There are four kinds of love in Western tradition. One is sex, or what we call lust, libido. The second is eros, the drive of love to procreate or create—the urge, as the Greeks put it, toward higher forms of being and relationship. A third is philia, or friendship, brotherly love. The fourth is agape or caritas as the Latins called it, the love which is devoted to the welfare of the other, the prototype of which is the love of God for man. Every human experience of authentic love is a blending, in varying proportions, of these four.

We begin with sex not only because that is where our society begins but also because that is where every man’s biological existence begins as well. Each of us owes his being to the fact that at some moment in history a man and a woman leapt the gap, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “between the desire and the spasm.” Regardless of how much sex may be banalized in our society, it still remains the power of procreation, the drive which perpetuates the race, the source at once of the human being’s most intense pleasure and his most pervasive anxiety. It can, in its daimonic form, hurl the individual into sloughs of despond, and, when allied with eros, it can lift him out of his despondency into orbits of ecstasy.

The ancients took sex, or lust, for granted just as they took death for granted. It is only in the contemporary age that we have succeeded, on a fairly broad scale, in singling out sex for our chief concern and have required it to carry the weight of all four forms of love. Regardless of Freud’s overextension of sexual phenomena as such—in which he is but the voice of the struggle of thesis and antithesis of modern history—it remains true that sexuality is basic to the ongoing power of the race and surely has the importance Freud gave it, if not the extension. Trivialize sex in our novels and dramas as we will, or defend ourselves from its power by cynicism and playing it cool as we wish, sexual passion remains ready at any moment to catch us off guard and prove that it is still the mysterium tremendum.

But as soon as we look at the relation of sex and love in our time, we find ourselves immediately caught up in a whirlpool of contradictions. Let us, therefore, get our bearings by beginning with a brief phenomenological sketch of the strange paradoxes which surround sex in our society.

SEXUAL WILDERNESS

In Victorian times, when the denial of sexual impulses, feelings, and drives was the mode and one would not talk about sex in polite company, an aura of sanctifying repulsiveness surrounded the whole topic. Males and females dealt with each other as though neither possessed sexual organs. William James, that redoubtable crusader who was far ahead of his time on every other topic, treated sex with the polite aversion characteristic of the turn of the century. In the whole two volumes of his epoch-making Principles of Psychology, only one page is devoted to sex, at the end of which he adds, “These details arc a little unpleasant to discuss….”¹ But William Blake’s warning a century before Victorianism, that “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence,” was amply demonstrated by the later psychotherapists. Freud, a Victorian who did look at sex, was right in his description of the morass of neurotic symptoms which resulted from cutting off so vital a part of the human body and the self.

Then, in the 1920’s, a radical change occurred almost overnight. The belief became a militant dogma in liberal circles that the opposite of repression—namely, sex education, freedom of talking, feeling, and expression—would have healthy effects, and obviously constituted the only stand for the enlightened person. In an amazingly short period following World War I, we shifted from acting as though sex did not exist at all to being obsessed with it. We now placed more emphasis on sex than any society since that of ancient Rome, and some scholars believe we are more preoccupied with sex than any other people in all of history. Today, far from not talking about sex, we might well seem, to a visitor from Mars dropping into Times Square, to have no other topic of communication.

And this is not solely an American obsession. Across the ocean in England, for example, “from bishops to biologists, everyone is in on the act.” A perceptive front-page article in The Times Literary Supplement, London, goes on to point to the “whole turgid flood of post-Kinsey utilitarianism and post-Chatterley moral uplift. Open any newspaper, any day (Sunday in particular), and the odds are you will find some pundit treating the public to his views on contraception, abortion, adultery, obscene publications, homosexuality between consenting adults or (if all else fails) contemporary moral patterns among our adolescents.”²

Partly as a result of this radical shift, many therapists today rarely see patients who exhibit repression of sex in the manner of Freud’s pre-World War I hysterical patients. In fact, we find in the people who come for help just the opposite: a great deal of talk about sex, a great deal of sexual activity, practically no one complaining of cultural prohibitions over going to bed as often or with as many partners as one wishes. But what our patients do complain of is lack of feeling and passion. “The curious thing about this ferment of discussion is how little anyone seems to be enjoying emancipation.”³ So much sex and so little meaning or even fun in it!

Where the Victorian didn’t want anyone to know that he or she had sexual feelings, we are ashamed if we do not. Before 1910, if you called a lady “sexy” she would be insulted; nowadays, she prizes the compliment and rewards you by turning her charms in your direction. Our patients often have the problems of frigidity and impotence, but the strange and poignant thing we observe is how desperately they struggle not to let anyone find out they don’t feel sexually. The Victorian nice man or woman was guilty if he or she did experience sex; now we are guilty if we don’t.

One paradox, therefore, is that enlightenment has not solved the sexual problems in our culture. To be sure, there are important positive results of the new enlightenment, chiefly in increased freedom for the individual. Most external problems are eased: sexual knowledge can be bought in any bookstore, contraception is available everywhere except in Boston where it is still believed, as the English countess averred on her wedding night, that sex is “too good for the common people.” Couples can, without guilt and generally without squeamishness, discuss their sexual relationship and undertake to make it more mutually gratifying and meaningful. Let these gains not be underestimated. External social anxiety and guilt have lessened; dull would be the man who did not rejoice in this.

