Disorganization & Sex
The fluid adventure of sex
Jamieson webster
When I think about sex as psychoanalysis conceives of it, I hear the phrase ‘Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink’ from Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Granted this is a particularly hysterical way of parsing a problem replete with voracious orality, an emphasis on dissatisfaction, and a metaphoric density bordering on confusion, but why not begin with a confession of my oral issues? It’s impetuous, and it knows no bounds—I simply love the pleasures of the mouth. Sex is sometimes felt as a curse and not a cure, though for the ancient mariner the cure was to learn to love the albatross, not to fear it. To this end, I want to speak to the importance of sex and the rarity of sex in the psychoanalytic sense; the extreme search one has to engage in to find what can assuage a thirst. Sex has the power to bring something revelatory, a satisfaction that we name sexual which changes something in reality. At my most open, I want to us to all be on this adventure.
For psychoanalysis, sex and civilisation are in a tight dialectical relationship: human sexuality is unnatural, meaning it goes beyond the programme that can define life. Sex needs life to create forms that can meet its anarchic, unquenchable nature. Sex presses us up against the ways we attempt to organise its excess. Sex disorganises. What might contain it? Whatever our solutions or satisfactions, from artistic expressions to scientific inventions, the multitude of institutions centred on the body, on education, on consumerism and the family, these are always, only, partial solutions—for a time, for one singular individual, for one specific societal locale. If we start to fear that we cannot offer adequate containment, we can initiate attempts to bring desire under wraps and at our most violent, kill it, desiccate the environs, even at our own cost. This desire and its impediments, civilisation and its discontents, defines what psychoanalysis understands about human life as sex life.
Sex has the power to bring something revelatory, a satisfaction that we name sexual which changes something in reality.
I am reminded of my water breaking—I recently had a daughter—and the panic it induced in the medical personnel who need the breaking of waters to line up seamlessly with readiness to give birth; it often does not. So they force the issue and it is unpleasant; a series of painful interventions that make you wonder who invented them and whether it was with the actual body with sexual organs in mind. As a psychoanalyst, in my experience, the strangest and cruelest practices are driven from the places where medical attention to the body and the question of sex are close. You get a feeling that the sexuality of bodies brings medical practitioners toward something they don’t understand, perhaps don’t want to understand, and need to feel is separate from the work that they do.
Sex in psychoanalysis at its most clichéd often brings up the trope of a desire to return to the womb, reverse-birth as a return to the water, to the safe environs of the motherland. But the psychoanalytic message emphasises the barriers to this fantasy. We humans cannot return to the womb because billions of years ago we crawled from the seas onto land. Our time in amniotic fluids isn’t even a memory, even when it is a reality, even when it is our point of origin, now only existing in the form of a desire that is forced to search for it knows not what. The ice age for Freud, when the seas dried up or froze, is the mythic moment of the birth of neurotic sexuality. Human sexuality stranded on land. The project is the pursuit of a more fluid sexuality. This is the question of sex in psychoanalysis as I understand it.
My previous book had ‘disorder’ in the title; this became an important word for me, a way to resist the psychiatric love of multiplying the realm of supposed disorders, especially personality disorders. I embraced disorder in the book; I don’t know what a personality is. In this newly edited collection of papers, ‘disorganisation’ speaks to an illusion about organisation. Sometimes I like to think this illusion is beginning to evaporate. During my clinical training, ‘disorganised’ was a word we used psychiatrically to label someone’s thoughts that were seen as scattered, fragmented, splintering, that couldn’t be gathered and made coherent. But who could be the judge of what counted as coherent? Did we really believe that there was such an ideal person? While the previous book links the body to disorder, this one links sex to disorganisation. We encounter an everyday demand to put our bodies and our ideas in some kind of order, to streamline our sex life, to reproduce the image of ‘settling down.’ Psychoanalysis says, point blank, that nothing could be more impossible, and nothing is more counterproductive to the sexuality unique to human beings; one that, as Freud points out, goes beyond instinct, beyond pleasure, and is thus radically open. Open, but for carrying the burden of history.
In a book about sex, I decided to shift to a word that has ‘organ’ in it—importantly, in the form of its undoing. Lacan remarked that post-coitus our organs are side-lined, we are stripped of them, uncocked, as intensity leaves our body. Perhaps this is the point of orgasm—taking us (our wishes and expectations) down a notch, leaving us with nothing but scattered memories and traces of excitement and tenderness, grasping at these after-pleasures. These pieces of sex life are what we have, a minimal organisation, a kind of disorganised amalgam, and a precious one. I recently encountered Oliver Davis and Tim Dean’s book Hatred of Sex (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), which opens with this polemical provocation: ‘Like democracy, sex is messy and disordering, hateable as well as desireable.’ The question is how to welcome the disorder and the disorganising force of sex (and democracy), and the ways that resistance to it, and indeed hatred of it, are being utilised for the purposes of anti-democratic power. This is the contemporary crisis the authors see in rising autocracies, and no less in multiplying conspiracies, like QAnon. These organs of organisation. Here Davis and Dean contextualise the term ‘hatred’: ‘Sex betokens . . . the highly complex relationship that all humans have with their body’s capacity for intense, even excessive pleasure. It is the underestimated difficulty of that relationship with one’s own pleasures that prompts us to speak in terms of a distinct hatred of sex.’
The psychoanalyst is the one who takes on the burden of disorganisation and tries, at all costs, to do something other than make it go away.
A question of the psychoanalytic cure that touches psychoanalysis with respect to its knowledge, its institutes and the passing down of clinical knowledge: what organisation is possible that allows for the place of disorganisation, messiness, difficulty? The story of psychoanalytic institutes and psychoanalytic training does not fare well in this arena; there is calcification of sexuality in these institutional forms and bureaucratic regulations. Freud had the audacity to imagine a civilisation that could tolerate the sheer multiplicity of sexuality, the singularity of individual styles of pleasure and unpleasure, of which the psychoanalyst has the odd glimpse in clinical work. The psychoanalyst is the one who takes on the burden of disorganisation and tries, at all costs, to do something other than make it go away. We do so with no guarantee and at great risk. We do so having to test everything on ourselves first, knowing that where we falter, step back, we will never be able to lead our patients all that much further. Can’t you almost envision a form of democracy that takes on this manner, this same weight of responsibility? Water, everywhere.
Just this evening my daughter and I were playing at taking turns sucking on each other’s faces, my chin, her mouth, my cheek, her neck. The pleasure was ecstatic, not just because of the pleasure of sucking, the pleasure of the lips and the tongue, but also the game of it, the furtive exchange of gazes, the unfolding and developing rhythms, the play of choice around where, when, how hard, and always a question of when to stop. It was late. She soon grew tired. When infants are sleepy they are more disorganised; like loose ends, their bodies fray around the edges and they are unsure of what to do with themselves. Sometimes her knees buckle out from under her. Many times she does something very special at this place of disorganisation, which I’ve come to marvel at: she invents something new as a way of soothing herself, extending pleasure, and falling asleep (no doubt entering that miraculous space of disorganisation known as dream life). It’s a little like why we have our patients lie down on a couch—to get closer to this. Tonight, she figured out that not only could she suck, she could blow, and she could make the most incredible noises, which created a whole song that made me laugh and laugh and laugh, which pleased her, but not any more than she had already pleased herself. I know because once I was quiet, she continued as if I wasn’t there, refining her instrument, playing with her new organ, until she slept.
This is an excerpt from Disorganization & Sex (Divided Publishing, 2022).