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

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502 Abby stein, ph.d. sires (e.g., scatological, pedophilic, sado-masochistic) are projected onto others, whether or not they share our fantasies, and certainly independent of whether they have acted them out. As Ogden (1979) theorized, any reality that does not comport with our fantasized projections is quickly dismissed. . . . there is a pressure exerted by the projector on the recipient of the projection to experience himself and behave in a way congruent with the projective fantasy. This is not an imaginary pressure. This is real pressure exerted by means of a multitude of interactions between the projector and the recipient. (p. 359) So intense is the pressure to conform, the inheritor of toxic projections may ultimately take on the qualities that are being ascribed to him or her. To some extent, we make the Other what we need him or her to be, not only in perception but through his or her acquiescence to our demands. For example, when we banish men convicted of sex offenses to tents on the outskirts of town—as has happened intermittently in Florida, Tennessee, and Georgia—and allow them to fraternize only with other sex offenders we are virtually asking the men to reoffend (Associate Press, 2009; City Paper [Nashville], 2010; Samuels, 2011). <strong>The</strong>ir conforming behavior is then used to justify our original expulsive actions even though, consciously, we may not be aware of how we have helped shape their behavior. Unconscious influence is at least bidirectional (Stern, 2010, and perhaps multidirectional, with each participant simultaneously contributing to a series of dissociated enactments that shape others’ thoughts and behavior. Writing about supervisor-therapist dyads, Gediman and Wolkenfeld (1980) note that an unrecognized affect from the patient-therapist dyad reconstitutes itself within the relationship between supervisor and therapist, creating an unconscious parallelism that is “truly triadic: a complex multidirectional network, or system, and not simply a unidirectional process with a set point of origin in the patient” (p. 236). Thus, there is not a one-to-one correlation or simple transfer of affective data. Rather, at each level of interaction, there may be both displacement and distortion, resulting in countertransference reactions that are slightly unhinged from their original trigger, elaborated in a deeply personalized way, and that evoke slightly more convoluted “parallels” to the originally dissociated phenomena. Although, in the psychoanalytic literature, such parallels 04 CP47(4) 497-518.indd 502 10/6/2011 11:16:33 AM
the sex monster 503 were first recognized in supervisory relationships, coincident identificatory processes among multiple actors are not unique to psychoanalytic interactions. Indeed, as Bromberg (1982) remarked, “life is a good example of what goes on in psychoanalytic supervision” (p. 92). Just like transference, parallel processes can occur in any set of human relationships, although they are particularly common in relationships in which there are clear lines of authority and in which the subordinate feels inclined to “manage the impressions” of the authority figure (p. 139). Transactions like these are commonplace between people accused of sexual offenses and psychiatric “experts” or forensic therapists, between testifying experts and prosecution or defense teams, between lawyers and the judiciary, between forensic mental health practitioners and their institutional bosses, as well as between those clinicians and the public (and the media who shape public perception), and, finally, between the public and anyone who is suspected of sexual deviance. Seducing the Bogeyman I was once asked to be on a panel with Chris Hansen (2007), a television correspondent and author of the book To Catch a Predator: Protecting Your Kids from Online Predators Already in Your Home. My own book on predation (Stein, 2007) had come out the same year as Hansen’s and his agent, obviously not having read it, thought we would make a nifty team inveighing against the supposed scourge of the century: men who sought sex with underage girls. When I explained my more nuanced view of things, Hansen’s representative was amazed that, even given my position, I wouldn’t want to take advantage of the easy publicity to be garnered in a seek-and-destroy mission to root out the “perverts” in our midst. Online predators are only the latest in a series of “folk devils” (McRobbie & Thornton, 1995) identified by the public as an insidious threat to children’s welfare. <strong>The</strong> contemporary sex panic actually began with a raft of sex abuse convictions of day-care center workers in the 1980s, starting with the infamous McMartin Preschool case. (For a summary of earlier sex panics, see Zilney & Zilney, 2009.) Even latter-day wisdom about that decade’s raft of indictments—in which overzealous district attorneys prosecuted cases with psychological evidence that defied credibility— has done little to derail the witch-hunting of supposed sexual offenders, even though the targets are no longer day-care workers and kindergarten 04 CP47(4) 497-518.indd 503 10/6/2011 11:16:33 AM
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The Sex MonSTer: - John Jay College Of Criminal Justice - CUNY

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