But internal anxiety and guilt have increased. And in some ways these are more morbid, harder to handle, and impose a heavier burden upon the individual than external anxiety and guilt.

The challenge a woman used to face from men was simple and direct—would she or would she not go to bed?—a direct issue of how she stood vis-à-vis cultural mores. But the question men ask now is no longer, “Will she or won’t she?” but “Can she or can’t she?” The challenge is shifted to the woman’s personal adequacy, namely, her own capacity to have the vaunted orgasm—which should resemble a grand mal seizure. Though we might agree that the second question places the problem of sexual decision more where it should be, we cannot overlook the fact that the first question is much easier for the person to handle. In my practice, one woman was afraid to go to bed for fear that the man “won’t find me very good at making love.” Another was afraid because “I don’t even know how to do it,” assuming that her lover would hold this against her. Another was scared to death of the second marriage for fear that she wouldn’t be able to have the orgasm as she had not in her first. Often the woman’s hesitation is formulated as, “He won’t like me well enough to come back again.”

In past decades you could blame society’s strict mores and preserve your own self-esteem by telling yourself what you did or didn’t do was society’s fault and not yours. And this would give you some time in which to decide what you do want to do, or to let yourself grow into a decision. But when the question is simply how you can perform, your own sense of adequacy and self-esteem is called immediately into question, and the whole weight of the encounter is shifted inward to how you can meet the test.

College students, in their fights with college authorities about hours girls are to be permitted in the men’s rooms, are curiously blind to the fact that rules are often a boon. Rules give the student time to find himself. He has the leeway to consider a way of behaving without being committed before he is ready, to try on for size, to venture into relationships tentatively—which is part of any growing up. Better to have the lack of commitment direct and open rather than to go into sexual relations under pressure—doing violence to his feelings by having physical commitment without psychological. He may flaunt the rules; but at least they give some structure to be flaunted. My point is true whether he obeys the rule or not. Many contemporary students, understandably anxious because of their new sexual freedom, repress this anxiety (“one should like freedom”) and then compensate for the additional anxiety the repression gives them by attacking the parietal authorities for not giving them more freedom!

What we did not see in our short-sighted liberalism in sex was that throwing the individual into an unbounded and empty sea of free choice does not in itself give freedom, but is more apt to increase inner conflict. The sexual freedom to which we were devoted fell short of being fully human.

In the arts, we have also been discovering what an illusion it was to believe that mere freedom would solve our problem. Consider, for example, the drama. In an article entitled “Is Sex Kaput?,” Howard Taubman, former drama critic of The New York Times, summarized what we have all observed in drama after drama: “Engaging in sex was like setting out to shop on a dull afternoon; desire had nothing to do with it and even curiosity was faint.”⁴ Consider also the novel. In the “revolt against the Victorians,” writes Leon Edel, “the extremists have had their day. Thus far they have impoverished the novel rather than enriched it.”⁵ Edel perceptively brings out the crucial point that in sheer realistic “enlightenment” there has occurred a dehumanization of sex in fiction. There are “sexual encounters in Zola,” he insists, “which have more truth in them than any D. H. Lawrence described—and also more humanity.”⁶

The battle against censorship and for freedom of expression surely was a great battle to win, but has it not become a new strait jacket? The writers, both novelists and dramatists, “would rather hock their typewriters than turn in a manuscript without the obligatory scenes of unsparing anatomical documentation of their characters’ sexual behavior….”⁷ Our “dogmatic enlightenment” is self-defeating: it ends up destroying the very sexual passion it set out to protect. In the great tide of realistic chronicling, we forgot, on the stage and in the novel and even in psychotherapy, that imagination is the life-blood of eros, and that realism is neither sexual nor erotic. Indeed, there is nothing less sexy than sheer nakedness, as a random hour at any nudist camp will prove. It requires the infusion of the imagination (which I shall later call intentionality) to transmute physiology and anatomy into interpersonal experience—into art, into passion, into eros in a million forms which has the power to shake or charm us.

Could it not be that an “enlightenment” which reduces itself to sheer realistic detail is itself an escape from the anxiety involved in the relation of human imagination to erotic passion?

SALVATION THROUGH TECHNIQUE

A second paradox is that the new emphasis on technique in sex and love-making backfires. It often occurs to me that there is an inverse relationship between the number of how-to-do-it books perused by a person or rolling off the presses in a society and the amount of sexual passion or even pleasure experienced by the persons involved. Certainly nothing is wrong with technique as such, in playing golf or acting or making love. But the emphasis beyond a certain point on technique in sex makes for a mechanistic attitude toward love-making, and goes along with alienation, feelings of loneliness, and depersonalization.

