LOVE AND HATE - ORGASM AND DEATH

Prof. Dr. Luiz Miller de Paiva
Psiquiatra, Psicanalista, Professor Adjunto da Escola Paulista
de Medicina e do Instituto de Psicoterapia Analítica de Grupo
Dra. Alina M.A. de Paiva Nogueira da Silva
Psiquiatra, Mestre pela Escola Paulista de Medicina

1. INTRODUCTION

Observing Dorothea Tanning's pictures The Birthday or Wedding Night, we reflect on why paint a beautiful woman covered in branches of trees with a vampire-like monster at her side?

Likewise, other paintings have a similar theme:

In 1854, Henry Fussli painted The Nightmare with a beautiful woman in a lascivious position, dreaming of monsters (winged horses, etc.), writhing and twisting in despair; seeming, however, to experience a great deal of genital desire, accompanied by sheer terror of the act, transforming pleasure into suffering.

Paul Delvaux in Venus Asleep shows us, in an atmosphere of Greek classicism, a naked woman lying down and another woman, dressed ceremonially, pointing to a skull at her side. The analytical significance would be to show how sexual pleasure is associated to death. In fact, Salvador Dali, in his sculpture La Licorne shows a horse with a single horn (phallic symbol of purity and neutralizer of poisons) as male potency (horse-power) entering delicately in a wall in the shape of a heart, in order to extract blood (to deflower) from the timorous naked girl prostrate on the ground.

Salvador Dali's Canniballism in Autumn, in which a man and a woman penetrate each other, one devouring the other. In the picture, we can see knives, forks, etc. all of it "telescoped" in a cannibal fashion. These fantasies may persist until adult life, if there were quarrels,fighting, and separating of the parents.
** Presented in XI INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY - Montreal, August 22, 1992

2. CLINICAL MATERIAL

With these pictures and sculptures in mind, we had a group session in which the following took place:

A woman (unhappy in marriage), with several children and a chauvinistic husband, dominating, miserly, brutal and aggressive, living in constant strife,and always frigid. She felt the sexual act as it were between two men. She had never masturbated; excessively religious. Since child-hood, she felt neglected because she had not been born a man, causing disillusionment to her father, and she was envious of her brother, the "figlio maschi", owner of all the rights. As group analysis progressed, she became aware of the elaborations of her unconscious fantasies of aggressivity towards her father, also a despot (superimposing him on the image of her husband) and of the strong resentment that she bore her mother, for being weak and very submissive). Once, during a group session, she said: "Yesterday, I had a very short dream that impressed me very much. I was in the diningroom at home, sitting,dressed in a straightjacket. I remember my children were near me. What most impressed me was that all of them were smiling calmly, including myself. At a given moment, I asked them, serenely, if they could remove the straightjacket for a little while so that I could scratch myself". The group interpreted that scene as indicative that the patient was hindering harmony within her home with so much controlled aggressivity and hostility, however, without despair. The patient said: "Really, I am not only afraid of going mad, but lately, I have felt pursued by the fear of death". The patient then began to recount a second fact that had occured the day before:

"I was persuaded by friends to go to the opera, so I decided, then, to go to the dressmaker's and have a dress made because on the first of next month, I will be 40 years old and this coincides with the opening of the opera season. I chose a purple dress,but it reminded me of death. The color reminded me of a coffin: in fact, I had the impression that I was buying a dress because I was going to die on my birthday with my death at that moment".

Another patient from the group (who had lost her mother when she was 3 years old and her father put her into a boarding school at the age of 6, felt abandoned and rebellious and became a person who was envious, pseudofrigid and dissatisfied with everything and with everyone); she also said she had had two dreams:

"I was having intercourse with my husband and did not know whether it was anal or vaginal. On one side, a nun (who used to spoil me a lot when I was in boarding school) asked: "Does it hurt much?" I said yes, that it did hurt a lot, but I was laughing as I said so.The nun was confused and brought me a towel and some soap for me to clean myself. At this moment, the nun, with a transparent skirt, showed an enormous penis; when I looked at her again, she had changed into the priest in the Buñuel film who had killed the gardener. Terrified, at a glance, I saw my husband's revolver, so I picked it up and shot him right through the forehead".

