Author: Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

I retired as a clinical psychologist in private practice in 2014. I was a member of The American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) 1994-2018, and maintained a Diplomate in Sex Therapy 2005-2018. I was a Sex Therapy Supervisor 2011-2018. I served in the AASECT leadership 2000-2018, including 5 years as a Director. I was twice Awarded the Distinguished Service to AASECT Award in 2012, and 2015, I chaired the AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group for 2011 -2015. In May of 2017, I was Awarded a 'lifetime achievement award in training , research and advocacy' by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF and the Community-Academic consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS). In 2016 NCSF took over that award, renaming it the Race Bannon Advocacy Award. In 2019, I became and adviser to Tickle.Life. Prior to all of that, I have been formally studying sexual deviance, sex variation, and the psychology sexuality for 40 years.

The AASECT Position Statement on Sex Addiction

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP2 Comments
Last week, AASECT announced a new advocacy position regarding sex addiction passed by the its Board of Directors at their Fall Meeting on November 15 in Chicago.    That statement reads:


AASECT Position Statement — Sex Addiction
Founded in 1967, the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) is devoted to the promotion of sexual health by the development and advancement of the fields of sexual education, counseling and therapy. With this mission, AASECT accepts the responsibility of training, certifying and advancing high standards in the practice of sexuality education services, counseling and therapy. When contentious topics and cultural conflicts impede sexual education and health care, AASECT may publish position statements to clarify standards to protect consumer sexual health and sexual rights.
AASECT recognizes that people may experience significant physical, psychological, spiritual and sexual health consequences related to their sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors. AASECT recommends that its members utilize models that do not unduly pathologize consensual sexual problems. AASECT 1) does not find sufficient empirical evidence to support the classification of sex addiction or porn addiction as a mental health disorder, and 2) does not find the sexual addiction training and treatment methods and educational pedagogies to be adequately informed by accurate human sexuality knowledge. Therefore, it is the position of AASECT that linking problems related to sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors to a porn/sexual addiction process cannot be advanced by AASECT as a standard of practice for sexuality education delivery, counseling or therapy.
AASECT advocates for a collaborative movement to establish standards of care supported by science, public health consensus and the rigorous protection of sexual rights for consumers seeking treatment for problems related to consensual sexual urges, thoughts or behaviors.
—————————


This position statement is, in my view, a crucial and inevitable step AASECT has taken at the time given the characteristics of the clinical and social environment.  This, indeed, is why I agreed to participate with Michael Aaron, Doug-Braun-Harvey, and Michael Vigorito, in creating it at the behest of Ian Kerner,  the AASECT Public Relations, Media, and Advocacy Steering Committee Chair.  The statement purposes are also consistent with my work as Kink-Aware Professionals Advocate for The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, (NCSF) a position I accepted shortly before receiving the invitation to participate in constructing the statement.

Context:

Elephant is all about context, and like kink, therapy, and so many other things in social life, it is easy to misunderstand this statement without appreciating the context from which it arose.  So that is going to require excursions into organizational history, some discussion of the contemporary socio-political landscape, and AASECT’s history as an advocacy organization for fuller understanding.  But let’s talk a little bit about what the statement might or might not be intended to accomplish.

One important caveat:  While I speak as an author, and the document I helped create was adopted by AASECT, I do not speak for AASECT, or even the other members of the task force that created this language.  The history I shall present is as factual as I can make it, but the views are my own.  I am urging readers to view my observations critically in the interest of better therapy and social policy towards sexual variability, but it would be naïve to assume that all readers will share the values and assumptions that characterize this blog.

The AASECT Position Statement is an assertion that the best scientific studies do not currently support the theory that sex can be an addiction directly analogous to cocaine, heroin, alcohol or nicotine.  That similar neural pathways may sometimes be shared by sexuality and other sources of pleasure and reward, including those involved in true addictions, reflects correlation, but does not establish causation.  The scientific evidence is also weak that one will lose erectile function or partner desire from over-use of erotica.   These claims are the modern equivalent the 1880’s shibboleths that one will grow hair on one’s palms or go blind from masturbation.  Just last month a new study was reported that failed to replicate the long-touted study that partners who used high levels of erotica were more likely to divorce than those who did not.  The evidence is clear that clients sometime have problems with excessive and non-consensual sex behaviors, but not that they are ‘addicted’ to sex.

The statement is also an attempt to reframe the inept social language that defines sex problems such as excessive use of erotica or intimacy difficulties as ‘addictions’ because they are best treated by the same techniques as alcohol and recreational drug dependencies.  Neither is there scientific basis for claiming we are in a public health crisis caused by erotica use that requires emergency governmental intervention.

The position statement also states that it is not reasonable for the public to expect high quality treatment for sexuality problems from addiction specialists certified by addiction specialty organizations unless those professionals also have special training and certification in professional sexology.  The clear majority of sexual problems do not belong to the class of addictions, but are in the domain of the human sexuality professionals.

The position statement does confront the practice of using shame as a mechanism of social control for human sexuality generally, and specifically and directly opposes it as a therapeutic technique to attempt to change sexual behavior.  We made this statement confidently and assertively given the poor scientific track record of therapies relying on shaming techniques and the ubiquity of sexual shame in society generally which greatly risks over diagnosis of sex as the root cause underlying presenting complaints about a client’s sexual and intimate relations.

Thus, the position statement is not a blanket condemnation of all certified addiction specialists, some of whom already have, and others who are seeking, advanced competence in treating the problems of human sexuality.
 
While it is criticizing the use of the term ‘sex addiction’, it is not a blanket condemnation of all ‘sex addiction’ treatments.   Therapists, both sex therapists and so-called sex addiction therapists, use a great variety of techniques, and there is overlap between what good therapists of differing theoretical orientations do.  In fact, we are confronting the use of shaming and the uncritical defense of sexual conventionality, not specific theoretical orientations.

Neither is it an attack on other certifying organizations, especially SASH and IITAP, which are nowhere mentioned in the document, except in so far as they teach their memberships based upon unsound scientific principles, and fail to require adequate human sexuality training, or advocate for under-trained individuals to practice as if they were certified and licensed professionals.  It is anticipated that our opposition to the use of shaming behavior in therapy would be a bone of contention for some members of other organizations that deem shame to be condign.

It is not an attempt to expel persons seeking expertise in the field of human sexuality from our AASECT community because they hold certification in other organizations whose ideology we do not share.  That not only includes professional organizations like AAMFT, IITAP, or SASH, but religious organizations, or diverse minority communities some of whom hold sexual views with which we might disagree.

Immediate Context:

The immediate impetus to the AASECT PRMA Steering Committee soliciting this advocacy document and passing it was two-fold.   AASECT evaluates the educational programs of other organizations in the field to determine which of our education requirements outside providers might fulfil.   This work is conducted by the CE Approval Committee led ably by Sally Valentine, which, late last year, stopped approving sex addiction programs because they were not adequately sexologically grounded.  This raised the issue that if we had a principled reason to this, we had an educational responsibility to communicate to the Membership and public about it.   At around the same time, Susan Stiritz chair of the, AASECT Summer Institutes Committee, decided that years of controversy on the AASECT listserv about sex addiction might indicate an excellent programing opportunity.  If Members wanted to talk about it so much on the list, maybe they would pay to attend quality intensive training about it.  This simultaneously made for excellent opportunity to teach about the change in the CE Approval policy.  The Summer Institutes Committee assembled such a great line up, I coughed up the money to go and it was the best AASECT program I have ever attended.  PRMA Steering was moved to action because of discussion generated by the resultant program: ‘Revisiting “Sex Addiction”: Transformative Ways to Address Out of Control Sexual Behavior’.  It included a wide slice of AASECT participants, including many who held SASH and IITAP memberships.  Presenters included Eli Coleman, Joe Kort, David Ley, Nicole Prause, Rory Reid, Neil Cannon, Ruth Cohn, Dalychia Saah and Rafaella Smith-Fiallo, Michael Vigorito, Doug Braun-Harvey and Susan Stiritz.


Also influential in the timing of this position statement was the deteriorating social discourse associated with the then-current US Presidential Campaign.  Comment trolls and political flaming did not originate with this campaign, but it is highly significant that in it, blatantly false discourse and the promotion of strongly-held opinions as the equivalent of facts crossed the line from internet anonymity to daily public speeches by the candidates before thousands of partisans.  In this climate, organizations like “Fight the New Drug” have been spreading ideology that porn is the equivalent of heroin.  The Republican National Committee put a plank in their platform that erotica constitutes a public health crisis in defiance of STI rates, unequal access of poor and ethnic minorities to sexual healthcare, and sexual transmission of the Zika virus which constitute genuine public health crises.  It is the professional responsibility of AASECT to defend the practice environment in which quality sexuality education, counseling and therapy might take place.  The position statement is part of AASECT’s response.

How big was the lie, Donald?  “It was this big.  You should have seen the one that got away”!

AASECT History:

AASECT Founder Patricia Schiller, JD.  Photo taken by AASECT around 2008.

 
This year AASECT will celebrate its 50th anniversary.   It was founded by Patricia Schiller with the express goal of supporting high standards in the field of sexuality education.  It was not until 5 years later that AASECT’s mission was expanded to cover training psychotherapists and physicians in sex therapy.  Schiller founded AASECT because, despite social changes in the 1960’s that made for increased social discourse about human sexuality, academic institutions failed to provide adequate graduate and undergraduate programs to train in human sexuality.  The contemporary political environment made it extremely hard for colleges and universities to secure funding and legislative support for academic programs involving sex.  That sad reality remains true even today despite a handful of quality programs at Morehouse University, University of Minnesota, University of Michigan, Guelph and Widener University.   Sexuality education, sexuality counseling and sex therapy remain post graduate specialties to this day, and are marginalized and diminished as academic disciplines relative to supply chain management and forestry because of social stigma surrounding human sexuality.
 
So AASECT took up the task of certifying competence in the sexual health professions outside of traditional medicine.  This is the basis for its Continuing Education Approval Committee needing to make decisions about what programing has AASECT-approved sexuality content.

Although ratified by 35 states, the Equal Rights Amendment failed in 1979 sparking debate in AASECT about boycotting Colorado.  No permanent advocacy mission was established in AASECT until 2004.
Until 2004, AASECT had no official advocacy function.  Great controversy had attended AASECT’s decision to hold a conference in Denver Colorado about the time of the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1979.  But efforts to officially incorporate an advocacy function were deterred by three factors.   Tax-exempt educational associations like AASECT are strictly limited in their ability to lobby governmental officials, and cannot generally afford to do so and simultaneously fulfil their other responsibilities to their memberships.  Because of those regulations, AASECT existed in an agreement to carve up the domain of professional sexology with three other organizations.  The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (SSSS) handled research, The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS) handled advocacy, the Foundation for the Scientific Study of Sexuality did fundraising, and AASECT was responsible for certification of professionals.  In that arrangement, advocacy was another organization’s job.  Third, these arrangements were mostly fine with sex therapists, who made up most voting members in AASECT and were reluctant to advocate, seeing it as a role conflict with their clinical work and a diffusion of scarce organizational resources.

The ACT UP die-in at The National Institutes of Health over experimental treatments for AIDS.
But in the late 1990’s NCSF formed and, along with the Victoria Woodhull Foundation, started exhibiting at AASECT Conferences, gently advocating for kink and consensual non-monogamy.  GLBT members became increasingly influential in AASECT Membership.  Many had learned that collective action and advocacy were essential to surviving the HIV epidemic.  And the practice environments of sex educators were steadily deteriorating due to the onslaught of abstinence-only education funded by the states and federal government. At about this time, the World Health Organization and World Congress of Sexology (now named The World Association of Sexual Health) adopted advocacy platforms, legitimating the argument that AASECT should advocate for sexual health too.

   
In this new environment, Barnaby B Barrett, then AASECT President-elect, persuaded the 2004 AASECT Board of Directors to create a Public Relations, Media, and Advocacy Committee with the tasks of amending the AASECT Mission to permit sexual health advocacy, and writing the AASECT Vision of Sexual Health.  In 2006, the Board was reorganized and the advocacy function was made a permanent Board-level position to support other initiatives that fell within the scope of the AASECT Vision of Sexual Health.  Since then, AASECT has passed statements opposing abstinence-only education, opposing reparative and conversion therapies, and supporting scientifically sound ideas of healthy sexual variability.  Because sex addiction therapies have been used reparatively against gay, lesbian, gender-nonconforming and kinky clients, these efforts involved intense discussion whether sex addiction should be specifically named in our statements against conversion therapies.  I opposed this as misplacing our focus:  we are against reparative therapies because they are a violation of human rights and scientifically ineffective regardless of the treatment methods involved.  But these earlier advocacy efforts were yet another source of impetus for AASECT to address sex addiction explicitly.  The formation of the AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group in 2009 became yet another focus for some of this advocacy discussion.

Hypersexuality , Sex Addiction, OCSB or Problem Sexual Behavior?

I will not review here the long history of the various theoretical constructs that have been offered to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual revision efforts.  Back in the 1960’s with the publications of DSM – II, one set, ‘nymphomania’ and ‘satyriasis’, were mentioned in DSM – II.  Hypersexuality also had standing in the manual as a research diagnosis or component of the catch-all diagnosis; Psychosexual Disorder Not Otherwise Specified (NOS).  But AASECT is not alone in resolutely regarding the scientific evidence for ‘sex addiction’ to be too weak and pejorative to serve as a diagnosis.  Eli Coleman has long championed work to make some form of excessive sexual behavior a billable diagnostic code, but his efforts had foundered in a thicket of competing terminologies.
 
Back in the 1980’s, the addictionologists and the sexology community worked together in the effort to research, define and treat excessive sexual behavior.  In their second year of joint meetings, they even conducted mini-SAR’s to spread sophistication about sexual variability among the two communities, but starting in the third year of regular meetings, the addiction community decided on meeting separately and insisted on their own terminology, much bolstered by the success of Patrick Carnes book “Out of the Shadows”.  Over time, the addiction community became self-certifying, yet failed to incorporate sexual science-based sexual criteria in their certification standards.

I have written extensively on this blog about the 2014 publishing of the DSM – 5 with scant mention of hyoersexuality and the problems this has posed for the addictions community.  For those interested, here the links follow this paragraph.  But AASECT is neither premature, nor is it taking a radical position to assert that, even though the neuroscience is still coming in, sex addiction is not an appropriate clinical definition of most sexual problems involving high frequency or variant consensual sexual problems.

 
Finally, I chose to cooperate with Doug Braun-Harvey and Michael Vigorito on this effort because of a crucial concept in their writing that I believe constitutes a cornerstone of good clinical work.  Although every effort should be made by all practitioners to ground their work in the best science, the long history of clinical ideas illustrates that we have been providing good quality psychotherapy with inadequate, scientifically weak, but widely practiced treatment models.  Between Krafft-Ebing’s first modern attempt at nosology in 1886 and today, we spent the first 66 years with no classification system at all, and almost a hundred years without one based upon defined and observable symptoms.  So modesty about our methods and care not to abuse our clinical authority in treatment is exceeding important.  Sex addiction therapy is not client-centered, even if the client comes in with intense, ego syntonic shame and needs no urging to adopt self-shaming labels like ‘sex addict’.  David Ley has emphasized the risk to a client’s sense of agency regarding their sexual behavior through adoption of such labels.  And overstating the power of sexual urges feeds the shaming social discourses that underlie many clinical problems we as sexology clinicians see presenting for treatment.  Terms like out of control sexual behavior and problem sexual behavior are appropriately atheoretical, less stigmatizing, and appropriately modest about what science knows right now.  It is an ethical cornerstone of diversity-sensitive practice that we not employ terms that imply that we know more than we do simply because they constitute effective marketing techniques.  Such behavior is objectionable because it puts our welfare before that of our clients.

In Summary:

This discussion of AASECT’s Position Statement on Sex Addiction emphasizes organizational histories and missions, changing social forces, with emphasis on the changing social environment in which sex is practiced and discussed and in which quality sexuality education and therapy are conducted.  This is not because gifted individuals do not deserve recognition for their efforts to promote sexual health.  There are many heroes.  But none of these people would have been successful if their efforts were not supported by others, and didn’t take advantage of the opportunities their times afforded them.  In the actual event, the impulse to take a position on sex addiction came from AASECT’s program accreditation function, their own educational programs, their commitment to supporting good educational and clinical work for alternative sexualities, the opening of AASECT to increasingly diverse Members and exhibitors, and AASECT’s responsibilities to support a constructive practice environment.  Ultimately, it is within AASECT’s primary mission to protect the field and the public.

I participated because I believed this is the correct step at the correct time in a long history, and I thank all my colleagues for their support in this effort.

 © Russell J Stambaugh, PhD,  Ann Arbor Michigan, December 2016.  All rights reserved.

AASECT Position Statements on Sex and Gender Diversity and Reparative Therapy

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP

On June 9, 2016 at its board meeting in San Juan, Puerto Rico, AASECT unanimously adopted two position statements authored by other organizations.  The first was initiated primarily by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, stimulated by AASECT’s Position on Sexual Expression, including Orientation and Identity adopted in November of 2015, and available here:  AASECT Position on Sexual Expression

NCSF required a statement that explicitly named activities that were subjected to discriminatory court cases and devised this language as congruent with parts of the Position on Sexual Expression:
“Sexual Freedom Resolution

Working within the position of social justice and human rights, we support the right of freedom of sexual expression among consenting adults.  We affirm that sexual expression is integral to the human experience, that this right is central to overall health and well-being, and that this right must be honored.  We support the right to be free from discrimination, oppression, exploitation and violence due to one’s sexual expression.

The best contemporary scientific evidence finds that consenting adults that practice BDSM, fetishism, cross dressing and non-monogamy can be presumed healthy as a group.  We believe that any sexuality education of therapies that treat sexualities must avoid stigmatizing or pathologizing these sexual expressions among fully informed consenting adults.
 
As professionals in the field of sexuality and sexual health, we actively seek to destigmatize consensual sexual expression and consensual practices among consenting adults, as well as to help create and maintain safe space for those who have been traditionally marginalized.

Signed:

National Coalition for Sexual Freedom
AASECT (American Association for Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therpists)
CARAS (Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities)
Center for Positive Sexuality
Institute fir Sexuality Education and Enlightenment
Projects Advancing Sexual Diversity
Science of BDSM Research Team
TASHRA (The Alternative Sexualities Health Research Alliance)”
The National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSFreedom.org) continues to solicit organizational signers for this document.  Arrangements can be made either through contacting them through their website, or by leaving a comment here on Elephant.