One aspect of the alienation is that the lover, with his age-old art, tends to be superseded by the computer operator with his modern efficiency. Couples place great emphasis on bookkeeping and timetables in their love-making—a practice confirmed and standardized by Kinsey. If they fall behind schedule they become anxious and feel impelled to go to bed whether they want to or not. My colleague, Dr. John Schimel, observes, “My patients have endured stoically, or without noticing, remarkably destructive treatment at the hands of their spouses, but they have experienced falling behind in the sexual time-table as a loss of love.”⁸ The man feels he is somehow losing his masculine status if he does not perform up to schedule, and the woman that she has lost her feminine attractiveness if too long a period goes by without the man at least making a pass at her. The phrase “between men,” which women use about their affairs, similarly suggests a gap in time like the entr’acte. Elaborate accounting- and ledger-book lists—how often this week have we made love? did he (or she) pay the right amount of attention to me during the evening? was the foreplay long enough?—make one wonder how the spontaneity of this most spontaneous act can possibly survive. The computer hovers in the stage wings of the drama of love-making the way Freud said one’s parents used to.

It is not surprising then, in this preoccupation with techniques, that the questions typically asked about an act of love-making are not, Was there passion of meaning or pleasure in the act? but, How well did I perform?⁹ Take, for example, what Cyril Connolly calls “the tyranny of the orgasm,” and the preoccupation with achieving a simultaneous orgasm, which is another aspect of the alienation. I confess that when people talk about the “apocalyptic orgasm,” I find myself wondering, Why do they have to try so hard? What abyss of self-doubt, what inner void of loneliness, are they trying to cover up by this great concern with grandiose effects?

Even the sexologists, whose attitude is generally the more sex the merrier, are raising their eyebrows these days about the anxious overemphasis on achieving the orgasm and the great importance attached to “satisfying” the partner. A man makes a point of asking the woman if she “made it,” or if she is “all right,” or uses some other euphemism for an experience for which obviously no euphemism is possible. We men are reminded by Simone de Beauvoir and other women who try to interpret the love act that this is the last thing in the world a woman wants to be asked at that moment. Furthermore, the technical preoccupation robs the woman of exactly what she wants most of all, physically and emotionally, namely the man’s spontaneous abandon at the moment of climax. This abandon gives her whatever thrill or ecstasy she and the experience are capable of. When we cut through all the rigmarole about roles and performance, what still remains is how amazingly important the sheer fact of intimacy of relationship is—the meeting, the growing closeness with the excitement of not knowing where it will lead, the assertion of the self, and the giving of the self—in making a sexual encounter memorable. Is it not this intimacy that makes us return to the event in memory again and again when we need to be warmed by whatever hearths life makes available?

It is a strange thing in our society that what goes into building a relationship—the sharing of tastes, fantasies, dreams, hopes for the future, and fears from the past—seems to make people more shy and vulnerable than going to bed with each other. They are more wary of the tenderness that goes with psychological and spiritual nakedness than they are of the physical nakedness in sexual intimacy.

THE NEW PURITANISM

The third paradox is that our highly-vaunted sexual freedom has turned out to be a new form of puritanism. I spell it with a small “p” because I do not wish to confuse this with the original Puritanism. That, as in the passion of Hester and Dimmesdale in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, was a very different thing.¹⁰ I refer to puritanism as it came down via our Victorian grandparents and became allied with industrialism and emotional and moral compartmentalization.

I define this puritanism as consisting of three elements. First, a state of alienation from the body. Second, the separation of emotion from reason. And third, the use of the body as a machine.

In our new puritanism, bad health is equated with sin.¹¹ Sin used to mean giving in to one’s sexual desires; it now means not having full sexual expression. Our contemporary puritan holds that it is immoral not to express your libido. Apparently this is true on both sides of the ocean: “There are few more depressing sights,” the London Times Literary Supplement writes, “than a progressive intellectual determined to end up in bed with someone from a sense of moral duty…. There is no more high-minded puritan in the world than your modern advocate of salvation through properly directed passion….”¹² A woman used to be guilty if she went to bed with a man; now she feels vaguely guilty if after a certain number of dates she still refrains; her sin is “morbid repression,” refusing to “give.” And the partner, who is always completely enlightened (or at least pretends to be) refuses to allay her guilt by getting overtly angry at her (if she could fight him on the issue, the conflict would be a lot easier for her). But he stands broadmindedly by, ready at the end of every date to undertake a crusade to assist her out of her fallen state. And this, of course, makes her “no” all the more guilt-producing for her.

This all means, of course, that people not only have to learn to perform sexually but have to make sure, at the same time, that they can do so without letting themselves go in passion or unseemly commitment—the latter of which may be interpreted as exerting an unhealthy demand upon the partner. The Victorian person sought to have love without falling into sex; the modern person seeks to have sex without falling into love.

I once diverted myself by drawing an impressionistic sketch of the attitude of the contemporary enlightened person toward sex and love. I would like to share this picture of what I call the new sophisticate:

This new puritanism has crept into contemporary psychiatry and psychology. It is argued in some books on the counseling of married couples that the therapist ought to use only the term “fuck” when discussing sexual intercourse, and to insist the patients use it; for any other word plays into the patients’ dissimulation. What is significant here is not the use of the term itself: surely the sheer lust, animal but self-conscious, and bodily abandon which is rightly called fucking is not to be left out of the spectrum of human experience. But the interesting thing is that the use of the once-forbidden word is now made into an ought—a duty for the moral reason of honesty. To be sure, it is dissimulation to deny the biological side of copulation. But it is also dissimulation to use the term fuck for the sexual experience when what we seek is a relationship of personal intimacy which is more than a release of sexual tension, a personal intimacy which will be remembered tomorrow and many weeks after tomorrow. The former is dissimulation in the service of inhibition; the latter is dissimulation in the service of alienation of the self, a defense of the self against the anxiety of intimate relationship. As the former was the particular problem of Freud’s day, the latter is the particular problem of ours.

