sexuality as, basically,

“polymorphously perverse”; a bundle of “component drives” growing out of various

“erotogenic zones” (anal, oral, and genital) striving for satisfaction (1905b, pp. 183–184, 191,

231–235).

My key criticism of this picture is that, whatever uses it may have, it conspicuously fails

to make sense precisely of the thing that interests Freud most in human sexuality, namely its

pervasive trouble and strife, its terrible conflicts. As Zupančič (2008, pp. 14-15) says, “Freud

discovered human sexuality as a problem (in need of explanation), and not as something with

which one could eventually explain every (other) problem”. Or, in the words of Lear (2003,

p. 156): the essence of Freud’s view of sexuality is that “our sexual life gets expressed in the

activities of repressing and distorting certain aspects of our sexuality”; “misleading ourselves

about our own sexual life is sexual life”. Now, my objection to Freud’s official theory of

sexuality is precisely that it obscures this very insight. And in fact, although in theory Freud

wishes to describe sexuality in terms of bodily drives only loosely connected to desire for

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others, when referring to sexuality in his clinical descriptions, his focus is always on

difficulties in inter-personal relationships. Thus, he connects the conflicts during the “anal

stage”, when potty-training takes place, to the child’s wish to make the parents happy,

making a “gift” of its faeces; to struggles over power and independence, with the child

refusing or deciding when to defecate (cf. the later expression “Don’t touch my shit!”) and,

finally, to the parents’ traumatic rejection of the child as “dirty” (cf. 1905b, pp. 186–187 and

footnote). I fail to see how speaking of “erotogenic zones” clarifies these human difficulties

concerning freedom and wilfulness, love and disgust. Obviously and significantly, the very

same difficulties played out around the potty arise elsewhere, too, for instance in apparently

“oral” feeding situations, with the child refusing food or making the parents the “gift” of

eating “like a good boy/girl”, and so on. (For similar criticisms of Freud’s focus on erotic

zones and drives, see, e.g., Fairbarn (1954) and Kohut (1977)).

Consider also that crucial Freudian idea: the oedipal constellation. While Freud

characterises it as a fundamentally sexual drama, it is primarily indeed a drama, a tale of

terrible tensions and difficulties between family members. The “family romance”, as Freud

likes to call it (1909; Masson 1985, pp. 248, 317–318), is certainly not driven by mere sexual

attraction, but by the dynamics of possessiveness, rivalry and jealousy which arise because

those involved do not only love, but also have a great fear and mistrust of, each other. While

these fantasised “romances of revenge and exoneration” (Masson 1985, p. 318) clearly often

have a sexual charge, as Freud claims they always will, this charge itself gets its character

from its setting within the moral-existential conflicts between people ― which are, in

essence, love-trouble, not mere sex-trouble. For Freud, “oedipal” names a destructive

dynamics of demands raised in the name of love, in which the child proceeds as though the

parents, primarily the parent of the opposite sex, should by rights be devoted to it exclusively,

and regards anything contradicting this as proof of “unfaithfulness” (1917, p. 332; 1910–18,

p. 171). Pleasure is not what is at stake here, but love understood, or rather, repressively

misunderstood, in a possessive-preferential sense, where the specifically sexual value of

pleasures given is inextricable from their being taken as tokens of privileged status. In this

context, then, the relationship to the “object” is clearly not a secondary add-on, but the very

centre and site of the sexual drama.

Furthermore, if voraciously sprawling, “polymorphous perversity” were indeed

the basic nature of sexuality, a happy orgy and free-for-all would be the obvious “solution”

for an otherwise inevitably frustrating situation. But not only are such “solutions” not in fact

adopted; they would not really solve anything, as ideologically driven, forced and therefore

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inevitably unhappy experiments in sexual “freedom” (cf. some Hippie communes) illustrate.

