The Sex MonSTer: - John Jay College Of Criminal Justice - CUNY

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500 Abby stein, ph.d. times babysat. The client’s presentation is filled with contradictions: she is awash with compassion, she feels betrayed, she wants to understand what seems inexplicable, thinks she finally understands something about her husband’s ways that before eluded her, she wants to kill the abuser, she wants to kill her husband for not killing the abuser. Over the next few weeks, I hear how her marriage is coming unglued from his revelation. Mostly, the client is furious that her husband seems incapable or unwilling to supply greater detail about the molestations. She keeps relating stories about her entreaties to him to tell “the whole truth.” It sounds to me like she is both forcing him to expose himself and compelling him to talk, something he doesn’t want to do but that she is certain is good for him. I feel my client is reenacting the abuse scenario with him, metaphorically forcing him get naked and do something with his mouth. She is so angry at her husband’s refusal to submit to her wishes that she withdraws from their sexual relations for a while. I wonder if, through this punishment, she is somehow protecting him from sex. Throughout this time in our work, I find myself feeling concerned for her husband and turned off by her. As a third, I am awed by the long reach of the husband’s distant sexual abuse: how it has reached into the present and choked off my own desire for closeness with my client. 4. Over the years, I have done a lot of clinical and research work in the areas of violent crime, sex crime, and childhood sexual abuse. Years ago, when a colleague welcomed me into a new research project by throwing open a file of autopsy photos showing a sexual mutilation and dared me to look, I remember scanning the picture easily. At the time, I felt that being constituted in a particular way— not being squeamish or overly sentimental—simply meant that I was well suited to the kind of population with whom I had chosen to work. I had little negative affective reaction to my work. When interviewing offenders, I was intensely interested in their stories and felt a great deal of compassion for them, because so many had been victims of terrible maltreatment in childhood (Stein, 2007). The more research and writing I did, the more I recognized my own dissociation around my subjects’ sexual violence. Disturbingly, I realized how often the jaw-dropping stories I heard were distilled in my brain to their erotic components. Rather than experiencing the uncanny emotion of it all, I would fixate on the most perverse sex- 04 CP47(4) 497-518.indd 500 10/6/2011 11:16:33 AM
the sex monster 501 ual components of the narratives—not fixate exactly but find them in my head: unbidden, intrusive, and, yes, arousing. It felt amazingly easy to be inside the head of a sex murderer, I would think, or have him inside mine. Consciously, at least, none of the interactions “freaked me out” as much as having strangers leer briefly at my baby in his stroller, or feeling the momentary blur of propriety and desire when my child’s lips grazed my neck. The deeply unsettling nature of sex and aggression, and the potential for boundary violation they present, constitute much of the core theoretical and clinical work of psychoanalysis. Not coincidentally, the same two chimeras haunt all the forensic cases with which I am familiar, even those in which offenses seem superficially detached from the erotic or violent. A history of burglaries committed may predict corporeal invasions later on (Schlesinger & Revich, 1999), a naked suicide often has special significance (Simon, 2008), and even graffiti has its sexual and aggressive undertones (Stocker, Dutcher, Hargrove, & Cooksource, 1972). The thought of blatantly sexual offenses, of course, can be a bullet to the epicenter of consciousness. Particularly in cultures whose struggle between the puritanical and the Dionysian is enacted rather than articulated; ideas of bodily integrity and violation arouse powerful, intolerable affect, as can be intuited in my four vignettes. The processing of those affects involves a number of defensive maneuvers, including denial, negation, dissociation, projection, and identification, as well as retributive enactments of surveillance, punishment, and exile. Projective identification is a particularly effective method of dealing with frustration: one simply puts one’s most awful half thoughts and feelings into the Other; the subject remains pure whereas the object is contaminated (Ogden, 1979). If the recipient of these projections can metabolize them on behalf of the one who is overwhelmed (parents do this for children all the time), a reflective capacity may develop. But when projective identification occurs too frequently or too intensely—or when there is no containing other to metabolize the frustration—a psychopathological course is set (Bion, 1959). Projective identification is the chief mechanism in the production of psychological, physical, and sexual aggression, in which the externalization of profound but unformulated internal events results in actual harm to another human being (Meloy, 1988). I contend that our culture provides ever more arousing but forbidden sexual objects, which then become vehicles for frustration. Our de- 04 CP47(4) 497-518.indd 501 10/6/2011 11:16:33 AM
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