The new puritanism brings with it a depersonalization of our whole language. Instead of making love, we “have sex” in contrast to intercourse, we “screw” instead of going to bed, we “lay” someone or (heaven help the English language as well as ourselves!) we “are laid.” This alienation has become so much the order of the day that in some psychotherapeutic training schools, young psychiatrists and psychologists are taught that it is “therapeutic” to use solely the four-letter words in sessions; the patient is probably masking some repression if he talks about making love; so it becomes our righteous duty—the new puritanism incarnate!—to let him know he only fucks. Everyone seems so intent on sweeping away the last vestiges of Victorian prudishness that we entirely forget that these different words refer to different kinds of human experience. Probably most people have experienced the different forms of sexual relationship described by the different terms and don’t have much difficulty distinguishing among them. I am not making a value judgment among these different experiences; they are all appropriate to their own kinds of relationship. Every woman wants at some time to be “laid”—transported, carried away, “made” to have passion when at first she has none, as in the famous scene between Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. But if being “laid” is all that ever happens in her sexual life, then her experience of personal alienation and rejection of sex are just around the corner. If the therapist does not appreciate these diverse kinds of experience, he will be presiding at the shrinking and truncating of the patient’s consciousness, and will be confirming the narrowing of the patient’s bodily awareness as well as his or her capacity for relationship. This is the chief criticism of the new puritanism: it grossly limits feelings, it blocks the infinite variety and richness of the act, and it makes for emotional impoverishment.

It is not surprising that the new puritanism develops smoldering hostility among the members of our society. And that hostility, in turn, comes out frequently in references to the sexual act itself. We say “go fuck yourself” or “fuck you” as a term of contempt to show that the other is of no value whatever beyond being used and tossed aside. The biological lust is here in its reductio ad absurdum. Indeed, the word fuck is the most common expletive in our contemporary language to express violent hostility. I do not think this is by accident.

FREUD AND PURITANISM

How Freudian psychoanalysis was intertwined with both the new sexual libertarianism and puritanism is a fascinating story. Social critics at cocktail parties tend to credit Freud with being the prime mover of, or at least the prime spokesman for, the new sexual freedom. But what they do not see is that Freud and psychoanalysis reflected and expressed the new puritanism in both its positive and negative forms.

The psychoanalytic puritanism is positive in its emphasis on rigorous honesty and cerebral recitude, as exemplified in Freud himself. It is negative in its providing a new system by which the body and self can be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a mechanism for gratification by way of “sexual objects.” The tendency in psychoanalysis to speak of sex as a “need” in the sense of a tension to be reduced plays into this puritanism.

We thus have to explore this problem to see how the new sexual values in our society were given a curious twist as they were rationalized psychoanalytically. “Psychoanalysis is Calvinism in Bermuda shorts,” pungently stated Dr. C. Macfie Campbell, president of the American Psychiatric Association in 1936–37, discussing the philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis. The aphorism is only half true, but that half is significant. Freud himself was an excellent example of a puritan in the positive sense in his strength of character, control of his passions, and compulsive work. Freud greatly admired Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan commander, and named a son after him. Philip Rieff, in his study Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, points out that this “affinity for militant puritanism was not uncommon among secular Jewish intellectuals, and indicates a certain preferred character type, starched with independence and cerebral rectitude rather than a particular belief or doctrine.”¹³ In his ascetic work habits, Freud shows one of the most significant aspects of puritanism, namely the use of science as a monastery. His compulsive industry was rigorously devoted to achieving his scientific goals, which transcended everything else in life (and, one might add, life itself) and for which he sublimated his passion in a quite real rather than figurative sense.

Freud himself had a very limited sexual life. His own sexual expression began late, around thirty, and subsided early, around forty, so his biographer Ernest Jones tells us. At forty-one, Freud wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess complaining of his depressed moods, and added, “Also sexual excitation is of no more use to a person like me.” Another incident points to the fact that around this age his sexual life had more or less ended. Freud reports in The Interpretation of Dreams that at one time, in his forties, he felt physically attracted to a young woman and reached out half-voluntarily and touched her. He comments on how surprised he was that he was “still” able to find the possibility for such attraction in him.¹⁴

Freud believed in the control and channeling of sexuality, and was convinced that this had specific value both for cultural development and for one’s own character. In 1883, during his prolonged engagement to Martha Bernays, the young Freud wrote to his future wife:

The basis of Freud’s doctrine of sublimation lies in this belief that libido exists in a certain quantity in the individual, that you can deprive yourself, “economize” emotionally in one way to increase your enjoyment in another, and that if you spend your libido in direct sexuality you will not have it for utilization, for example, in artistic creation. In a positive statement of appreciation of Freud’s work, Paul Tillich nevertheless remarks that the “concept of sublimation is Freud’s most puritanical belief.”¹⁶

I am not making a simple derogatory value judgment about psychoanalysis when I point out the association between it and puritanism. The original Puritan movement, in its best representatives and before its general deterioration into the moralistic compartments of Victorianism at the end of the nineteenth century, was characterized by admirable qualities of dedication to integrity and truth. The progress of modern science owes a great deal to it and, indeed, would probably not have been possible without these virtues of the secular monks in their scientific laboratories. Furthermore, a cultural development like psychoanalysis is always effect as well as cause: it reflects and expresses the emerging trends in the culture, as well as molds and influences these trends. If we are conscious of what is going on, we can, in however slight a way, influence the direction of the trends. We can then hopefully develop new values which will be relevant to our new cultural predicament.