The second position statement originated from the American Psychiatric Associations United States Joint Statement work group.with ties to working communities in the American Medical Association, The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the National Association of Social Workers, and other national organizations.  It has already been adopted by the several organizations listed in the ‘Action Paper’ below:


“Joint Statement on Conversion Therapy in the U.S.
This statement is a framework for values and action to address issues raised by conversion therapy (also known as reorientation therapy, sexual orientation change efforts, ex-gay therapy, or reparative therapy). This statement expresses a shared commitment of two core principles of ethical mental health services: 1) facilitate individual self-determination and 2) do no harm.
The ethical principle of self-determination requires that each individual is seen as a whole person supported in their right to explore, define, articulate, and live out their own identity. For this reason, it is essential for clinicians to acknowledge the broad spectrum of sexual orientations and gender identities/expressions. In order to do so, it is necessary to have an equal understanding of and respect for sexual and gender minorities as well as the religious, spiritual, and other ideological values of individuals, families, and communities.
To ensure all healthcare providers do no harm, it is essential to recognize that a person is not mentally ill or developmentally delayed because they experience same-sex attractions or a nontraditional gender identity or expression. The focus of treatment must not be to convert an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. The signatories share a commitment to protecting the public from the harms of conversion therapy.
There is no intention in this statement to deny those with conflicted feelings around sexuality or gender identity from seeking qualified and appropriate help. Nothing in this statement is intended to preclude ethical research relative to gender identity or sexual orientation.
Background

Historically, research findings and clinical expertise have found that variations in sexual orientation and gender identity are within the normal range of human development, and that conversion therapy or other efforts to make sexual orientation or gender identity/expression conform to specific standards and expectations are not effective, are not appropriate therapeutic practices, are not ethical, and are harmful.1, 2, 3  Many professional associations already have position statements relative to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, of Gender NonConforming (LGBTQ/GNC) health and/or the ineffectiveness of efforts to change sexual orientation and/or the potential harms of conversion therapy for sexual orientation.4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15
Goals and Objectives

Given the harm associated with conversion therapy efforts, other affirmative behavioral, psychological, and emotional health interventions are recommended for individual or family distress associated with sexual orientation and gender identity/expression. We commit ourselves to ensure that:
●     The public is informed about the research on conversion therapy and the risks thereof;
●     Healthcare professionals are made aware of the ethical issues relating to conversion therapy;
●     New and existing healthcare providers are appropriately trained to competently deal with requests for conversion therapy and to provide appropriate support to clients in distress over their sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression;
●     Healthcare professionals from various disciplines work together to promote the public interest in addressing conversion therapy.
Roles and Responsibilities

This statement does not define a list of actions which every organization will carry out. It sets out a framework for how organizations will respond to the issue in areas where they have responsibilities.
●     Each organization will review its codes of ethical conduct for members and consider the need for the creation of specific amendments to those codes;
●     Professional associations will ensure their members have access to the latest information regarding the ineffectiveness and harms of conversion therapy;
●     Professional associations will endeavor to make continuing professional development events available to further providers’ understanding and cultural competence in working with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning and gender nonconforming (LGBTQ/GNC) clients;
●     Organizations will work together to create a shared information resource on the ineffectiveness and harms of conversion therapy to help and support both members of the public and professionals, including sets of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs);
●     Those with a responsibility for clinical and academic training will work to ensure that such programs provide mental and behavioral health providers with a sufficient degree of cultural competence to work effectively with LGBTQ/GNC clients;
●     Clinicians who are not sufficiently trained around issues of sexual orientation and/or gender identity/expression will make every effort to seek appropriate training or consultation or to connect patients with clinicians or agencies who are trained to provide appropriate clinical care;
●     Auditing and accrediting organizations will review their current guidelines and policies for individual practitioners and training organizations to assess the need for more specific standards to demonstrate awareness of and compliance with policies regarding conversion therapy.
Beyond ending potentially harmful practices, it is important to also build greater social acceptance of people of all gender identities, gender expressions, and sexual orientations, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and gender nonconforming people of all ages; to adopt appropriate and supportive therapies; and to provide current, targeted and accurate resources and information for all patients and their families. Building better supportive environments and working to eliminate negative social attitudes will reduce health disparities and improve the health and well-being of all LGBTQ/GNC people.
Review

The undersigned organizations will review the statement 12 months after publication.
Mutual Understanding

This memorandum is signed in recognition of a shared professional responsibility to improve the support and help available to those at risk from conversion therapy.
Notes
  1. http://www.psychotherapy.org.uk/UKCP_Documents/policy/MoU-conversiontherapy.pdf
  2. http://store.samhsa.gov/product/Ending-Conversion-Therapy-Supporting-and-Affirming-LGBTQ-Youth/All-New-Products/SMA15-4928
  3. http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6803%3A2012-therapies-change-sexual-orientation-lack-medical-justification-threaten-health&catid=740%3Anews-press-releases&Itemid=1926&lang=en
  4. http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/about-ama/our-people/member-groups-sections/glbt-advisory-committee/ama-policy-regarding-sexual-orientation.page?
  5. http://www.apa.org/about/policy/sexual-orientation.aspx
  6. http://www.socialworkers.org/diversity/new/documents/hria_pro_18315_soce_june_2015.pdf
  7. http://www.psychiatry.org/file%20library/about-apa/organization-documents-policies/policies/position-2013-homosexuality.pdf
  8. http://www.guideline.gov/content.aspx?id=38417#Section420
  9. http://www.aamft.org/iMIS15/AAMFT/Content/about_aamft/position_on_couples.aspx
  10. http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2292051
  11. http://www.counseling.org/news/updates/2013/01/16/ethical-issues-related-to-conversion-or-reparative-therapy
  12. http://www.apsa.org/content/2012-position-statement-attempts-change-sexual-orientation-gender-identity-or-gender
  13. http://www.schoolcounselor.org/asca/media/asca/PositionStatements/PS_LGBTQ.pdf
  1. http://www.wpanet.org/detail.php?section_id=7&content_id=1807
ACTION PAPER
TITLE:   US Joint Statement on Conversion Therapy

Whereas:  In December of 1998, the Board of Trustees issued a position statement that the American Psychiatric Association opposes any psychiatric treatment, such as “reparative” or conversion therapy, which is based upon the assumption that homosexuality per seis a mental disorder or based upon the a priori assumption that a patient should change his/her sexual homosexual orientation,
Whereas:  In December 2013 the Board of Trustees issued a position statement that the American Psychiatric Association believes that the causes of sexual orientation (whether homosexual or heterosexual) are not known at this time and likely are multifactorial including biological and behavioral roots which may vary between different individuals and may even vary over time.  The American Psychiatric Association does not believe that same-sex orientation should or needs to be changed, and efforts to do so represent a significant risk of harm by subjecting individuals to forms of treatment which have not been scientifically validated and by undermining self-esteem when sexual orientation fails to change.  No credible evidence exists that any mental health intervention can reliably and safely change sexual orientation; nor, from a mental health perspective does sexual orientation need to be changed,
Whereas:   The World Psychiatric Association has taken the position that gender identity is not seen as pathological and “the provision of any intervention proposed to’ treat’ something that is not a disorder is wholly unethical,“

Whereas:  The American Academy of Nursing, the American Counseling Association, the American Medical Student Association, the American Psychoanalytic Association, AGLP The Association of LGBTQ Psychiatrists, the Association of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Issues in Counseling, the Clinical Social Work Association, GMLA: the Health Professionals Advancing LGBT Equality, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health have signed on to the US Joint Statement on Conversion Therapy; and the Woodhull Freedom Foundation and PFLAG International have endorsed the US Joint Statement on Conversion Therapy.
Be it Resolved:  That the American Psychiatric Association sign on as a signatory to the US Joint Statement on conversion Therapy which cautions mental Health Professionals that conversion or change therapies for Lesbian, Gay Bisexual and Transgendered patients are unethical and emboday a risk of harm to those patients.

AASECT would thus be added to the list of organizations under the fourth ‘Whereas’ in the ‘Action Paper’.

The Joint Statement was started independently by the American Psychiatric Association work group, but AASECT’s decision to become a signatory grows naturally both from the AASECT Vision of Sexual Health, and from the aforementioned Position on Sexual Expression adopted last November.  The ripples of that decision, and AASECT’s earlier decisions to undertake systematic advocacy with the formation of its Public Relations, Media, and Advocacy Committee in 2004 and its adoption of the AASECT Vision of Sexual Health in 2006, continue to wash up on shores then undreamed of.  Elephant in the Hot Tub: Kink in Context is yet another unanticipated consequence of those decisions.



Even those of modest height can see farther when standing on the shoulders of giants, Sir Isaac!

The Social Psychology of Kink Safety

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP
This post is dedicated to the dead, wounded and traumatized in the Pulse nightclub shooting and all those who love them.  It is also dedicated to those who sense of safety has been diminished by this horrific act.  Potentially, that is a lot of people, including the author.  Although gay, lesbian, queer, trans, and gender fluid people know less safety than many of us, all of us are correct to feel that the realities of terrorism, anti-homosexual ideology, and toxic masculinity make us less safe than we may have previously imagined.  Finally, I want to particularly spotlight Eli Green, AASECT Annual Conference Co-Chairs Melissa Keyes DiGioia, and Mariotta Gary-Smith who worked so hard to promote safety at AASECT16 when we were threatened by a lesser invasion that was only made more disturbing by the Pulse shooting.

Kinksters are very concerned about safety.  It is possible to be an outsider with relatively low levels of stigma, but when you know that your sexuality is judged as threatening and crazy by others, you carry stigma about it even when you are not out, and when there is no immediate threat.  All kinky people are vulnerable to some social stigma, and, depending on their preferred practices, many are vulnerable to legal prosecution as described in previous posts on Elephant.  Even before learning about kink communities, potential members learned to conceal their sexual desires, to manage double lives, to handle internal and external stigma, and to control as much as they can how others perceive them.

Social Participation:

Is it safer to be out or not?  It depends on which risks are important to you.
So the first line of kinksters’ defense in the struggle for safety is not being out.  In the 2014 Consent Violations Survey, 70% said they were not out to someone.  We didn’t ask, but there is a large but unknown number of kinky people who have never been out to anyone.  They were not likely to have been in our sample.  These are people who learned their desires were forbidden before they ever had the opportunity to express them.  They may be so afraid they do not act on them ever.  Why I periodically take issue with the ‘sex addiction’ discourse here on Elephant is that some children and adolescents fear to masturbate to their fantasies for fear of becoming addicted and losing control of how other people perceive them.  They internalize stigma and feel shame and hatred of their desires.  So for the fearful, the price in judgment of knowing themselves can be enforced celibacy and lonely secrecy.  Is it any wonder that out kinksters are often counterphobic?  To own their sexuality, they have no alternative to facing their fears.

Because sexuality is a private matter in conventional public life, one does not need to lead a double life to be kinky.  An unknown number of kinky couples exist out in the world who read books, or respond to movies or other media, or are introduced to kink by a partner and take to it like a duck to water. They recognize that they have kinky desires, and reveal their kinks only to a few willing partners and achieve safety through appearing conventional in everyday social life and doing as they please in bed.  They hide their toys from the kids, and lock up everything when guests come to stay for a few days.  For these people, safety may feel routine and pose modest psychological burdens.  The more polyamorous one is, the harder this is to pull off, because it is harder to conceal multiple partnerships under the cloak of hetrro-normativity.  For most gender fluid clients it is impossible, and for gay clients, so-called marriage equality holds out some hope that they too can avoid stigma through maintaining sexual privacy that previously was available only to heterosexuals.

A wise words from Oscar Wilde.  Come to think of it,though, didn’t he do time for being out!
For others, the inability to tell significant others about their desires leads to behaviors we would consider risky.  They chose to lead double lives.  They contact other people through personal ads and express their kink outside of their primary relationships.  They decide the fears of relationship loss are the lesser of the evils relative to never discussing their desires.  We often interpret the resulting secrecy and duplicity as proof that they do not value their relationships, but it would be equally true that they value them too much to risk speaking of their kinks!  (Lest you credit me with this gem, know that I learned it first from Ether Perel’s work on affairs!)
Leading double lives can be elaborate, and sometimes the rituals of doing this become eroticized.  Contacting new partners who might accept you and share your excitements can be hot.  So can doing something illicit.   So swiping the correct direction can feel like rolling the dice, and you may feel a rush when the object of your intense interest responds with an encouraging text message.  In the past, kinksters chose aliases and wrote away to re-mail services.  Sometimes letters arrived saturated in perfume, and filled with sexy pictures.  Now mostly this happens electronically.
Did someone say “Red Room of Pain’?  This is actually from a bondage B&B in Edinburgh
Wealthy people build secret dungeons equivalent to Christian Grey’s Red Room, and hold private parties by invitation only.  Despite the intimacy of play, they may not know one another’s real names, occupations or marital statuses.  At CARAS every year a therapist discussion group is held for kinky therapists who worry about managing their caseloads of kinksters in the incestuous environment of their local scene, and worry that if they play anywhere 300 miles from the office that a client’s therapy will be damaged by an unplanned social meeting at a kink event.  So the sources of unsafety, and the complexity of solutions when a double life is undertaken, can vary tremendously and require a huge amount of attention and energy. When the burdens of maintain these arrangements become too great, safety is often sought in therapy, as kinky clients worry that the burdens of dealing with stigma constitute proof that their kinks are ‘pathological’.
    
Of course, double lives can provide one kind of safety at the expense of other dangers.  Lying and deception can sour the relationship with the primary partner and destroy trust.  Partners that might have lovingly faced their own fears and judgments about kink might lack the trust to make the attempt if they discover yours only after learning about a prolonged deception.  All the things one sought to protect with deception can be precipitously damaged when deception fails.  Therapists long experience with secrets suggest secrets and confidences tend to slip out more frequently in times of acute stress, conflict and crisis, such that damage can be very hard to contain and repair.  Therapists as a community tend to be pro intimacy and pro honesty and to question the benefits of double life behaviors, so people using these face psychological risks of being confronted about their relationship strategies in therapy.  Kink-aware therapists can be expected to handle these situations in non-directive and client-centered ways.

Informed Consent as a source of safety:

Negotiation and contracting are the foundations of kink safety.  In their ideal form they operationalize informed consent.  Ideally, they work best if the following conditions are maintained continuously:
Equality:  The parties in the negotiation come to the negotiation form a place of existential equality and negotiate freely as equals. 
Honesty:  Each participant has good communications skills and negotiates honestly about what they do and do not want.
Empathy:  Each participant has a high degree of empathy for the other parties in the negotiation.
Limited but Shared Interests:  The parties negotiate with a flexible acceptance that negotiation partners have not only interest that align, but also differences that do not, and they are prepared to be accepting of the irreducible differences.
Self-Discipline:  Each participation maintains discipline about their expectations.
Risk tolerance: Each participant is aware and tolerant of the risks of negotiation.
Explicit agreement:  The negotiation is explicit and limited in its specifications of what is to be agreed.
The negotiation contains serious considerations of what might go wrong, and has a safety plan for dealing with potential problems if everything agreed to does not proceed smoothly and expectable difficulties arise.
It is important that the above description is my ideal statement of negotiation for informed consent.  In actual practice, actual negotiations rarely maintain ideal standards on all of these dimensions.

This Your E-Card is a great example of how 50 Shades of Grey has altered the conversation about kink.
Contacts often lead to the expression of hard and soft limits.  Hard limits are activities that you do not want to do under any circumstances.  If you have breathing difficulties, that might mean no gags, ever.  A fear of spiders may mean no role playing Little Miss Muffett.   If you have a prominent public position, that may mean no pictures, or no scenes where you are locked outside the hotel room naked for the excruciating thrill of humiliation.  Soft limits are limits you are prepared to relax under special circumstances.  Examples might include no public play unless we are a safe distance from home, or unless you are masked and hooded.  Someone who was afraid of her potential for angry reactions might only agree to sensation play when she’s securely bound so she doesn’t hit back.  Or some behavior which was extremely hot and anxiety provoking might be OK in private play, but never OK in a group scene.  Using negotiation, hard limits and soft limits, kinksters can titrate their fears and desires and their desire for risk and adventure with their needs for safety into scenes that have the best chance of being fun and sexy.

From Niiad.com This one hit a little too close to home; our cat’s name is Khatzie!  So sue me!
Safewords and contracts are about safety.  Although it may be hot to imagine that you are helpless at the hands of a sexy sadist, cramps, sudden illness, an accident, or emotional triggering can all lead to dangerous situations in which ending the scene immediately is imperative.  Often kinksters play with making safewords less safe, by making them long or difficult to say, or by imposing penalties for using them.  Also, submissives often try to avoid using their safewords under the theory that good role players don’t do such things, or the top might be hurt or inconvenienced.  These are a dangerous ideas, but also illustrate one of the key safety principles of kink:  that one never has to be any safer than they want to be.  Much safety in kink just about doing your best to make an informed choice about exactly the level of safety you want, and about the human fallibility of getting it.

Aftercare is partly about safety.  Getting emotional support and processing your experiences are important parts of getting safety both through sharing understanding of your experiences, processing any problems that arose, and consolidating possible new learnings about yourself from play.

Community Safety Resources:

Please note that the photo and links immediately below are from commercial sites, and some videos may require you to pay a fee and/or subscribe.  By way of personal disclosure, some videos may be by personal friends and professional colleagues of the author.  I have received no fee or other commercial consideration for using these examples.

What?  There are only 50 skills?  This piece of shrewd marketing to newbies is from KinkUniversity at Kink.com, an excellent source of on-line kink training videos.  Kink Academy.com is also recomended.

Kink Academy

The logo of  The Eugenspiegel Society in New York City. The United States first aboveground kink social group founded in 1972
Society of Janus, the second oldest kink social group, marching in the San Francisco Pride Parade.

There are now a great many local BDSM social communities in medium and large cities and many university campuses.  The best palce to locate a local group is on FetLife.com


Joining a kink community can have risks, like being more ‘out’, but often puts people in touch with many new sources of safety.  Kink communities endlessly educate, and safety is very often a main theme of kink educational sessions.  Kink groups often provide mentoring programs for new members.  In mentoring programs, safety is learned directly by processing one’s own emotional reactions with experienced players.  Mentors can help you decide what new things you are ready to try and under what conditions you are most likely to enjoy them.  They can serve as sounding boards that help you understand what your actual play partner might be thinking and feeling when they are doing new things with you.  Good mentors check on your safety techniques to help make sure they are working as you intend and as they are intended to work in the community you are joining.  Direct instruction can teach about safewords, safe play methods, the physiological consequences of different techniques and behaviors.  It is a typical feature of mentoring programs that mentors do not play with their charges.  This makes it easier for mentees to keep clear that sexual self-interest is not coloring the mentor’s advice.



Often, kinksters chose close confidants to be their ‘safeties’ from within their local communities.  A safety is a person who serves as a spotter for you when you are playing.  They are similar to people who help keep you safe when you are practicing trampoline or diving.  They can observe while you contract and watch with neutral eyes while you play.  Sometimes another pair of eyes will serve to deter someone who would go beyond their agreement with you because such behavior would make them look bad in the eyes of the community.  Safeties can stop play, or question it, if something appears to be going amiss, even if you are in top or subspace.  When you make explicit arrangements to visit a private party or other venue, you can arrange to text your safety with where you are and when you plan to report in so that someone else knows you are safe and can call for help if you fail to check in.  Safeties don’t just deter other people who might not be careful or scrupulous enough not to harm you, but also can serve as an experienced and neutral source of judgment in helping you to keep from taking greater risks in the heat of desire than you intend to.  Safeties differ from mentors in that they are often relative equals, and often they are in the same roles you prefer to explore in the community.  Different people can play the role of safety for you at different times, where as a mentoring relationship is usually filled by just one person and for a prearranged period.

Friends can serve as support for discussion and understanding what you have experienced.  Those in the scene are a valuable source of information about norms and community history.  Just as Elephant in the Hot Tub is often about context, knowing and influencing the context of where you play and who you play with can be an important source of safety information and risk.  Friends can help with those efforts.
Actual playing technique is often a source of safety.  Many things you see on Porn Hub and kinky illustrations are either artistic license, or scenes carefully crafted by unique and highly experienced models.  Just because you can fantasize doing something and get off on it does not necessarily mean you can do it safely.  Educational sessions can keep you from practices that might lead to injury or worse if done without instruction.  For example, many kinksters lack partners and engage in self-bondage.  If it is important to you to be genuinely helpless, it is a real risk that if you tie yourself up that you will be unable to free yourself.  Furthermore, positions that are hot for short periods can become highly uncomfortable or dangerous if circulation gets cut off or cramps ensue.  Learning ways to free yourself may seem self-defeating, but may spare you the embarrassment of calling the authorities, or neighbors to get free, or suffering genuine injury.

E Gary Gygax makes an animated guest appearance on Futurama as a Dungeon Master.
This is not the kind of Dungeon Master we’er looking for.! It is another one of those wonderful multi-cultural double entendres like CBT.  The term Dungeon Master arose independently and nearly simultaneously in the 1970’s in D&D and BDSM sub-cultures.


In group playing situations, Dungeon Masters operate to ensure that group rules about play and personal conduct are observed.  Those of you who attended the Taste of Kink event in Minneapolis last June saw both safeties from AASECT and Dungeon Masters from the demonstrating local group in operation.  Play groups and BDSM social organizations always have policies.  Alcohol and drugs may be banned, both to protect players’ states of mind and to ensure that authorities do not have an excuse to raid playspaces.  Personal touch and touching of others’ equipment is generally prohibited, in part because people with past histories of boundary violations have been known to test limits like these and such rules bring their attention to group leaders.  Photos and recording are prohibited to protect group members’ anonymity and privacy.  Dungeon masters are generally senior and high status members of the community who have a broad familiarity with techniques, and can observe that play is safe and have full authority to stop it.