The point is that people could live in unlimited promiscuity without anxiety and frustration

only if they had already solved their problems. Freud would presumably say that “orgy-

solutions” are unworkable because, during socialisation, we have been forced to repress and

deny, in a way not to be undone by simple decision, overt satisfaction to certain

“components” of the sexual drive, e.g., sadistic and anal desires, and yet the “fundamental

processes which produce erotic excitation remain unaltered” ― thus the excremental

remains “all too intimately and inseparably bound up with the sexual” ― so that instead

of complete sexual fulfilment, we get frustration and symptomatic crypto-satisfactions

(1910–18, pp. 189–90). The social repression of sexual expression is indisputable, but what

needs explaining, and Freud does not explain, is why and how the apparent need to repress

sexual life arises in the first place. Sexual desire itself is not the problem, although Freud

sometimes suggests so, as we will see; instead, our problems have the form of a destructive,

repressive turning-against-one’s-own-desire (cf. Freud 1906, pp. 276–277). But the question

is what drives this turning. And here, Freud’s reference to the influence of “shame, disgust ...

and the structures of morality and authority erected by society” (1905b, p. 231) will not do,

for the question is precisely why and how these moralistically repressive forces arise; what

are they, what supplies their energy, what are they responses to?

While social repression of sexuality can be a terrible thing, as the Victorians or

the Taliban illustrate, it merely represses the basic problem, it does not create it. This is why

Hippie experiments generally fail and today’s post-modern sexual permissiveness, despite

having eliminated much obvious unhappiness and outright persecution, has not created a

genuinely free sexual life. Changing social norms cannot make it easier for two people to be

themselves with each other, to feel free to fully reveal their desire, for that is something the

two have to accomplish themselves. Thus, the difficulty of sexual communion remains as

great as ever, only the characteristic modes of repressing it are now different. The Victorian

debasement of sexuality as something “dirty”, and the corresponding false idealisation of

“pure” love ― a schizophrenic attitude which meant, as Freud says, that “where they love

they do not desire, and where they desire they cannot love” (1910–18, p. 183) ― allowed

Victorians to defend themselves against, and pervert, their desire for the other by denying its

sexual dimension altogether. Today, people more typically meet the same defensive needs

through a kind of banalisation of the sexual dimension. Sex is made (apparently) “safe”, the

frightening prospect of fully showing one’s desire for the other managed, by reducing it to

“natural” wishes for pleasure to be negotiated by autonomous persons with their preferences,

13

expectations and “rights”, who must reach agreement on the terms of their sexual

“exchange”. The doomed attempts to formulate one’s actual relational desires, anxieties and

grievances in this impersonally “rational” idiom are comical and heart-rending; anxious

desires to please and not impose on the other alternate with arrogant demandingness, inability

to “fault” anyone for terrible destructiveness (“It’s his life, he has a right to do as he pleases”,

“I never promised you anything”) leads to mute depression and aggression, and knowingness

is revealed as despair.

Our permissiveness can thus play the same defensive rôle, and be attended with

the same despair, as its apparent opposite, Victorian repression. As has often been noted, on

the level of public opinion, sexual enjoyment has changed from something forbidden to

something one is supposed not only to value but to achieve, and the typical object of guilt is

now not sexual desire but its lack. In Rich’s (1980, p. 188) words, while the Victorian wife

was “expected to have no sensuality, to ‘lie still’; the twentieth-century ‘free’ woman ... is

expected to fake orgasms”. Such changes in social attitudes are interesting and important (for

a historical account of the emergence of modern, “liberal” attitudes to sexuality, see

Dabhoiwala (2012)), but they nonetheless do not change the basic difficulty of the sexual

encounter, which is about fully revealing oneself to the other in desire. And this is possible

only insofar as one frees oneself from social attitudes and modes of being whatever their

specific character. In taking a social attitude, one assumes a shared response instead of

actually responding to the other. One imposes certain responses on the other and oneself,

certain notions about what kinds of relations between people, including in sexual matters, are

possible and acceptable. But love is the desire to know the other, and oneself in relation to

her; it is to ask “Who are you? Who am I?” ― not to assume an answer.