Another dream:

"I was walking in the Luz Railway Station with my husband's penis, putting it in my mouth as if it were a baby's pacifier. I decided to suck it, and as sperm came out, I got angry and bit it. At this point, my husband (who was by now in possession of the penis) protested in pain. With hate, I pulled the penis out again and threw it into the lavatory (I was, by then, in my apartment)".

These dreams were interpreted as the patient's experiencing coitus as aggressive and dirty, but that caused a certain amount of pleasure, although it made them suffer. The nun would be the analyst-mother who tries to help them; however, he becomes persecutory when she realizes that he is the mother combined with the father (combined figure) (8,a). The group as a whole showed unconscious murderous fantasies towards the analyst, or of eliminating him also. The mother of patient A had died of a brain tumor, hence the terror of suffering the same illness as her mother, if she had had an orgasm - fear of lex talionis.

The second dream was also interpreted as penis envy. To go out with it, to walk about, would be to have total possession, thus becoming more sure of herself without so much censure: the Luz Railway Station would represent incestuous pregnancy (for her father lived in the interior of the state of São Paulo) and, as she had matricidal feelings she aggresses and, under threat of imminent aggression, she castrates the man-analyst. who possesses something strong that causes envy.

These fantasies explained the fact that, if they achieved genital pleasure, they would be punished for two reasons: first, for fear of being attacked by the mother, if she attained orgasm (she did not feel she had the right to experience genital pleasure) and, second, because she felt she possessed a castrating vagina dentata of the penis that was so envied (hate of the male figure) (8,b). On the other hand, the patients also did not feel satisfaction in living (their depressive crises were accompanied by suicidal ideas) and one of them often had amenorrhea (interpreted as an unconscious desire to not be a woman owing to her concept of the frail sex) (8,c).

The association between death and life followed several considerations made by the group. The analyst then showed that the fear that was felt of death was not fear of physical death, but rather fear of the death of a taboo, from which resulted the birth of reality.

3. COMMENTS

3.1 Genital Level

At each level in the progression of pleasure, the process (as in the levels of evolution of the libido), may be interrupted, repressed, denied, substituted by a symptom. Excitation of the clitoris is disappointing, unequal, ambiguous, contradictory to the vulvar pleasure that was activated, but not completed. Clitoral pleasure enters only as an accessory at the moment of maximum vaginal pleasure. Orgasm restricted only to the clitoris does not subsequently calm sexual tension.

The erogenous participation of the neck of the womb also produces an authentically satisfactory orgasm.

Dolto (2) writes that: "Orgasm that is merely vaginal is usually insufficient to eliminate sexual tension, and may produce spasms in the vagina and around the vulva for some minutes and more rarely, spasms in the anus, that are at times painful, owing to the absence of participation of the corpus uteri in the movements that are characteristic of female orgasm".

However, in our analytical experience, we observed that anal pain was owing to fantasies of orgasm-death. Anal pain experienced as aggression (being "taken" in ano). The antero-superior walls are what produce maximum pleasure. The woman's partner is the only witness of this orgasm (8,c).

Intercourse is a symbol of the reciprocal capacity to give. The assuaging of all tensions, the nirvanic well-being and, each time, the conviction of a happiness that is more intense than the previous one. She experiences the feeling of tenderness and recognition by her partner and a sensation of renewal.

So that a woman can fulfill her desire in complete orgasm, she must participate entirely in the emotional and sexual encounter with her partner. However, the absence of carnal harmony does not necessarily, at least for the woman, mean that a creative relationship is impossible.

By submitting themselves to intercourse without disdain, women can, after intercourse, experience a generalized well-being.

There was pleasure, but clitoral and vulvovaginal orgasms did not manifest themselves on a conscious level (2). Nevertheless, in our view, prolonged group analysis will show some very resistant conflict of being felt, that sooner or later, can cause vital anguish. This is a theoretical problem that is still not resolved (8,c).

There are women who are completely satisfied with their orgasms but that are completely crazy. They are completely absorbed in bringing up their children and in their work all of which shows us that it is not only a perfect orgasm that is a panacea for all ills. Human life is entirely symbolic and, what is most important is not the fecundity of the body but rather the affective and spiritual fecundity.