Groups also often have reporting policies in the event that people make complaints about a group member’s behavior.  Often there is considerable dispute about the ways that communities regulate play, and what rules the community should adopt.  A climate of anarchic radical personal responsibility prevails.  But leathersex traditions and histories of community violators have led most to have them.  Therapists of new community members should ask them to enquire of their kink social organization about what the response procedures are if something untoward happens.

It is common practice in kink social organizations for new members to ask for references when playing with someone for the first time, and this is especially true when playing outside the group playspace.  References are far from infallible, but using them to rule out problem players is a really good idea.  In the 2014 Consent Violations Survey, references were not always sought, but when they were, 74% of reported violations were committed by someone with a good or excellent rating, so references are not infallible protection.  They are mostly useful to weed out known unsafe players.

A group photo of participants from the Folsom Street Fair (FSF) ironically serves to illustrate dress codes.  Ironic because FSF is a rare event with no dress code, and no prohibition against photography.  You automatically consent to being photographed, and that is why I often select it for stock photos.  Although black is not required, yet it is very prevalent. 
Dress codes are often enforced at kink events.  These offer the relatively weak protection that the people who attend kink events are actually kinky, not passing tourists or voyeurs who do not share group norms and commitments.  Depending on the group, these dress codes can be pretty broad, and offer rather little additional safety.

Trigger warnings and trauma safety:  Some kinksters play despite trauma histories.  It may seem surprising, but some explicitly play with past traumas.  Many kinky social groups are already familiar with this possibility, and they may have members who are trained and familiar with trauma, and systematic efforts are made to make sure not only that participants are aware when intense experiences are planned, but they also have support if a participant or observer reacts unexpectedly.  If you know your vulnerabilities, it is good to share them before you play and have a support plan prepared ahead of time.  Informed consent is not just important for you, but for those who play with you.



Munches are social meetings where kink is discussed, but there is no play.  Meetings are generally in local restaurants.  The fact that they are in public space with no play scheduled makes them safe from physical boundary violations, but may be uncomfortable for people who do not want to be observed discussing BDSM in public.  Munches generally do not have dress codes so that new members are not outed by hanging out with leather clad ‘undesirables’.   Sometimes people go off and play together from munches after sizing each other up in safe space, a practice commonly practiced in all forms of on-line dating.  Obviously if you leave a munch with someone you like, you have the potential for privacy, but loose the protections of public space.  Munches provide a great way for new members to size up the people in the group, and to make judgments about how much they would like to share of themselves with group members.  Many people who are attracted to kink are not comfortable with playing in public, so it is quite likely that those who join kink social organizations and play together are among the more adventurous for whom the voyeurism, exhibitionism, and group processes are not barriers to entry.

Attitudes, Values, and Process that Produce Safety:

Gradualism is a characteristic of safety strategy in which new recruits to any sub-culture gather information, try out new behaviors, test their assumptions against experience, and develop new commitments, identifications, and even sexual orientations.  It provides the time and information to bring feelings and knowledge into integration, and allows the building of new relationships that support social participation in the sub-culture.  Munches are a deliberate part of this plan, and they exist also for asexuals, old friends, and newbies to meet together where the possible pressures of sexual excitement are less, and friends can interact at whatever level of participation they prefer.  The social rules in play groups are more strict, and munches can be a relief from some of these.  Sometimes psychological safety means being protected from your own desire and the desire of others, and a relaxing of social roles that are otherwise very exciting to play out.

An attempt has been made here to be exhaustive about the kinds and sources of safety in the kink community, and to discuss both generic and arcane aspects of kinky communities that help people manage their risk taking behavior.  Obviously, a truly comprehensive list is impossible, and for all these efforts, safety is never complete.  I strongly encourage readers to add additional examples of safety to this thread using the comments section.  Eventually, many people who do not know the conventions of the kink communities will read this article and profit from consideration of your commentary.

This week’s horrifying attack on the Pulse Disco in Florida is a shattering demonstration that, despite the fact that terrorism constitutes a very modest threat to American citizens—you are in much greater danger from falling in your bath tub, let alone negative health consequence’s for your diet, lifestyle or traffic accidents—safety is never complete, and kink involves deliberate risk taking.  This article eschews the usual kink slogans of SSC or RACK, but love and sex and spiritual pursuits all entail risk.  The kink communities know this, accept it, plan for risk and for things to go wrong despite everyone’s best efforts.
Not everyone is benign.  Not all players are skilled in all things.  Highly skilled people still make errors.  Even those of us who strive continuously for self-knowledge have limitations.
Prevailing community attitudes produce safety:  A general ethos prevails in BDSM of radical personal responsibility.  Radical in that, in the face of laws and norms that may make some kink activities illegal, many kinksters make up their minds to do them anyway.  But the responsibility for risk taking until laws and social attitudes can be changed remain theirs.  This attitude may assume some risks, but is inclined to see responsibility for one’s safety as primarily one’s own responsibility. 

In that spirit, when assuming responsibility for your own emotional safety, aftercare with your play partners is important, but it is also necessary to plan for your own self-care when trouble disrupts your plan to receive care from others who may become unavailable.  It is in precisely that spirit, that this blog provided the link to an excellent sub and top drop safety kit:Top and Sub Drop Safety Kit

Analogous to kink?  Serious leisure.
Kink has provided all these safety tools and resources because we live in a word where complete safety is not always desirable, and the panoply of different kink loves, activities, needs, and risks is so great.  Kink demands communication because any given partner’s knowledge and skill in the midst of this diversity cannot be assumed.  Although many dating sites have tried kink activity checklists as a place to begin discussions with potential partners, they are not a very big start.  There is a lot of safety to talk about and lots to learn.  Emily Prior and DJ Williams have likened kink to extreme sports; a kind of serious leisure in which participants become partially professionalized.  Skills offset risks, and ideology embraces planful risky behavior.  Unlike extreme sports governed by the logic of athleticism and competition, kink embraces unreasoned passion as a primary motive for play, so the serious leisure analogy isn’t perfect.  Whether you accept their sociological analogy or not, kink requires lots of safety.  But many people have faced the same safety problems before you have, and they have a large history of solutions.   

© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

#AASECT16–Consent 201: Consent and Its Discontents

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP2 Comments

Susan Wright and I presented a 90-minute program at AASECT’s 48th Annual Conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico entitled Consent 201: Consent and its Discontents on June 9, 2016.  At the end of that presentation, Susan and I promised to mount the slides and notes on FetLife under the Consent Counts discussion thread, and here on Elephant.  The posting is delayed until Sunday, June 19 while I get an upgrade to my tech skills!  Sorry for the delay!

Consent 201: Consent and its Discontents

Here are some of the takeaways I think this presentation about complex and ambiguous consent and the 2014 consent violations survey offers:

1)  While there are many costs to confronting stigma and being ‘othered’, outsiders have insights their unique histories and contexts can offer us.  We can learn from them, or just learn the hard way.

2)  Consent is not simple and will not work by rote for kinky folk or for conventional ones.  Kink has a long history of what consent can and can’t do.  Communication lessens the dangers, but does not fully ameliorate power imbalances.

3)  Community offers powerful protections, but we only achieve them if we are not only inclusive, but show vigilance for our most vulnerable members and fully socialize them.

4)  Even in counter cultures like kink, the cultural weaknesses of our larger cultural context bleed through.  Kink is egalitarian, but not fully equal.  Males, heterosexuals, tops, and those with clear gender boundaries are less likely to report consent violations than women, submissives, queer, and fluid folk.

5)  There are serious risks of over-victimizing consent violations in our efforts to decrease them.  Half are not serious, bumps and bruises are to be expected from risky play, and we dare not decrease the agency of all participants.  The passion to share risk creates the opportunity for understanding our shadow and our vulnerability.  Safety training and aftercare need to operate not just between immediate players, but within the larger communities they play in.  2014 Consent Violations Survey is part of a long history of community commitment to that care.  So is posting these results for others to learn form them and apply them.

Enjoy, learn, play safely, and lead with empathy, not conflict.

© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

The Psychotherapeutic Theories of Kink: Myths and Realities about Sigmund Freud

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP1 Comment
Sigmund Freud is the towering figure in the invention of psychotherapy and is one of the most important thinkers to contribute to Western notions of modernity.  Born in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic) in 1856, Freud’s Jewish father was a moderately successful textile salesman who brought his family to Vienna and paid for his son’s education at the gymnasium, thus qualifying Sigmund to enter the University of Vienna.  Sigmund studied first medicine, then neurology, training with some of the most famous Swiss and French neurologists of his day and became a lecturer at the University of Vienna.  Throughout his tenure there, Freud was very much split between teaching, his private practice as a psychotherapist, and his prolific career as a writer.  An inveterate publicist and promoter of his ideas, he invented psychoanalysis, organized it as a clinical and academic discipline, and wrote seemingly tirelessly about its clinical technique, theory, and larger societal implications.  Although Freud was not religious and never practiced as a Jew, he was a pillar of the Viennese social community and married Martha Bernays, the daughter of a prominent rabbi from Hamburg.  From 1902, he held continuous weekly meetings about psychoanalytic topics, and in 1905, he founded the International Psychoanalytic Association.  The so called Standard Edition of his works translated into English by James Strachey runs 24 volumes and thousands of pages.

Freud’s inner circle circa 1920:  Top, left to right: Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Ernest Jones
Bottom:  Sigmund Freud, Sandor Ferenczi and Hans Sachs.
By this time, Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, and Wilhelm Stekel were already gone. 
Between the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1901 and his departure from Vienna in 1938, Freud’s psychoanalytic circle anointed all the greatest thinking about therapy.  Carl Jung, Alfred Adler, Otto Rank, Sandor Ferenczi, Karen Horney, Marie Bonaparte, Erich Fromm, Lou Andreas Salome, Harry Stack Sullivan, Wilhelm Reich were all pillars of the International Psychoanalytic Association at one point or another.  In his later years, Freud increasingly turned his attention to social phenomena like religion, education, and the relationship between society and repression.  Just after the Anschluss in which Austria was absorbed by Nazi Germany, the Freud family emigrated first to Paris, and then to London, by June 4, 1938.   By the time he left Vienna, he had suffered from the effects of mouth cancer for more than 15 years, the disease was initially diagnosed in 1923 and Freud went through a long and difficult history of treatment.   In September of 1939, without further treatment options and in the face of weakness and chronic pain, Freud arranged for legal physician-assisted suicide on September 23, 1939 at his new home in Hampstead, London.

Freud poses with a cigar.  He famously said “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”when asked if his habitual cigars were phallic symbols.  Actually, cigars are never just cigars.  Sometimes, they are a cause of mouth cancer.
Anna Freud, who assumed the intellectual leadership of psychoanalysis after her father’s death, was so embittered that she did not return to Vienna even for visit until 1972.  Because of that and difficulties associated with his emigration from Vienna and the death of Sigmund’s four sisters in Nazi concentration camps during the war, Freud’s extensive library, archeological artifacts, and clinical consulting room were recreated and kept in London and never repatriated to Vienna after his death.

Anna Freud (1895-1982), in 1957. 
Freud not only invented psychoanalysis, he was a prominent mythologizer of the field.  He constantly portrayed psychoanalysis as victimized by the very forces of repression that he was striving to overcome through psychoanalytic insight.   As a consequence, of this dramatic struggle, the popular imagination about Freud is plagued by a variety of hyperboles and exaggerations about Freud’s already immense role in modern thinking.  I will proceed to break a few of these down, and try to put his real contributions into a larger perspective:

Myth #1.  Freud Invented Talk Therapy:

Physicians had been talking to their patients for years and already realized that reassuring conversation, non-medical advice, patriarchal solicitousness, and even placebos, could have powerful effects on patient health.   Mesmer and Charcot had already demonstrated powerful effects from talking interventions like hypnotism.  Freud invented psychoanalysis, the termhe used for his particular theoretical and technical rationale about what made the talking cure work.  So Freud did much to popularize and refine the talking cure, but did not invent it.

Myth #2.  Freud Set Out to Invent Talk Therapy:

Freud thought of himself as a neurologist, and imagined that the clinical phenomena he was seeing in therapeutic conversations with patients were neurological, not psychological phenomena.  Until 1900, Freud was engaged in an elaborate and failed study, the Project for a Scientific Psychology, in which attempted to describe mental phenomena in neurological terms.  This effort was premature and awaited technological breakthroughs, including the identification of neurotransmitters and CT, PET, and fMRI imagining techniques that were not developed until long after his death.  Were Freud working today, he’d probably be seeking NIMH grants for brain studies using the latest scanning technology!

Freud’s couch ready for it’s scan.  It could happen!
Myth #3.  Freud Was a Cocaine Addict and His Work Was Nonsense Because of Chronic Intoxication:

Turn of the century apparatus for administering the 7% solution of cocaine.  93% was saline.
In 1974, Nicholas Meyer penned a novel that threw Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud together on a case.

Freud was an enthusiastic early user of cocaine and wrote rhapsodically about its stimulating effects.  At the time (late 1800’s) its addictive properties were not known, and laws had yet to be passed against its use.  Freud’s extensive body of writing has withstood the test of time, and while some of it is clearly wrong, it is much more limited by his times and the extant medical knowledge and social conventions, than by the researcher’s use of psycho-active drugs.  It should be noted that Freud’s cocaine use was conventional in his time, but would constitute impaired professionalism in the modern context.  Recognition of the dangers that opiates and cocaine posed led to the Harrison Act of 1911 in America.  That legislation established non-medical uses as illegal, commenced limited regulation of the pharmaceutical industry, and self-prescription would eventually be forbidden.  European countries passed similar laws around this time as well.  It is estimated that around the turn of the century, 1 in 20 Americans was addicted to patent medicines that contained alcohol, opiate derivatives, and/or cocaine.   Freud may have remained vulnerable to self-prescription due to cocaine’s analgesic effects it most likely had on the pain associated with advancing mouth cancer.
Snake oil.  Yes, it sometimes contained the oil from freshly squeezed snakes!
The active ingredients, however, were cocaine, alcohol, and opioids.

Myth #4.  Freud Invented the Idea of the Unconscious:

Jean Martin Charcot presents on hysteria circa 1870.
Actually, the idea of the unconscious pre-dated Freud’s work and the idea that people were not fully aware of what they were thinking was in common currency during Freud’s training as a neurologist and the staple of early learning theorists.  Franz Mesmer’s ideas of animal magnetism were known to be involved in hypnotism and, relied on the existence of an unconscious.   Similarly, Jean Martin Charcot, the founding father of modern neurology, came to believe that repression was involved in hysteria and he demonstrated how memories could be lost and recovered from the unconscious under hypnosis.   Freud did, however, invent and popularize the idea of the dynamic unconscious as a mental agency in which socially intolerable instinctual impulses were kept from consciousness lest we think badly of ourselves and violate social rules.  It is the Freudian model of the unconscious that undergirds popular thinking today about our mental lives and self-concepts.

Myth #5.  Freud Thought Everything Was About Sex:

Austro-Hungarian machine gunners in World War I.  Freud served his country during that war, and saw the psychological consequences of industrialized combat.  Maybe not everything was about sex.
Although this myth seems difficult to refute, it is important to realize that even in its most extreme form, Freud’s position was more nuanced.  In his initial theorizing, sex played an exclusive explanatory role, but Freud was not speaking of foreplay, intercourse, or suspension bondage.  For Freud, sex was an underlying human motivation derived from direct but largely unconscious instinctual expression.  It was a natural consequence of our Darwinian animal nature and our evolutionary purpose to pass our genes on to the next generation of human beings.  Libido, that natural biological energy that sometimes resulted in direct mating behavior, got sublimated into all other social acts like going to school, attending church, everyday labor and social interaction.  So for Freud, behaviors that didn’t look sexy at all were energized by underlying sexual motives.  Later, Freud also hypothesized a death instinct which was equally mutable and unconscious.  Most writers after him have preferred to translate his death instinct as ‘aggression.’  Both of these instinctual drives were balanced in their social expression by the conscious abilities of the person, and their internalizations of social rules, norms, ideas and values, so libido was only expressed in directly sexual ways a small percentage of the time, even for the sexually preoccupied.

Myth #6.  Freud First Recognized the Importance of Infantile Sexuality:

Victorian urban life was crowded and unhealthy. John Harvey Kellogg was a great popularizer of hygiene that included anti-masturbatory messages.  Childhood sexuality was denied even as massive prevention efforts were undertaken.  Its enough to give ‘repression’ a bad name!  The flakes aren’t bad, though.
This myth partially depends on what you believe the importance of infantile sexuality really was, but it is certainly true that the Victorians, including their physicians, did not recognize that children experienced sexual feelings and did not recognize childhood behaviors as sexual in nature.  In fact, the Victorians didn’t recognize that people were sexual throughout the life span, dramatically understated female sexuality, and struggled to accept Darwinian ideas.  Thank heavens we are all past that today!  Victorian physicians who operated vibration clinics as a way to release stress in women would not have been able to do so, had the full sexual nature of the relaxation response been properly recognized for what it was! 

Albert Moll (1862-1939) German psychiatrist and among the first to recognize childhood sexuality.

Albert Moll was the turn of the century sexologist who was first in advocating for the recognition of childhood sexuality.  When Freud advanced his own developmental theory that suggested the sucking, defecation, urination, and Oedipal behaviors were all manifestations of infantile libidinal expression, this idea was revolutionary.  But you have to think the proliferation of anti-onanistic interventions and ideology, from sports advocacy to gender-segregated education to aphorisms like ‘Idle hands are the devil’s playground!’ reflected some Victorian suspicion that children weren’t all that innocent.  Even today, the role of direct sexual expression in childhood is largely under-recognized, and this underlies social phobias around comprehensive sexuality education in the United States.

Myth #7.  Freud Was the First to Recognize the Importance of Bisexuality:

Sorry!  This is not the kind of bisexuality Freud meant in his theory.
Freud probably learned about the concept of libido and its bisexual nature first from Charles Darwin.  It certainly figured prominently in Freud’s early theories of sexuality that libido was bisexual in that a child could feel love for both the same and opposite gendered parent.  If Freud had encountered the idea of gender fluidity, he would doubtless have endorsed that love could be expressed by people of any gender towards any other.  However, Freud operated in a bi-gendered social world, and his theory had to account for the obvious clinical observations that children loved both parents and were in conflict about it.  However, if Darwin came first with the theory that libido could be expressed across gendered lines, Freud’s theory did not really address behaviorally bisexual sexual behavior, which he would doubtless have categorized as homosexual behavior and seen as further proof of his theory.  Freud did not really write about bisexuality in the way that we use the term today.

Freud did accomplish some great things that are probably under-recognized, notwithstanding his role as the most prominent clinical writer in psychology.

Freud broke the philosophical stalemate between Krafft-Ebing’s excessively constitutional theory, that claimed sexual deviance was largely an expression of constitutional degeneracy, and the early learning theorists, or ‘associationists’ like Alfred Binet, who claimed that all sexual behavior was learned.   Freud’s theory allowed for a middle ground that allowed roles for instinctual and learned factors.

Freud is best known for his model of what makes talk therapy effective.  He did not think that benign paternalistic discussion cured hysterics of their pseudo blindness or paralysis.  Rather, he believed these patients inflexibly refocused their infantile sexual conflicts on the therapist and felt towards him as they did towards their fathers.  Their guilty ambivalence about loving their fathers and feeling guilty about wanting to supplant their mothers and to do socially inappropriate things with fathers, led to the personal disempowerment seen in their terrible symptoms.  By helping the clients to recognize and refocus these transference feelings in the therapy, normalizing them, and seeing that the feelings need not be harmful, the hysterical clients could give up their symptoms.  This is the Freudian description of the transference cure.  Did it work?  At least sometimes, but it was far from infallible.  Considering the severity of disability from such symptoms as paralysis and blindness, it could be a big help.

Freud is also associated with a rather extreme version of analytic neutrality that many patients and practitioners regard as emotionally depriving.  A look at today’s austere psychotherapy offices suggests the pervasive influence of fears that betraying any portion of the therapist’s personality might become a distraction and interference with the process of transference.  After all, if the therapist displays masculine qualities, for example, this kind of reasoning might expect interference with the patient’s possible need to experience maternal transference feelings.  If the therapist appears gay, perhaps the client will be reluctant to express heterosexual feelings.