Returning to Freud, he never explains either what sex is; what makes an act

sexual ― cf., how he evades this “difficult” question after stating that it “cannot be

evaded” (1905b, p. 180) ― or why sex, and not rather something else, should be the great

stumbling-block of his patients. As Laplanche & Pontalis note (1967, p. 362), the “final

theoretical justification of this privileged rôle accorded to sexuality in [psychic] conflict” was

“left in the air” by Freud, who tended to fall back on the claim that “analytic experience”

showed that it was in fact so, although he could not explain why (cf. Freud 1905a, p. 115;

1906, p. 278). I have suggested that this indeed appears arbitrary and incomprehensible if one

conceives of sexuality according to Freud’s official theory, whereas the situation becomes

comprehensible if one places sexuality in the context of our difficulties with love. It is never

really sexuality as such that is the problem, however. Or, more exactly, there is no sexuality

14

“as such”. Rather, the problem is the repressive turning against one’s own desire for the

other, and it is because this desire is a desire for the other that the turning takes the form of

destructive patterns of relatedness: fearful, hateful, disgusted. These patterns, which are

conspicuously manifest in sexual relations, but by no means only there, are responses that

serve both to mask and reveal the desperation of a longing for the other which one dares not

affirm, but also cannot be rid of, and so can only repress, deny and pervert.

Anonymising fantasy

Insofar as we depersonalise and pervert our desire for each other in the ways indicated ―

and innumerable variations of the theme could be given ― Lacan’s (1999, p. 58) dictum

that “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship” holds true. For then we are, even when

together with others physically, fantasising a particular mode of their and our own presence

and desire, rather than actually being present to and with each other in desire. Think of the

potentially uncanny experience of unexpectedly catching a glimpse of oneself in a mirror

while engaged in a sexual act with someone; one suddenly looks at oneself and the other, as

though one was not actually there with her but somewhere else, peeping in at “the scene”. But

this same outsider’s perspective, this same lack of presence with and to the other in sexual

enjoyment, is also exemplified in the wish (perhaps more prototypically male) to look at the

bodies and the genitals in the act, as it were from outside, from a safe distance, as though one

was reading a porn-magazine, rather than feeling the genital contact with the other in the act

― or again in the apparently opposite wish to close one’s eyes and fantasise, rather than

looking the other in the eye. The fantasy may involve a third party, but it may also have as its

object the very person whose eyes one cannot bear to meet; the safety of the fantasy is that,

even if I fantasise about you, it is always my fantasy.

Not all imaginings are or express fantasies in the troubling sense just indicated,

obviously. Waiting for or writing to an absent lover, one can certainly imagine sexual scenes

with her, where this does not screen one off from, but on the contrary expresses one’s desire

for, her. And destructive fantasies do not, of course, most importantly appear as conscious

fantasising, but as the unconscious scripts that structure a person’s behaviour and responses

even though she herself would never admit it. Thus a woman may claim to want a “real man,

someone strong”, daydream about sexual encounters with such a man, and yet always start

relationships with weaklings whom she can bully and despise, and perhaps also “mother”.

The fantasy script structuring her sexual life is revealed in her actual behaviour, and her

15

explicit avowals and conscious fantasies reveal their sense, their function, only within that

structure. What the woman wants is a man to despise, and herself in the role of despiser; the

“official” fantasy of the strong man is necessary because she can despise her man (rather than

herself) only if she can hold onto the belief that he is not the man she really “wants”, just

someone she is “saddled with”. Now why does she want a man to despise? I would say:

because she does not want to love him, she is afraid of real encounter, and viewing someone

with contempt means seeing them as, and trying to keep them in the position of, someone

incapable of offering anything that challenges one, brings joy or grief ― this case

illustrates how repression and fantasy are nested, one layer covering another. There is a

fantasy of the strong man (and her as admiring and submitting to him), masking a deeper

fantasy of the despicable man (despised and dominated by her), which in turn masks a fear of

relationship with a man beyond power, submission and domination.

Most typically, the depersonalisation of desire is effected via perfectly “normal”

and “ordinary” fantasy-scripts that, because of their very ordinariness, are not recognised as

fantasies at all. Consider, for instance, Freud’s claim that “the psychical value of erotic needs

is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy” so that an “obstacle” is required in

order to “heighten libido”; “where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been

sufficient”, Freud says, “men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to

enjoy love”, while “love became worthless and life empty” where sexual morals were so

loose that satisfaction became too easy to obtain (1910–18, pp. 187–188). I would say that, in

the guise of making a “scientific” observation, Freud is here voicing a pervasive prejudice

and fantasy; witness the “truisms” that a girl must play hard to get to keep a man interested,

and so on. In discussing the rôle of “forbiddenness” in the love-life of women, Freud notes

that many girls keep their love-relationships secret from parents and others even when they

have no reason to fear disapproval: “Girls often say openly that their love loses value for

them if other people know of it” (1910–18, pp. 186, 203). This game of secrecy enacts a

fantasy of transgressing against social prohibitions; as Freud notes, the same logic explains

why many married women uninterested in their husbands find their sexual desire kindled

again “as soon as the condition of prohibition is re-established by a secret love affair:

unfaithful to their husband, they are able to keep a second order of faith with their lover”

(1910–18, p. 186).

