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Sexual Fantasies as Antidotes to Guilt and Worry

Anxiety is love’s greatest killer. It makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

—Anais Nin

If sex isn’t dirty, you’re doing it the wrong way.

—Woody Allen

 

We all feel guilty about something: survivor and separation guilt, guilt about having fun, about being selfish, ruthless, independent—such guilt is universal. Everyone grows up both wanting pleasure and independence while still caring about their attachment to their families of origin. The conflict between our attachments to our families and our wish to grow up and be happy often creates guilt. Even in the best of circumstances normal development introduces such problems and leads us to unconsciously put a lid on our desires. The solution is to be found in our sexual fantasies.

Women seem to be especially prone to guilt. They are socialized to be sensitive to the needs of their partners, to derive their self-esteem and validation from being “givers” and not “takers,” to be objects of desire rather than desiring subjects. This can make it difficult to surrender to the pulse of one’s own excitement, to be ruthless. Sometimes the very trait that enhances an emotional relationship undermines the sexual relationship. For example, I have found that in many lesbian couples, there is a special intensity to and emphasis on the empathy and interpersonal sensitivity of the partners. Such heightened attunement, however, can often lead to heightened feelings of guilt and worry in these couples, then to a dissipation of sexual excitement. The forces that breed emotional closeness are the same forces that inhibit sexual ruthlessness. Both ruthlessness and empathy are necessary in a healthy sexual relationship. When empathy breaks down, we are left with sex that is mechanical. When ruthlessness is inhibited, we can feel enslaved to the needs of our partner and lose touch with the fullness of our own desire.

Help is on the way, though. Sexual fantasies and preferences arise as elegant solutions to the problems of ruthlessness, guilt, and worry. The following are detailed case studies.

A RAPE FANTASY: THE CASE OF JAN

A clear example of the special difficulty women have with guilt and sexual ruthlessness can be found in a closer study of the case of Jan, who required a fantasy of being sexually dominated by a stranger in order to have an orgasm with her husband. Jan was an outspoken feminist who had, in fact, written numerous articles that critiqued traditional sex roles. In her professional life, she was usually viewed as strong and outspoken, someone who, in her words, didn’t “take any shit.” However, Jan’s personal life was unsatisfying. She tended to get involved with “nice guys” who initially seemed to be extremely sensitive to her needs, almost maternal in their treatment of her. Her pattern was that she would eventually lose interest in these men and become critical of them as she began to experience their sensitivity and deference as weakness. Driven by her need for caretaking, she married one of them eventually and was inevitably plagued by sexual boredom. As she began to criticize her husband, she would frequently experience his injured feelings as a sign that he couldn’t take care of himself. This made her feel guilty, “bitchy,” an intolerable feeling that then led her to criticize him more, all the while hoping for some way out of this unhappy cycle. She hated being so critical but didn’t want to be a typically deferential woman either. She felt pessimistic and depressed about her capacity to love.

During a discussion of her boredom, she first told me of the sexual fantasy that she used in order to have an orgasm with her husband, a fantasy that she’d used in some form since adolescence and that embarrassed her. To Jan, it suggested that while she defended women by day, by night she was a masochist, a pathetic woman who really wanted to submit to male power. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Jan told me about her domination fantasy a little bit at a time, with many stops and starts. When we put all the pieces together, it went something like this:

I sometimes imagine that I’m sitting in my office, working diligently at my computer. It’s late, and the building is empty. Suddenly my door opens, and a custodian enters, saying that he needs to empty the wastebasket, which happens to be under my desk. I’m curt with him and tell him to hurry up. I notice that he’s quite big and well muscled under his uniform. As he reaches under my desk for the wastebasket, he suddenly runs his hand up my leg, under my skirt, and roughly squeezes my cunt. I start to resist. He grabs my hands, holds them together over my head with one hand, and with the other hand lifts me onto my desk, spreads my legs, and rips off my panties. He tells me that he’s wanted to fuck me for a long time. His cock is huge. His whole body is massive. He’s so strong that I can’t move. He squeezes my tits hard. The thing is, while he’s fucking me, he isn’t even looking at me. Sometimes the scenario involves him grabbing my head and fucking my mouth. Other times, it’s my ass. But it’s as if he has to not only have a hard prick, he has to be a prick as a person. He has to not give a shit about my pleasure but instead just use my body as something to fuck and something to give him pleasure. He’s exactly the kind of asshole I’ve hated my whole life, and yet this fantasy gets me so hot that I can reach orgasm with it in minutes.

The crude and raunchy language that Jan used in recounting her fantasy conveyed its essential meaning—namely, that what was happening had nothing to do with tender feelings, love, or sensitivity. For her fantasy to “work,” the man had to be rough and insensitive—no whispering sweet nothings, no eagerness to please, no concern about whether the other person climaxed or not.

Why was this so appealing to Jan? Why would a fantasy rape bring her to orgasm while a real one would obviously traumatize her? Sometimes Jan would chalk it up to the effects of socialization—after all, society teaches girls and women to be passive and masochistic—but this offered her little comfort because she knew that there was something more than simple social learning going on here. Was she some kind of a masochist? Were her feminist opinions about the importance of female empowerment simply defenses against her private longings to be taken over by a powerful man? These were the doubts that haunted Jan and made it difficult for her to reveal and analyze her fantasy.