But if we try to take the content of our values from psychoanalysis, we are thrown into a confusing contradiction not only of the values themselves but of our own self-image. It is an error to expect psychoanalysis to carry the burden of providing our values. Psychoanalysis can, by its unfolding and revealing of previously denied motives and desires and by enlarging consciousness, prepare the way for the patient’s working out values by means of which he can change. But it can never, in itself, carry the burden for the value decisions which do change a person’s life. The great contribution of Freud was his carrying of the Socratic injunction “Know thyself” into new depths that comprise, in effect, a new continent, the continent of repressed, unconscious motives. He also developed techniques in the personal relationships in therapy, based on the concepts of transference and resistance, for bringing these levels into conscious awareness. Whatever the ebb and How of the popularity of psychoanalysis, it will remain true that Freud’s discoveries and those of the others in this field are an invaluable contribution not only to the area of psychological healing but also to morality in clearing away hypocritical debris and self-deceit.

What I wish to make clear is that many people in our society, yearning for the nirvana of automatic change in their characters and relief from responsibility that comes from handing over one’s psyche to a technical process, have actually in their values of “free expression” and hedonism simply bootlegged in from psychoanalysis new contents to their old puritanism. The fact that the change in sexual attitudes and mores occurred so quickly—virtually in the one decade of the 1920’s—also argues for the assumption that we changed our clothes and our roles more than our characters. What was omitted was the opening of our senses and imaginations to the enrichment of pleasure and passion and the meaning of love; we relegated these to technical processes. In this kind of “free” love, one does not learn to love; and freedom becomes not a liberation but a new straitjacket. The upshot was that our sexual values were thrown into confusion and contradiction, and sexual love presented the almost insoluble paradoxes we are now observing.

I do not wish to overstate the case, nor to lose sight at any point of the positive benefits of the modern fluidity in sexual mores. The confusions we are describing go hand in hand with the real possibilities of freedom for the individual. Couples are able to affirm sex as a source of pleasure and delight; no longer hounded by the misconception that sex as a natural act is evil, they can become more sensitive to the actual evils in their relationships such as manipulation of each other. Free to a degree Victorians never were, they can explore ways of making their relationship more enriching. Even the growing frequency of divorce, no matter how sobering the problems it raises, has the positive psychological effect of making it harder for couples to rationalize a bad marriage by the dogma that they are “stuck” with each other. The possibility of finding a new lover makes it more necessary for us to accept the responsibility of choosing the one we do have if we stay with him or her. There is the possibility of developing a courage that is midway between—and includes both—biological lust on one hand and on the other the desire for meaningful relationship, a deepening awareness of each other, and the other aspects of what we call human understanding. Courage can be shifted from simply fighting society’s mores to the inward capacity to commit one’s self to another human being.

But these positive benefits, it is now abundantly clear, do not occur automatically. They become possible only as the contradictions which we have been describing are understood and worked through.

MOTIVES OF THE PROBLEM

In my function as a supervisory analyst at two analytic institutes, I supervise one case of each of six psychiatrists or psychologists who are in training to become analysts. I cite the six patients of these young analysts both because I know a good deal about them by now and also because, since they are not my patients, I can see them with a more objective perspective. Each one of these patients goes to bed without ostensible shame or guilt—and generally with different partners. The women—four of the six patients—all state that they don’t feel much in the sex act. The motives of two of the women for going to bed seem to be to hang on to the man and to live up to the standard that sexual intercourse is “what you do” at a certain stage. The third woman has the particular motive of generosity: she sees going to bed as something nice you give a man—and she makes tremendous demands upon him to take care of her in return. The fourth woman seems the only one who does experience some real sexual lust, beyond which her motives are a combination of generosity to and anger at the man (“I’ll force him to give me pleasure!”). The two male patients were originally impotent, and now, though able to have intercourse, have intermittent trouble with potency. But the outstanding fact is they never report getting much of a “bang” out of their sexual intercourse. Their chief motive for engaging in sex seems to be to demonstrate their masculinity. The specific purpose of one of the men, indeed, seems more to tell his analyst about his previous night’s adventure, fair or poor as it may have been, in a kind of backstage interchange of confidence between men, than to enjoy the love-making itself.

Let us now pursue our inquiry on a deeper level by asking, What are the underlying motives in these patterns? What drives people toward the contemporary compulsive preoccupation with sex in place of their previous compulsive denial of it?

The struggle to prove one’s identity is obviously a central motive—an aim present in women as well as men, as Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique made clear. This has helped spawn the idea of egalitarianism of the sexes and the interchangeability of the sexual roles. Egalitarianism is clung to at the price of denying not only biological differences—which are basic, to say the least—between men and women, but emotional differences from which come much of the delight of the sexual act. The self-contradiction here is that the compulsive need to prove you are identical with your partner means that you repress your own unique sensibilities—and this is exactly what undermines your own sense of identity. This contradiction contributes to the tendency in our society for us to become machines even in bed.