People, men as well as women, clearly often behave in these ways. But contrary to

Freud, who seems to accept the fantasy they stage at face value, I would not ascribe this to

any need for “excitement” inherent in love or sexuality. At stake, rather, is the individual

16

woman’s or man’s difficulties with wholeheartedly desiring the person they claim to love,

which makes them anxiously grab for whatever resources they can find to depersonalise the

relationship. To play the rôle of a faithful wife fulfilling her matrimonial duties is one way of

doing this, but there is just as much depersonalisation in the unfaithful wife’s extra-marital

affair, insofar as she is enacting a drama in which certain set rôles are filled by herself, her

husband and her lover; rôles just as much defined through the social norms and expectations

involved, although in this case, these define the situation as “illicit”. To see how wholly

conventional and anonymous the framing of the situation is, we need only imagine that the

lover is not just looking for an “affair” ― in itself an anonymous term, indicating a certain

well-defined kind of transaction ― with the wife, but actually loves her and asks her to

make up her mind whether she wants to share her life with him. This will force the wife

towards the realisation that what she has set up is a little social-imaginary threesome that can

be kept up only on condition that none of the people involved really love each other.

Love, an empty daydream?

As indicated, sexuality is pervasively structured by fantasies. They are the screen we erect

between ourselves and the other, so as to avoid direct contact with them. Our fantasies do not

show the vitality of our sexual life, but are an index of our sexual difficulties, that is, of the

love-trouble that pervades and deforms sexual life. How deep the trouble goes is evident from

the fact that the relation between the sexes is itself pervasively scripted by constricting and

destructive collective fantasies, with the gendered positions of “man” and “woman” mutually

defining each other in a kind of dynamic deadlock which tends to make communion between

them almost impossible; a predicament closely connected to the asymmetrical rôles of mother

and father in the early childhood of both sexes; see Dinnerstein (1976/1987) and Benjamin

(1988) for two acute analyses. I will not try to attack this enormous and crucial problematic

directly here. The only point I wish to make is that, while our collective gender-fantasies are

certainly deep and difficult to deconstruct, they are still, just like the more “local” fantasies

discussed above, precisely repressive defences against love. They do not create or define

sexuality or love between human beings, but rather attempt to hide and contain love (sexual

and otherwise).

This brings us to the last topic of the paper. For contrary to what I just said, some would

claim that fantasy is not just pervasive but inescapable; that it is not a deformation of sexual

desire, but its own proper form. On the Lacanian conception, Van Haute (2002, pp. 156-157,

17

and footnote) explains, “the relations of the subject to the Other will always be structured in

terms of phantasies” in which “the Other is reduced to a part object” ― e.g., she is

imagined as someone who must take care of me (like the “good breast”) or who must be

controlled (like faeces) ― and this being so, there is never a real relation between lovers,

only two people locked in their respective fantasies, so that sexual love turns out to be “an

empty daydream”.

Following Freud’s suggestion that “something in the nature of the sexual drive

itself is unfavourable to the realization of complete satisfaction” (1910–18, pp. 188–189),

then, the Lacanians claim that “the failure of the sexual relationship is not a matter of

individual impotence but is a structural impossibility” (Verhaeghe, 2009, p. 97). The sober,

scientific sound of this statement can easily make one overlook its audacity, revealed as soon

as one imagines it made not in abstracto, but spoken to someone in real life. Suppose two

people are struggling in an embittered and sexually unhappy marriage; they are desperately

trying to find their way back to each other, but at the same time, the failure of their attempts

reveals a lack of wholeheartedness in one or both of them, a lingering unwillingness to let go

of their bitterness. It is in situations like this that the seriousness of the Lacanian claim must

be tested. Is one ready to tell this man and this woman, or for that matter, will one tell oneself

or one’s partner, that “the failure of our relationship is not a matter of our individual failures,

our lack of wholeheartedness, but is a structural impossibility”? And if one is ready to say

this, how does one’s declaration differ from the cynic’s which, behind its façade of

impersonal “truth”, hides both admission of and refusal to admit to a wholly personal failure

in love?