3.2 Impulses of Life and Death

Subjective experiences of pleasure and pain are generally differentiated between themselves; they may, however, without any doubt, under certain conditions, appear mingled and associated in complex ways.

The psychoanalytical exploration of intense affective explosions in regressive patients, by its regularity, shows that there is no such thing as "pure" affection without cognitive content (5) and it also has, invariably, an aspect of object relations.

Kernberg (5) observed that object relations in transference also contain a certain affective state.

The masochistic suffering of a female hysterical patient who experience the analyst as frustrating and punitive, may serve as a defense against sexual excitation and the positive oedipal impulses involved: the combination of sadness, rage and self-pity reflects a complex affective state.
The defensive process disorganizes the affective state itself, as usually occurs in frigidity and in impotence.

Hate can cause aggressive behavior that is highly pleasurable: sadic pleasure in causing pain, humiliation and suffering; pleasure in devaluing others as occurs with certain frigid women, who in order to devalue the man do not have any orgasm thereby deriding him. This behavior can be rationalized as an expression of righteous indignation, the included to be expressed in explosive nonmitigated violence, that obscure its true origin - sadistic pleasure - in the act of destroying the object of its hate.

It was necessary for an entire generation of psychoanalysis devoted to the treatment of severe character pathologies and borderline conditions, of regressive types of perversions and of the psychoses to clarify the list of regressive forms of agression.

A strange process occurs with a patient under the domination of primitive hate: a common defense against the awareness of this hate is the absolute destruction of the patient's capacity to be conscious of it, in such a way that the patient's mind can no longer "contain" the acknowledgement of a dominant emotion such as feeling orgasm. In practice, the intolerance to reality (capacity to love) converts the physical reality into hate, directed against the self and against the object (to have an orgasm with the penis).

Under the influence of intense hate, the patient may present the combination of localized curiosity, arrogance and pseudo-stupidity described by the Bionian School. Also, we may add the intolerance of the male figure (the phallus) or the female figure (vagina dentata) (8,b,c).

Intolerance toward the phallus as a good object is reflected in the excessive avidity on the part of the female patient, the voracity toward the genital act, arising from ontological insecurity or through marital quarrels, forms of sadomasochism. This intolerance is the expression of the deepest fears of losing the loved object, basically, the good mother.
The patient is threatened by the fantasy of his own destruction as a consequence of pathological projective mechanisms that transform the frustrating hated object (the "bad" mother) into a powerful, dangerous and threatening enemy that might well annihilate the patient.

At its source, hate is the result of the incapacity to eliminate frustration by means of orgasm (8,c).

However, primitive hate at a solid, intense level generates a vicious circle that not only perpetuates it but also pathologically develops it, which leads to the persistence of frigidity and of impotence. This feeling of being attacked by an object formerly needed and loved, is the most primitive experience of betrayed love that augments hate even further with a greater enlargement of hate by means of projective identification and now the object is perceived as extremely cruel and sadistic (the opposite sex).

Hate and the efforts to destroy an Oedipal rival, the pleasure of triumph over this rival and the vindictive rejection of an unfaithful loving object include differentiated levels of hate.

3.3. Primitive Origins of the Correspondence of Impulses of Life and Death

As to the origins of the correlation between orgasm and the fear of death, they are found in infantile conflicts in the molding periods (7,c). For this understanding, we must base ourselves on the writer Yukio Mishima, narcissist, homosexual, exhibitionist, fetishist, tormented by numerous sadomasochistic fantasies and genius, described as the "Leonardo da Vinci" or "St. Sebastian" of present-day Japan. He had an insatiable need to prove himself superior to everyone in multiple fields.

In Sun and Steel (10,a) he writes: "... as from childhood, I feel in me a romantic impulse towards death; but a type of death that requires, as its vehicle, a body of classical perfection... a tragic and powerful figure of sculptural muscles is an indispensable requirement for a noble, romantic death, so long as it occur in the prime of youth.”