Another motive is the individual’s hope to overcome his own solitariness. Allied with this is the desperate endeavor to escape feelings of emptiness and the threat of apathy: partners pant and quiver hoping to find an answering quiver in someone else’s body just to prove that their own is not dead; they seek a responding, a longing in the other to prove their own feelings are alive. Out of an ancient conceit, this is called love.

One often gets the impression, amid the male’s flexing of sexual prowess, that men are in training to become sexual athletes. But what is the great prize of the game? Not only men, but women struggle to prove their sexual power—they too must keep up to the timetable, must show passion, and have the vaunted orgasm. Now it is well accepted in psychotherapeutic circles that, dynamically, the overconcern with potency is generally a compensation for feelings of impotence.

The use of sex to prove potency in all these different realms has led to the increasing emphasis on technical performance. And here we observe another curiously self-defeating pattern. It is that the excessive concern with technical performance in sex is actually correlated with the reduction of sexual feeling. The techniques of achieving this approach the ludicrous: one is that an anesthetic ointment is applied to the penis before intercourse. Thus feeling less, the man is able to postpone his orgasm longer. I have learned from colleagues that the prescribing of this anesthetic “remedy” for premature ejaculation is not unusual. “One male patient,” records Dr. Schimel, “was desperate about his ‘premature ejaculations,’ even though these ejaculations took place after periods of penetration of ten minutes or more. A neighbor who was a urologist recommended an anesthetic ointment to be used prior to intercourse. This patient expressed complete satisfaction with the solution and was very grateful to the urologist.”¹⁷ Entirely willing to give up any pleasure of his own, he sought only to prove himself a competent male.

A patient of mine reported that he had gone to a physician with the problem of premature ejaculation, and that such an anesthetic ointment had been prescribed. My surprise, like Dr. Schimel’s, was particularly over the fact that the patient had accepted this solution with no questions and no conflicts. Didn’t the remedy fit the necessary bill, didn’t it help him turn in a better performance? But by the time that young man got to me, he was impotent in every way imaginable, even to the point of being unable to handle such scarcely ladylike behavior on the part of his wife as her taking off her shoe while they were driving and beating him over the head with it. By all means the man was impotent in this hideous caricature of a marriage. And his penis, before it was drugged senseless, seemed to be the only character with enough “sense” to have the appropriate intention, namely to get out as quickly as possible.

Making one’s self feel less in order to perform better! This is a symbol, as macabre as it is vivid, of the vicious circle in which so much of our culture is caught. The more one must demonstrate his potency, the more he treats sexual intercourse—this most intimate and personal of all acts—as a performance to be judged by exterior requirements, the more he then views himself as a machine to be turned on, adjusted, and steered, and the less feeling he has for either himself or his partner; and the less feeling, the more he loses genuine sexual appetite and ability. The upshot of this self-defeating pattern is that, in the long run, the lover who is most efficient will also be the one who is impotent.

A poignant note comes into our discussion when we remind ourselves that this excessive concern for “satisfying” the partner is an expression, however perverted, of a sound and basic element in the sexual act: the pleasure and experience of self-affirmation in being able to give to the partner. The man is often deeply grateful toward the woman who lets herself be gratified by him—lets him give her an orgasm, to use the phrase that is often the symbol for this experience. This is a point midway between lust and tenderness, between sex and agapé—and it partakes of both. Many a male cannot feel his own identity either as a man or a person in our culture until he is able to gratify a woman. The very structure of human interpersonal relations is such that the sexual act does not achieve its full pleasure or meaning if the man and woman cannot feel they are able to gratify the other. And it is the inability to experience this pleasure at the gratification of the other which often underlies the exploitative sexuality of the rape type and the compulsive sexuality of the Don Juan seduction type. Don Juan has to perform the act over and over again because he remains forever unsatisfied, quite despite the fact that he is entirely potent and has a technically good orgasm.

Now the problem is not the desire and need to satisfy the partner as such, but the fact that this need is interpreted by the persons in the sexual act in only a technical sense—giving physical sensation. What is omitted even from our very vocabulary (and thus the words may sound “square” as I say them here) is the experience of giving feelings, sharing fantasies, offering the inner psychic richness that normally takes a little time and enables sensation to transcend itself in emotion and emotion to transcend itself in tenderness and sometimes love.

It is not surprising that contemporary trends toward the mechanization of sex have much to do with the problem of impotence. The distinguishing characteristic of the machine is that it can go through all the motions but it never feels. A knowledgeable medical student, one of whose reasons for coming into analysis was his sexual impotence, had a revealing dream. He was asking me in the dream to put a pipe in his head that would go down through his body and come out at the other end as his penis. He was confident in the dream that the pipe would constitute an admirably strong erection. What was entirely missing in this intelligent scion of our sophisticated times was any understanding at all that what he conceived of as his solution was exactly the cause of his problem, namely the image of himself as a “screwing machine.” His symbol is remarkably graphic: the brain, the intellect, is included, but true symbol of our alienated age, his shrewd system bypasses entirely the seats of emotions, the thalamus, the heart and lungs, even the stomach. Direct route from head to penis—but what is lost is the heart!¹⁸

