SEVEN PAPERS ON EXISTENTIAL ANALYSIS ... - Wagner College

I will soon be clear that my understanding of eros is not the conventional one, which in
the postmodern period invariably referred to Freud’s understanding of one element of his final
overarching metapsychological binary, Eros and Thanatos: the anabolic tendency to build up
structure, organicity and life, and the complementary catabolic tendency of what is living to
return to star-waste, the inorganic and death. Ultimately, for Freud, Eros was reducible to
sexuality, and herein lies the crux of the problematic I will examine.
The sense of eros I have in mind is something quite different than what it had for Freud
and the sexologists. A re-envisioning of eros, I believe, will allow us to step beyond not only
positivism and psychoanalysis but also Heidegger’s fundamental ontology to realize the promise
of phenomenology in the human sciences—in particular, psychology. Let me add at once that I
do not understand eros in terms of the evocative and often compelling variations on the theme
of desire represented by French scholars as diverse as, for example, Barthes, Baudrillard,
Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan and Ricoeur. Just as for classical psychoanalysis and neopsychoanalytic
theories, the thought of the philosophers of desire is colored by the conflation or
eros and sexuality.
My presentation is based on clinical work, which (for me) is always phenomenological in
the sense that its sole task is to let appear what matters to both client and clinician. More
specifically, such work is the always mutual effort at clearing a way for a renewing openness,
that is, a freeing up of possibility—again, for both client and therapist. To modify a well-known
distinction made by Erich Fromm (1994), the goal of existential analysis is freedom for the present.
At the same time, however, it is freedom from the blinking Janus-face that each of us has
learned to wear—the postmodern face if you will—that looks, retrospectively, for the truth of a
past and, prospectively, for a plan to manage what must, alas, always be an unimaginable
future. Sheer possibility and the present are coterminous.
In clinical work, what is meant to appear? Heidegger’s answer was, of course, existence.
I will suggest, however, that what we must endeavor to first let appear first in the clinical venture
is eros. Only within its field does existence then unfold.
2. I begin by carefully explaining what I mean by eros, then illustrate its essential part in
existential analysis by telling you the story of Will. Along the way I will reach for some preliminary
conclusions regarding clinical psychology at the horizon, here where the postmodern era has
reached its end.
Everything depends on distinguishing between eros and sexuality. We are all so immersed
in ways of talking or discourses about experience and behavior attuned to the notion of
sexuality that we are no longer able to see eros and the erotic. The erotic has been eclipsed by
the sexual. Let me first distinguish between sex and sexuality, and then differentiate both from
eros.
Sex is a physical act, a bodily function like breathing, eating and eliminating. Unlike these
acts, however, sex requires another human being, specifically someone of the sex that is
genitally complementary to one’s own. For me, it makes sense to reserve talk about sex to acts
that occur only between a male and a female. Autoerotism, so-called homosexuality, the
paraphilias are issues of sexuality, but not sex, as I will explain.
For sex, it is not enough that the other be present symbolically or in one’s imagination,
that is, at the level of desire. Sex is a brief transaction, the telos of which is the biological
continuation of the species. It does not require sexuality, the human context, or a personal
relationship—certainly not romantic love. Nor does it even imply pleasure for either, let alone
both, of the participants. With practice, sex can be enacted or endured with mindless facility as
a technique or the performance of a series of acts embedded in muscle memory. Just as
people can play the piano while they breathe or eat while reading a newspaper or watching
television (merely masticating and swallowing), they can engage in sex as a mechanical
exercise, but with this important difference. Unlike breathing and eating, performance of the sex
act has been learned. And this is a very important difference, as we will see. Briefly, then, the