This article examines the psychological experience of sexual longing. It offers a way to think about erotic experience as a state of consciousness that connects us with material registered in the body. The article addresses erotic longing and its relation to loss, and emphasizes 2 simultaneous levels of existence. It proposes that the enigmatic aspects and the pragmatic cocreated interaction with the (m)other always coexist and play a dual part in the otherness of lustful states of mind. The article addresses the dialectic tension between the pragmatic attachment to the object and the enigmatic existential aspects, and suggests that adult sexual states of consciousness contain both the enigmatic and the pragmatic mother. Questioning the nature of our sexual longings, I bring this inquiry into the analytic room.
This paper brings together contemporary thinking about early attachment and affect regulation with our clinical and theoretical understanding of the problems of adult sexuality. In addition to recent theories of affect regulation and attachment, we incorporate Laplanche's idea of 'excess', which was an important transitional concept integrating real experience with fantasy in sexuality. We elaborate the idea of excess-- 'too-muchness' --to illuminate the early overwhelming of the psyche that affects the formation of sexuality. Linked to recent theoretical developments, this idea helps to grasp the relationship between sexual excitement and early affect regulation, showing how excitement becomes dangerous, thus impeding or distorting desire. The 'too-muchness' of excitement recalls the experience of being a stimulated, overwhelmed, unsoothed child and influences later inability to tolerate sexual arousal and the excitement affect. A clinical case illustrates this connection between attachment trauma, anxiety about sexuality, as well as shameful experiences of gender identity as an area of trauma. We emphasize the importance of working through the terrors and desires of the mother-baby relationship as they emerge in the transference-countertransference in order to develop the ability to hold excitement and stimulation without experiencing the too-much as the intolerable. This includes the working-through of ruptures related to overstimulation as well as the delicate balance of attention to fantasy and intersubjective work in the transference.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.