I do not have statistics on hand concerning the present incidence of impotence in comparison with past periods, nor does anyone else so far as I have been able to discover. But my impression is that impotence is increasing these days despite (or is it because of) the unrestrained freedom on all sides. All therapists seem to agree that more men are coming to them with that problem—though whether this represents a real increase in the prevalence of sexual impotence or merely a greater awareness and ability to talk about it cannot be definitely answered. Obviously, it is one of those topics on which meaningful statistics are almost impossible to get. The fact that the book dealing with impotence and frigidity, Human Sexual Response, clung near the top of the best-seller lists for so many months, expensive and turgidly-written as it was, would seem to be plenty of evidence of the urge of men to get help on impotence. Whatever the reason, it is becoming harder for the young man as well as the old to take “yes” for an answer.

To see the curious ways the new puritanism shows itself, you have only to open an issue of Playboy, that redoubtable journal reputedly sold mainly to college students and clergymen. You discover the naked girls with silicated breasts side by side with the articles by reputable authors, and you conclude on first blush that the magazine is certainly on the side of the new enlightenment. But as you look more closely you see a strange expression in these photographed girls: detached, mechanical, uninviting, vacuous—the typical schizoid personality in the negative sense of that term. You discover that they are not “sexy” at all but that Playboy has only shifted the fig leaf from the genitals to the face. You read the letters to the editor and find the first, entitled “Playboy Priest,” telling of a priest who “lectures on Hefner’s philosophy to audiences of young people and numerous members of the clergy,” that “true Christian ethics and morality are not incompatible with Hefner’s philosophy,” and—written with enthusiastic approbation —that “most clergymen in their fashionable parsonages live more like playboys than ascetics.”¹⁹ You find another letter entitled “Jesus was a playboy,” since he loved Mary Magdalene, good food, and good grooming, and castigated the Pharisees. And you wonder why all this religious justification and why people, if they are going to be “liberated,” can’t just enjoy their liberation?

Whether one takes the cynical view that letters to the editor are “planted,” or the more generous one that these examples are selected from hundreds of letters, it amounts to the same thing. An image of a type of American male is being presented—a suave, detached, self-assured bachelor, who regards the girl as a “Playboy accessory” like items in his fashionable dress. You note also that Playboy carries no advertising for trusses, bald heads, or anything that would detract from this image. You discover that the good articles (which, frankly, can be bought by an editor who wants to hire an assistant with taste and pay the requisite amount of money) give authority to this male image.²⁰ Harvey Cox concludes that Playboy is basically antisexual, and that it is the “latest and slickest episode in man’s continuing refusal to be human.” He believes “the whole phenomenon of which Playboy is only a part vividly illustrates the awful fact of the new kind of tyranny.”²¹ The poet-sociologist Calvin Herton, discussing Playboy in connection with the fashion and entertainment world, calls it the new sexual fascism.²²

Playboy has indeed caught on to something significant in American society: Cox believes it to be “the repressed fear of involvement with women.”²³ I go farther and hold that it, as an example of the new puritanism, gets its dynamic from a repressed anxiety in American men that underlies even the fear of involvement. This is the repressed anxiety about impotence. Everything in the magazine is beautifully concocted to bolster the illusion of potency without ever putting it to the test or challenge at all. Noninvolvement (like playing it cool) is elevated into the ideal model for the Playboy. This is possible because the illusion is air-tight, ministering as it does to men fearful for their potency, and capitalizing on this anxiety. The character of the illusion is shown further in the fact that the readership of Playboy drops off significantly after the age of thirty, when men cannot escape dealing with real women. This illusion is illustrated by the fact that Hefner himself, a former Sunday-school teacher and son of devout Methodists, practically never goes outside his large establishment in North Chicago. Ensconced there, he carries on his work surrounded by his bunnies and amidst his nonalcoholic bacchanals on Pepsi-Cola.

THE REVOLT AGAINST SEX

With the confusion of motives in sex that we have noted above—almost every motive being present in the act except the desire to make love—it is no wonder that there is a diminution of feeling and that passion has lessened almost to the vanishing point. This diminution of feeling often takes the form of a kind of anesthesia (now with no need of ointment) in people who can perform the mechanical aspects of the sexual act very well. We are becoming used to the plaint from the couch or patient’s chair that “We made love, but I didn’t feel anything.” Again, the poets tell us the same things as our patients. T. S. Eliot writes in The Waste Land that after “lovely woman stoops to folly,” and the carbuncular clerk who seduced her at tea leaves,

Sex is the “last frontier,” David Riesman meaningfully phrases it in The Lonely Crowd. Gerald Sykes, in the same vein, remarks, “In a world gone grey with market reports, time studies, tax regulations and path lab analyses, the rebel finds sex to be the one green thing.”²⁴ It is surely true that the zest, adventure, and trying out of one’s strength, the discovering of vast and exciting new areas of feeling and experience in one’s self and in one’s relations to others, and the validation of the self that goes with these are indeed “frontier experiences.” They are rightly and normally present in sexuality as part of the psychosocial development of every person. Sex in our society did, in fact, have this power for several decades after the 1920’s, when almost every other activity was becoming “other-directed,” jaded, emptied of zest and adventure. But for various reasons—one of them being that sex by itself had to carry the weight for the validation of the personality in practically all other realms as well—the frontier freshness, newness, and challenge become more and more lost.