What Jan and I learned was this: Her deepest view of men was that they were, as she put it, “paper tigers.” Outwardly, men acted macho and strong, but beneath this facade, men were really fragile and insecure. We all have a basic image or belief system in our minds, usually unconscious, about what constitutes a typical man and woman, what goes into the formation of masculinity and femininity. These beliefs are, to use computer language, “default” beliefs, beliefs that the mind automatically returns to unless the person makes a conscious effort to override them. With effort, we may develop other, more conscious and rational beliefs about masculinity and femininity, but there is always a pull back to our original constructions. A man might consciously believe, for example, that women like sex as much as men, while unconsciously believing that they don’t. Jan’s primary construction of masculinity was that it was hollow and weak. She unconsciously believed that if she fully experienced and expressed her sexuality, most men would feel threatened and overwhelmed. She chose kind and gentle men as partners because they offered the promise of satisfying other needs of hers, primarily needs to be loved and understood. But these men frequently confirmed her view that men were weak and unable to stand up for themselves, and she would test them by criticizing them. She secretly wanted them to assert themselves and not be affected by her attacks. Instead, these men would often get hurt. She would feel terribly guilty. The guiltier she felt, the more she wanted them to stand up for themselves and not be hurt by her, so she would up the ante and become even more “bitchy.” The cycle would escalate.

At one point I playfully suggested that she seemed to feel that a man would have to be a giant in order to stand up to her. Immediately, Jan recognized the implied reference to her sexual fantasy. Its function became clear. She takes care of her problem of guilt by creating a man so strong that she can’t hurt him. She arranges for him to be hurting her, not vice versa. In so doing, Jan reassures herself that she’s not the destructive and powerfully ruthless one—he is. No matter how strong she is, no matter how excited she gets, no matter how out of control her impulses might be, her fantasy partner will never become overwhelmed. Since he is selfishly taking exactly what he wants, Jan can be confident that he’s happy and satisfied, and she does not have to worry about buoying him up. Her fantasy counteracts her pathogenic belief that she overwhelms and hurts fragile men with her strength and needs. He’s taking what he wants, and so she can get what she wants.

These discoveries about the meaning of Jan’s sexual fantasy helped her tremendously. First of all, they helped reduce her shame; her fantasy didn’t mean that she was a secret masochist, but rather that she felt guilty about being too powerful. Second, Jan was now able to review and revise her fundamental picture of men. Perhaps being sensitive didn’t necessarily mean that a man was weak. Perhaps a man could be caring and still be strong enough to take care of her. And finally, Jan was able to use her insights into her sexual conflicts to feel less guilty about being strong with her husband and not have to test him so frequently. She began enjoying him. She still had fantasies about being sexually dominated, although they increasingly starred her husband as the dominator. In addition, Jan could now sometimes allow herself to enjoy fantasies and scenarios in which she was openly the aggressor.

Domination fantasies frequently involve attempts to circumvent the chilling effects of guilt and worry on sexual desire. Such fantasies are prevalent among both men and women, and obviously entail two roles in such scenarios, the “top” and the “bottom.” Fantasies of being the dominator (or dominatrix) are also common. Perhaps because our society tends generally to discourage public expressions of aggression, self-assertion, and ruthlessness in women, it has been my clinical experience that in the heterosexual world, the submissive side of this type of sexual relationship seems to be slightly more preferred by women, while the dominant role in the fantasy seems to attract more men.

Jan’s fantasy is not uncommon among women. There are many variations on the theme of a woman arranging a fantasy in which she can let go of her inhibitions about being too strong. Though the manifest script often puts her in a passive position, the underlying unconscious message is that she is guilty about being too much for a weak, limited, or inadequate man. Consider the following fantasy of Gina’s, a fantasy that she, too, uses to have an orgasm with her sweet but boring husband:

Fred is a nice man, in and out of the bedroom. When we’re screwing, he always comes before I do. When I’m having sex with him and want to make sure I come, I will often have a fantasy in which he takes me to a romantic and private spot in the woods and, to my surprise, has arranged for his tennis buddies to meet us. Fred tells me that they’re going to “wear me out.” They’re all over me, first one, then the other, taking turns fucking me. One will play with my tits and make me jerk him off while the other eats me out. Every hole gets filled up. I go wild and completely lose control.

Gina felt that in reality she wore Fred out, that he couldn’t keep up with her. To some extent this was confirmed by his tendency to ejaculate quickly, but it also reflected Gina’s view of herself in relation to men in general, namely that she overwhelmed them with her sexual energy. Gina’s guilt about being too strong in bed is perfectly counteracted by a fantasy in which she finally meets her match in the form of two men. The story line of her fantasy seems to feature her degradation—the men are going to “wear [her] out,” she’s being gang-banged, they “make” her jerk one of them off—but the result is that Gina has an orgasm because, in her unconscious reality, she finally has enough “man” to fill her up and satisfy her. She is so sexually voracious that it takes two of them to do the job.

As noted earlier, even a casual perusal of the bestselling collections of sexual fantasies by Nancy Friday provides lots of anecdotal evidence of the relationship of guilt and worry to sexual arousal. Many of Friday’s respondents, women who sent her their sexual fantasies, describe their daydreams in direct, coarse, and aggressive language. The men and women who populate these fantasies get carried away with their excitement and do so with exuberance, force, and lusty aggression. Men “thrust with savage hardness,” while women ride their “cocks.” These fantasies aren’t Harlequin romances in which sexual excitement is conveyed through a soft focus. The ruthlessness of these fantasies is important because it eliminates the need to feel guilty or worried. Everyone is having fun, no one is fragile, and the result is sexual pleasure.

Having illustrated common scenarios in which a woman uses a typically passive feminine role to enact and fulfill her active and powerful sexual aims, I want to say again that heterosexual gender roles do not translate neatly into sexual fantasies. There are countless cases in which the roles are reversed, situations in which the man wants to surrender sexually to a woman, to be “done to,” and others in which women are aroused mainly by fantasies of explicitly and aggressively sexually dominating a man. Gender differences, though real, are not as profound as one might expect. The only relevant question is: what pathogenic beliefs do dominance and submission solve?

Since all of us have pathogenic beliefs of some kind, and since all sexual fantasies are attempts to correct such beliefs, we should not conclude that analyzing fantasies necessarily means that they are especially unhealthy. Sexual fantasies can and do have complicated psychological meaning without being pathological.