Twenty days before his death, Mishima organized a "Mishima Exhibition". In fact, as J.A. Vallejo-Nágera (15) was to write, he had allowed himself a "posthumous homage while alive".

The exhibition was divided into four rooms, the "Rivers" (the River of Literature, the River of Theater, the River of the Body and the River of Action) along which flowed his interests and activities and that were now to converge into the Sea of Fertility - his final work.

For many years, I stated that I could remember things I had seen at the moment of my birth". With this phrase, Mishima begins his Confessions of a Mask (10,b).

Meltzer (7) calls this complex emotional situation in which a newborn baby finds himself as "Aesthetic Conflict". He is submersed by new sensations that stem, essentially from his mother, sensations that upset him and the sense of which eludes him.

As we have seen, patients A and B also show the conflicts with their respective mothers, since infancy.
"Death gains roots at the moment of birth" (10,b).

Meltzer (7) says that: "... these secrets of nature belong to the category of things from within the body of the mother. Possession and control of her and, therefore, of mortality, are the final objective of knowledge, because death is felt as an obligatory return to her womb, just as life was an exile from her womb. Through probable fear of his mother, Mishima became homosexual. He says that: "Excrement symbolizes the earth, and there is no doubt that it was the malevolent love of Mother Earth that tempted me" (10,b).

The sensitivity of true artists is capable of the action of blended death impulses, though not so much as the impulses of life. There, where the death impulse predominates, the libido is at the service of the death impulse; and this is particularly manifest in perversions (12). In a broad sense, it might be stated that the self-destructive function, as noted by Segal (13), acts, for the death impulse, a role corresponding to that which sexuality acts for the life impulses...

Mishima (10,a) says that: "One day, my teacher opened that book precisely at that page that so fascinated me and asked:

· "Do you know the story of this picture?"

· "No".

· "It looks like a man, but it is a woman. Her name was Joan of Arc..."

· "That was a shock. The person I took to be HIM was Her. If that handsome rider was a woman, was everything not reduced to nought?"

J.C. Smirguel (1) and Joyce McDougall (6) characterize as prototypes of identity of the perverse. The two pillars upon which human identity is built are ABSENCE and DIFFERENCE. In the perverse, this ceases to have any significance and importance. Absence of a penis can be filled by a fetish, differences do not exist, and in their place, arises an all-poweful and complete being.

Greenacre (4) believes that the fetish results from innate aggressivity and trauma in the first year of life; it is not only defensive and brings with it the fear of castration, it is Winnicott's transitional object. The transitional object is used for comfort and the fetish for sexual use. The former is created in response to the experience of separation (baby pacifier, teddy bear, etc., substitute the mother's breast), whereas the fetish incorporates the fear of castration - that is, the hostile desire to destroy the penis in intercourse, and at the same time, protect the body caused by penetration.

We had a patient who could only have intercourse if his wife wore a new pair of shoes and walked in them. As a child, he would go to the foot of his parents' bed and his mother would carress him with her feet. He became fixed on the foot as a sexual object. A woman can substitute a penis for a boot; it is the famous case described by Hug-Hellmuth in which the woman was in love with her military father who wore boots and was much admired, which caused her a sexual perversion (11). Likewise, there was the case of an individual that used a coffin as a place for intercourse. On the other hand, transvestism seems to be the catastrophic result (in the Bionian sense) of an arrest in growth or psychological distortion the primary trauma of which would be at the root of a psychotic depression through emotional absence of the father: part of the mother would be rewarded in the body of the transvestite (14). Therefore, the transitional object is normal and the fetish abnormal or else the adjunct factor for performing of the genital act, as we have seen in Patient B, the penis is a baby pacifier. Sometimes, premature orgasm or the cut of orgasm should the penis penetrate, are fantasies dominated by the death instinct.

With Freud (3) in "a beaten child" was the beginning of the understanding of the intimate mechanism of perversion.

Freud (3,b) had already concluded that "a child that is being beaten" is, at a certain stage of transformation of this fantasy, the subject himself, leading him to perversion.

Freud (3,a) said that the death impulse operated silently within the body, that we could never see its manifestations in a pure state, but only those that fused with the libido.

