Dr. Arthur Janov - Sex and the Subconscious: Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido

Sex & the Subconscious

Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido

DR. ARTHUR JANOV

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SEX & THE SUBCONSCIOUS. Electronic Edition. Copyright 2010 by Dr. Arthur Janov. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Reputation Books, ReputationBooks@gmail.com .

ISBN: 978-0-9913635-4-4

Table of Contents

My thanks to Mary Strobel and Augustin Gurza for the editing of this book, and to my patients who wrote their life stories and opened themselves up so that others could profit from their experience.

Putting the fun and pleasure back into sex is not so easily done. We have to know what happened to take the fun away. And now we do. We can look back from sexual behavior and have a good idea what happened to us during gestation, birth, and infancy. We can see how the man who is obsessed with cross-dressing, with wearing womans panties and clothes, may well have had a problem with a cold or absent mother early in his life. The cross-dressing is the fragment of a memory. We take that fragment and immerse the patient in the global feeling with the assurance that it will lead us to a specific time in history. We do not try to change the behavior. That implies taking a moral position. We are neither priests nor behavior therapists. We address the human condition. We trust that it has a logic all of its own. We let it lead the way.

There are all kinds of sexual difficulties I address in this book, from impotence and frigidity (dont like that word) to compulsive sex rituals (exhibitionism and voyeurism). Never before have we understood how deep the causes lie of later sexual problems, usually events that long predate sexual maturity. Too often, there is just a problem in getting aroused and seeing sex to the finish. By and large, if sex is diminished so is much of life, as passion underlies sex and life. Or to put it differently, sex is life at its essence. We had better be sexual or our species will die out, not something to be desired. Usually a load of repression lies beneath sexual indifference. We have found a way to unload that repression in measured steps a bit at a time. It is my impression that once we take a symptoma sex problemas THE problem and attempt to treat it as apart from the rest of it, we have a prescription for failure. Sex is embedded into our bodies and our physiology; it has to be in context not as some alien event to be done to.

I have chosen a couple of case histories here in the Prologue to give the reader an example of the stories that are discussed throughout the book. These, along with the other case histories, are intended to give the reader a greater understanding of human sexual behavior. It is important to understand that if we experience some sexual dysfunctionand most of us will at one point or anotherthat it is not simply current stress that is responsible, but that it could be the result of stress imprinted on lower levels of consciousness that has given rise to a particular problem. These imprinted memories may affect our sex life without our ever understanding why.

We shall see how depression affects libido or sexual interest, why people fail to control their impulses, and what is behind voyeurism and exhibitionism. We will learn about the impulses behind premature ejaculation and what can be done about it. Once we access the unconscious, we begin to understand the problems behind such behavior.

Sex can be contorted into an infinite number of permutations that have nothing to do with sex, because we are trying to fulfill other needs. In this way, we bring other issues into how we express ourselves sexually. It is little different from taking a drug to find relief from some painwhen pain is transmuted into over-eating, for example, we may be trying to find relief from an emotional emptiness we carry inside. Or, we may use drugs to do what mother should have conveyed: to experience an emotional warmth, to find a sense of confidence and comfort within ourselves. In the same way, we may use sex to give ourselves a sense of love, to experience touch and intimacy, and finally, to find relief from our pain.

For a normal, healthy person, sex involves sensations, feeling, attachments, and emotional closeness. It involves experiencing passion and pleasure and sharing love. Unfortunately, many of us are not "normal"meaning, we do not have full access to our feelings. We are plagued by a whole subterranean world of pain created by past trauma and lack of love, which is always a trauma, a world that has made us blunt our sensations, thereby diminishing our pleasure, and most importantly, our sexual pleasure.

Most of us do not know that this is happening because repression has interceded in all its tender mercy to make us unaware. We have dulled our experience of sex but often do not know it. When we feel what we couldnt previously feel before, we become healthy beings once again. When we feel the pain that our system has held down, our consciousness expands. When we touch someone, we touch with feeling, and they sense it. It is sensual and stimulating.

The case study of Phillip is discussed in

At age ten I found some pornographic pictures in an empty lot. It was the first time I realized that women had nipples. What a shock! I thought breasts were just beautiful white mounds on a woman's body, just deliciously enchanting, yet always out of reach. Nipples got in the way, but soon I couldn't conceive of women without them. I don't know how many times I masturbated to the pictures where the women were looking back at me. That excited me. The larger-breasted women who also looked back at me were the most exciting.

My mom happened to be big breasted, but she never looked at me in an understanding way. So here I was getting what I needed from pictures: a mother who exposed herself (like mine never did) and paid attention to me (which she also never did).

Shortly afterwards I began exhibiting myself and also became a peeping Tom. I also tried on my mother's undergarments. All this was part of my daily routine and was repeated thousands of times for three and a half decades. Many hours each day would be spent on my rituals. So much energy expended in this destructive manner. It was the same energy that could have been used in creating a life for myself.

I performed so that I was rarely seen by the women who passed by my window, or door, or car. If they did, I would quickly hide from view. The excitement was too intense to conceive of being seen for more than one or two seconds. After all, my mother never saw me, and that was what I needed so deeply. Since all women became "Mommy" to me, I wanted desperately to be seen by them and couldn't stand it at the same time.

It was beyond my emotional comprehension that any woman could ever see me. That is why I have never been arrested. I was a shy exhibitionist. Even in the convulsive act of exposing myself, I could never conceive of being accepted by a woman.

The main scene as a child that led to exhibitionism is being forced by my brother to pick up a crayon with my right rather than my natural left hand. It happened over and over again for weeks. Mom thought it correct to allow my brother to sit on me with his knees pinning my arms down, forcing the crayon into my right hand while I, at four years of age, was screaming for my existence. She never saw me. I have been reliving this scene over and over, and it is beginning to rid myself of the urge to expose myself. Feeling the pain of my childhood traumas leads me to be more conscious and less compulsive. I know I am being healed from within, and it can only affect the way I behave from without.