When it comes to its meaning, it doesn’t matter if the scenario involves two men, two women, or a man and a woman. Someone is dominant, and someone is submissive, regardless of gender or sexual orientation. In any of these situations both parties are getting aroused by their respective roles. The point is to understand this arousal, the centrality of guilt in the scenarios, and the psychologies, not only of the one being “done,” but also of the “doer.”

TOPS AND BOTTOMS: THE CASE OF MANNY

It is common in my clinical practice for a patient to tell me about sexual practices about which he or she has little conflict. There seems to be no correlation between the type of sexual practice or fantasy that someone has, and the extent to which he or she feels sexually frustrated or confused. On the other hand, I have never seen a patient whose sexual practices and fantasies didn’t shed an important light on what ailed them emotionally. While sex might not always be presented as a problem in and of itself, it almost always helps us understand things that clearly are problematic.

Manny entered therapy with one of my supervisees for help with depression. In the middle of his one-year treatment, he revealed details of his sexual life. Manny considered himself a “top” in the gay sexual scene in the city where he lived. In Manny’s world, elaborate and formal rituals of dominance and submission were routinely enacted. He told his therapist about the “slaves” he had had over the years, some of whom had been given to him by a “master” from another city. One of these slaves had been “sent” to him from Texas and moved into Manny’s house to serve as his houseboy. Manny described his sexual pleasure in whipping, slapping, beating, and humiliating this man, and he recounted in detail the slave’s intense excitement at his beatings. Manny was not embarrassed or conflicted at all about his sexual preferences. He was mainly concerned about feeling depressed.

Manny had had a very traumatic and painful childhood. His father had beaten him for no apparent reason, often leaving bruises and welts all over his body. The father died when Manny was twelve years old. His mother had made excuses for the father and had never protected Manny. She was a depressed woman who made comments to Manny like, “If it weren’t for you, I’d kill myself.” She couldn’t take help from anyone and saw herself as a martyr. When she was dying of cancer, she once told Manny, “Don’t worry, I’ll just die soon, and you won’t have to worry about me.” On her deathbed, hours before she died, she pleaded with Manny to “save” her. Manny subsequently blamed himself for his mother’s death. He had always felt intensely responsible for her, calling her twice daily throughout his adult life and quitting a lucrative job so that he could care for her full-time during her illness.

It was clear that Manny had numerous reasons to be depressed. He came to understand how identified he was with his mother in his everyday life. He suffered from the belief that he lived only to give and not receive. When he was depressed, Manny felt like his mother was inhabiting him. He daydreamed about joining his mother when he died. Once, after he had stood up to a belligerent store clerk, he became depressed and feared that he was going to die of cancer. His therapist told Manny that he felt guilty about being stronger than his mother and was punishing himself by putting himself in the same boat as his mother. Manny instantly felt somewhat relieved by this clarification of the role guilt played in his unhappiness. His depression lifted somewhat but was still lingering in the background.

When Manny later told his therapist about his sex life as a “master” and described some of the sexual scenarios that turned him on, several lights went on for both of them. Manny had made a point of recounting how the “slaves” with whom he trafficked got extremely aroused by being dominated and abused. Their arousal was essential to his. In the world of sadomasochism, one usually can’t enjoy being a master unless one’s partner enjoys being a slave (exceptions to this rule where someone’s pleasure depends on someone’s actual fear and suffering will be discussed later). Manny and his therapist came to see how this fact enabled his sexual dominance to negate his tremendous guilt and worry about his mother. Manny was prone to think of himself as a bad son who had let his mother suffer and die, and this survivor guilt that squelched his passions. In the master/slave relationship, Manny created evidence that he was not a bad guy, a disloyal son, by beating someone who enjoyed it and therefore did not suffer from his abuse. His slave was happy and aroused by being hurt and dominated, a fact that Manny’s unconscious mind employed to counteract his guilty belief that he was always hurting his mother.

Though this explanation helped Manny, it did not seem completely adequate. Why a master? Why not a slave? The answer emerged as Manny talked about his father, a man he described in such terrifying terms that, at first, neither he nor his therapist could see how much Manny had identified with him. Eventually, however, they came to see that, in his role as a sexual top, Manny symbolically became the abusive father and not the helpless victim. In psychoanalytic terms, he “identified with the aggressor.” By enacting the role of a frightening parent, Manny momentarily negated the pathogenic belief that he was helpless and counteracted the terror of being overpowered. Manny and his therapist eventually described this process in terms similar to those used by Pres. Lyndon Johnson to describe why he placated FBI director J. Edgar Hoover: “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” In his mind, Manny reversed the traumatic feelings of helplessness that he’d endured as a child.

In addition, by identifying with his father, he remained connected to him—a father whom he also loved. This is a common dynamic. We identify with hurtful parents out of love as well as fear. The psychological dynamic is: if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. The problem for Manny was that he was not only a slave driver to his slaves but to himself as well. He was as harsh with himself as his father had been with him. This harshness was a crucial ingredient in Manny’s depression, and when he understood it, his depression lifted.

In sum, Manny was a “chip off the old block” during the S-M scenes and thus preserved a connection with his father. By counteracting the helplessness in his relationship with his father and the guilt in his relationship with his mother, Manny’s sexual practices enabled him to feel intense pleasure. Further, by understanding how these dynamics affected the rest of his life, Manny began to get some relief from his depression. He had tormented himself with both the guilt about abandoning his mother “in her hour of need,” as he put it, and with the self-blame and self-hatred that his father’s abuse had created.

In therapy, Manny was able to begin to be more compassionate toward himself, to feel less like a disloyal or bad son and more like an innocent victim who deserved sympathy and self-love. His self-esteem began to improve. Manny’s sexual practices, however, had not changed at the time he left therapy. He had created an entire lifestyle for himself out of his sadomasochistic tendencies and derived a great deal of pleasure and satisfaction from it. Although he better understood its origins, he had little motivation to change it.