Girl Before a Mirror (1932) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)  This was definitely not the original in our anecdote.   It hangs in The Museum of Modern Art in New York City  I chose this for thematic contrast with Titian’s Venus with a Mirror in the first von sacher-Masoch essay. 
This is no idle concern.  When I was in graduate training, there was a famous supervising analyst who was extremely proud of his original and expensive Picasso, which hung prominently in the consulting room in which he saw is clients and supervised his mostly rather impoverished graduate students.  The analyst’s presumed need for phallic display was much discussed, and evidence marshalled for his excessive egotism.   It was my fortune to never have actually met this person, so I never had the chance to assess any of this for myself, but it is certainly true that his deviation from presumed orthodoxy had a big impact on his reputation.

Freud’s Vienna home and  office at Berggasse 19, now a museum.  The sign is a recent addition!
(stock photo)
Late last year, I had the opportunity to visit Vienna for the first time.   Despite the fact that our tour did not include a stop at the museum that had been made of Freud’s home and consulting room — are contiguous on the second floor of Berggasse 19 on the edge of the Old Jewish section of Vienna — I arranged for a private tour.  I knew that Freud had amassed a large number of artifacts collected in the early twentieth century heyday of classical archeology, and had heard these were displayed profusely in his office and consulting room.  I was nearly disappointed.  Most of his collection had been removed to London after the famous French analyst, Marie Bonaparte, generously donated the rapacious emigration fees the Nazis required of Jews before they would allow them to flee the country prior to the beginning of World War II.  Only a handful of Freud’s artifacts were available in Vienna for display, and only the actual waiting room was furnished.  But with a keen eye for history, Freud had hired a photographer to make a record of his rooms before his furniture and collections were shipped away.  The pictures showed a dense Edwardian riot of pictures and artifacts!    Short of stiffly lying on the analytic couch and staring resolutely at the ceiling, Freud’s clients were surrounded by a surfeit of visual stimulation.

The consulting room, replete with artifacts.  Yep, that’s the couch back from the fMRI! (stock)
A tiny fraction of Freud’s collection left behind in 1938 (photo by author)

Sometime a clay penis is just a penis! (photo by author)

This drawing hung in his waiting room (photo by author)

Freud’s Vienna waiting room (photo by author)

Freud’s consulting and waiting rooms were anything but a modern study in bland neutrality.  One can only wonder at the ways in which Freud telegraphed his areas of interest to his clients amid 19th century drawings of swooning classical nudes, every imaginable combination of mythic imagery, and his collection of phallic objects from cultures around the world.  Either Freud was completely awash in repression of how all his interests impacted his patients, or he operated on the idea that for transference to be the powerful force that unified every therapy under the aegis of his recommended techniques, it must be so strong that the client imported it willy-nilly into all situations, largely regardless of context, and that propensity made it powerful and neurotic enough to require analysis.

In the next post, I will start to turn to the discussion of Freud’s specific theories about sexuality as they affected thinking about sexual variation.  Freud has the reputation of being very judgmental, and Freudians get much blame for the patholigization of kink.  Some of this is well-founded, but it would be well to remember that Freud believed that everyone had a dynamic unconscious, had ways in which they were reluctant to completely grow up, and that most under-sublimated expressions of libido were peccadilloes, not pathologies.  Kind of like kinks, it the pre-idiomatic sense of that term before it came to be applied to sex variations.  We will look at how Freud might have come to be mistaken for judgmental by his successors, despite his demonstrated flexibility and acceptance as a writer.  And we will see that in many ways, his critics were correct.
 © Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

Sadism and the Marquis de Sade

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP
Alphonse Donatien Francoise, Comte de Sade. (1740-1814)
Alternating senior de Sades use ‘Comte’ or ‘Marquis’, and posterity has decided on Marquis.

On this day, 276 years ago, Donatien Alphonse Francoise was born in Paris to a French diplomat and his wife who were not getting along any too well…  I would wish him a Happy Birthday today, but his singular achievement seems to have left Western philosophy in a bit of a bind about what kind of happiness we should want to have!
Richard von Krafft-Ebing chose as his poster boy for the paraesthesia for sexual satisfaction in the infliction of pain, degradation and suffering a far more famous and imposing figure than Leopold von Sacher-Masoch.  He selected the most notorious libertine, the Marquis de Sade.   De Sade is an imposing figure of the Age of Reason because, relative to the company of social, political and economic giants, he was the only one dead set against reason.  Despite spending nearly half his adult life jailed, he is remembered today precisely for his demand for absolute freedom and rejection of reason and law.  He was acutely ironic figure, for he particularly detested religion even as the age’s greatest philosophers were coming up with new discourse justifying it even as it was declining in power, yet he was heavily persecuted for religious reasons.  Whatever he didn’t like about authority, he was utterly inept at resisting it.

Because de Sade’s influence on modern thought greatly exceeds von Sacher-Masoch’s, it will not be possible to be encyclopedic about his life and influence in a short essay.  Born 100 years before von Sacher-Masoch, he had already been subjected to much more analysis and discourse than Von Krafft-Ebing’s other exemplar.  The psychiatrist was far from the first to use the term ‘sadism’ which was courant long before Psychopathia Sexualis.  But de Sade influenced Nietzsche, Apollinaire, Barthes, Genet, Breton, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Bakunin and especially, Sigmund Freud.  Through them, he goes to the core of our notions of modernity, freedom of expression and individualism, even those of us that find him repellant.

How did such an impulsive, defiant, and aggressive man become so important in Western thought?  That requires a good deal of historical context.  de Sade came along at a juncture of Western civilization in which social change was altering traditional ideas about the relationship between the individual and society and the sources of institutional legitimacy:

Pope Leo X (1475-1521), by Raphael
Pope Leo failed to reach accommodation with German princes and Martin Luther,
precipitating the 30 Years War and Wars of Religion.  
Religious absolutism was being challenged:  Prior to the Enlightenment, the Roman Catholic Church had the power to dictate what reality was.  Then Protestantism arose to challenge for that power.  Recoiling from the ferocious and devastating Wars of the Reformation, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism had battled to a standstill.  The Western thinkers were looking for reasons to stop fighting, and one of the solutions was reason itself. 

Anton Van Leuwenhoek (1632-1723), a tradesman who specialized in optics and invented the first microscope.
He thereby discovered cellular life and human red corpuscles in his own blood.  He makes a great example of scientific change, being neither clergy, nor noble.
New scientific breakthroughs and the beginnings of industrialization and spreading literacy were democratizing the discourse about how government should work and how knowledge about the world could be gained.  Newton discovered gravity, Galileo observed its workings on the ground and in the heavens.  The science of optics was invented, human cells observed for the first time, and maps profited from the Cartesian coordinate system and navigation based physical principles.  Direct observation of the natural world was yielding scientific breakthroughs and challenging religious authority.

Francoise-Marie Arouet (1694-1778)  You are more likely to know him as Voltaire.
Like de Sade, he was an ardent critic of the Roman Catholic Church.
Redefinition of politics: Europe and the colonies in America were in a discussion about reason as an alternative to faith.   At a time when every major European country had an official state religion, the nascent United States of America would simultaneously bring about constitutional protections for religion, but also protect government from official religious affiliation.  Soon, that thinking was going to infect France.  de Sade was a powerful voice in the context of that time.

Louis XIV of France (1638-1715)  “I am the state.”
Louis XIV had marked the high water mark of absolutism.  He had uttered the famous dictum “L’etat, c’est moi”, literally “The state, that’s me!”  and he had the leadership ability to pull off so grandiose a claim.  But his heirs were not nearly as able, nor as long lived, nor as fortunate as Louis XIV had been.  The state that seemed to function so well under Louis XIV that it was the envy of all Europe lacked sufficient system of public finance, and, following the expulsion of the Protestant Huguenots, had a depleted merchant class just when commerce was becoming crucial to state finance.   When he died in 1715, the proper functions of government were tilting towards greater democracy and individualism because absolutism was failing.  Epicureanism, republicanism, and freedom of thought preoccupied philosophy.

Libertinage:

John Calvin (1509-1564) As Calvinism spread, Libertines were originally reacting against his determinism.
Libertinage arose from the conflicts between the prominent Protestant John Calvin and French Catholicism.  Calvin preached religious absolutism in Geneva in opposition to the militant Catholicism that later revoked the Edict of Nantes (1598, revoked 1685) and drove the Protestants out of France.  Distaste for Protestant determinism led philosophers to questioning whether Catholic and Protestant doctrines might both be incorrect.  Libertines were people who stuck up for the right to consider the possibilities that neither faith was the ultimate truth.  Initially, libertinage had nothing to do with sexual freedom, it was about freedom to rethink doctrine.  Free-thinking would influence philosophy in many ways, not the least the philosophical justifications for the American Revolution; states governed for the benefit of the people, by the consent of the people, and dedicated to life, liberty -there it is now-and the pursuit of happiness.  The happiness referred to here that government is instituted among men to pursue is a rational happiness.  It fits well with the unruly political actors of Hobbes and Locke, the self-interested economic actors of Adam Smith and the separation of powers of Montesquieu.   All of this would thrive under people who, freed from original sin by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s insight that people were born good until corrupted by bad institutions, could best govern themselves.  If people are born innocent and capable of making their own political decisions, then perhaps their sexual choices should be free and are inherently good too!

De Sade was far from the only Libertine to have seized the license to pursue his selfish sexual interests.  It didn’t take long for people to recognize that if they were free to reject religious doctrine, they could be freed from religious notions of sexual restraint.  But Sade insisted on his right to indulge all of his passions without restraint, and maintained that no other criteria, not reason, law, or even the consent of others should stand in his way.  Sade bought Rousseau’s notion that man was the sum of his passions, but declined to restrain himself to that which was socially licensed as good.

This is a fascinating twist on Rousseau, whose defense of passion was actually performed in the service of defending religion.  Rousseau saw reason as partly antithetical to spirituality.  If science was vastly more capable than previously thought of explaining the natural world that God had created, and people were born innocent, what was the proper basis of religious belief?  Rousseau’s answer was that passion was the basis for faith.  De Sade, who’d seen the passion to inflict harm and to dominate in religion was not giving Rousseau a free pass to conjure up a modern idyll grounded on idealizations of innocence.  In doing this, de Sade rubbed Rousseau’s nose in the problem of power.  Perhaps because the Comte de Sade never recovered from exactly that same demonstration when it was perpetrated upon him.

de Sade’s life:

18th century corporal punishment was not just practiced upon children.
De Sade was born in Paris in 1740.  Although de Sade was his parents’ only surviving child, his father abandoned the family, his mother joined a convent.  de Sade was raised by an indulgent uncle and was soon widely regarded as spoiled even as an aristocratic child.  Sent to an abbey for his early education, he was subjected to the severe corporal punishment that was characteristic of Jesuit education of the age.  The Jesuits in the 1740’s had not yet gotten Rousseau’s message that children were born innocent!  It is easy to imagine the intensity with which the Brothers and Sisters attempted to whip the Devil out of de Sade.  de Sade became obsessed with corporal punishment even before he was out of his teenage years and developed a passionate hatred of the Church.  At age 14 he was sent to military school, and then entered military service and rose to the rank of colonel in the dragoons in time to participate in the 7 Years War ending in 1763.  Military service had agreed with him well enough, he had risen rapidly through the ranks despite the fact that France did poorly, and war debt would be a factor in the coming French Revolution.

Chateau Lacoste today, with a statue commemorating the Marquis’s incarcerations and defiance.
The young colonel mustered out in 1763 and lived near Paris where he got into several altercations with prostitutes (he insisted in incorporating crucifixes in his sexual acts which offended the prostitutes and was regarded at the time as the serious crime of blasphemy) and was briefly imprisoned.   The family forced de Sade to marry, in hopes this might end his embarrassing activities, but there is little to suggest this restrained him.   By 1768 he had been banished to his family’s estate Chateau Lacoste, in Provence and far from Paris.  Shortly thereafter he lured a beggar woman, Rose Keller to his property with the promise of employment, then launched on a campaign on nonconsensual behaviors including tying her up, making incisions on her and pouring hot wax in them.  After hours of this abuse she escaped by jumping from a second story window.  De Sade’s mother-in-law became involved in the ensuing criminal matter and obtained a lettre-de-cachet from Louis XVI to have de Sade imprisoned without the need for a trial.  She was a devout religious person, and de Sade and she loathed one another, no doubt in part due to complaints from de Sade’s wife.  Eventually, De Sade was banished or escaped to Italy in the company of his wife’s sister (yes, they had an incestuous relationship), where he was again incarcerated and escaped.  He returned to Lacoste, where he hid for a time and became involved in a prosecution for sodomy with several prostitutes and his manservant.  Although sodomy was widely practiced and tolerated among the aristocracy in pre-revolutionary France, de Sade’s mother-in-law saw to it that he was fully prosecuted.  Eventually de Sade was lured to Paris on the pretext that his mother was dying.  There he was arrested and incarcerated for about a decade in the prison at Vincennes.  De Sade also spent time in the Bastille, where he was far from a model prisoner.  On July 8, 1789 he was heard yelling to a gathering mob that the authorities were killing all the prisoners.  On July 14, 1789, the mob stormed the Bastille, the symbolic opening of the French Revolution, but two days too late to liberate the Marquis, who was relocated to La Conciegerie.  In fact, the authorities had not executed anyone, but all but seven of the prisoners were removed before the prison was liberated by the people.  Nonetheless, in the French mythology of the Revolution, de Sade practically started it!

During his incarceration, de Sade became a prolific writer.  And this is the source of his protracted influence on Western philosophy.  I am not a huge fan of his work, but de Sade wrote compulsively.  He could be an incisive and provocative social critic.  His sexual writings dwell heavily on corrupting others, hatred of church and other officials who inflict atrocities on the helpless, and compulsive escalating scenarios in which his characters top themselves by repeatedly doing more extreme, intense, cruel and numerous abuses.

If inflicting pain and degradation are not your thing, and blasphemous descriptions of venal churchmen don’t tickle your transgressive funny bone, you are in danger of finding his work boring and very repetitive.  Two stars!

The manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom preserved by Iwan Bloch, now in French hands within the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts in Paris
But on another level, de Sade’s drive to express himself is that of any writer, and he was nothing if not urgent about his need to speak.  While incarcerated in the Bastille, he was deprived of pen and ink and wrote the manuscript for 120 Days of Sodom in ‘blood and excrement’ on a huge role of paper smuggled in one square at a time and the glued together.  It was hidden, and re-found and published by the pioneering sexologist Iwan Bloch at the beginning of the 20th Century.  Some critics claim that the plot is derived from the life exploits of Gilles de Rais, a famous lieutenant of Jean D’Arc who is notorious as a serial murderer of children, and Elizabeth Bathory, a Hungarian serial murderess of young girls.  120 Days of Sodom is a categorization of all of de Sade’s fantasies of penetrating, torturing and killing young people.

Storming the Bastille, July 14, 1789.
One might have imagined that, with the removal of de Sade from the Bastille, his incarceration would have continued.  However, in the early days for the French Revolution, the practice of lettres-de-cachetwas abolished and, despite his aristocratic heritage, he was freed, and even given a seat as a deputy to the national convention that sought to draw up a new French constitution.  In 1790 he was out of prison and trying to get his works published anonymously.  He was a member of the radical left, advocating against elites and for common people.  As the Revolution entered its paranoid phase and devolved into the Reign of Terror, de Sade opposed it.  He even intervened to preserve the life of his hated mother-in-law!  When his son deserted the French Army, besieged as it was on all fronts by anti-revolutionary forces, de Sade narrowly avoided execution himself.  As it was, when Maximillian Robespierre took power, de Sade was imprisoned for ‘moderatism’.  This is probably the first and only time he was ever accused of that.  But de Sade was so oppositional that he played a dangerous game.  He went so far as to criticize the guillotines in the Pace de la Concorde as offensive for executing people for bureaucratic and civil reasons rather than out of pure passion.  He was lucky to have escaped with a mere year in prision when over a thousand lost their lives.  He was released in 1794 with the death of Robespierre, who eventually fed the maw of the guillotine he had unleashed.  For the next several years de Sade was largely destitute, and lived in Paris, his Chateau Lacoste having been sacked earlier in the revolution.
During his period of penury, de Sade was able to get two his novels, Justine and Juliette published.  They tell the stories of two sisters who are separated young and make diametrically opposite choices.  Juliette embraces vice early on, gets drawn into perversions such as papal orgies but thereby is able to live a comfortable life and turn towards virtue.  Justine is made of sterner stuff and fixes her star rigidly on virtue from the start, only to careen from one terrible misfortune to another and inadvertently cause great harm to others.  Justine turns to the church, to the wealthy, and to the courts for justice only to be violated and exploited every time until she is finally rescued by her sister.  No sooner is she freed by Juliette than she is struck dead by lightning.  Unlike 120 Days of Sodom, Justine and Juliette are not mere catalogs of vice, but an active indictment of the futility of trying to live virtuously, and of the classic sources of authority.

Napoleon Bonaparte as First Consul by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte came to power following his impressive military victories in Italy in war against Austria.  He readJustine and Juliette, and pronounced Juliette “the most abominable book ever engendered by the most depraved imagination.”  Napoleon signed the order personally to have its anonymous author imprisoned without trial.  Later entreaties from his family removed de Sade to the French insane asylum in Charenton where he spent the final 13 years of his life.  In Charenton, the Marquis’ reading and writing were mostly encouraged.  He did write plays that were produced by the local populace outside the asylum, but not, as has been written in popular representations since, using the inmates as his actors.  On Dec 2, 1814, de Sade died in Charenton.
Cultural Significance:

The Marquis de Sade’s primary cultural significance is as a bête noire or bogeyman.  He is a cautionary tale about the depravity and tragedy that will befall us if we give ourselves over to our innermost natures.  This role was already well established by the late 19th century when Richard von Krafft-Ebing took him up as the exemplar and the name for his perversion of sexual satisfaction at the suffering and degradation of others.  But, aside from Freud, most depictions of de Sade represent his general satisfaction at making others suffer, rather than his sexual response.  So the term sadism in common usage has lost its explicitly sexual origin.  de Sade and his acolytes remain staples of modern horror mythology.

De Sade considered his depictions of sex as naturalistic, just as Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’ was a description of man’s natural condition.  de Sade opposed supernaturalism, and thereby considered himself a kind of natural philosopher of human sexuality.  This idea would be affirmed by Iwan Bloch and the early sexologists, who saw in his work a kind of encyclopedia of perversions.  Freud would incorporate this idea into his notion of the id, much taken by de Sade’s conflict with authority.  Freud’s eternal conflict between our inner morality and instinctual impulses owes something to de Sade.  Likewise, Andrè Breton, one of the founding fathers of the surrealist movement took up this Sadean unconscious as the goal of surrealistic representation, and images of suffering, dismemberment and decay in Salvador Dali owe a little to de Sade.  For more of this than you can take, take as much of a look as you can at the opening eye sequence in Un Chien Andalou, Breton’s classic of surrealist cinema.   Breton is responsible for referring to him as “the Divine Marquis” in celebration of his ability to see into the same inner truth of our natures that the surrealists were at pains to depict.
Simone de Beauvoir, author of the The Second Sex, and ardent opponent of censorship.

de Sade also retains huge influence today as a symbol in the struggles between artists and censors.   In 1957, the French government came into possession of the original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom, and debated destroying it.  Simone de Beauvoir, the famous French existentialist and author of The Second Sex wrote and important anti-censorship essay Must We Burn Sade?  That essay grounds existential authenticity in passion, not principles, and de Beauvoir defends Sade as the existentially authentic despite his crimes, basing all of this on his criticism of institutional murder during the Reign of Terror.  It is difficult today to imagine the resonance of such an argument for a country that had been occupied by hated German oppressors, and had forced to collaborate in the transportation of dissidents and Jews to the death camps of 1940-45.  For modern free-thinkers de Beauvoir and Sartre, de Sade’s hatred of privilege and institutional power were important corollaries to personal responsibility, even if his behaviors were crimes.  Ultimately, the manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom was not burned and is treated as a national icon, although its acquisition and display lagged the famous essay by 50 years.

