The Denial of Death (34 page)

Obviously, this is one way of affirming that the game is for keeps, the play is the reality, and if one gets caught when the clock strikes twelve he is apt to lose everything. Bak reports similarly on his patient:

Dressing up and undressing in front of a mirror dominated his practice for a long time. The penis was bandaged and very forcefully tied backward, and the testes pushed back into the inguinal canal. Such episodes were followed by intense castration anxiety—he feared that the shaft was broken, that the penis had become crooked, that the spermal duct was torn and he would be sterile.
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The dramatic play-control of sex does not absorb the anxiety completely, probably again because the danger of it heightens the sense of the reality of the games and because of the inevitable sense of guilt from the fact that the self is now completely overshadowed by the body in
both
its sexual forms, which can only mean that individuation is completely stunted.

There is no doubt about the simple-minded dedication to the magical efficacy of clothing. Fenichel’s patient, on one occasion when he caught sight of a crippled boy, “felt an im
pulse to change clothes with him. The implication was a denial that the boy really was a cripple.”
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But often these fantasies can be turned to reality. One of Greenacre’s patients had many fantasies of changing boys into girls and vice versa and went on to become an endocrinologist!
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From which we can conclude that the transvestite and the fetishist do not live entirely in illusion. They have glimpsed the truth that all men live, that culture can indeed transform natural reality. There is no hard and fast line between cultural and natural creativity. Culture is a symbol system that actually d
oes give power to overcome the castration complex. Man can partly create himself. In fact, from this point of view, we can understand transvestism as the perfect form of
causa sui
, the direct sexual relationship to oneself, without having to go via the “circuitous” route of a female partner. As Buckner pointed out in a stimulating essay, the transvestite seems to develop a female personality within himself; this gives him an internal two-person relationship, actually an “internal marriage.”
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He is not dependent on anyone for sexual gratification since he can enact his own “counter-role.” This is the logical c
onsequence of the hermaphroditic completeness, the becoming of a whole world unto oneself.

Nowhere is there a better example of the blurring of the line between fetishist creativity and cultural creativity than in the ancient Chinese practice of binding the feet of females. This practice mutilated the feet, which were then an object of veneration by the men even though deformed. Freud himself remarked on this practice in relation to fetishism and observed that the “Chinese man seems to want to thank the woman for having submitted to castration.”
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Again, a profound insight conceptualized and phrased slightly beside the point. We should rather say that this practise repre
sents the perfect triumph of cultural contrivance over the animal foot—exactly what the fetishist achieves with the shoe. The veneration, then, is the same: gratitude for the transformation of natural reality. The mutilated foot is a testimonial and token sacrifice to the efficacy of culture. The Chinese are then revering themselves, their culture, in the foot, which has now become sacred precisely because it has left the given and bland reality of the everyday animal world.

But somewhere we have to draw the line between creativity and failure, and nowhere is this line more clear than in fetishism. The anal protest of culture can be self-defeating, especially i
f we like our women to walk or if we want to relate to them as full human beings. That is precisely what the fetishist cannot do. Secret magic and private dramatization may be a hold on reality, the creation of a personal world, but they also separate the practitioner from reality, just as cultural contrivances do on a more standardized level. Greenacre has understood this very acutely, remarking that the secret is Janus-faced, a subterfuge that weakens the person’s relationships to others.
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The transvestite in his secret internal marriage actually does without the marriage relationship entirel
y. In all of this we must not forget the general impoverishment of the fetishist and transvestite: the insecure identification with the father, the weak body-ego.
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Perversion has been called a “private religion’—and that it really is, but it testifies to fear and trembling and not to faith. It is an idiosyncratic, symbolic protest of control and safety by those who can rely on nothing—neither their own powers nor the shared cultural map for interpersonal action. This is what makes their ingenuity pathetic. As the fetishist, unlike the matter-of-fact cultural performer, is not secure in his repressi
ons and body-ego, he is still overwhelmed by the sexual act, the demand that he do something
responsible
to someone else with his entire body. Romm says of her patient: “While he had a very sensitive need for his wife’s sexual compliance, all desire left him whenever his wife indicated any sexual drive.”
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We can look at this as the refusal of the impersonal, instrumental species role, but it is a refusal based in insecurity, when one is
called upon
to perform. Remember we said, with Rank, that a major characteristic of neurosis was seeing the world as it is, in all its superordinacy, power, o
verwhelmingness. The fetishist must feel the truth of his helplessness
vis-à-vis
the ponderous object and the task he has to perform. He is not securely enough “programmed” neurally by solid repressions and body-ego, to be able to
falsify
his real situation and hence act his animal role with indifference. The object must be overwhelming in its massiveness of hair, pendulous breasts, buttocks, and stomach. What attitude to take toward all this “thingness” when one feels so empty in himself? One of the reasons that the fetish object is itself so splendid and fascinating to the fetishi
st must be that he transfers to it the awesomeness of the other human presence. The fetish is then the manageable miracle, while the partner is not. The result is that the fetish becomes supercharged with a halo-like effect.