TIED UP IN KNOTS: THE CASE OF ROBERT

In an article about beating fantasies (“Bondage Fantasies and Beating Fantasies,” in Psychoanalytic Quarterly), the psychoanalyst Joseph Weiss presents a clinical case that perfectly illustrates the centrality of guilt in sexual fantasies. Six months into his therapy, Robert told his therapist about his bondage fantasies. During sex with his wife, he would often imagine a strong, happy woman tying him up and playfully having sex with him. She would pinch his nipples and seductively tease him. His fantasy woman was quite different from his experience with the actual woman lying next to him. In reality Robert was excessively worried about her. He felt that he had to work hard to bring her into social conversations lest she feel left out. He felt guilty when she was upset, and he saw it as his job to cheer her up. He admitted to being worried about his wife during intercourse because he feared that she had sex only to placate him. His belief that his wife wasn’t interested in sex made it difficult for him to become sexually aroused.

Robert’s therapist made the following interpretation: he told Robert that he used the bondage fantasy to reassure himself during intercourse that he was not hurting his wife. This made immediate sense to Robert, who confirmed that the fantasy of a strong, cheerful woman tying him up turned him on and that, in fact, during sex he blotted out what he saw as his wife’s grim expression and substituted the image of a woman who was confident and enjoying herself. Robert was immediately relieved and responded that he was tremendously sensitive to every nuance of his wife’s moods and could tell in an instant if she was unhappy. Since he often saw her in much this way, Robert was often downcast in her presence.

Robert was curious about the origin of his fantasy solution to the problem of a grim wife. He had never actually had a woman tie him up during sex and couldn’t understand how he had developed this particular fantasy. Was he simply a masochist at heart? His therapist wondered if Robert’s childhood might hold some clues. Robert was an only child. He remembered his mother as nervous, possessive, and easily hurt, completely unable to exert any authority. Robert felt that he had to “walk on eggshells” around her. He often felt nervous around her nervousness and had a lot of trouble separating from her. As an adult, he called his mother almost every day and twisted his own travel schedule to visit her regularly. Robert remembered his father as calm and warm. The two of them would play together, and his father read to him. Robert remembers his father showing him how to fix things around the house, and spending hours with him in his workshop.

Robert recovered an interesting memory almost immediately after the therapist made his interpretation that Robert’s bondage fantasy reassured him that he wasn’t hurting his wife. When he was about three and a half years old, he used to become restless and would often dash around his family’s small apartment, engrossed in his own imaginative games and adventures. His mother would get upset, develop a headache, and retreat to her bedroom. On one such occasion, his mother’s buoyant younger sister, who was visiting, ambushed him as he ran down the hallway and playfully held him down so he couldn’t move. He enjoyed the attention of his vivacious aunt and remembers becoming sexually aroused. This memory was extremely clear to Robert, and he and his therapist immediately saw its relevance. Robert’s early childhood experience with his mother led him to develop a frightening unconscious belief that he posed a danger to her. When the aunt playfully held him down, he was temporarily assured that he was not dangerous to a woman. He didn’t have to worry about his aunt; he could also borrow her strength and sense of fun and so became sexually excited. As Robert became an adult, he often experienced his sexual partners as he had experienced his mother. He imagined that his self-assertion and exuberance would hurt them, and so he tended to suppress his sexual feelings. The mental image of a woman binding and dominating him helped him momentarily overcome his fear of hurting women, and this made it safe for him to become aroused.

Although Robert only imagined himself tied up, many other men, heterosexual and homosexual, frequently enact some version of a bondage fantasy. Such a man might get especially turned on when his partner is in complete control. Another man might like to be spanked or tied up. The essential psychodynamics of the situation are often exactly the same in both heterosexual and homosexual sex. The person being dominated, whether man or woman, is unconsciously reassured that he or she is not hurting the dominant partner and is not responsible for making sure that the partner is happy. Absolved of guilt, responsibility, and worry, the submissive partner can finally “let go” and experience intense sexual pleasure.

Thus far we’ve been emphasizing the aspect of guilt that involves worry about hurting a partner. There are, of course, many ways of hurting a loved one that are not immediately obvious, such as draining or overwhelming him or her with real or perceived needs, as the following case illustrates.

THE “MOMMY THING” : THE CASE OF MATT

Matt was a thirty-eight-year-old phone-sex addict, but I didn’t know it until two years into his therapy. I knew that his sex life with his wife of fifteen years was tepid and infrequent—he said that it had come to feel like “it was too much work”—but I didn’t know that he was using phone sex to masturbate almost every day at work. When he finally worked up the courage to tell me, it was clear that he was terribly ashamed of his compulsion, didn’t understand its appeal, and desperately wanted help to stop. He also was running up phone bills of more than seven hundred dollars a month at work and had to concoct elaborate stories to explain them.

Matt was a man who came across as eager to please others—sometimes to a fault. He had come into therapy originally because his sales job occasionally required him to act in a cutthroat fashion in his dealings with his peers, and Matt was so guilty and nervous about these situations that he had developed panic attacks. As a result of our work together over time, he began to feel more comfortable with his aggressiveness and to enjoy his job more. While proud of his success at work, Matt became particularly embarrassed when he admitted to me that he had been calling phone-sex services and had been having erotic conversations with women as an accompaniment to masturbation. He found that he could act out, at least verbally, what had always been a private daydream. There was one central fantasy to which he always returned:

I tell the woman on the phone that I want her to have big tits. We pretend that she works for me, perhaps as my secretary. She comes into my office one day and closes and locks the door behind her. She tells me that she’s been noticing that I’ve been staring at her tits. I nod. She asks me if I’d like to see them. I tell her yes. She takes off her blouse and bra and sits on my lap facing me so that her breasts are only inches from my face. “Do you like them?” she asks. I tell her I like them very much. She asks me if I’d like to suck them and adds that she loves to have a man suck her nipples and squeeze her breasts. I tell her that I must have a “Mommy thing” because I love the idea of nursing. She tells me that her breasts are full of milk and that I should milk them. So I start sucking and squeezing, and her breasts start expressing milk. She’s getting incredibly excited and reaches down to unzip my pants and starts jerking me off with one hand while she is offering a breast to me with the other. She is moaning and gyrating on my lap, and I climax.