Geoffrey Rush as the Divine Marquis in Quills (2000) 
The other great exploration of de Sade as resistance to repression is Doug Wright’s Quills, a meditation on art and censorship.  Played fearlessly by Geoffrey Rush in the 2000 film adaptation, Rush was nominated for an Oscar.  The manic, chronically provocative de Sade is locked in mortal combat with an enlightened doctor who has been sent by Napoleon to ‘cure’ the madman who wrote Justine.  While the play and movie take considerable liberties with history, they capture de Sade’s struggle against authority and repression brilliantly.  There is a good chance you are looking at decent approximation of the ‘real’ Marquis de Sade in Rush’s performance.  De Sade never sat for a proper portrait, so we have only a rather effete and beautified engraving of his likeness.  It does not do historians any good that his humiliated family destroyed many of his writings and did their best to minimize the damage he did to the family name by eradicating his history.   He was never discussed among the family for five generations, and many of his writings were destroyed.  It is safe to say that if his portrait had ever hung in the family gallery, it had long since been taken down.

de Sade’s hatred of authority influenced the 19thcentury nihilists who claimed that power was too corrupted to serve as a constructive source of meaning.  Had de Sade lived to debate this, I suspect he would have denied this conclusion, claiming instead that meaning lies in the natural expression of his passions, but would have taken delight in the trouble nihilism was to cause.  Had he lived, de Sade would have been panicked by the rise in state power that followed the Second Industrial Revolution and World War I.


The Divine Marquis and Kink:

Were Alphonse Donatien Francoise alive today, there is a good chance he’d be in jail, but he would be endlessly celebrating modern kink.  That he might have inspired others to debauchery over two hundred years after his death would delight him.  But he is a highly ambivalent figure for modern kinksters.  We have come to accept the Freudian insight that we are inherently ambivalent in a way that de Sade strove to avoid with his flamboyant acting out.  De Sade’s natural man may well have been murderous, but he was not ambivalent.  He would have had no tolerance for our ambivalence about him!


de Sade regarded consnet as a token concession to authority, which by its very nature, existed to privilege some to have their desires and to deliver others up to them.  So modern kink has had to disavow de Sade, even in the face of elements of the community who have argued against the doctrines of Safe, Sane and Consensual for just this reason.  Sade negotiated nothing, and regretted nothing in his writings.  This is why von Sacher-Masoch had the opportunity to introduce the ideas of consent, negotiation and contract 75 years later.  And resistance remains to any need to negotiate one’s impulses because it lessens the perceeived power of toping and pure freedom of bottoming.  But only a self-destructive few are so wedded to their fantasies of extreme surrender that they are willing to knowingly dispense with the need for consent.  When John Wayne Gacy advertised on Alt.com and lured gay men to their deaths,  de Sade would have seen integrity and authenticity where we see only tragedy and murder.  Modern kinksters don’t really worship at the altars of Bathory and de Rais.

Maggie Gyllenhaal in The Secretary.  Its not really about routine office power relations, is it?
Kinksters bemoan the social confabulation of sexual sadism with the routine sublimated joys of degrading others.  Plenty of opportunity exists in organizational life for routine dominance and submission, and part of what makes kink exotic and special is counter-cultural lust to take dominance and submission out of the desexualized, prosaic, and mundane contexts in which we all ordinarily have to do these things.  That is the fun of The Secretary in which Maggie Gyllenhaal and James Spader infuse their professional relationship with lusty kink despite no explicit sexual relations.  This dynamic often applies even of those who claim that their primary satisfactions from kink are not ‘sexual’.  Perhaps not, but they are even more emphatically not mundane or utilitarian. de Sade was already known to have applauded this as we saw in de Beauvoir’s essay.  Indeed, part of what made de Sade shocking in the 18th century was that he used lust, not utilitarianism, to justify his protagonsits’ behaviors.  The same treatment of slaves was in many places not even criminal.  So modern kink and de Sade are strongly allied in making kink passioante, not utilatiarian, in its ultimate motives.  Although de Sade distrusted religion, I believe he would have applauded those who seek spirituality in sensation play as long as it did not conform to institutionalized religious power structures.


De Sade never saw power as exchanged.  He desired to corrupt others by inciting and shaping their desire.  That struggle has been displaced in modern kink to obtain consent under conditions of ambivalence.  Power is experienced in getting the ambivalent so excited that they face their fears when highly afraid!  De Sade was never satisfied that he had had all the fun he could until dozens were destroyed.  So the modern irony is that kinksters love to play out imitations of de Sade, while fearing to encounter a ‘real’ one.  And no matter how glamorous his ideas may seem, de Sade was a rapist.  When feminists and conventional moralists attack kink as violence, it is this image of de Sade that makes BDSM’s discussion of consent seem like superficial rationalization to them no matter what de Beauvoir wrote.


The Marquis and the DSM:


If the Marquis de Sade were alive today, no Krafft-Ebing or DSM would be needed to diagnose him anymore than the forerunners of psychiatry were needed at the turn of the 19th century.  The real de Sade broke countless laws, and his modern counterpart would do the same.  If called upon to diagnose him, the emphasis would be on which personality disorder was needed to describe him.  Was he borderline, narcissistic, or just antisocial?  Ultimately, antisocial personality disorder better describes de Sade than sexual sadism, which he also had (and pedophilia, hebephillia, voyeurism and exhibitionism.  But all in the service of defying our norms and laws about how individual power must be limited.  For de Sade was not compulsive about which sexual behaviors he preferred, but that they be transgressive.


There is a superficial similarity between the childhood life stories of de Sade and von Sacher-Masoch.  Both are raised Roman Catholic.  Both are subjected to harsh corporal punishment, and both become feverish writers of kink.  Both become manifestly self-defeating.  But this simple equation belies a much more complicated and mysterious picture about the relationship between childhood corporal punishment and subsequent kink.  Although the cultural contexts of mid-eighteenth French and mid-nineteenth Austrian cultures had many similarities, both widely license corporal punishment for children, yet these cultures produced few de Sades and Sacher-Masochs, even allowing for singular genius in their aptitudes for writing.  We can imagine von Sacher-Masoch discovering ecstasy in the adrenaline/endorphin rush that accompanied beatings he was forced to experience, but surely many similar child victims of beatings experienced this without the intensity of connection that imprinted this particular gifted boy.  De Sade, rather than reveling in the sensuality of his neurochemicals, identified with the power to force and degrade others.  In this, he is the perfect case study for Alfred Adler, whom we will take up much later[i].  Was he somehow able to activate his adrenaline and endorphins by identifying with the exquisite suffering of his victims?  We know that he occasionally had himself whipped during sex, an idea that is as old as time itself and certainly familiar to well-read libertines.

 

But the superficiality of von Sacher-Masoch’s and de Sade’s early experiences with corporal punishment did not account for their differences.  De Sade, for all his extolling of the virtues of unlimited power over others, was strikingly intolerant of being on the receiving end of such abuse.  Yet he did not start getting into real trouble throughout his army career, where discipline was no less tight than in Jesuit education.  Note, however, de Sade had ever increasing power as a rising cavalry commander, which he did not have as a student in the abbey, nor after he mustered out aristocrat in Paris.

 

Ultimately, we do not know why these two life histories took such different turns.  Early history of corporal punishment may have loaded the dice, but did not dictate their outcomes.

For a time, the DSM flirted with the diagnosis self-defeating personality disorder.  Although this had nothing to do with his professed ideology, but when one examines Alphonse Donatien Françoise’s life history, de Sade seems to have allowed himself a rather limited expression of his natural instincts so vividly and compulsively displayed in his writing.  Despite the privilege of his rank in pre-revolutionary France, he got prosecuted for a string of fairly minor (relative to his writings) sex crimes.  Despite a passionate sympathy for the revolution, he got himself incarcerated by Robespierre for being too moderate.  Despite being allowed to write and produce plays for the citizens of Charenton, he got forbidden to write for a time.  And he had no trouble so offending Napoleon that he was imprisoned merely for writing.

Napoleon crowns himself while the Pope watches in  Bonaparte’s 1804 coronation as Emperor of France.  Detail from The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David (1808)
And this makes for a stunning contrast.  Napoleon Bonaparte, then the French First Consul, thought so highly of himself as the ultimate new revolutionary man that, three years later, he would not allow the Pope to crown him, and instead crowned himself Emperor of the French December 2, 1904; and de Sade, a man who repeatedly assaulted a poor washer woman, gave too much Spanish fly to a prostitute, and had sex with his manservant, squared off against one another other.  Napoleon was the most brilliant military mind of his time whose behavior, directly and indirectly, led to the 4.1 million deaths of the Napoleonic Wars.  I am rather glad that neither is my next door neighbor, but please do not ever imagine for a moment that the Marquis de Sade is everybody’s ultimate boogeyman and Napoleon is just a great general from the past because it suits the legitimization of institutional power to tell the story that way.  The Marquis de Sade is no hero.  But he bemoaned the routine destruction of life to enforce the power elite, while Napoleon spent lives liberally to sustain and enhance his power.  de Sade may not be my idea of a healthy person or a hero, but he comes off pretty well in comparison with the French Emperor who jailed him.



[i] Alfred Adler was an early Freudian who came to disagree with Freud about centrality of the Oedipus Complex.  Adler thought power was a key underlying motive, and came up with the theory of masculine protest, and the still current idea of identification with the aggressor.  He would have argued that de Sade became obsessed with taking on the powerful role of the punishing religious teachers who had disciplined him as a youth.

© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

Book Review: Sex with Shakespeare by Jillian Keenan

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP1 Comment



I just posted the following review of amazon.com:

“The myth of conventional relationships is a great deal like Leo Tolstoy’s famous quote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.  The beauty of Jill Keenan’s brilliant little book is that she shows that, if relationship happiness is not as effortlessly forthcoming as advertised, there are a lot of different ways to get there, and she shows you hers.
“Starting with an intense spanking fetish from her preadolescence, she arrives at the ingenious solution of understanding her kink, herself, and how to have a good life using the words of William Shakespeare.  Never mind that he is dead 400 years ago, dead even before his works were written down, and that as Jillian rightly points out, his plays were meant to be enacted and were never intended as literature.  There is a good chance that if you found the Bard dry in high school or college, you will find him juicier here.

“If you are already into spanking, you are going to learn a lot about Shakespeare.  If you are already into Shakespeare, you are going to learn a great deal more about kink.  But the greater learning here requires abstraction beyond the specifics of Jillian’s journey to how it is we learn about ourselves, and how we negotiate the complexities of being an outsider.

“No one grows up with a fetish without recognizing that they are unconventional.  In addition to negotiating stigma, they must learn to fit their satisfaction into a relationship with people who do not fully, sometimes not even remotely, understand their desires.  There are thousands of different kinks, like Tolstoy’s families, and each successful relationship requires blazing one’s own trail, despite therapists, FetLife, or countless self-help books.  I would suggest this may be true of conventional relationships, too.  Those trails have hidden perils: isolation, deeper vulnerabilities, inaccessibility of social supports, hurts that go deeper, and the need to accept risks we might prefer not to take.

“But such trails involve learnings other people can’t reach:  Shakespeare as a bridge between Western and Omani sexualities, how to sneak into a prison, or where the gay bars are in countries that outlaw homosexuality.  In this book you are likely to lean what ‘spankos’ are, new uses for ginger rhizomes, and a brand new perspective on what ‘nothing’ means.  You will become sensitive to the slightest changes in iambic pentameter, and what they tell you about the heart.  You travel to the limit of literary analysis to the edge of the world we can know from the analysis of an author’s words.  And how everything we learn with our heads cannot protect us from taking a ‘trust fall’ with our hearts.

“Jillian is the perfect example of using the communications skills you have to understand yourself and build the relationship you need.  She doesn’t lecture; she enacts her story.   It is the perfect antidote to the fantasy that porn or romance novels can be imitated on the straight and narrow pathway to a satisfying love life.”


For those of you who are sex therapists and sexuality educators, there is often a call for books that depict the lives of people struggling with outsider identities.  Sex with Shakespeare is particularly good for this purpose.  It is a short read, is well written, and moves quickly.   Some may have a little trouble with the Shakespeare.  There are also brief moments of magical realism in which Shakespearean characters come to life in subways and taxis.  And as a trigger warning to clients surviving abuse histories, there are episode in which childhood sex abuse is recounted.

© Russell J Stambaugh, June, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

von Sacher-Masoch and Modern Psychiatry

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP
Note: This post assumes you have read biographical information from the immediately preceding post:  

For all of these firsts described in the previous post, only some of which were fully articulated by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, von Sacher-Masoch was a very particular and idiosyncratic case from which to generalize and spin a psychiatric diagnosis.  If von Krafft-Ebing had seen many more cases, would he have drawn up the criteria for sexual masochism any differently?  Surely we would do so today, but our context is dramatically different now.  At least four different modern kink behaviors were described by von Sacher-Masoch and categorized in von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis.  In Sacher-Masoch’s case they co-occurred, but it is not clear they make a syndrome.  These are:
A preference for fur among women is often called ‘fashion’.  
In a fashion magazine, this photo isn’t kinky.

Fur Fetishism:  von Sacher-Masoch had enjoyed erotic fantasies in response to statues and artistic imagery prior to a severe episode of punishment at the hands of his Aunt in early adolescence.   Few non-Slavic readers recognize the name Olga as that of a local noblewoman prominent in Ukranian history for her brutal torture of her husband’s assassins.  But Leopold was an ardent historian at an early age, and had shown obsessive interest in history and especially in tales of torture and cruelty prior to this episode.  He told Aurora that he had had a similar experience to Severin’s punishment by an aunt.  Leopold’s real aunt was prone to wearing furs, and was very aristocratic, but was dear to him, not resented and authoritarian as Severin’s was described to be. 

Interestingly, later psychiatric writers had no trouble separating the fur fetishism from other aspects of von Sacher-Masoch’s presentation.  Masochism does not always co-occur with fetishism, but that is pretty common.  Does the fact that we can differentiate fetishism and masochism really mean they are different things, or are they all dimensions of some larger syndrome?  Krafft-Ebing had died before Von Rumelin’s confessions revealed that Leopold’s aunt was not named Olga, and was adored, not reviled, and like so many aspects of the Sacher-Masoch story, the dividing line between fact and fantasy was blurred over 100 years ago and has not become clearer with time.  But we cannot rule out that von Sacher-Masoch had imprinted on fur, and maybe on pain, on or before age 12 as described in John Money’s Lovemaps. That is a common story, but not a universal one.  Some people learn kinks and new behaviors later in life much as they pick up a foreign language or a new sport.  If kink education didn’t teach people new kinks, and better ways of doing old ones, there would be no point in arranging educational programs.

Pinhead from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser movies. Notice that auteur Barker designed Pinhead so that his acceptance of chronic pain is very frightening to viewers.  This same phenomenon makes us shun people with diseases and disabilities.
Sex Desire for Physical Pain:  In this early adolescent whipping incident, and in his creative writing, von Sacher-Masoch describes transcendent, ‘suprasensualist’ feelings in response to severe pain.  It is easy to imagine that thoughtful academic writers who had not experienced such transcendence, and found orgasm to be their own peak experience might have conflated von Sacher-Masoch’s descriptions with orgasm.  Although we do not really know today what ‘sub space’ is, we do know a great deal more about endorphins, enkephalins and adrenaline than was understood in von Krafft-Ebing’s time. von Sacher-Masoch does not describe orgasm as an ultimate symbol of pleasure as is nearly universal in modern pornography, and in romantic erotica, and never waxes upon the superiority of beating to orgasm, but clearly seems to prefer it.  He had coitus with partners before proceeding to whippings, and describes relationships where whipping happened first.  In his marriage, it appears to have cemented his intention to marry, yet he continued to demand whipping even after coitus had resulted in Aurora having multiple pregnancies.  So Aurora’s account of her sex life with von Sacher-Masoch disconfirms Von Krafft-Ebing’s hypothesis about paraphilias that kinks interfere with reproductive agency..  But he was died in 1902 before these details became public.

     How blurred are the concepts of pain and humiliation?  When I Googled ‘masochism’ I          got a list of pics including old Pinhead, and the following disambiguation list:  ‘Art’. ‘Make’,      ‘Women’, ‘Extreme’, ‘Disorder’, ‘Japanese’, ‘Self’, ‘Love’, ‘Humiliation’, ‘Emotional’, and            ‘Tango’.  Tango?  Point about blurring of the meanings effectively made!

Just because orgasm or possible feelings of transcendence during whipping happened frequently does not mean that Sacher-Masoch was satisfied by his kink.  Very few people, conventional or kinky have a peak erotic experience and then declare “been there and done that!” and stop trying to get additional pleasure.  Leopold was ultimately a romantic writer whose dissatisfaction in pursuit of his obsessions persisted in part because the realities of what he could live up to in action never quite overcame his ambivalence or his robust imagination.  He could always imagine better than he could achieve.  Not fully submissive, he never had a mistress who could limit his demands for more and better betrayal, even when they were ready to beat him as he desired or actually enacted betrayal scenarios he requested.  The novella Venus in Furs conforms better to Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s degenerative theory than von Sacher-Masoch;s actual life history.

Oh, you thought sexual submission was reserved for the kinky?  Not exactly.  This is a picture of normophilic sexual submission
Sex desire for submission, humiliation, social abasement and emotional pain:  von Sacher-Masoch’s story can be viewed as an attempt to control the fear of abandonment and Severin’s clear understanding of his painful vulnerability to the woman he desires.  Social, racial and erotic humiliation are a crucial part of his description.  Unlike The Story of O, in which the protagonist elevates herself into a detached object of awe and power through submission, Severin seeks abasement.  One wonders how Leopold ‘knew; that abasement might conquer his fears of loos?  von Krafft-Ebing reads the desire for physical pain and social subjugation as the same desire.  We now know that these often co-occur, but are not the same thing.  Leopold and Aurora extensively explore pain and restraint, but can never agree about sexual betrayal.  She is too middle class and legally vulnerable to charges of adultery to comply willingly.  He is unceasing in his demands that Aurora do a better betrayal.

High fashion female domination:  Just von Sacher-Masoch’s style.

Female sexual domination:  This is a crucial part of von Sacher-Masoch’s story that does not make it into the diagnosis.  Like fur fetishism, which was determined to be a different preference, that he seeks domination by a woman is taken as evidence of his desire for social submission, but is not regarded as crucial to the kink.  One of the things von Krafft-Ebing and subsequent psychiatry get right is that power exchange could be gendered, but it does not have to be.

Non-Kinky Symptoms:

Then there are some non-kinky idiosyncrasies that might draw a modern clinical diagnosis:

How confabulated are kink and self-destructive wishes:  this was among the first ten pics

Self-destructive urges:  It says everything about the social context of von Krafft-Ebing’s times that sexual desire for social submission, emotional pain, humiliation, and sexual pain were lumped together in the diagnosis, but that fetishism, adulation of powerful women and social role play were not intrinsic and essential to the syndrome.  Over time, the idea that one would pursue lower social status for erotic purposes, or place sexual desire above the desire for productivity or higher social status would become confabulated with self-destructiveness.  Since DSM III, mental health professionals would know these pathologies not just for their overt behaviors, but for the disruptive social and work and relationship consequences of voluntarily accepting the consequences of social stigma that healthy people would presumably resist.  Eventual, ‘self-destructive’ and ‘masochistic’ would become synonymous, a confabulation analysis of Severin’s behavior clearly invites in his second contract in which he vows to suicide.

The idea that a lover would hold feelings for a paramour above life itself is not viewed in Western thought as automatically proof of self-destructiveness.  Sometimes it is viewed as impulsive and immature, as in Romeo and Juliette.  Sometimes it is ennobling and self-sacrificial as in Sydney Carton in Tale of Two Cities.  Sometimes it is proof of the chivalry, as in the medieval romances.  In Christianity, it is proof of God’s love and the ultimate demonstration of the power of forgiveness.  So it is hard to avoid the idea that in Western thought, sex is not a privileged reason for self-sacrifice, but love is.  This is a symptom of Augustinian sex negativity.

The thing that unites these different preferences and made them kinky was, for Krafft-Ebing, intended to be defiance of the biological order.  But the unification of these ideas and labeling them as components of masochism is social construction at work, and our readiness to view them differently is greatly facilitated by social changes since the 19th century.  Von Krafft-Ebing and von Sacher-Masoch died before World War I; before modern feminism; before relativity theory; before the 20th century revisions of the role of the state and individual; before Foucault’s deconstruction of the professionalization of sexuality; and before instantaneous global networking.  It shouldn’t surprise us much that their some of these ideas have undergone radical revision.  But just as Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s nosology of sexual disorders had remained largely intact well into an era of much greater sexual liberation and acceptance of sexual variation, von Sacher-Masoch’s description of power dynamics, role play, pain and idealization remain surprisingly current.