Romm’s patient saw things in their pristineness and never got over the effect:

The patient’s earliest recollection was of his mother washing her hair. When drying her hair in the sun she would throw it over her face. He was both fascinated and horrified at not being able to see her face, and relieved when it was again visible. Her hair combings held a great fascination for him.
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On one level we might understand this as expressing the anxiety of the child that the most personal and human part of the object—the face—can be eclipsed by the animal hair. But the whole feeling of the scene is one of awesomeness at the miracle of the created object. Most of us manage to get over the hypnotic quality of natural objects, and we do it, I think, in two related ways. One is by achieving a sense of our own power and so establishing a kind of balance between ourselves and the world. We can then ply our desires on the object without being thrown off balance by them. But a second thi
ng must also be done: desire itself has to be fetishized. We cannot relate to the total object as it is, and thus we need standardized definitions of sexual attractiveness. These we get in the form of “cues” that serve to cut the object down to manageable size: we look at the breast or the black underwear, which allow us not really to have to take account of the total person we are relating to.
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In these two ways we strip the partner of awesomeness and power and so overcome our general helplessness in the face of her. One of Greenacre’s patients conveys the problem perfectly:

If he continued to see the girl she would become increasingly repulsive to him, especially as his attention seemed inevitably focussed on her body orifices. Even the pores of her skin began to be too conspicuous, to loom larger and become repellent… . Gradually he found too that he could be more successful if he approached a girl from the rear and did not have to be visually or tactually too aware of the difference between them.
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(I think here, too, of Rousseau’s famous account of his repulsion from the breath-taking Venetian whore, when he noticed a slight imperfection on her breast.) When the overwhelming object cannot be shrunken as a straightforward vehicle of desire, it could become repulsive because its animal qualities become
disengaged from it and begin to loom larger and larger. This, I think, might explain the paradox that the fetishist is overwhelmed by the awesomeness of the object, the superordinacy of it, and yet finds it repulsive in its animality. The foot only becomes a problem in itself as a paradigm of ugliness when we cannot fuse it into the body under the secure rush of our own desire and will. Otherwise it is a neutral part of an attractive woman. The fetishist’s difficulty, then, is like the child’s exactly: the inability to master pragmatic action situations with the requisite equanimity. I think thi
s helps explain, too, why the typical phallic-narcissist, the Don Juan character, often takes any object—ugly or beautiful—that comes along, with the same unconcern: he does not really take account of it in its total personal qualities.
^†

All perversions, then, can truly be seen as “private religions,” as attempts to heroically transcend the human condition and to achieve some kind of satisfaction in that condition. That is why perverts are forever saying how superior and life-enhancing their particular approach is, how they cannot understand why anyone would not prefer it. It is the same sentiment that animates all true believers, the trumpeting of who is the true hero and what is the only genuine path to eternal glory.