How could “love is impossible” express anything other than personal

resignation, a refusal to go on, a giving up? For love is about two people longing for and

trying to reach each other. It is not a game. In a game of chess, because the possible moves

are defined in advance, one can arrive at a hopeless position; whatever one does, one will

lose. But life has no rules and therefore no impossibilities in this “objective” sense. It may

feel impossible for me to forgive you, say, but this “impossibility” is not created by any rule,

but by my own despairing unforgivingness; that is what blocks my way to forgiveness ―

and forgiveness is itself one of the “faces” of love (cf. Backström, pp. 216–227). Nonetheless,

Lacanians seem to claim that love is impossible in something like the chess-sense; that

human sexuality is a game set up to be unwinnable from the start. Indeed, they claim that all

the contingent obstacles that seem to be hindering a full realisation of love and sexual

happiness – repressive social prohibitions, private complaints about the faithlessness or

18

incompatibility of lovers, and so on ― are at bottom mere defensive stratagems calculated

to conceal the “inherent impossibility of attaining the object” by making the a priori

“impossible” appear merely “prohibited”, thus creating “the illusion that without [these

obstacles] the object would be directly accessible” (Žižek, 1994/2005, p. 94; cf. the whole

passage pp. 89–112, and the analysis of courtly love in Lacan (1992); see also Salecl (1996)).

There is indeed an important sense in which one may hide an “impossibility”, a

structural impasse in one’s love-life, behind a focus on contingent factors that supposedly

“happened” to hinder love. This, however, does not show that love is impossible, only that

one has locked oneself into an impossible fantasy of what love is. Thus, someone abandoned

by their lover may think that, had they done certain things differently, the other would have

stayed; had they only demanded a little less (or more), or compromised more or been more

assertive, they could have made the other love. The confusion here lies in mistaking love for

trying to get what one wants from others by giving them what they want. This is indeed a

game set up to be lost, for even if one gets the other to stay, and is satisfied with them, what

one gets will not be love. That, again, is not because love is “inherently impossible”, but

because one is not looking for love at all, however passionately one claims to be doing so,

and however bitterly one complains of not finding it. And pointing to things one should have

done differently, or to ways in which the other could have been different, as “explanations”

of the failures of love, functions to mask from oneself the lovelessness of one’s own

orientation.

Since in love one does not, as explained in Sexual love, anticipate any particular

fulfilment for oneself, but longs to find the other, to make, stay in and deepen contact with

her, love knows no “possession” or “consummation” in the sense of desire finally reaching its

goal, finally come to rest; in love, the presence of the desired other “does not fulfil ... but

deepens” one’s desire, as Levinas (1969, p. 34) writes. However, it might seem that even if

love is not aimed at satisfaction, sex surely is, in a very obvious sense: orgasm, desire

satisfied, is the goal. But sexual activity is not a mere means to orgasm; the “point” of the

sexual act is not simply to “release pressure”, although someone afraid of exploring the

possibilities of contact may, of course, consciously or unconsciously, wish to “get it over

with as fast as possible”, to leave, satisfied with his little satisfaction ― instead of saying,

for instance, “Let’s do it again! Let’s go further!”

Lacanians, too, insist that sexual desire cannot be understood as the satisfaction

of natural need. Desire, as they conceive it, “does not seek satisfaction, but rather its own

continuation and furtherance: more desire, greater desire!” (Fink, 1995, p. 90) However, it

19

seems to me that their notion of sexual desire nonetheless remains caught in a

privatised/depersonalised conceptualisation of the situation that excludes love, and so any

true understanding of the difficulties of sexual life. They deny, quite rightly, that one could

ever “get” to love, to a sexual relation in a real sense, by trying to “match” the lovers’ wishes

and needs (cf. Van Haute, 2002, 155). But they overlook that the reason for this is that love is

not about seeing the other as an “object” satisfying one’s “desires” at all. On the contrary,

they seem to accept the idea that (sexual) love is precisely about that, only they insist that we

are necessarily unable to determine what the satisfaction we seek from the other really is ―

or, correlatively, what it is that the other wants from us. Van Haute (2002, p. 129) says that

the child ― who remains at the unconscious core of our adult selves ― expects mother

to tell it “what she really wants ― to answer the question: Che vuoi?” by letting it know

