ABSTRACT
This chapter represents the history of my efforts to analyze the tension of bearing the tension of sexuality in light of affect regulation and recognition theory. I do this by locating the origins of our stance towards sexual excitement in experiences in the early mother-infant dyad and continue by following the trail of this pattern into gender complementarity. The crux of this work was an effort to establish a place in intersubjective, relational thought for sexuality, and to further integrate, as in “Sympathy for the Devil,” (Benjamin, 1995e), Laplanche’s idea of the fantasmatic sexual with relational intersubjectivity. I first gave a version of this paper as a keynote at Division 39, “How Intersubjective Is Sex?” (also called “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”) which formulated the basic proposition that excess arises as that which cannot be symbolized or held in dialogic mental space. I was also aiming to further develop Eigen’s early (1981) insight that our psyches can generate so much more than they are equipped to handle.
Excess could be seen as a link to Freud’s view of the psyche as grounded in an energetic economy—but without the drive. These ideas were finally published in the paper “Revisiting the Riddle of Sex” (Benjamin, 2004b). However, some years later I took another shot at the project and collaborated with Galit Atlas, in our paper “The Too-Muchness of Excitement,” first presented in 2010 and published in 2015 (Benjamin & Atlas, 2015). As Atlas and I continued to work on the clinical theory of how early dyadic interactions can result in later difficulty with arousal and excitement within the sphere of sexuality—”too-muchness”— many of my earlier theoretical speculations were elaborated and concretized. I am grateful for her collaboration, as well as her own contributions to my thinking (see Atlas, 2015, especially Chapters 2 and 3).
Both phases of work on this subject began with reflection on Laplanche’s ideas about seduction and the enigmatic message, but the further elaboration of excess by Stein (2008) plays a greater role in my formulations here. Whereas my earlier work emphasized the way the constellation of passivity as femininity was constructed to hold excess by Freud (and the patriarchal culture he embodied), my later work with Atlas emphasized the clinical sequelae of early dysregulation: the effects of unrecognized distress, abandonment and overstimulation during infancy on adult sexuality. We explored the inability to tolerate sexual arousal and the excitement affect, “too-muchness,” these early problems with recognition and regulation that later appear in clinical enactments, transference-countertransference.
112 Both works emphasized the constant tension between intrapsychic fantasy and the intersubjective relationship in practice and theory, a tension corresponding to what Atlas (2015) calls the Enigmatic and the Pragmatic. The interweaving of these two layers can be seen in the fantasies that both mask and reveal intersubjective failures in regulation and recognition. These fantasies are shaped by the metaphors of gender that are used to process the enigmatic message. In this way I try to integrate a view of sexual fantasy with my earlier critique (Benjamin, 1998; Benjamin, 2004b) of Freud’s formulation of the active-passive split in the Oedipus complex: masculine “activity” is seen as an attempt to solve the problem of excess. At the end, I return to the theme that underlay my discussion of Story of O in Bonds of Love (Benjamin, 1988), the search for a form of surrender, a form of thirdness that takes us beyond the complementarity of sado-masochism into shared holding of the excess that is sexuality.