Matt was embarrassed about revealing this fantasy. He assumed that it meant that he was “really screwed up” and must have had a disturbed relationship with his mother, since breast-feeding seemed to be such an important theme. He wondered if there had been something sexual in his relationship with his mother or if he had been weaned too early.

Despite frequent inquiries about, and reconstructions of, his childhood experiences, however, it did not seem to be seductiveness or weaning that troubled Matt when he was growing up. Instead, Matt saw his mother as an anxious woman who was constantly complaining about various physical ailments. According to Matt, she took lots of pain medication, tranquilizers, and antidepressants, and she was frequently in bed with headaches, stomach aches, muscle pains, or gynecological problems. Matt saw his mother as weak and fragile, rather than seductive, and he worried about her a lot. In addition to being worried, he was also a rather lonely boy. An only child, Matt remembered many days playing alone in his room, his mother holed up in hers, having to be quiet so as not to disturb her. Matt’s father was often away on business. When he was home, he was frequently withdrawn or drunk in front of the TV.

As Matt came to see that he felt neglected, not seduced, by his mother, he realized that as a child he must have felt that she was too preoccupied with her physical suffering to tune in to him very much. Matt became his mother’s caretaker. He would bring her medicine, listen to her complaints, sometimes call the doctor on her behalf. He became sensitive to her moods, could tell in an instant if she was in pain, and could shift immediately into a solicitous, caretaking mode. All the while Matt felt disconnected and rather grim inside. He developed the pathogenic belief that he was undeserving of caretaking, that his needs were burdensome and greedy, that a woman would experience giving to him as depleting, and that he would have to prove himself worthy of any caretaking he received from that woman. He felt tremendously guilty about need of any kind. Since his mother’s emotional tank was empty, Matt experienced his normal and legitimate needs for nurturing as coercive. This was why his sexual relationship with his wife felt so onerous.

In this context it is easy to understand how Matt’s fantasy worked. In his phone-sex scenario the woman wants to give to him and is gratified by giving. She wants him to take from her, to suck from her breasts. Maternal nurturing doesn’t hurt or deplete her. His wish to take is exactly matched by her wish to give. To Matt, large breasts symbolized women who had a lot to give to a man. Matt liked the image of a baby suckling because it evoked an image of a woman who herself felt nurtured in the process of nurturing her child. In Matt’s unconscious mind, such an image nullified his picture of a mother who was too preoccupied, too burdened, to take pleasure in giving to her son.

When Matt was able to see why his phone-sex fantasy was so gratifying, he felt more sympathy about his own sadness and loneliness as a child. Self-compassion often increases when a patient comes to see how a disturbing behavior or feeling was formed in childhood. Matt’s primary experience of women was that they were depressed and preoccupied, an experience that would make it difficult for him to sustain any kind of sexual excitement in a relationship. Since Matt expected that women didn’t have the capacity or inclination to devote themselves to a man’s pleasure or to their own, he felt guilty about wanting such a thing.

Matt didn’t want to have sex with his mother. In order to get excited, he needed to create a woman who was turned on by mothering him. Unfortunately, he believed a real woman with whom he had a real relationship couldn’t perform the same function. His pleasures required a toll call.

Matt’s relationship to phone sex had many of the characteristics of an addiction. In a sense, our sexual fantasies can sometimes seem to have addiction-like properties, not simply because we feel desperately driven to have them or because abstaining from them produces uncomfortable feelings of withdrawal, but because sexual fantasies, like other addictive substances, are intended to tranquilize the anxieties associated with pathogenic beliefs. In some cases the parallels to addictions are striking and obvious in the sense that the person simply cannot get aroused at all without the use of the fantasy, or that without it the person feels incapable of pleasure and excitement. Most of the time, however, our fantasies and preferences are not obligatory. We can and do get aroused by a variety of stimuli and scenarios. Our libidos are somewhat flexible but not infinitely so. Sexual fantasies and preferences are unconsciously created because they are the best solution to the psychological problems associated with our pathogenic beliefs. Therefore, we are drawn, either in practice or in fantasy, over and over again, back to some version of these particular stories.

Unlike other addictions, sexual addictions can often lose some of their compelling power as a result of understanding them. In Matt’s case, the key was not only understanding what drove him to the phone, but his gradual and, at first, tentative willingness to talk to his wife about his inner experiences of loneliness and guilt. Matt explained to his wife about his sense that his needs would burden her, that she’d feel drained by him. His wife, to his surprise, was receptive to Matt’s newfound honesty and proved it in an interesting way. She greeted him one evening in sexy lingerie and told Matt that tonight he wasn’t going to have any say about what happened in bed. She was in control. She made him lie down, completely still and silent. She made love to him, and Matt had an intense orgasm. Matt’s wife was able to fulfill the same needs as his phone partners, namely that he be able to receive pleasure without any responsibility, without having to make a woman happy, without worry or guilt. Like his fantasied phone partner, his wife now seemed happy to give and expected nothing in return. It turned out that, for her own reasons, this kind of sex was quite exciting to his wife, and Matt was gradually able to increase his sexual pleasure in his marriage, which brought him and his wife closer.

FETISHISM AND SEXUAL AROUSAL

People who inhibit their sexuality as a result of feeling unconsciously worried and guilty about hurting their partners can free themselves up with a wide range of fantasies and sexual preferences. Jan’s rape scenario, Manny’s slaves, and Matt’s phone sex are but a few of these sexual remedies. Another class of solutions to the problems of guilt and worry are called fetishes.