Fill in the same thought bubbles.
Obsessional symptoms:   von Sacher-Masoch was not just sexually aroused by furs and betrayal, he couldn’t stop bringing them up.  Whenever he saw an attractive woman, he would say “She’d look good in furs.” regardless of context. Likewise, he chose his folk tales and stories of rural life so as to very frequently include allusions to tyrannical physically aggressive and dominating women. It would be fair to say he was heavily preoccupied with these thoughts.



Impulsiveness:  von Sacher-Masoch was unable to manage his money, and would overspend on his interests, and then lead a hand-to-mouth existence between writing successes.  Because we mainly have his story of domestic life from a materialistic wife who was unhappy with their financial stability and lifestyle, there is some possibility this is her judgment, not good clinical description.  However, Aurora von Rumelin’s and Leopold’s frequent changes of residence and poor housing probably describe a real problem above and beyond Aurora’s judgments.



Depression and Grief:   von Sacher Masoch’s writing was highly variable, both in quality and productivity.  Later in life, he seems to have written his fair share of hack melodramas at times to make ends meet, and stopped working for prolonged periods due to relationship conflicts, the loss of his sister at age 14, his son Sacha when he divorced Aurora, and at other times.  At one point in his marriage, he was psychologically immobilized for six months over the death of his cat. Sometimes success in acting out his fantasies buoyed him and a prolonged period of increased productivity would buoy his work.  Immediately before his hospitalization he was morose.

Edvard Munch’s classic expressionist painting The Scream

Psychotic Symptoms:  von Sacher-Masoch was prone to occasional hallucinations, and sometimes others thought his obsessions bordered on delusions.  In an incident that provoked his hospitalization, he killed a kitten, and threatened to kill his second wife when she suggested he had gone mad.  Inevitably, the tragedy of his declining mental health framed the implications of his paraphilia.  Since Sacher-Masoch, the vast majority of people who sexually respond to pain have not suffered from concomitant hallucinations or delusions.  On the other hand, as most mentally healthy people systematically avoid pain, it was easy to mistake sexual response to it as crazy, and this tendency would become all the greater with the rise of experimental and behavioral psychology.   After the publication of Psychopathia Sexualis, it was even easier.

It is unthinkable today that Leopold would have been put in a mental hospital for potentially over ten years for a psychotic episode in which he murdered his pet cat, but he might well have been placed in extended care for dementia.

Would Leopold von Sacher-Masoch have resembled the modern director in Venus in Fur?  Yes, and no.

von Sacher-Masoch today:  Whatever Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s reception was in his own time, it is difficult to imagine him receiving a diagnosis today despite a fairly broad array of diverse behaviors.  There is no record of his having sought a psychiatric consultation voluntarily during his lifetime until the incident with the cat.  His bitter correspondence with von Krafft-Ebing already alienated him from that profession, which had rather less legitimacy at the time than modern psychiatry enjoys in the present.  Such minimal description of his psychosis is provided in his biography that it is quite difficult to tell how his hospitalization became chronic, but it would be easy to imagine Krafft-Ebing’s work facilitated that.  Now he might have been kept under observation for several days, provided with antipsychotic medicine and released.

If von Sacher-Masoch presented for outpatient treatment today, there is ample evidence that he meets the criteria for the paraphilias of sexual masochism and fetishism.  There is a pretty good bet that most diagnosticians would cite adequate evidence of disruption in life and occupational functioning to call his variations a paraphilic disorder bolstering their diagnosis with evidence of preoccupations interfering with his work and the demands for sexual betrayal destabilizing his marriage.  If he consulted most sex addiction practitioners, he would certainly have been labelled a sex addict.  Twelve step groups did not exist in his day, even for alcohol treatment or widespread use of opiates and cocaine, which did not start becoming regulated until after 1910.  He is likely to have been resistant to religious based treatment.

Despite Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s diagnosis of masochism, it was in the Belle Époque that kink began to emerge from the brothels and became a demi-monde.  The study of the diagnosis of masochism is the perfect case study for Michel Foucault’s analysis that the colonization of sexuality by medical professionalism was not about controlling actual sexual behavior, but about controlling the discourse so as to legitimate the professions roles in that conversation.  Krafft-Ebing, then Freud, then Freud’s followers did not decrease conversation about sex, or increase societal prosecution of it.  Rather they facilitated a huge increase in the conversation on their own terms.

Brain transplants across genders, female domination, and plenty of action pluss skimpy costumes.  Oh my!  Written in 1928

  

Photography begat bordello photography and private pornography.  This in turn created commercial demand for cabarets, stage productions and the hand fabrication, then the mass production of kinky paraphernalia.  Krafft-Ebing’s serious psychiatric analysis begat faux psychiatric books filled with titillating case studies designed to arouse.  At the same time, penny dreadfuls, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edgar Rice Boroughs wrote pulps that dealt in sexualized and kinky themes. The cover of fairy stories and folk tales was no longer needed.  Books and magazines were mass produced and became sufficiently inexpensive than many more people could afford them. 
 
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was a man ahead of his time.  His power as a titled gentleman and his fame as an author afforded him kinky opportunities that less privileged members of his society would have missed.  His obsession and gifts as a writer gave him a chance to discuss them. But he lived at a time when he had to make a lot of his own opportunities.  Today, we have products, social groups, social support, ideologies, and improving psychotherapy services for a much broader diversity of sexual interests.  Von Sacher-Masoch paid a price for being out of step with his time, but he helped frame the discussion of which this blog is a tiny part 145 years ago.  That is a very long time ago given the speed of social change we have recorded in the interim.

Resources:  The book Venus in Furs (1870), Venus in Furs book and the Polanski movie Venus in Fur (2012) Venus in Fur (20120 movie are easily found on Amazon.  Given the book’s history, various illustrated and early edition versions can be found from antiquarian book sellers.  There are also numerous previous film versions of Venus in Furs, including Seduction: The Cruel Woman(1995) Seduction: The Cruel Woman directed by Monika Treut, and other productions in 1967, and two different European productions in 1969.  Clips from the David Ives’s production are on YouTube, but I did not see a video production of the entire Broadway play.

For atmosphere, the Velvet Underground song Venus in Furs was on their debut album in 1967.  Written by Lou Reed and produced by John Cage.  Sherman, set the Way-Back machine for Greenwich Village, NYC in the summer of ’67.  On the Left coast it was the Summer of Love.  On the right coast, Velvet Underground served as the house band for Andy Warhol’s Factory and was a direct forerunner of punk rock music. Venus in Fur by the Velvet Underground

Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) Psychopathia Sexualis (book)  is also available from Amazon, and in a variety of editions from antiquarian booksellers 
.
The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch (1992) The Confessions of Wanda von Sacher-Masoch is also available on Amazon in the secondary seller market.  It is currently out of print.

The First Masochist: A Biography of Leopold von Sacher-Masochby James Cleugh (1967) Stein and Day, NYC  The First Masochist is available on the secondary market.  It is not a great read, but is valuable for its review of his many writings that were not translated into English.

Lovemaps by John Money Lovemaps is available from Amazon.  Do not confuse it with the novel Love Maps or a host of blogs that sound similar and offer relationship advice on unknown provenance.
© Russell J Stambaugh, May, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved





Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1836-1905?) Austrian uuthor of Venus in Furs.

Nowadays, if you have ever heard of the Austrian man of letters and novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, you know that he wrote the scandalous novella Venus in Fur(s) (1870), which in 2011 became a hit Broadway play by David Ives and was made into a movie by the notorious and highly kinky auteur Roman Polanski in 2012.  In 2012, Nina Arianda won the Tony for Best Actress in the lead role of Vanda Jordan.  In 2014 it was the most performed title across the US in repertory theaters.  Dead for over 100 years, von Sacher-Masoch has been enjoying a bit of a comeback.

Nina Arianda and Hugh Dancy in the 2011-12 Broadway production of David Ives’ Venus in Fur.

If you know two things, you know that Richard von-Krafft-Ebing decided to name his clinical diagnosis—masochism–for sexual arousal to pain and humiliation, after Sacher-Masoch.  This has given Leopold a good deal more than his standard allotment of 15 minutes of fame, and made ‘masochism’ a dirty word for over 130 years, and led to considerable fuzzy thinking about what exactly we are dealing with when we encounter kinkery that involves pain and submission.

A depiction of Baba-Yaga’s hut.  Consultations with the crone are not for the faint of heart.  If you don’t know your slavic folk tales, you probably know Baba-Yaga’s hut from the game Dungeons and Dragons!  It first appeared in the Eldritch Wizardry expansion back in 1974.
You probably don’t know that Sacher-Masoch was a prominent professor and writer of Slavic folktales which are in and of themselves a repository for plenty of dark themes.  Think Baba-Yaga, the mysterious but capricious and powerful crone who could help or hinder the innocent.  Or witches that cooked greedy little children in ovens.  Or Little Red Riding Hood saved only when she was cut from the wolf’s stomach after getting eaten.  Pretty Grimm stuff!   Sacher-Masoch anthologized folktales from German, Jewish, Slavic and Polish traditions before writing two novels.  Only Venus in Furs was translated into English.  Any examination of his collected works reveals that von Sacher-Masoch was obsessed with tyrannical punishing women and he seems to have scoured central European mythologies for examples.  Suffice it to say, such tales were there to be found, and that Sacher-Masoch passionately needed to tell them!


This post is about von Sacher-Masoch’s contributions to kink. Another post will follow shortly discussing his psychiatric symptoms in more detail.   Although he never intended to lead anyone, and fought having his name used, he has had a strong influence on people who practice kink, and on those who study it.


Young Leopold was born in Lemburg, Austria Hungary, now Lviv in the western Ukraine, in 1836.  He grew up in time to be greatly affected the second industrial revolution and the formation of a powerful German State.  A Catholic born son of an Austria-Hungarian civil servant and a mother who was the last heir of the noble von Sacher family, Leopold was the first to be born with the hyphenated Sacher-Masoch name.  Despite noble blood, Leopold was sympathetic with socialist and feminist thinking of his day.  He was ardently opposed to antisemitism and wrote compelling stories of Jewish life in his region.  It is likely that the young Leopold grew up in a household with conflicts attending recent accession to the nobility.   It is pure speculation on my part that his mother’s nobility may have upset the prevailing patriarchal dynamics in young Sacher-Masoch’s household and may have had a role in his interest in powerful women.  But his mother was not a powerful and punishing figure as so often appears in his literature.  His father was no slouch, having been Chief of Police in Lemburg, Prauge, and Graz, all parts of the Austria-Hungarian Empire at the time.  His father acquired the title of knight, which passed to Leopold later in life when his father died.

He was educated in Graz, Austria, where he was an excellent student; his passion was the study of folktales and history quickly overtook his original training in law, which he never practiced.  He soon returned to Lemberg and became a professor of history, but tired of academic lecturing and he returned to Graz to devote all of his time to writing.  He then began publishing his ambitious collection of stories, The Legacy of Cain, in 1869 of which Venus in Furs is the only work routinely translated into English.  He would eventually complete one other volume, The Mother of God.  But outside of Slavic languages and literature scholarship, Sacher-Masoch’s legacy lies entirely within his contributions to kink and clinical theory.  This legacy comes from three sources.  First is from his novel, which came to be seen as autobiographical, the second is through Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopatha Sexualis, and the third is from his first wife’s memoirs.


Venus in Furs

Venus in Furs (1870)  The lovely Gustav Klimt illustration was added later.

The novel was begun sometime in the mid 1860’s and completed in 1869.  It is set as a tale within a tale, as one man attempts a kind of kink reparative psychotherapy on another who, following a meditation on Titian’s painting Venus with a Mirror, falls into a dream of speaking to the goddess and develops a mania for subjecting himself to the mercies of a cruel women.  The main plot of this cautionary story concerns protagonist Severin von Kusiemski, who, as a child discovers that he is a ‘suprasensualist’, and as an adolescent is severely whipped by his aunt, a noblewoman who habitually wears furs, and is deliberately intent on punishing him so brutally that he learns the pleasures of being beaten.  He indeed finds himself overwhelmed with sensuous feelings associated with the punishment and craves to repeat it.  As a grown man, Severin falls in love with a woman, Wanda von Donajew, who becomes his mistress.  Severin ardently desires to become Wanda’s slave and for her to wear furs and beat him.  He broaches the idea of becoming submissive to her, and she is initially resistant, but agrees to try it out, only to progressively recognize the advantages.  Severin proposes and Wanda draws up a legal contract for him to become her abject slave, and in a textbook example of seduced consent, she terrorizes him about the potential harshness of the arrangement.  She rejects the submission of traditional marriage for the empowerment in Severin’s proposed contract.  Confronted with the apotheosis of all his fantasies, he tremblingly signs his life away… literally, as late in the novella, he contracts to suicide in accordance with his plans to have Wanda sexually betray him with another man.

Titian’s (1588-1676) Venus with a Mirror, which mesmerizes von Sacher-Masoch’s protagonist in Venus in Furs.
They then travel to Florence where they can pursue their contract away from their respective social circles.  Per the contract, Severin takes the name ‘Gregor’, that of a common servant, and travels third class while Wanda rides in luxury.  In Florence he wears the livery of a servant, and adheres to the contract, serving her in all ways, as she grows progressively crueler and her love and fascination transform into contempt.  Eventually Wanda exploits the full measure of her power over Severin, and ties him up, and leaves him for a real man, a handsome Greek who will dominate her.  Rather than whip him as he ardently desires, she has the beautiful new paramour perform the beating.  She has come to despise Severin for his weakness even as she enjoyed dominating him. The climax of the novel is this beating and Wanda’s departure.  The contracted suicide is merely implied. This tragic outcome should thus serve as warning to the framing story’s protagonist of the perils of sexual submission of the male.  For despite all niceties to the contrary, women must either be men’s despots or their slaves, and men who crave submission court their own destruction.

Venus in Furs, which would seem to be an exciting story about love of dominant women is in fact set up as a warning about female weakness and their inevitably abandoning ways, and similar themes in his other stories have provoked many critics to regard Sacher-Masoch’s work as misogynist.  In his writing on contemporary and historical matters, Sacher-Masoch was a feminist, socialist, and advocate for women’s suffrage.  In his fiction, women come off as vain, craven, selfish, and ultimately weak.  As much as he craves submission to them, he regards himself as morally superior, a peculiar and problematical position from which to submit.


Psychopathia Sexualis

Psychopathia Sexualis (1886)  The John Willie illustration was added later. Krafft-Ebbing would never have approved.  He wrote much of his book in Latin for fear of corrupting lay readers.  Bondage illustrator and Bizarre Magazine (1946-56) publisher John Coutts had no such compunctions.
When Psychopathia Sexualis was first published in 1886, Venus in Furs had been in print for 16 years and had had an impact not unlike the 50 Shades series in 2011.  It was published in a society in which reading novels was a very common form of entertainment.  It brought von Sacher-Masoch a great deal of notoriety precisely because it stood out against the prevailing ideologies of the times. Industrializing central Europe was being pulled in nationalist, socialist, ethnocentric and liberalizing directions.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire was losing its grip on restive minorities, women were pressing for social equality, and science was challenging religious traditions of Catholicism and Protestantism alike.  Venus in Furs did not spark the wave of sexual experimentalism that 50 Shades has, but this is the era in which vibrators were first used to relieve women’s sexual tensions, Psychoanalysis was used to treat an epidemic of hysterical conversion reactions, and sexual hypocrisy was a widespread response to Victorian moralism.  Spencer’s social Darwinism was gaining wide credence, and warfare was thought to be manly pursuit that would strengthen a country by short decisive wars that established national superiority.  Austria’s bid to unite the German states had been crushed in 1866 by the Prussians in the Austro-Hungarian War.  In 1870-71, the North German Confederation formed around Prussia after its victory over Austria decisively defeated France, resulting in the unification of Modern Germany.  These events seemed an obvious validation of Spencer and Darwin.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) British Philosopher and leading proponent of Social Darwinism, although he was closer to a Lamarkian.  Still, scratch a Neocon today, and you find a modern veneer over Social Darwinism.

This was the context in which the Belle Époqueemerged and in which Venus in Furs, Psychopathia Sexualis, and Freudian psychoanalysis became crucial symbols.  Readers who recall the previous post on Richard Krafft-Ebing will have little trouble recognizing that the details of Venus in Furs play directly into the Viennese psychiatrist’s theories that aberrant sexual desires reflect degenerative impulses contrary to evolution’s reproductive purposes.   Severin fails to impregnate Wanda, fails to cement his relationship with her, and is eventually abandoned for a reproductively fit male.  In fact, Sacher-Masoch’s tale hints at Severin’s sexual attraction to this fine male specimen, and that is precisely in line with von Krafft-Ebing’s theories on sexual inversion (homosexuality).  That the story also exploits conventional ideas of class only serves to underscore the doctor’s point about sexual superiority of normophilic sex.  It seems entirely natural that Krafft-Ebing, given his theoretical perspective and the prevailing cultural context, would name his paraesthenia for desire for sexual pain and humiliation ‘masochism’.

 

When von Sacher-Masoch learned he had been made the poster boy and namesake of the sexual perversion for arousal from sexualized pain, a contentious correspondence ensued.  von Sacher-Masoch feared identification with the diagnosis would damage his credibility as a writer.   But Krafft-Ebing seized the professional high ground, claiming that the novelist could have no objection to the use of a neutral medical term that implied no moral taint and was a simple scientific description.  We might be more inclined today toward empathy with Sacher-Masoch’s point, but as Psychopathia Sexualis became the dominant psychiatric work in the paraphilia discourse and the Freudians picked up the term masochism, Sacher-Masoch’s attempts to get out from underneath the label were fruitless.

 

In his 50’s Sacher-Masoch’s mental health severely deteriorated and he was placed in an asylum.  There is some dispute about when he died, but he stopped writing and was in no condition to defend himself.   Although this correspondence with Krafft-Ebing clearly began before Sacher-Masoch became ill, I do not know how, if at all, this dispute may have affected his condition. 


“Confessions”

Aurora von Rumelin, Sacher-Masoch’s first wife and author of Confessions, as Leopold would have preferred her, limned with furs.


Much of what we ‘know’ about Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s personal life is provocative, but comes primarily from the memoirs that are attributed to his first wife, Aurora von Rumelin.   A certain professional skepticism would seem to be justified by this tale, which came to light after his death, and in the context of the considerable social stigma attending his name being lent to the disorder.  Conditions of the sales and marketing of this story also exploit the salacious quality of the material.  The original version of Meine Lebensbeicht was published in German in 1906, and in French the following year as Confession de Ma Vie under the name Wanda von Donajew, Severin’s fictional paramour.  It was then published in English in 1991 by RE/search and Rip Off Press in 1991 under the title Confessions of Wanda Sacher-Masoch.  Despite the ‘von’ as evidence of her nobility, Aurora was not from a noble family, and then there is the opprobrium attendant her partnering with Leopold and his scandalous behaviors to contend with.  So critical readers of Confessions have been at pains to deconstruct her point of  view.

In these memoirs, Leopold is described as fascinated by history form an early age. The turbulent times of central Europe and deeply affected him, he was given to creating puppet shows inspired by a bloody peasants revolt in Poland in 1846, and the Revolution of 1848 that swept much of Europe.  his father, as chief of Police was posted to Prague during these chaotic times, had an active hand in supressing the revolution, and brought home stories.  But even asa pre-adolescent, Leopold was drawn to creating and recalling narratives in which he is atthe mercy of cruel female rulers.  After Prague, his father was posted to the quiet town of Graz where Leopold became a stand out student.  He entered the University of Graz and had earned his law degree by age 19.  He lectured there in history, and later moved to Lemberg as a professor.  It wass during this period he began formally publishing tales of rural and ethnic life.


Within the Romanticism current in his day, von Sacher-Masoch’s tales were well received.  Although later critics would comment on his tendency to dwell on certain themes that were the core of his obsessions, his accounts were by and large sympathetic, nuanced and vivid.  Only occasionally did his work descend into melodrama.  He wrote sympathetically of ethnicities and nationalities that were not always accepting of one another.  When not emotionally unsettled by conflict or upset by his obsessions, he made a decent living as a writer.  His stability was much marred by by a general impulsivity with money, and his obsession with furs was expensive.  He wound up moving frequently.  He was easily manipulated and went through his money quickly when he had any.  