For we are now living in the post-Riesman age, and are experiencing the long-run implications of Riesman’s “other-directed” behavior, the radar-reflected way of life. The last frontier has become a teeming Las Vegas and no frontier at all. Young people can no longer get a bootlegged feeling of personal identity out of revolting in sexuality since there is nothing there to revolt against. Studies of drug addiction among young people report them as saying that the revolt against parents, the social “kick of feeling their own oats” which they used to get from sex, they now have to get from drugs. One such study indicates that students express a “certain boredom with sex, while drugs are synonymous with excitement, curiosity, forbidden adventure, and society’s abounding permissiveness.”²⁵

It no longer sounds new when we discover that for many young people what used to be called love-making is now experienced as a futile “panting palm to palm,” in Aldous Huxley’s predictive phrase; that they tell us that it is hard for them to understand what the poets were talking about, and that we should so often hear the disappointed refrain, “We went to bed but it wasn’t any good.”

Nothing to revolt against, did I say? Well, there is obviously one thing left to revolt against, and that is sex itself. The frontier, the establishing of identity, the validation of the self can be, and not infrequently does become for some people, a revolt against sexuality entirely. I am certainly not advocating this. What I wish to indicate is that the very revolt against sex—this modern Lysistrata in robot’s dress—is rumbling at the gates of our cities or, if not rumbling, at least hovering. The sexual revolution comes finally back on itself not with a bang but a whimper.

Thus it is not surprising that, as sex becomes more machinelike, with passion irrelevant and then even pleasure diminishing, the problem has come full circle. And we find, mirabile dictu, a progression from an anesthetic attitude to an antiseptic one. Sexual contact itself then tends to get put on the shelf and to be avoided. This is another and surely least constructive aspect of the new puritanism: it returns, finally, to a new asceticism. This is said graphically in a charming limerick that seems to have sprung up on some sophisticated campus:

Marshall McLuhan, among others, welcomes this revolt against sex. “Sex as we now think of it may soon be dead,” write McLuhan and Leonard. “Sexual concepts, ideals and practices already are being altered almost beyond recognition…. The foldout playmate in Playboy magazine—she of outsize breast and buttocks, pictured in sharp detail—signals the death throes of a departing age.”²⁶ McLuhan and Leonard then go on to predict that eros will not be lost in the new sexless age but diffused, and that all life will be more erotic than now seems possible.

This last reassurance would be comforting indeed to believe. But as usual, McLuhan’s penetrating insights into present phenomena are unfortunately placed in a framework of history—“pretribalism” with its so-called lessened distinction between male and female—which has no factual basis at all.²⁷ And he gives us no evidence whatever for his optimistic prediction that new eros, rather than apathy, will succeed the demise of vive la difference. Indeed, there are amazing confusions in this article arising from McLuhan’s and Leonard’s worship of the new electric age. In likening Twiggy to an X-ray as against Sophia Loren to a Rubens, they ask, “And what does an X-ray of a woman reveal? Not a realistic picture, but a deep, involving image. Not a specialized female, but a human being.”²⁸ Well! An X-ray actually reveals not a human being at all but a depersonalized, fragmentized segment of bone or tissue which can be read only by a highly specialized technician and from which we could never in a thousand years recognize a human being or any man or woman we know, let alone one we love. Such a “reassuring” view of the future is frightening and depressing in the extreme.

And may I not be permitted to prefer Sophia Loren over Twiggy for an idle erotic daydream without being read out of the New Society?

Our future is taken more seriously by the participants in the discussion on this topic at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions at Santa Barbara. Their report, called “The A-Sexual Society,” frankly faces the fact that “we are hurtling into, not a bisexual or a multi-sexual, but an a-sexual society: the boys grow long hair and the girls wear pants…. Romance will disappear; in fact, it has almost disappeared now…. Given the guaranteed Annual Income and The Pill, will women choose to marry? Why should they?”²⁹ Mrs. Eleanor Garth, a participant in the discussion and writer of the report, goes on to point out the radical change that may well occur in having and rearing children. “What of the time when the fertilized ovum can be implanted in the womb of a mercenary, and one’s progeny selected from a sperm-bank? Will the lady choose to reproduce her husband, if there still are such things?…No problems, no jealousy, no love-transference…. And what of the children, incubated under glass?…Will communal love develop the human qualities that we assume emerge from the present rearing of children? Will women under these conditions lose the survival drive and become as death-oriented as the present generation of American men?…I don’t raise the question in advocacy,” she adds, “I consider some of the possibilities horrifying.”³⁰

Mrs. Garth and her colleagues at the Center recognize that the real issue underlying this revolution is not what one does with sexual organs and sexual functions per se, but what happens to man’s humanity. “What disturbs me is the real possibility of the disappearance of our humane, life-giving qualities with the speed of developments in the life sciences, and the fact that no one seems to be discussing the alternative possibilities for good and evil in these developments.”³¹

The purpose of our discussion in this book is precisely to raise the questions of the alternative possibilities for good and evil—that is, the destruction or the enhancement of the qualities which constitute man’s “humane, life-giving qualities.”