When we reduce something human to the status of a thing, or imbue things with human qualities, we are said to be fetishizing them. People often use fetishes to become aroused. In these cases, the function of fetishes is to eliminate any guilt and worry that might interfere with sexual excitement by eliminating the human dimension of the other person. Consider an example of an extreme sexual fetish: the fantasy or enactment of sex with animals. Whether it’s Catherine the Great with her horse or shepherds with their flocks, the idea of sex with animals has long existed in Western culture. Often, for women, the focus of such a fantasy is on the size of the animal’s penis or, more generally, the “animalistic” nature of the beast’s desire. We think about “animal” passion as an intense passion that doesn’t obey social rules or restraints. It is pure sex, its crucial ingredient being that there is no pretense of an exchange between two complicated and consenting people. As a result, the woman can surrender to her own sexual passion with impunity. For a man, the appeal—when there is one—is similar. He can use an animal without having to worry about his partner because his partner is not human. The animal’s passion and genitals are fetishes. A fantasy of sex with an animal negates any irrational beliefs that we are obliged to feel empathy and responsibility for the interior states of others, beliefs that put a damper on sexual excitement.

A more common example of a fetish is clothing. Many people find articles of clothing arousing. Some people, usually men, find shoes especially exciting, particularly high heels. In the man’s unconscious mind, it is not the shoe itself that is arousing but what the shoe represents. What does a spike heel symbolize? Usually, in the unconscious mind of the shoe fetishist, it represents a strong, powerful woman. Sometimes such a woman is called a phallic woman because in our culture a powerful woman is seen as having a masculine edge. In addition, the high-heeled shoe is fetishistic in this way because its long, pointed form can unconsciously suggest the image of a penis. Obviously, such “phallic” women need not be masculine in any conventional sense. It might be more fair to say that, in the mind of the shoe fetishist, the femininity of the phallic woman is a tough and pointed one.

Although the excitement is triggered by the image of a high-heeled shoe, ultimately the shoe itself is not the cause of the man’s sexual arousal. The shoe is only the tip of the psychological iceberg. The man is actually getting turned on by the fantasy of a strong woman because such a woman is tough enough to stand up to the intensity of the man’s sexual desire and consequently isn’t a woman for whom the man has to feel responsible and worried. The masculine toughness that the high-heeled shoe symbolizes helps the fetishist feel safe from the debilitating effects of his guilt toward women.

Other people fetishize parts of the body. He’s a “tit man” or “leg man.” She likes men who are “well hung.” Any quality of appearance or manner can be fetishized. Someone might get turned on by hardness, size, youth, or a certain kind of hairdo. In all of these cases, a great deal of meaning and energy are packed into something that might be quite trivial. The part is treated as if it were the whole, or, conversely, a whole being is reduced to a part. The relationship with another person is mediated through that partial characteristic, that thing.

There are fetishistic elements in the sexual fantasies of most people, people whom one would never describe as fetishists. While some men—shoe fetishists—live for the sight of a woman’s shoe, for others the attraction might be more subtle or subliminal. While some women only get aroused by being sexually involved with a “bad boy,” many women might find certain aspects of ruthlessness attractive but do not need them to become aroused. In other words, there are often fetishistic qualities to someone’s preferred route to sexual pleasure without that route being dominated by these qualities. We can learn a lot about the general issue of sexual arousal by looking into its more extreme or flamboyant forms.

An interesting example of a fetish is the attraction some people have to shiny leather, rubber, or latex clothing. This clothing, usually tight and formfitting, suggests some a kind of second skin, but one that is hard, tight, smooth, and shiny—not soft, vulnerable, shaggy, blemished, or otherwise imperfect. The image of such a skin, to its wearer and audience, unconsciously counteracts feelings of worry or guilt, as well as feelings of shame or insecurity. The reassuring fantasy that one of my women patients had while wearing such an outfit was that she was strong and invulnerable, not weak and insecure as she actually felt. Thus reassured, she could get turned on. A gay male patient of mine was attracted to leather on men because he associated the look with a hard-edged “top,” who could dominate him and thus counteract his guilt about hurting others. Another patient had a fantasy of being completely bound up in a rubber suit. This man also had fantasies of being playfully tied up by young boys while they excitedly danced around him. For him, the issue was his fear of his own power to hurt others were he to let go of his self-control. The rubber suit, as well as the scenario in which he is tied up, served as antidotes to his feelings of destructiveness and guilt and thus led to an unleashing of his sexual excitement.

Race is also often fetishized in our society. Skin color, like clothing, hardness, or body parts, can be a “thing” that the unconscious mind uses to represent human qualities. Some Caucasians have a fetishistic relationship to African-American men. A black man is consciously and unconsciously associated with large, phallic sexuality. Blackness itself becomes the fetish, evoking meanings unrelated to color. These meanings don’t have to be sexual but often are. A white woman may be sexually drawn, in fantasy or in reality, to a black man precisely because she fetishistically invests his skin color with meanings that permit her to get aroused. The real man becomes a one-dimensional stereotype in her mind. His “blackness” means that he is “other,” different and separate from her known universe. In addition, his color is also associated in the white woman’s unconscious mind with an inferior social status. Because of these differences, she allows herself to experience him as if he did not have a complex internal life that contained feelings and vulnerabilities just like her own. In her unconscious, he is alien, almost thinglike. Furthermore, the black man is often psychologically represented as primarily a sexual being, a creature with a large penis with whom the white woman can become extremely aroused. She doesn’t need to worry about being judged by him because of his lower social status. She doesn’t have to worry or feel guilty about him because he’s not like her, fully human, familiar, and knowable. A white man is like her; a black man is not. She can surrender to her own excitement because she has reduced him to the level of pure animal sexuality. She uses her racial stereotype to overcome a pathogenic belief about hurting or overwhelming men and is therefore able to get excited.