Leopold’s first sexual affair was with Anna von Kottewitz a beautiful woman 10 years his senior who was fine with his desire to be beaten, but gradually became disenchanted when his demands for whipping and for betrayal with another lover became excessive.  She seems to have mainly been drawn to the aristocratic lifestyle and notoriety that came from romancing a successful author.  Leopold was very productive during this relationship, writing in an attempt to keep her in the style she preferred.  Their relationship eventually collapsed after she grew tired of his efforts to get him to betray him with another man.  After several years one of these characters proved to have a criminal history and gave her syphilis, which was then incurable so the prolonged affair had to be ended in some embarrassment.

Leopold then had a brief affair with a French actress. Mademoiselle Clairemont she bore him one daughter, Lina.  While he enjoyed their relationship and she was reputedly very beautiful, he was dissatisfied with her lack of aristocratic bearing and refinement he really craved, and their relationship collapsed after less than one year.
Fanny Pistor and Leopold share a quiet moment.

In 1869 and by then a writer of some reputation, von Sacher-Masoch met Fanny Pistor who sought his help with her own writing career.  They quickly turned their attentions to matters romantic, and he arranged the following sadomasochistic contract with her just like the one that Severin agreed to with Wanda von Donajew:


“Her Leopold von Sacher-Masoch gives his word of honor to Frau Pistor to become her slave and to comply unreservedly for a period of six months with every one of her desires and commands.
For her part, Frau Pistor is not to extract from him the performance of any action contrary to honor, i.e. which would dishonor him as a man or as a citizen.  She is also to allow him to devote six hours a day to his professional work and agrees never to read either his correspondence or his literary compositions.
The Mistress (Fanny Pistor) has the right to punish her Salve (Leopold von Sacher-Masoch) in any way  she thinks fit for all errors, carelessness or crimes of Lèse-majesté on his part.
In short, her subject, Gregor, must accord his mistress a wholly servile obedience and accept as an exquisite condescension any favorable treatment she extend to him.  He recognizes that he has no claim upon her love and he renounces all rights whatsoever to a lover’s privileges.
Fanny Pistor, on her side, promises to wear furs as often as possible, especially when she is in a cruel mood.
This period of servitude is to be considered at an end after six months and no serious allusion to it will be permitted at the expiration of the period.
Everything that may have happened must be forgotten.  The original love-relationship will then be resumed.
This six months need not run continuously.  They may be interrupted for long periods, which will begin and end whenever the Mistress chooses.  this pact is hereby put into force by the signatures of the contracting parties.”

He signs this on Dec 9, 1869, shortly before the publishing of Venus in Furs.  It is clear that significant portions of Venus in Furs are strongly autobiographical. He travels third class, assumes the name “Gregor”, and wears the livery of her servant, just as Severin does in the novel. Following an exciting period in Italy, Frau Pistor and Von Sacher-Masoch decline to renew the contract after rather less than the full six months and go there seperate ways.


The success of that novel led to a number of young women who wrote anonymously to von Sacher-Masoch about the titillating themes of the book.  In (1873) Aurora von Rumelin, after a prolonged exchange of provocative letters, met Leopold under a streetlamp in Graz, heavily veiled and under the pretense of recovering compromising missives sent by a friend, and Leopold is seduced into striking up a relationship.  In their first meeting alone, she beat him with a whip and he agreed shortly thereafter to a private wedding in which he wore a white coat and tails and she was dressed in furs.  This wedding was later followed by a public wedding as befit his noble station, but Aurora and Leopold could not consolidate a stable marriage and their years together were not happy.  Aurora especially disliked Leopold’s mania for arranging sexual betrayals for her with men. and despite frequent pregnancies, the couple had three children together and two painful losses, Leopold was obsessive, did not stay satisfied for long, and they were not sexually happy despite his enjoyment of beatings.  For her part, Aurora who had ardently desired the aristocratic life, was never satisfied with the reality she was able to achieve with Leopold.  In 1879, following the death of his adored older son, he divorced Aurora for his assistant Hilda Meister.  Hilda struggled with Leopold’s declining mental health, and in the late 1880’s he was hospitalized in an asylum.  He was officially declared dead in 1895, but is alleged to have lived on in the asylum for another decade. Actually, his death remains somewhat murky.


As described by von Rumelin, Leopold was not a man to stay satisfied, and even had she not been terrified that his moody instability would leave the family penniless, she was dominated by her husband’s social and professional status and could never fully trust his demands that she betray him with other men given the prevailing divorce laws of the period.  Much of her account in Confessions emphasizes his agency over hers.  Although she went to elaborate lengths to seduce him, given his writings, it would be hard for any reader to doubt that he was the driving force for kink in their relationship.  He pursued it with a rigidity that was tiring to all of his partners.  And Leopold might have originated the idea of ‘topping from the bottom.’  As hard as it might be for a highly educated and titled aristocrat to permanently surrender power to his less educated female partner in the later half of the 19th century, he didn’t seem to accept the fate he had bargained for very well. 

von Sacher-Masoch’s legacy for kink:

Aside from lending his name to the diagnosis of masochism and the sex practice itself, von Masoch can also be seen as the source of the idea of contracting, and laying the foundations for consent in modern BDSM.  In publicizing his enthusiasms, he also inspired the kink practice of cuckolding, and he started a complicated conversation about the relationship between power and control in masochism, a problem that is still very lively in kink’s discussions today.


Contracting and Consent:

For von Sacher-Masoch, who cared very much what he said and wrote, and who had trained in law, the contract is crucial to the reality of sexual submission.  He used this strategy with Fanny and Aurora and others.  Unlike de Sade, who in writing and in deed inflicted his sexuality without boundaries, consent established the boundaries of his submission, even if ultimately he badgered his way around them.  Although consent did not become a discourse in kink until 1982, von Sacher-Masoch left contracting as a legacy 100 years before there were above-ground kink organizations.:


Power and Control: 

The appropriation of contracts did not solve all problems, however.  In Venus in Furs, later readers are greatly troubled by implications of the conflict between dominance and control in this contract.  While the idea for the contract is Severin’s, and the actual contract proposed is Wanda’s, agreed to with only a little negotiation with Severin, Severin’s ultimate goal in signing the contract is to get Wanda to give up control of her freedom to leave him.  Yet when he loses his free agency to worship her and his objectification by contract renders his desire for her irrelevant, she is no longer constrained by her desire to be freely worshiped, loses her desire for him, and eventual, she leaves.  Ultimately, she would rather surrender to her desire than be constrained by the contract.  Von Sacher-Masoch writes, and his later critics deconstruct, this contract as if the inherent asymmetries in male and female biology, and as embodied in the sexual inequality of male and female social roles, are inevitable and the contract is doomed to failure.  The von Sacher-Masoch’s chronic marital unhappiness does little to undermine this impression.

Economic slavery, to which consent is irrelevant.

Historically, people have not held slaves because their masters desire them, but because slave holders desire their labor.  On occasion, masters have fallen in love with slaves, and even more frequently, the labor of slaves has included responsibility for sexually servicing their owners.  But Wanda desires control over Severin’s worship and adoration, which slave owners do not ordinarily care about or value.  Neither did slaves often have to fear abandonment as long as their labor was useful.  The definition of slavery in the masochistic contract really hinges on the vulnerabilities lovers feel in the face of their own desires.  von Sacher-Masoch’s life history would seem to show that masochism shows little prospect for permanently overcoming that ambivalence.  As desirous of being a slave as he might have been, his marriage to von Rumelin was dominating of her.  Coitus and parenting provided him little reassurance and did not provide ultimate stability for his fear of abandonment.  The contract to be her slave could not overcome the social context in which he as a male and aristocrat was dominant over her as a commoner and a woman.  Eventually, Leopold left Aurora.

Matt Groening’s depiction of ambivalence.  If Freud had drawn Homer Simpson, instinct would have occupied one shoulder and social rules would occupy the other, instead of angels and devils
Freud would go on to make great capital of the ambivalence while ignoring the power dynamics.  The struggle between moral ideas of the super ego and the lusts of the id was essentially ambivalent.  His neurotics were slaves not to desire, but to their inability to recognize the inevitable conflicts and accept their ambivalent nature, egged on as they were by excessive social repression.  von Sacher-Masoch’s relationship history is fertile ground for Freud’s explanations, the writer is repeatedly unable to consolidate a stable and satisfying love life no matter how his partners attempt to comply.

Emmanuel Sevigny and Mathieu Amalric in Roman Polanski’s version of David Ives’ Venus in Fur (2012).
Roman Polanski made diabolical films even before the tragic Tate/La Bianca killings in 1969 and his prosecution for sex with an 13 year old and flight from the US in 1977.  Sevigny is now his wife.  In this version, Sevigny;s character is an actual goddess.  
It might be argued that Venus in Furs is only role play, and the David Ives’s play would seem to highlight exactly this aspect.  Vanda Jordan comes in late out of the rain eager to play the part of Wanda von Donajew.  But the power in that play highlights a crucial insight about von Sacher-Masoch’s desire, that the slavery contract render his new status anything but a social role that might under mundane circumstances be discarded and return him to power.  In the play, Vanda stops auditioning for a role and becomes a goddess with the power to dominate, and to abandon, that no bargain can overcome.  The feminist objection to Venus in Furs to von Sacher-Masoch is overcome with magical realism, in fact, the argument that Wanda might not really have the power in their relationship is precisely mentioned by Vanda in the play!  Ives and Polanski insist that she does.


But modern kink has come to recognize that the desire for submission and dominance is a kind of figure/ ground illusion.  The political requirements of consent, stemming as they do from inherent democratic equality, mean that even in 24/7 sexual slavery, Master and slave begin negotiation from a position of equivalent agency.  Take way physical freedom, safewords, the opportunity to own property or phone home, the slave still agrees to the role of slavery, and ultimately must come up for air, if only to renew the contract.  For in actual slavery, no contract is needed, and the slave has no power, no personhood, and no essential value whatsoever, only the value of service.   This is pure utilitarianism, the opposite of lust a point on whch von Sacher-Masoch and De Sade, his apparent opposite number, would agree.  Real slave owners took the control of the slave as proof of their own agency, but could not further elevate themselves relative to an audience of their peers by exercising rights already assumed.  Sadism was already privileged.  It was mundane, not exoctic; utilitarian, not romantic.  de Sade would have been most disapproving of the strategy of trying to solve this problem with any sort of contract!

Female Dominance:

Venus in Furs is not only the founding document of masochism and the origin of the sadomasochistic contract and the problem of consent, but it is a founding document of female dominance.  In a Western social context of rising female equality, its timing and placement are significant.  For all of von Sacher-Masoch’s liberalism, the idea that females are too vain and weak to be dominant without destroying their partners seems shockingly retrograde.  Venus in Furs is not an endorsement of genuine female empowerment.  This is true even in Polanski’s modern revision, in which the fumbling aspiring actress Vanda Jordan ultimately becomes terrifyingly powerful personification of cruel female divinity.  No true equality seems possible, only a game in which dominance is played at, and powerful men temporarily surrender their power for a little recreation with the gracious assurance they will still control their tech start ups at Monday morning executive committee meeting.  Vanda must be a terrifying goddess incarnate, or fall back into the desperate audition for an acting role before a powerful director.


Modern criticisms of this retrograde depiction of female dominance abound.  But there is still great transgressive power in the feverish excitement Wanda and Severin enjoy as they fail their negotiation.  The novella shows that lust can dwell in female empowerment, even if Goethe and Kant and Spencer have warned the right relation with women is subservient, Richard von Krafft-Ebing was eager to ratify it, and Freud would go on to describe women’s sexual satisfaction as inherently masochistic.  His error was his lack of empathy to imagine that penetration might be anything other than painful.

Anti-suffragette propaganda was already presenting themes of female domination outside of the bordello.
I would argue that Krafft-Ebing had no chance of recognizing masochism as a perversion had he not found its doctrine articulated by a man, and that not only women’s subservience but women’s desire for subservience was so normalized in the context of the Belle Époque that only a man’s endorsement of masochism could be regarded as deviant and thus as proof of pathology. After all, men needed to submit to men all the time in an aristocratic society.  But men need never submit to women. Neither should we be surprised that the existence of female kinky desires awaited the doctrines of female liberalization and psychologizing of the 1960s and 70s.  There are as many kinky women in BDSM social organizations today as males, but for sexology’s first 100 years following Krafft-Ebing, only men were thought to be kinky.

Late 1800’s Lesbian sadomasochistic erotica.  Sacher-Masoch was far from the only artist presenting these themes in European culture.

In fact, professional domination became the reigning metaphor throughout the period after Venus in Furs for men who were excited to enact their submissive kinks.  Certainly it was there in the discourse about women’s suffrage.  It is highly likely, given the role of prostitution, the changing roles of women, and the reactive religious moralism that accompanies those changes that the role of dominatirx would had to have been invented if von Sacher-Masoch hadn’t articulated it.  In fact, it has existed in bordello culture for perhaps a couple hundred years before it became popularized by changes in gender role expression.  But efforts to declare prostitutes or dominatircies as proof of female kinks foundered on the grounds of pragmatism.  If kinks were really crazy expressions of sex desire that were contrary to reproductive success, prostitution was constructive, albeit amoral economic behavior.  Those opposing prostitution urged criminalization to raise its costs as a rational economic strategy, and decried the exploitation of women by claiming the morally degraded status of the role of prostitutes victimized women far more than any earnings could compensate.  In this climate, the idea that a woman could be truly dominant as a sex worker eluded social recognition for over a century, and remains very much in social dispute today.  The idea that sexual domination might be an expression of a woman’s sexual desire, rather than a submission to male desire, is still widely under recognized.  This denial is remarkable in the face of a steady string of exposes by prostitutes in which they honestly described their reasons for being in the life, and despite the Freudian recognition that people chose their social roles, including their occupations for over-determined and unconscious reasons.  But these arguments went unrecognized and were discounted because they conflicted with conventional discourse on gender roles.

Photography meant consumer’s that did not dare enter a bordello could partake of themes that were explored there.  “Photography is the new drug.org!”
Cuckolding and Key Holding:


Likewise, Venus in Furs is a foundation document in cuckolding and key holding.  Van Sacher-Masoch does not dwell on coitus, orgasm control or on the agonies and pleasures of sexual withholding, which are at the core of this modern kink.  But Severin’s readiness to give up coitus, and von Rumelin’s complaints about her sex life with Von Sacher-Masoch have suggested to later readers that masochism is desexualized.  This would only be tangentially challenged by Freud when he argued that feminine masochism was at the core of biologically driven female desire.  This mistake, as well as laws against prostitution may have led to mistaken ideas that masochism is not about sex, only about pain and submission.  Reading the historical record as closely as I can, Sacher-Masoch, although weakened as a writer by excessive fixations on his obsessions, was not a good example of Krafft-Ebing’s degenerative and desexualized masochist.  Coitus remained an important part of his sexual expression throughout, and he fathered at least 6 children with his various partners, including one with a French actress before Fanny Pistor, three with Aurora von Remelin, and 2 Hilda.


But Freud was correct that Sacher-Masoch’s work was not dyadic.  Wanda beats Severin, but arranges for black servants to participate, and in the climax of the story, has her Greek lover perform the ultimate beating.  Venus in Furs is a triangular story, both in its relation to the framing story, and in Severin and Wanda enacting their relationship in relation to others, be it the law, servants, the audience that perceives his social abasement as a servant in third class during their travel on the train, or in the need to flee to Venice to evade their social circle.

 

This is also the essential structure of cuckolding play, that thrives upon not only the power of orgasm control, but in the enactment of the preference of the key holder for a “bull’, who is submissive to her desire to inflict humiliation on the cuckold both by seeing her enjoy her sexual release with a more masculine man, but also her domination of the bull in penetration of the feminized cuckold.

Coda:

Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s statue in Lviv is a great opportunity for photo ops!  Oh, a collar!  How convenient!
Back in Lviv, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch remains a local boy who made good.  His folktales are a robust validation of Ukrainian identity in region of dangerous political fluidity.  They play down the ambiguous ending of his life in madness.  There is a statue commemorating the author, and a restaurant, the Masoch Café, done up in dungeon accoutrements.  For those with retrograde conventional tendencies, they boast the best fondue in town.  For those who prefer cuisine a l’outrance, try the bull’s testicles and menu with sadomasochistic illustrations.  For an aperitif, the female wait staff provides free whippings.  Perhaps this would be a good time and place to consider your requests and tipping strategy carefully.

Red and black, er, dominate the decor of Cafe Masoch in Lviv.
Part II of this essay on Leopold von Sacher-Masoch will include the imapct of his case on psychiatry, and references for these essays.

© Russell J Stambaugh, May, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved

The First New York City AltSex Conference, April 22, 2016

Russell J Stambaugh PhD DST CSSP9 Comments
The First NYC AltSex Conference was held at the Jerry Orbach Theater in Midtown Manhattan on Friday April 20, 2016.   It was the work of AASECT Certified Sex Therapist Michael Aaron, PhD and Dulcinea Pitagora, MA, LMSW.  About 150 mental health professionals and kink and poly community members attended in person, and about a dozen participated electronically.   Your intrepid reporter made the trip to the Big Apple to attend in person following favorable medical testing in Houston earlier that week.  It was difficult to tell just how many professionals vs community members attended.  Only one person attended in a business suit, looking like he had wandered in off of Wall Street. Embarrassing, really! However a number of prominent AASECT Members presented or were in attendance including Joe Winn, LICSW, CST-S, Lori Michaels, LMFT, CST, and AASECT AltSex Special Interest Group Chair, Kate Bornstein, Chris Farrington from the Community-Academic Consortium for Alternative Sexualities (CARAS), Carol Meeker from National Coalition for Sexual Freedom (NCSF), Sabitha Pillai, PhD, CST from Widener University with a group of her students, Jassy Timberlake, LMFT, CSSP, Director of Northampton Sex Therapy Associates, and other luminaries I missed in the rather dark venue.  Sorry if I missed you!

This is, to my knowledge, the first professional event devoted entirely to Alt Sex Since AASECT’s 2006 Conference on BDSM put on by Richard Sprott in San Francisco.  It was extremely encouraging to see that, in the age of social media, the event had been well publicized and was so well attended.  Proceeds were donated to CARAS, and at the end of the meeting Chris announced a $1500 award for a research project investigating swinging, even as he disclosed that CARAS meetings were moving to a biannual schedule coordinated with the International Mister Leather event in Chicago.  That means the meeting in San Francisco scheduled the day before the Folsom Street Fair this year has been cancelled.

I will proceed to provide brief summaries of the presentations.  The event had no break outs, so we plowed through six presentations and a closing Q&A session together.
‘Kink is Good:  Kink, Consensual Non-Monogamy and New Models of Sex and Gender Variance’ by Margie Nichols, PhD, DST.

Margie Nichols
Margie began by challenging the historically pathology-based mental health model of kink and gender diversity. Citing queer historian Gayle Rubin, changes in the DSM, social constructionist social science, and queer theory, she argued for a ‘big tent’ conception of gender diversity, kink and relationship expression.  She showed that the queer community had led the charge for greater acceptance of gender and sexual expression, and duly noted that there had been an historical tension between acceptance and exclusion of kink from the fight for sexual diversity, including the marginalization of Leathersex and SAMOIS.  But she showed that new models proceed more from growing acceptance among the variant communities than from the tensions among them.

A strong aspect of her presentation included the lessons variant communities offer the therapist community in treating heterosexual and cis-gendered clients.  These insights include nonjudgmental tolerance of sexual tastes, clear negotiation skills, emphasis on good technique, the power of sexual vulnerability to deepen intimacy and connection, sex as a direct expression of spirituality, the importance of honesty and good boundary setting, management of jealousy, the role of autonomy in effective relationships, and the non-sexual benefits of alternative relationships structures in social, community and child rearing activities.

