How We Become Who We Are - 3

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


Now we move, following on from last week, to the adult stage. We have considered how infantile sexuality, embedded in our early childhood interactions with those around us, is the thing that shunts us toward an understanding of our own genderized position. This is not a small thing. In doing so it lays down deeply held convictions about ourselves, the world around us and how we interact with the same.
We also considered how after a quiet period up to about 12 or so, the sexual life within us re-emerges with great force. Now the early patterns are put to more direct use in terms of our sexuality. Now as we enter our teens we begin seeing ourselves not just as genderised beings, that is either boy or girl, but as more fully sexual beings. By this I mean, we now become people for whom the achievement of pleasure through the enactment of our sexuality becomes possible. We begin interacting with others, generally our peers, in a way that has an undeniable sexual content. It naturally starts innocently enough, with kisses and hugs or holding hands. By our late teens or early twenties most people will have begun to express their sexuality in a physical sense with one other or many other partners.
So the business of being adult, sexually active beings has begun. We have entered this phase, in terms of who we are, in the only way we know how. Whatever misconceptions, doubts, prohibitions, anger, depressive ideas, exalted ideals, or self criticisms we have picked up along the way, are now with us for the journey. And the journey essentially comprises being driven to find someone, same sex or different sex, who will do for us what the person we once had to separate from in our early childhood also did for us.
We are not talking about marrying our mothers or our fathers. We are talking about something far more fundamental than that. We are talking about finding someone to love us unconditionally. Someone for whom we can become the thing that will trigger their desire. This is pretty much exactly the position we all once found ourselves in from infancy onwards.
Back then we were more or less guaranteed of having our needs and demands met if we could trigger the desire of our primary carers to do it for us. Now we are adults and we are seeking the same thing in those around us, principally among those with whom we can identify the possibility of sexual satisfaction. The challenge as adults is to wield this influence. Some of us find it easy. Some find it impossible. Others are baffled by its requirements. That’s because from early childhood we gained an inkling of how good or not so good we were at this particular game or masquerade. From incredibly early on we already understand how capable or not we were at being the thing that could mobilise the desire of others.
We elevate those who we believe are good at this. We imagine it is because these people are thinner, better looking, more intelligent, and so on. It is always an ‘it’ that they have which gives them the edge in human relations. We even say it of them: he has it, she has it, without ever being able to fully define what this ‘it’ is. Sometimes we call it sex appeal, again in an attempt at recognising that something around sexuality and a certainty or absoluteness of their gender position is combined with an ability to offer the promise of satisfying our needs.
For an earlier generation Marilyn Monroe was an image or icon that had ‘it’. She was, in her public persona, the cause of all desire and the satisfier of all needs. But when we start to consider iconic figures such as this it leads us to the notion of ‘seeming’ or appearing to have it and the concept of masking the truth. It also leads us to the misapprehension that it is only about sex or sex appeal.
It may manifest itself as the drive for sexual satisfaction. But Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (so named after Dr Jacques Lacan who created it) has long been pointing to the fact that the human drive is ongoing and unstoppable and is not just about sex. It begins from birth and continues until death. It is the thing that has us constantly searching, changing, trying new things, seeking new mountains to climb or believing that we can be fully satisfied with the next lover or the bigger house or the faster car.
As such, there is an un-satisfiability intrinsic in it. There is no answer to the drive within us such that it will be quenched forever. We put names on it in order to help us achieve temporary respite from it and from early on one of the dominant names we put on it is sex. Yet a paradox of our time is that with sex more freely available, complete human happiness is not any closer. This is not because sex is disappointing, certainly for most it is not, but because the drive within us, of which the sex drive is just one component, also wants to be rid of fear, anxiety, inadequacy, uncertainty, pain, discomfort, and so on. We ask a lot of sex and, correlatively, we over-estimate its curative powers.
From early childhood we learned that something in the area of human sexuality, both in terms of gender difference and in the ability to trigger desire in others, held the answer to our questions. And it is this enigma which gives sex and sexuality such allure. Our consumer society ensures that many products are sold to us on the basis of this allure. A generation of young women, from teens upwards, believe that embodying this allure is the thing that makes them women.
For those who have successfully navigated the various challenges that face us all on the road to adopting our sexuality and identity, adult life is challenging but not overwhelming and is broadly embraced in a variety of ways. For those who have not navigated successfully, each new challenge comes with the threat of inhibition, impossibility and doubt and is viewed from a fixed and limiting perspective.