“who or what” it must be to become “worthy of her love”. The problem is, however, that

mother cannot tell the child this, for she does not know herself. No-one can say what they

want from another; if asked why we love someone we will not be able to give any real

answer, although we might be able to point to all kinds of qualities in them that we find

attractive. This means, Van Haute thinks, that “what interests me in this specific Other, and

what causes my desire for him … is situated beyond the order of signifiers” in an

inexpressible “remainder” which “announces itself [perhaps] in a certain gaze or tremor of a

voice which unsettles me without my being able to say why”; this “indissoluble core of

alienness in the Other” is what Lacan (1999, pp. 135, 146-147) calls “object a”, “the object-

cause of desire”, an object that desire is “not so much directed at … as provoked by”.

But this sense of love as impossible because the object of its desire is

“essentially enigmatic and indeterminate” (Van Haute 2002, p. 131–132), wholly dependent,

it seems to me, on trying to press love’s desire into categories whose insufficiency love itself

reveals. It is not love that is impossible, but the attempt to articulate it in these terms. Of

course one cannot say what one is searching for in the beloved, but this will seem to make

love’s desire “impossible” only if one pictures the exploration of love as a search for a

specifiable “something”; then, the impossibility of specifying what one is looking for will

seem baffling, and one will perhaps be led to speculate that an indefinable “something”

(object a) must still be there, in place of the actual something that one confusedly expected,

but was unable to find. The problem is that one starts from the wrong picture of love.

Compare a lover looking into the face of her beloved with someone looking at another for

signs of something ― of displeasure or disease or dishonesty, say. Only in the latter case

does it make sense to ask what one is looking for. Lovers, by contrast, are searching, longing

20

for each other, not for anything in the other. They can go on deepening their relationship

without limit ― they can, if they dare to; if their desire is wholehearted, full of the

humility which to a fearful eye can appear as crazy exposure and even ruthlessness. The fact

that they never get to “the end” or “the bottom” of each other does not reveal any inherent

impossibility in their desire. It has the character of gift and joyful infinity, not of “endless

postponement” or “eternal frustration”. The latter appearances, again, arise only where there

is an expectation that one should be able to reach some kind of “end” or “conclusion”. But in

love, that could only mean the end of love, “being done with” the other.

I do not think that the picture of love I have criticised is just a theoretical

invention. It reflects the attitude of anxious, distrustful demandingness that ensues where love

is weak. Then one starts to demand proofs of “love” from the other and proffers proofs of

one’s own “love” to him. I use scare-quotes here, because the “proofs” are really of devotion,

commitment, submission, attraction, affection and so on, not of love. There can be no proofs

of love. Love’s desire can be expressed in an embrace, a smile, a word, and this love can be

received and felt by the other; then, love “happens” between two people, but noting is

proven. These are not symbolic gestures, signifiers ― which is precisely what the “signs

and proofs” of the distrustful are; thus I may buy you a bouquet of flowers to express how

sorry I am, and if I am really sorry I buy you a bigger one. A smile, too, can be a sign, for

instance, I might smile at you encouragingly, trying to convey my “moral support” to you.

But a smile of love, an open, unguarded smile, does not try to convey anything, and does not

signify anything; it is what it is, it is love, contact itself ― and therefore, incidentally, can

offer something infinitely better than mere encouragement to the disheartened.

Van Haute (2002, p. 109) writes that the thing I demand from the other in close

relationships, e.g., some sexual favour, “takes on an eminently symbolic meaning; it is the

signifier of the love of the Other”, at the same time as “no object I receive in response to my

demands … can ever offer a conclusive guarantee of love”. But as I said, what is

demanded here is not really love ― love cannot be demanded ― but rather proofs of

devotion, submission, and so on. And the reason why nothing really satisfies one as sufficient

proof (“guarantee”) of this devotion is that one really does not want only that, but in a

repressed way still longs for the love one cannot, but in one’s anxiety nonetheless confusedly

tries to, demand. Thus the “proofs” of the other’s devotion will never finally satisfy, just as

the child always whining for sweets or attention (cf. Van Haute 2002, p. 111) will never be

satisfied by being given sweets or mere attention; what she “wants”, longs for, is love. It is

not impossible to love; the really impossible thing is to make do without it.