At this point perversions and so-called normality meet. There is no way to experience all of life; each person must close off large portions of it, must “partialize,” as Rank put it, in order to avoid being overwhelmed. There is no way to surely avoid and transcend death, for all organisms perish. The biggest, warmest, most secure, courageous spirits can still only bite off pieces of the world; the smallest, meanest, most frightened ones merely bite off the smallest possible pieces. I recall the episode of the illustrious Immanuel Kant when a glass was broken at one of his gatherings; how c
arefully he weighed the alternatives for a perfect place in the garden where the fragments could safely be buried so that no one would be injured by them accidentally. Even our greatest spirits must indulge in the fetishist’s magical, ritual drama to banish accident because of animal vulnerability.

The Naturalness of Sado-Masochism

Although there is nothing new to say on this problem, with all the vast writings that have covered it, I want to again stress the naturalness of these perversions. Sadism and masochism seem like frighteningly technical ideas, secrets about the inner recesses of man only fully revealed to practicing psychoanalysts. Even more than that, they seem like rare and grotesque aberrations of normal human conduct. Both these suppositions are false. Masochism comes naturally to man, as we have seen again and again in these pages. Man is naturally humble, naturally grateful, naturally guilty,
naturally transcended, naturally a sufferer; he is small, pitiful, weak, a passive taker who tucks himself naturally in a beyond of superior, awesome, all-embracing power. Sadism likewise is the natural activity of the creature, the drive toward experience, mastery, pleasure, the need to take from the world what it needs in order to increase itself and thrive;
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what is more, a huma
n creature who has to forget himself, resolve his own painful inner contradictions. The hyphenated word sado-masochism expresses a natural complementarity of polar opposites: no weakness without intensive focus of power and no use of power without falling back on a secure merger with a larger source of power. Sado-masochism, then, reflects the general human condition, the daily lives of most people. It reflects man living by the nature of the world and his own nature as it has been given to him. Actually, then, it reflects “normal” mental health.
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Do we wonder, for example, that rape is on the increase in today’s confused world? People feel more and more powerless. How can they express their energies, get things more in balance between overwhelming input and feeble output? Rape gives a feeling of personal power in the ability to cause pain, to totally manipulate and dominate another creature. The autocratic ruler, as Canetti so well observes, gets the ultimate in the experience of domination and control by turning all persons into animals and treating them as chattels. The rapist gets the same kind of satisfaction in w
hat seems a perfectly natural way; there are very few situations in life in which people can get a sense of the perfect appropriateness of their energies: the quickened vitality that comes when we prove that our animal bodies have the requisite power to secure their dominion in this world—or at least a living segment of it.
^‡

Have we always been puzzled by how willingly the masochist experiences pain? Well, for one thing pain calls the body to the forefront of experience. It puts the person back into the center of things forcefully as a feeling animal. It is thus a natural complement to sadism. Both are techniques for experiencing forceful self-feeling, now in outer-directed action, now in passive suffering. Both give intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. Furthermore, to experience pain is to “use” it with the possibility of controlling it and triumphing over it. As Irving Bieber
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argued in his import
ant paper, the masochist doesn’t “want” pain, he wants to be able to identify its source, localize it, and so control it. Masochism is thus a way of taking the anxiety of life and death and the overwhelming terror of existence and congealing them into a small dosage. One then experiences pain from the terrifying power and yet lives through it without experiencing the ultimate threat of annihilation and death. As Zilboorg so penetratingly observed, the sado-masochistic combination is the perfect formula for transmuting the fear of death.
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Rank called masochism the “small sacrifice,” the “
lighter punishment,” the “placation” that allows one to avoid the archevil of death. When applied to sexuality, masochism is thus a way of taking suffering and pain, “which in the last analysis are symbols of death,” and transmuting them into desired sources of pleasure.
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As Henry Hart also observed so well, this is a way of taking self-administered, homeopathic doses; the ego controls total pain, total defeat, and total humiliation by experiencing them in small doses as a sort of vaccination.
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From still another point of view, then, we see the fascinating ingenuity of the perversions: the turning
of pain, the symbol of death, into ecstasy and the experience of more-life.
^§