These fantasies, racist as they are, suffuse our culture. For white men, the perception of African-American men is often similar to that of white women—large, phallic, and frightening. To the heterosexual white man, however, this perception is usually tremendously threatening. In addition, white men may also have a fetishistic view of African-American women as primarily sexual in much the same stereotyped way. A male Caucasian patient of mine occasionally went to see a prostitute and would choose only a black woman. He created and maintained the fiction that the prostitute “really had a good time” because, in his mind, black women really liked to have a good time. Her skin color symbolically represented a capacity for unbridled pleasure. He also always chose women with large breasts because they symbolized to him a woman who wanted to give her man pleasure. His own mother was an incredibly bitter woman, and, most of the time, his wife seemed worn and haggard to him. He grew up burdened with a sense of helpless responsibility for making women happy—a pathogenic belief that threw cold water on his everyday sexual interest. His fetishistic fantasy about race—embodied in his choice of a large-breasted black woman—was an antidote to his view of women as highly desexualized, stingy, and unhappy, and, thus, permitted excitement to emerge.

A racial stereotype, an animal, hardness, particular body parts, sexual positions, all are details woven together into sexual fantasies to permit excitement. They are like tricks we play on our consciences, illusions we pretend are real. All of them make it safe to experience pleasure by negating certain imagined dangers—in these cases, the danger of hurting or worrying about the internal states of the other person.

We’ve seen that people often feel guilty and worried about hurting their partners with their aggressive intensity, the strength of their needs, and the ruthlessness of their desire. There is also an entire class of sexual phenomena in which the unconscious purpose is to make it safe to look. We call this phenomenon voyeurism. Let’s examine one case of it.

VOYEURISM: THE CASE OF BOB

Bob, a twenty-seven-year-old graduate student in history, came to see me for help with his relationship with his wife of three years. Bob was worried about the fact that he rarely wanted to have sex with his wife and, when he did, was unable to perform in a way that satisfied her. The situation had gotten so bad that both he and his wife came to expect disaster whenever sex was a possibility. Bob loved his wife and desperately wanted to please her sexually, but his failure to do so haunted him and made each attempt highly charged with significance. Would he please her or wouldn’t he? Would he make her happy or have to face a feeling of shameful failure? He became increasingly tentative, searching her body language for cues about what to do, and the more he worried, the less he was able to get excited and the more critical and unhappy his wife became.

Bob thought of himself as a sensitive man and felt superior to men who weren’t. His wife had been in a physically abusive relationship for years prior to their meeting and repeatedly told Bob that she fell in love with him because she knew that she could trust him and that he would never hurt her. Bob had grown up in a neighborhood filled with street gangs and always fancied himself as the polar opposite of these men. “I respect women,” Bob told me, “rather than objectify them like those pigs I grew up with.”

Bob eventually told me that although he rarely initiated sex with his wife, he masturbated almost every day. His masturbation fantasies varied, but most of them contained a common theme: he was having sex with or, more commonly, lusting after a woman who couldn’t see him. In one scenario, Bob was watching a woman dancing in a sexually provocative way behind a two-way mirror. In another, the woman was blindfolded while Bob was having sex with her. In yet another fantasy, Bob was able to make himself invisible and spy on women while they undressed. He wasn’t sure why these particular fantasies turned him on so much, but he knew that the essential detail in all of them was the fact that the women couldn’t see him, while he was free to inspect their bodies with prurient curiosity or lust after and touch them. He admitted these fantasies to me with embarrassment. What kind of person was he? Bob wondered. Was he some kind of closet Peeping Tom?

Bob, who was visibly uncomfortable as we spoke, went on to tell me that he also felt uncomfortable with crude sexual language. He never described having sex with a woman as “fucking” and felt uneasy with words like “cunt” or “cock.” He felt that these words degraded women and reduced lovemaking to something animalistic. He admitted, however, that when a former girlfriend once responded to the slow pace of their lovemaking by whispering, “Fuck me,” Bob felt at once both repelled and excited. He consciously abhorred “dirty” language, but he was aware that something in the experience of a woman using such language was also extremely arousing. He didn’t understand why. Like most people, Bob knew what turned him on and off, but he didn’t have a clue about the meaning of these conflicted feelings, and not knowing bothered him.

As our work proceeded, however, the secret behind Bob’s sexual inhibitions and fantasy life began to emerge. Bob admitted that, deep down, he felt that if a woman were to see the extent of his lust, she would be offended. She’d be offended by the fact that he was primarily turned on by her body and not her mind, that he wanted to fondle her, to stare at her genitals, to use her body for his own pleasure, and that he didn’t always want to kiss her and be gentle but to “fuck” her and do it without regard to what she wanted. He imagined her thinking, “He doesn’t like me as a person; I’m just a piece of ass to him.” He remembered a childhood game that the rough-and-tumble neighborhood boys used to play in which they’d boast that they were part of the “4-F Club”: Find ’em, Feel ’em, Fuck ’em, and Forget ’em. Bob felt that if a woman saw his true sexual desire, she’d perceive him as just like these boys: callous, narcissistic, and indifferent to the feelings of women. Bob told me about a girlfriend who’d asked him plaintively in the morning after their first sexual encounter, “Are you going to leave me now that you’ve gotten what you wanted?” He described how horribly guilty this had made him feel and how extreme and anxious his reassurances were.