21

Still, someone might say: “If love was ‘impossible’, that is, if there really was

no love, no real relation between us, life would be empty, a kind of living death. And if this

was indeed the horrible truth about our situation, it would certainly have to be repressed and

covered up with illusion”. I would say that this impression is itself an illusion that arises only

because we imagine “discovering the truth” from the position we actually inhabit, which is

not the living death of utter lovelessness. The very horror we feel at the thought of a loveless

world manifests the love in us, for only love can be horrified at lovelessness. If we were

really “empty”, wholly lacking in love, our emptiness would cause us no pain, would not

“register” at all. We do need to mask our lovelessness, but only because it is not original or

total. What we mask is our own refusal of love, and we have to mask it precisely because the

refusal never quite succeeds ― or rather, because it always remains a refusal, a running

from a real, ineliminable possibility.

In sum, what we try to mask is not some deep a priori impossibility of love, but

rather our own fear of and failure in love (for a Lacanian discussion that seems to agree with

this, see Zupančič (2003, pp. 174–181)). To be sure, this fearful failure is often also masked

by claims to success in love; thus, two people can tell each other “you give me everything I

want, I’m so happy with you”, and in a certain sense be right ― and yet there may be no

love, and no real sexual relation, between them, only a convenient fit between their

respective private-collective fantasies, their wishes and fears. This gives them precisely what,

on a superficial level, they want, namely safe contentment, perhaps including kinky sex, but

not love.

Conclusion

My discussion may sound like an argument purporting to “prove the reality of love”; just as

earlier sections would provide arguments proving the necessity of understanding sexuality in

terms of love, contrary to the view of Freud and many others. But putting it like that would be

very misleading, insofar as no philosopher has ever proven anything, in the sense of

conclusively demonstrating that one must look at things as they propose. Neither, for that

matter, and for much the same reason, has any psychoanalyst. This is not to deny that

psychoanalysts and philosophers have said many things that are true and important; they just

have not proven them. To think that they could or should have is itself a misunderstanding.

Only unproblematic things such as plain empirical facts or merely formal relations (as in

mathematics) can be definitely demonstrated; the meaning of facts and relations, what we are

22

to make of them ― which is what concerns psychoanalysts and philosophers ― cannot.

The point is not that “anything goes”, but that understanding, insight, acknowledgment

cannot be forced on people. If I am disinclined, unwilling to see what you are trying to show

me, perhaps because of my cynicism or sentimentality, you can in different ways try to help

me see, but you cannot make me ― and in my attempts to deny and evade the insight, I

will use any means available; for me, indeed, “Anything goes!”

Similarly, Freud tries to help his patients see their life more truthfully by

“bringing to light what [they] keep hidden within them”, and he does so simply by making

them aware of “what they say and what they show”; to be sure, what he sees is something

they, initially, deny, but this denial is undermined, Freud (1905a, p. 77-78) notes, by the

patients themselves: “If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out

of him at every pore”. In other words, the “secret” self-deceptively “kept” in repression is

always already out, the truth is hidden in plain view, “invisible” only because one does not

wish to see it. Thus, Freud (1912, p. 148) says, patients who finally start talking about what

they repressed “seldom” fail to add: “As a matter of fact I’ve always known it; only I’ve

never thought of it”. And my point now is that this same “logic” also operates in intellectual

debates. Obviously, this does nothing to prove the truth of my claims about love and

sexuality; it is not some kind of “higher order proof”! I simply point to the character of the

difficulties (existential rather than merely intellectual) blocking agreement on the relation

between love and sexuality ― that question at the very heart of psychoanalysis, and of the

life it analyses.

Notes on contributor

Joel Backström, Philosopher, Helsinki, Finland, an interest in Freud and psychoanalysis, teaching

Philosophy at the University of Helsinki and the Theatre Academy. Author of The fear of openness.

An essay on friendship and the roots of morality (Åbo akademi UP, 2007). Current research focuses

on repression, broadly understood, as crucially involved in moral difficulties and social conflict,

indeed as the "mad" core of social "normality".

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