Margie raised for me important questions in the fight against stigmatization.  How important is it to be ‘out’?  How are identity politics to be managed, and just how similar and different are people’s identifications?  If all these communities can be seen as one, what unifies them besides the stigma they face from conventional society?   Are alternative sexualities subcultures, or counter cultures?  Since electronic communication has become so important, most communities are fragmenting.  Her presentation effectively showed that identity had moved in the direction of greater variability and fluidity, and she emphasized the way marginalized communities had tended towards greater tolerance today than might have been the case decades earlier.  Despite the history of this dance, therapists and others are in a better position to consume the insights of the AltSex communities in their work with all clients than they were twenty years ago.  For Margie, the personal has always been political, and this is just as true for her today as when coming out was a much riskier leap of faith.

A special treat was seeing Margie get to present in front of one of her personal heroes, Kate Bornstein, who has lived out the fight for autonomy and diversity in her personal gender expression and served as a role model to many long before the Caitlin Jenner story became a riveting national discourse. 

Margie Nichols and Kate Bornstein  (photo probably by Barbara Carrellas)

Myths and Realities of Consensual Non-Monogamy by Zhana Vrangalova, PhD.

Zhana Vrangalova
Zhana began by defining monogamy and non-monogamy.  Crucial in the studies she presents is how these concepts are operationalized as there is great tension in Western society between monogamy as ideology and as behavior.  Taking the Center for Disease Control definition, sexual monogamy is “You agree to be sexually active with only one person and that person has agreed to be only active with you.”  By that definition, a great many people avow monogamy, but by their forties, only about 10% of men and 20% of women have had only a single sexual partner.  American infidelity rates range from 20% to 75% and only about 15% of 1230 societies in a cross-cultural database avow monogamy as their prevailing ideal marital style.  As a social constructionist, I must warn that monogamy is very vague concept given its ideological prominence in Western culture.

Some of Zhana’s most compelling data showed the degree to which CNM was socially stigmatized.  Across 22 variables, both conventionals and CNMists alike perceived CNM as inferior to monogamy on 20 of them.  CNM was most disparaged for ‘preventing STI’s’ and ‘being morally superior.’, and was perceived as marginally better than monogamy only for ‘prevents boredom’ and ‘allows independence’.

Nevertheless, CNMists were more liberal. less religious, more educated, had higher incomes, endorsed less sexist, racist and heterosexist attitudes, less heterosexual, more open to new experience, and higher sensation seeking than the non-CNM comparison populations.  She reported data from Fleckenstein and Cox showing that CNMs over 55 were physically healthier and happier than their conventional age mates in the General Social Survey sample, but were not mentally healthier.

Zhana also reported evidence from J Lehmiller that, contrary to conventional wisdom, consensual non-monogamy, as currently practiced, is not riskier for STI transmission than serial monogamy.  This effect relies primarily on the data that suggest CNMists are a good deal more conscientious about condom use, that their pursuit of multiple simultaneous liaisons motivates them to use barrier protection longer, and that monogamists tend to cease using barrier protection when they decide the relationship is serious irrespective of the gestation times of STIs.

Bottom line, CNM relationships are actually riskier than monogamy only with respect to social stigma, not to sexual health, relationship quality, sexual satisfaction, or psychological well-being.

My chief question arising from this presentation was, what, if experienced CNMists and conventionals shared similar ideas about the inferiority of CNM, was needed to dispel the stigma?  Apparently the presumption that monogamy is better is not based on experience, and is not dispelled by perceived success at CNM.  In fact, the practicing CNMists do moderate their negative ratings of poly relationships somewhat on the basis of their actual experience.

Zhana closed her presentation with brand new research hot of the presses indicating that about 21% of people in two representative US samples (from the Kinsey Sexual Health and Behavior Survey) had had some form of CNM.  The 21% figure was not correlated with typical predictors such as age, income, education, religion, political affiliation (all reported above!) but was higher for people who were male and those who were non-heterosexual in preference. (M Haupert et al, Indiana University, 2016).
The Kink-Poly Confluence:  Community Intersections and Clinical Approaches by Dulcinea Pitagora and Michael Aaron

Dulcinea Pitagora
Dulcinea began with some fairly standard definitions of BDSM and Poly.  She then proceeded to explain the finding that about 40% of the kink community engages in CNM, about 40% of the CNM community does some kink.  I would add that about 40% of the queer/gender fluid community does some kink too, but I am less clear how many kinksters are doing gender play.  Partly this depends on how you identify gender play.  But Dulcinea’s point is that certain shared ideologies promote interpenetration of these communities.  Examples of her shared ideologies include:

Transparency
Communication
Negotiation/renegotiation
Consent
Cultivating connection
Challenging social norms
Personal growth

Interpenetration of these communities on FetLife, and shared experiences with social stigmatization also promote contact and shared values across these communities.  A huge fly in the ointment in assessing just how much interpenetration there is hinges on how one defines the kink and poly communities.  If one is speaking of out kinksters who attend public play parties, the nature of these events promotes open relationships because of play and demonstration ethics that prevail there.  Shy, introverted, jealous, and exclusive people who do not have the values to be out are harder to identify in the community and in surveys.  This is important when comparing how many people do kink from good representative studies like Ritchie et al, which found between 1.4 and 2.1 Percent of Australians were into BDSM, with results like Haupert et al that suggest around 1 in 5 have done some sort of kink and/or CNM.

I would also note that that list of shared ideologies overlaps kinksters with the therapist community despite the latter’s history of pathologizing kink and CNM!

And Dulcinea showed that shared adversities, such as pathologization, discrimination, fear of being outed, concealable stigmatized identities, and internalized stigma were held in common by kink and poly folk but are often not experienced by therapists who are not themselves kinky.

Dulcinea then debunked several myths about kink and poly, including that kink was primarily caused by childhood abuse experiences; that kink leads to out of control and escalating sensation-seeking and risk-taking behaviors; that poly folk were promiscuous – true for some but by no means all – and that, as Lehmiller’s work as cited by Zhana had shown, STI’s are not more common among the CNM communities as popularly assumed.

Dulcinea identified several common presenting complaints that are prevalent among kink and poly clients presenting for treatment:  Problems with newbie identification and coming out to self, partners or others about emerging identity, relationship issues in the lifestyle context, and the typical array of mental health issues unrelated to identification or sex behaviors.

Finally, Dulcinea covered three clinical process issues commonly faced by therapists:  Normalizing alternative sex behaviors and lifestyles; confronting transference and counter-transference issues related to alternative practices; and challenges of self-education, supervision and referral for clients that are outside a therapist’s cultural competence.  And cultural competence remains a huge issue for the general community of therapists.  In a survey by Kelsey in 2013, 76% of therapists responding had encountered at least one AltSex client and less than half had felt adequately informed about the topic.  Dulcinea noted that there is a huge gap in training on alternative sexualities in mental health training generally, to which I would only add that this falls within the huge gap in sexuality training for the same fields.  Kind of like a donut hole in the middle of a donut hole!

Facing Your Shadow:  Psychological Edge Play by Michael Aaron

Michael Aaron
Michael gave three reasons for edge play:  exploration of the self, healing past hurts, and adrenaline rush.  To explain those, he provided a brief history of what was meant by shadow, starting with the Marquis de Sade, and his influence on psychology through Freud and Jung.  The latter two thinkers were united in their belief in the important role that the dark side of human psychology was crucial to understanding the function of the unconscious, but they divided over what the unconscious was.  Freud though Jung’s view was dangerously social, and insufficiently idiosyncratic for each patient.  Jung thought Freud’s view was too biological, and failed to account for the universals in inner experience.  But however the unconscious was viewed, it involved our intolerance for negative emotions.  Two of Michael’s quotes from Carl Jung are illustrative:

“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in an individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”   Psychology and Religion (1938)

“The shadow is the seat of creativity… represents the true spirit of life against the arid scholar.”  Memories, Dreams and Reflections (1963)

With respect to the negative emotions of shadow, Michael presented the typology of Sylvan Tomkins [Affect Imagery (1962)] in which Tomkins reduced all negative emotions to combinations of shame and humiliation; distress and anguish; disgust; fear and terror; anger and rage; and dissmell (reactions to really bad smells).  Michael argued that it was these unsettling feelings that could be brought to awareness with shadow or edge play.

To do so required the establishment of safety, boundaries and trust, which are embodied in the BDSM concepts of consent and negotiation.  These established the conditions for constructive self-exploration.

With respect to healing past hurts, Michael began with the now familiar empirical evidence that BDSM interests are not caused by historical trauma, but went on to emphasize that that some people in the world of kink were quite deliberately healing trauma through BDSM activity.   Michael presented theories of kink from Robert Stoller — Perversion: the Erotic form of Hatred (1975) and John Money — Lovemaps (1986) as examples of alternative theories of kink causation.  (My quick summary: To grossly oversimplify, Stoller was a long time student of gender, and reframed Freudian theories of perversion into threats to the paraphilic’s gender identity.  Money synthesized observations from ethology with Freudian ideas about the unconscious to explain how sexual preferences might be caused by preconscious interactions in early life.)  Michael then used opponent process theory to explain how a kind of mastery over past hurts could be achieved through enactments in contemporary life.
  
Finally, with respect to adrenaline rush, Michael cited the theories of Jack Morin, — The Erotic Mind (1996) -who is noted for his insight that special erotic intensity attends sexual activities that are founded on obstacles to sexual expression based on negative emotions.  Morin thought that some sex therapy properly focused on removing barriers like performance anxiety and inhibitions to achieve freer sexual expression.  But erotic intensity could be enhanced by presenting and overcoming barriers that were in a Goldilocks zone of being formidable enough to overcome without being either trivial or overwhelming.  Given the relationship between fear and adrenaline, Morin’s ideas seem tailor made for some kinky erotic expression.  Other sources of intensity:  longing and anticipation as in edging and orgasm denial; violating prohibitions through transgressive behaviors; the experience of power itself; and overcoming ambivalence.

One of the strengths of Michael’s presentation was that it overcomes the common problem of defining edge play in terms of some domain of specific activities.  Implicit in this model is that what is on the edge for one person is not on the edge for another, and that the edge is necessarily time and context dependent.  If real self-discovery is happening, the edge moves as one gains experiences.  What is in shadow at one time comes into the light, and may later return to shadow.  But notice that the healing and self-discovery models have different implications.  If one is learning new things about oneself, the edge will move.  New shadows are cast and discovered.  If Jack Morin is correct, one returns to the same obstacles over and over because that is where the fear is and where the adrenaline rush can be generated in overcoming them.  Play is likely to become ritualized.  A fear that is overcome becomes old hat, and loses its adrenaline rush.

Metamorphosis: Braving Transitions in Polyamorous Relationships by Rosalyn Dischiavo EdD, MA CSES of the Institute for Sexuality Education (ISEE)

Roz Dischiavo
Roz’s presentation is the first application of a model from family systems theory originally articulated by Papernow in 1993 for use with blended families, to the new application of helping polyamorous ‘families’ understand certain transitions in poly life and troublesome enough that they are very commonly encountered among poly clients who come to therapy.
Roz began with explanations of various transitions in polyamorous life, giving examples of a couple changing from swinging to poly lifestyle, or from couples-based poly to egalitarian poly, or the dread ‘replacement’ in which a poly couple dissolves and one of the partners is replaced by a metamour.  But a common source of therapy referrals generated by couples is the transition from monogamous pairs to a poly family, and this is the work to which Papernow’s model is most closely analogous.
Paparenow’s model has seven stages: 

Fantasy
Immersion
Awareness
Mobilization
Action
Contact
Resolution

In Fantasy, the participants each have their preconceived ideas and ideologies about how the blended family is going to work.  In blended families, that may mean ideas by the biological parent about how great the step parent will be, or ideas and fears that the kids may have about how the step will try to replace their ‘real’ parent.  In poly, this often means the love felt for the metamour and untested ideas about how the metamour will get along in relation to the newly poly couple.  Often it does not include realities about how finances are going to be managed, space shared or chores divvied up.  I would add that it is useful to note the similarities between Roz’s model here and the work of Esther Perel who identifies romantic idealization as a frequent obstacle to satisfying sexual relationships for many couples, not just kinky ones.  Aspects of Roz’s model may often apply to the social context of resolving other intimacy concerns.

In Immersion, both in blended families and in poly, the illusions held when fantasies are untested tend to get shattered.  The step parent proves far less invested, or perhaps over-invested in parenting.  The metamour proves surprisingly intolerant of all the video gaming, hates Game of Thrones, didn’t realize how hard it is to live day-to-day with a gluten-free diet, or doesn’t want to leave and go back to his house at everyone’s bedtime.  If nothing works, chaos or failure may ensue, but assuming the shattering is not too severe, the systems proceed to…

Awareness of the realistic problems that need to be overcome to accomplish the originally wished for goods that were articulated in fantasy.   The participants confront the new realities that cause their fantasies to fail to work out as planned and struggle with the confusion about that tension between expectations and results.

Mobilization occurs when participants try to adjust to the new realities.  Conflict is often high, negotiations are attempted, expectations are revised, sometimes brutally.  Perhaps at this stage, the blended family fails and kids go to the other parent or the step partner returns to their own residence.  In poly, perhaps the original couple abandons the attempt to transition.  Often, new strategies are mutually arrived at, and go forward on a more realistic basis than was attempted during immersion.

Action synthesizes these new efforts with new, and often more broadly participatory agreements.  The new relationship structures go forward on a more solid foundation.  Participants start to have positive experiences with the transition where the adjustments have been successful.

Contact results from the accumulation of positive experiences at bonding, conflict resolution, and redefined roles that emerged in Mobilization and Action.  If things weren’t fixed, the blend or transition may have failed, but usually successful Action results in increased trust and conflicts when they occur here are routine and managed, rather than scary, new and threatening to the new structure.

Resolution occurs when adjustments have stabilized to the new relationship structures.  These may not all be positive, for example the teen who opposed step mom moving in and controlling everything is spending more time away from home at friends now and is less involved with the family, but everyone is accepting of the new order and coping strategies are in place for the routine rough spots it entails.

Papernow’s family systems approach looks at these steps in terms of their participants’ different fantasies, roles, expectations, and the resources and rules by which the resources are allocated to manage conflicts and transitions.  Different families have different contexts, histories and traditions, even if they more or less confront these steps.  This model does not make the process of transition primarily dependent on explanations involving individual psychopathology, which is a huge advantage in terms of making therapy a place where stigma is not inadvertently perpetuated against nontraditional participants and their experiences.

I would add that in so far as coming out kinky or gay can also involve a process very much like this one, particularly for people who see their variant status not just as an intrapsychic issue of personal identity, but who require certain reactions from a larger social system in which they are embedded.  We are not just mental health professionals, kinky, cancer patients, or church elders for ourselves, but in terms of their effects on others.  So this model can be important when others are involved in decisions that are nevertheless primarily viewed as personal.  But as a family systems model, it can only work with intimately involved participants.  It might help when coming out to your partner or family of origin, but is going to be difficult to use with your employer, bowling league, or church group, even though their reactions are important to you.

A salient strength of Roz’s application of Papernow is that it provides an understandable context for the often disruptive feelings that accompany transitions.   It normalizes anxieties, losses, and conflicts that are commonly encountered. It is terrific at destigmatizing the rough spots of transition, and this is particularly important for people who may already be gun shy because of the history of stigma CNMs and kinksters face in the general society.  And the model itself is inherently destigmatizing for a general audience by making clear that it many ways, for all their colorful and titillating differences, AltSex folk confront understandable conflicts with which we are all familiar.  Men aren’t from Mars, women from Venus, trans folk from the asteroid belt and kinksters from Uranus (sorry, couldn’t resist!).  We are all from earth, and subject to many of the same influences despite our differences.

Age Play:  Eros, Practicality, and Walking the Edge by David Ortmann, LCSW

David Ortmann
Perhaps the bravest presentation was David’s exposition of how age play might be a creative outlet for the sexual expression of pedophilic desires.  While this is a common sense idea, it flies in the face of a great deal of political theory that suggests that consensual AltSex groups stay away from any content as socially poisonous as an analogy between adult kinky activity and pedophilia.

Age play is a form of erotic role play in which participants take roles that emphasize differences from their chronological age.  Often this has a strongly regressive component and adults assume the roles of teens, children, toddlers and infants.  When one partner is the adult, they are the ‘big’, and the partner who plays a child is the ‘little’.  A certain amount of this goes on in non-kinky relationships when we call our partner ‘baby’ or ‘daddy’.  In age play, partners may assume caretaking functions that are far removed from adult/adult activities such as diapering, toilette training, spanking and discipline, feeding, suckling, and just about anything that turns them on.  As age and childhood status are heavily saturated with power dynamics, there is plenty of opportunity for age related D/s, and enactment of incestuous and seductive dynamics.
 
Given these issues, the kink community has made strenuous efforts to differentiate age play from attraction to under age people as sexual objects.  That boundary rests on several ideas.  First, kinks is stigmatized enough as it is, and kinksters do not wish to blur the public perceptions about who is in their communities.  Second, consent is fundamental to kink community ideology, so discussion of any activity that does not involve fully consenting adults is anathema.  Third, pedophiles, as arguably the most stigmatized sexual variation of them all, do not exactly make safe political bedfellows.  And perhaps most important of all, the science about the relationship between sex desire and behavior is so poor, we have no idea how many people with pedophilic desire refrain from ever committing illegal behaviors despite those desires.  Such people are powerfully disincentivized to come forward and admit to desires that are, in some legal venues, illegal to even articulate.  There are some states that require therapists to report client disclosures of any contact with child porn, and these laws are always intended to make state officials, rather than the therapist community, responsible for deciding what the boundaries are to tolerated personal expression.

So David’s suggestion that age play might be a safe outlet for people with pedophilic desires is not easy to listen to for kinksters, the mental health community, or the larger society which, despite solid scientific evidence to the contrary, is so afraid of sexual differences that they expect transgendered people to assault them in public restrooms.  At this point I would also remind the reader of Margie’s history, in which female sadomasochists were excluded by mainstream feminists, lesbians initially excluded from the Leathersex community, and kinky folk generally marginalized by conventional society despite Kinsey’s evidence that sexual variability is typical.   If the treatment of pedophiles who don’t offend is left to forensic psychologists, what chance do non-offending people have of getting the healing power of social connections and the opportunity to tell their stories in a context where they might expect a sympathetic hearing?

David’s argument is a rational one.  If otherwise cis-gendered or gay kinksters can get sexual satisfaction from playing at being bigs and littles, why shouldn’t some pedophiles be able to sublimate their desires into legally unobjectionable role play with adults assuming the roles of children?
 
In the present environment, scarcely any group is motivated to appropriate money to make an investigation of so-called ‘virtuous’ (non-offending) pedophiles.   Present practice is to attempt to force the label pedophile on anyone who admits to such desires.  What we do know about pedophiles is almost entirely through the study of people who have been criminally prosecuted.  The US vigorously prosecutes child porn, even when it is kept on foreign servers in jurisdictions that do not criminalize these behaviors or do not share any of our varying State laws about the age of consent.

David presented his conclusions from 12 cases that fantasy could be used constructively to manage pedophilic impulses, and reported only one case where serious problems were encountered with such work.  It is certainly true that a great deal of shadow play goes on in the kink community, much of it benign or constructive, but problems are occasionally reported.  But as data goes, this is folk wisdom, not yet science.
 
We have heard from others at NYC AltSex 2016 that there is insight to be had by moving toward our fears.  David has done a great job of modeling exactly that. 
  
Miscellanea:

The afterparty: left-to-right: Lydia Leinsdorf, Dulcinea Pitagora, Michael Aaron, attendee, Zhana Vrangalova, and Russell Stambaugh

The conference included a Q&A with all the presenters, which I will decline to summarize, and a social gathering in a Lower East Side watering hole attended by the conference organizers, volunteers, and a few of the attendees.  All-in-all, it was a very well put together event.  Perhaps the organizers will brag here about how much money was raised for CARAS.

A sure sign of success is that the event will be repeated in NYC AltSex 2017 scheduled for April 28, 2017.  Congratulations to everyone who made it so successful!

Credits:  While the work of the presenters is their own, the summaries and some commentary are the responsibility of the blog author.  I am solely responsible for any errors, and will cheerfully correct them.  
All presentations had slides except David’s.  Requests for slides or references are for the presenters, please.
Photos here, except as noted, are submissions from the presenters and stolen by the author.  The afterparty photo is the work of the NYC AltSex 2016 Conference photographer.  
Within all those caveats:

© Russell J Stambaugh, May, 2016, Ann Arbor MI, All rights reserved