Bob was dimly aware that his guilt and worry about women were exaggerated. He reported that he was embarrassed to look at his naked wife, even though she explicitly invited him to do so. He felt that somehow his interest would be experienced by her as sordid, even though she told him it wouldn’t. This is a good example of how a pathogenic belief can persist despite conscious awareness of its irrationality. Another example involved Bob’s description of the experience of accompanying a friend of his to a whorehouse. Bob had decided that he would have a drink in the bar while his friend went to a room with a prostitute. He explained that the most uncomfortable part of the whole experience was entering the bordello. Whenever a customer entered, a bell would sound that signaled all of the women to assemble in a “lineup” and display their wares while the new client inspected them. They were dressed in revealing lingerie, spike heels, flimsy bikini underwear, and the like. The entire point of the lineup was for the customer to look at these women, scrutinizing body types, body parts, height, weight, manner, and color to decide which one was most appealing. The man was not supposed to care about them as people. Bob became acutely embarrassed and rushed off. Even though the situation sanctioned exactly what Bob most desired—prurient looking and lusting—he felt ashamed and fearful that acting on his desire would be offensive to the women. He reported a similar dynamic occurring at a strip show where a woman would dance up to where he and his buddies were sitting and, in exchange for a tip, spread her legs so that they would have a clear view of her genitalia. He felt embarrassed and then felt silly for his reaction. His rational mind knew that she was explicitly inviting him to objectify her, to use a part of her body as an object of excitement without any expectation of “respect.” But his unconscious mind rejected this knowledge. Instead, Bob felt that he would be violating and degrading her if he did what, clearly, he was supposed to do at that moment. Bob could analyze these situations and realize that his worries about women were not altogether rational, but he couldn’t help but feel them.

Bob’s fantasy of looking at or having sex with someone who couldn’t see him is actually a common one. It is the stuff that voyeurs are made of. Voyeurs symbolically penetrate and have their way with their imaginary partners without the latter’s knowledge. The objects of their desire can’t object, take offense, or retaliate in any way. It’s safe for both parties. An interesting version of this fantasy was fictionalized in a book, The Fermata, by Nicholas Baker. The narrator has the power to stop time, to freeze all motion in the world except his own. He uses these moments to perform various perverse sexual acts on women who have no awareness of his presence. Baker’s hero, like Bob, likes to watch.

There are many other versions of this kind of fantasy in our culture. There are peep shows where men enter private booths and masturbate to the gyrations of naked women seen through peepholes or two-way mirrors. Some people fantasize about their partner wearing a blindfold. Many sexual scenarios involve relating to the other’s body without any connection with his or her gaze. Some people like to be sexually penetrated—and penetrate—from the rear, or fondled from behind, in part because of the lack of face-to-face contact. Eye contact can present unconscious dangers. If someone can see you, they can judge you, can see the true intent in your eyes. If Bob’s wife sees him lustily watching her, she can feel hurt and used, and Bob will then have to see it in her eyes. Feelings of shame are often symbolically represented by situations in which one is on display, exposed to another’s gaze. Bob’s shame about his sexual peeping could be alleviated by avoiding eye contact.

If fantasies help avoid the guilt of hurting and the shame of desiring the other, how do such irrational feelings arise? In Bob’s case we had to look into his childhood. In the course of growing up, Bob had developed certain ideas, often unconscious, about who he was and who he was supposed to be. We discovered he had come to feel that his wish to be a rough-and-tumble boy—a boy confident in the world and with the opposite sex—would hurt his mother. This was never explicitly stated, but Bob inferred it from her hurt reactions to his going off to play “with the boys.” His memory of his mother was that she was something of a martyr. Her husband, Bob’s father, had run off with a younger woman when Bob was ten years old, and his mother had struggled to support Bob and his younger brother. She couldn’t ask for help from anyone, even when it was clearly available. When Bob’s brother was in the hospital for a serious childhood illness, his mother, who couldn’t drive, walked five miles to and from the hospital every day, even though her neighbors had repeatedly offered to drive her.

Bob grew up determined to be a “good boy” so as not to add to her burdens. He remembered vowing that he wasn’t going to hurt her like his father had, unconsciously inferring that his normal masculine assertiveness and boyish exuberance were equivalent to rejecting her. If his mother wasn’t having any fun, why should he? He felt that his mother didn’t really love and admire men very much, and Bob unconsciously worked hard not to act like too much of a confident man lest his mother become threatened.

As he grew up, Bob generalized from his mother to other women. He assumed, in obedience to his pathogenic beliefs, that no women would want him to act too sexually confident, masculine, and assertive, that women were instead sensitive creatures who might easily feel offended. It was almost as if he suppressed his normal phallic masculinity and became “one of the girls” in order to reassure the woman he was with that he didn’t pose a threat to her. According to Bob’s sense of how the world worked (formed in large part through his experiences with his mother), women felt threatened by men’s sexual interest unless such interest was balanced by a corresponding interest in the woman’s interior world. Therefore, unabashed staring at a woman’s breasts or genitals would be inherently offensive to a woman because she would interpret this interest as selfishly indifferent to other aspects of her life.

It is easy to see, then, how Bob’s sexual fantasies functioned perfectly to allow him to get excited. By insulating himself from the woman’s direct perception and awareness, he could feel safe enough to stare and play to his heart’s delight. He could be as randy, prurient, and self-centered as he wanted without the woman feeling offended or hurt. The details of the daydreams might change, but the essential theme of his invisibility was present in all of his fantasies.

Understanding these dynamics was liberating for Bob. In a sense, he “came out of the closet” and felt less “dirty” and “perverse” about his fantasies. Now that he understood them, he was able to talk to his wife about some of his inhibitions, which then enabled her to reassure Bob that she liked to be watched and aggressively desired. With the help of his new insight and his wife’s reassurance, Bob and his wife’s sexual relationship greatly improved.

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In a social atmosphere of apparent permissiveness, in which we are being constantly stimulated by images of hedonistic consumption and sexual freedom, it may seem as if guilt is no longer as central to human psychology as it once was. My clinical experience tells me that this is not so. The forms that guilt takes might change with time, but the importance of it remains. I would speculate that while conscious feelings of sexual guilt may have decreased historically, as cultural mores have become more permissive, unconscious feelings of guilt, worry, and responsibility for others have not. Sexual fantasies still have an important job to do.