Segal (13) in turn, commented that there is an intricate fusion of impulses, but that there are also pure actions of the death impulses, possible.

In some self destructive psychotics, only the self remains relatively whole and preserved when it can prevent the return of the enormous projected aggression, as usually happens with a neurotic with the sensation of having an orgasm and dying. Fear of the genital act would be through terror of entering the field of death. By projective identification, he wishes to kill and, as punishment, he can be killed; hence, by the boomerang system, he feels the woman has a "vagina dentata"(7,b,c).

Mishima (10,a) had already "prophesied" that "Man gives his seed to woman. Then starts the long, long, indefinable journey towards nihilism".

4. CONCLUSION

The group therapist must treat patients with disturbances in orgasm (orgasm-death and fetishism) as a frustrated and vulnerable child, whose desires have to be satisfied within bounds of possibility with a gradual tactful clarifying of what these bounds are. A patient treated in a group as a "special" human being, symbolically as "his offended majesty", the "baby" may, in the hands of a patient, talented analyst transform the chaos and violence of his unconscious fantasies into superficial calm of a compensated narcissistic personality. Psychotherapy becomes a secure refuge that protects the patient from the rigors of the present life and protects the therapist from the furious attacks of hate in the unconscious of the patient.

With the diminution of the perception of the analyst felt as a bad object, the patient can now begin to become aware that the object of his love and of his hate is the same.

By means of group sessions, we can show, clearly, how secondary elaborations of unconscious fantasies, loaded with guilt, increase the death instinct in such a way that it will prevent orgasm (pseudofrigidity and impotence) and also, the joy of living. If this unconscious guilt is less intensive, it will not prevent clitoral orgasm or the introducing of the penis (premature orgasm) or a certain joy in living; however, if guilt is very marked, it will render orgasm with the penis inside the vagina difficult for the woman or will lead to impotence in the case of a man, owing to his strong aggressivity towards his partner; in the woman, this guilt is reinforced by phallocentric guilt,(woman-serf). We conclude that: the individual will defend himself against a greater ill (death) by choosing a lesser ill (pseudofrigidity or impotence).

5. SUMMARY

The love-hate theme expansible to orgasm-death is first broached with the citing of famous paintings: Wedding Night by Dorothea Tanning; The Nightmare by Paul Delvaux; La Licorne and Autumn Cannibalism by Salvador Dali.

Clinical material from a group session is commented upon to clarify, in practice, the conflict between love-death and orgasm-death.

The author discusses the difficulties in obtaining pleasure and broaches the deeper causes for non-obtention of orgasm or when orgasm is only clitoral and premature ejaculation.

The individual may be led by the life instinct (love) and be contaminated by the death instinct (destructiveness) during sexual intercourse. He broaches the impulse of life and of death as an object relation, where the defensive process disorganizes the affective state itself leading to impotence, frigidity, perversity and the fetish (the latter as a transitional object and adjunct factor).

Hate may give rise to aggressive behavior which is highly pleasurable - sadism by humiliation or arrogance bring about suffering. These processes are, at times, unconscious, stemming from the molding periods - the bad-mother fantasy as a powerful enemy.

Hate stemming from secondary elaborations of unconscious fantasies and a subsequent feeling of guilt, would lead to an inability to love and through orgasm to do away with the subsequent frustrations.

In conclusion, the predominance of the death instinct prevents love, orgasm, and the ability to love. If this unconscious guilt is less intense, it will not prevent clitoral orgasm or the introducing of the penis (premature orgasm) or a certain pleasure in being alive; if, however, the guilt is very marked, orgasm will be rendered difficult for a woman with the penis inside the vagina or will lead to impotence in the case of a man, owing to strong aggressivity towards his partner; in the woman, this guilt is reinforced by phallocentric guilt (the woman-self), so that the individual defends himself in face of a greater evil (death) preferring the lesser evil (pseudo-frigidity or impotence).

6. BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

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12.SEEWALD, F. "Mishima, the Kagakure, the Aesthetic of Destruction - a Possible
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15.VALLEJO-NAJERA, J.A. "Mishima and the Pleasure of Dying". Edit. Planeta. Buenos Aires, 1978.