The Journal of Mind and Behavior

Volume 6, Number 1, Winter 1985 ~ Special Issue, Part 1

Introduction: The Perspective of the Sexual Body
Arthur Efron, State University of New York at Buffalo
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1985, Vol 6, No. 1, Pages 1-16, ISSN 0271-0137
[Note: First paragraph, no abstract available.] The term "the sexual body" is a deliberately chosen one. There may come a day when such a term is in fact a redundancy, when it will be no more than a synonym for "the human body." At present, however, the term is needed. It has been chosen as the title of this study in order to postulate that consideration of human realities must include the body, and that inherently, the body is sexual, in all the range of meanings that the word has. The term is chosen to prevent the elision, pervasive in most disciplines (indeed within most forms of thought) in contemporary culture, of the whole topic of the sexual (Efron, 1975). In the philosophy of science, this bias shows itself in the title of a volume written by Sir Karl R. Popper and Sir John C. Eccles, The Self and Its Brain (Popper and Eccles, 1977). The interdisciplinary argument of these two distinguished thinkers indeed supposes that the human self possesses or owns a brain, which in turn is connected to the central nervous system. The possibilities for raising mind over body with such an approach are easy, and sexuality need never be discussed. A reader will discover, in fact, that sexuality is absent throughout the book's 560 pages, even though the authors' object is to discuss "the relation between our bodies and our minds..." (p. vii). Popper, in his section of the book, acknowledges that the body is good for some things, but certainly not for understanding human identity. With little difficulty Popper commits himself to a view of human nature which once more values mind over body: "Temporally, the body is there before the mind. The mind is a later achievement; and it is more valuable" (p. 115).
Chapter One of the book The Sexual Body: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.

Psychoanalysis as the Key Discipline
Arthur Efron, State University of New York at Buffalo
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1985, Vol 6, No. 1, Pages 17-40, ISSN 0271-0137
[Note: First paragraph, no abstract available.] In its "classical" period (ca. 1896-1920), and prior to revisions made by Freud and others, psychoanalysis emphasized the sexual etiology of the neuroses, the reality of libido, the omnipresence of sexual thinking in fantasy, dreams and even in cognitive thought, and the failure of civilized morality to understand what sex was about. The theory of Oedipal dynamics entails a potentially strong criticism of the role of the father in culture, inasmuch as it posits an initial gratifying state of contact between the mother and the infant, rudely disrupted by the father with his patriarchal authority at about the time that the infant reaches the age of 3. The father was thus perceived as introducing the first of a long series of adjustments which look suspiciously like denials of the infant's sexual wishes. These adjustments had to be made by the child, in his or her own mind and body, but without effective conscious awareness of what was being denied. Repression was a sexual matter. The whole theory of repression raised a question that continues to prove threatening to normal assumptions about human life in its sociocultural contexts: was sexual denial warranted? Denial for what?
Chapter Two of the book The Sexual Body: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.

Analogues of Original Sin: The Postulate of Innate Destructive Aggression
Arthur Efron, State University of New York at Buffalo
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1985, Vol 6, No. 1, Pages 41-56, ISSN 0271-0137
[Note: First paragraph, no abstract available.] In an earlier article, I have given my account of how it came about that Freud, through his deep loyalties to cultural authority, took steps to water down, and finally to reverse, his early emphasis on the sexual body (Efron, 1977). As a theory, psychoanalysis did not come firmly under the influence of this reversal until the 1920's, and at first only uncertainly, through Freud's postulation of a death instinct (Freud, 1920a). The theory of a death instinct is speculative, and it remains in unclear status within psychoanalytic thought today. It is not necessary to discuss it as such, but the issue it raises is important because the postulation of an innately destructive "instinct" of some general description is necessary if the implications pointing toward sexual freedom in Freud's work of the classical period are to be negated. Today, probaly the bulk of writers who accept psychoanalytic assumptions believe that there is an "aggressive" instinct, and that Freud assumed so too. However, the derivation within Freud's theorizing of this aggressive instinct is dubious. As the highly perceptive volume on psychoanalytic terms by Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) notes, Freud had explicitly rejected the idea of an aggressive instinct during his classic phase; as these authors also point out, even the death instinct theory of 1920 does not rest on data that bear a relation to "aggressive behavior" (pp. 17,19). Freud of course had an awareness of the reality of aggression in all of his work, but Laplanche and Pontalis are not persuasive in their tacit suggestion that this early practice was but an unexplicit formulation of the later theory of aggression, which Freud had had in mind all the while he actually was stressing the libido, a form of life instinct. Stepansky (1977) has offered an elaborate justification of another kind: Freud had plenty of evidence at hand for the aggressive instinct prior to 1920, but he kept refusing to allow it any theoretical resonance, for reasons determined by Freud's own psychological needs. For a long time, according to Stepansky, Freud needed to "celebrate the triumph of the libido theory" (Stepansky, 1977, p. 111), and when Freud did begin to comment on the possibility of aggression as an instinct, he did so in the context of repelling Alfred Adler's attempt to re-center psychoanalysis on a theory of aggression which denied the primacy of sexuality (Stepansky, 1977, pp. 112-142). On the other hand, it could be that Freud knew what he was doing; it may be true, as the distinguished psycohanalyst Gregory Rochlin (past President, Boston Psychoanalytic Society) has claimed, that Freud concentrated on infantile sexual conflicts and "chose to withhold psychoanalytic consideration" of aggression and anything else that might blur his focus upon "conflicts which were plainly and immediately sexual" (Rochlin, 1973, p. 74). If so, it is a sign that he knew what he wanted to emphasize.
Chapter Three of the book The Sexual Body: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.

The Reichian Tradition: A View of the Sexual Body
Arthur Efron, State University of New York at Buffalo
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1985, Vol 6, No. 1, Pages 57-72, ISSN 0271-0137
[Note: First paragraph, no abstract available.] The only branch of psychoanalytic theory that has developed a coherent sense of the sexual body is that descended from Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). Even though Reich was expelled from the International Psychoanalytical Association in 1934, and despite the decline of his reputation in later years, his work continues to hold interest for thinkers in various disciplines and in several countries. I have already highlighted (in "Psychoanalysis as the Key Discipline") Prescott's cross-cultural analysis of the connection between physical affection and non-violent adult behavior (Prescott, 1979); this connection may be regarded as a major confirmation of Reich's theories. A recent issue of the respected French journal, l'Arc (Dadoun, 1983), devoted to Reich is one instance of the live interest in his thought, and one that is by no means confined to his generally acclaimed psychoanalytic work of the period 1919-1934. Without exaggerating the force of the Reichian movement today, it still can be said that his work is attracting far more interest than any of the other dissidents who split off from Freud, such as Adler, Rank, Stekel, Ferenzi, Horney, or Fromm. Jung's work also is being carried on vigorously, but it has the unique advantage of having its roots in an independent early analytic theory shaped by Jung even prior to his association, 1906-1912, with Freud; it also has an easier time in gaining acceptance in many quarters due to its affinities with traditional religious symbolism and, as I have argued in Chapter Two, because of Jung's disposition to avoid detailed considerations of sexual problems.
Chapter Four of the book The Sexual Body: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.

Challenges to Psychoanalytic Theory: Recent Developments
Arthur Efron, State University of New York at Buffalo
The Journal of Mind and Behavior, Winter 1985, Vol 6, No. 1, Pages 73-88, ISSN 0271-0137
[Note: First paragraph, no abstract available.] Psychoanalysis has always been challenged, or even held in a state of siege, by its commentators and co-workers in other psychological disciplines. Up to now, however, most of the challenges have missed the point. The charges that the theory was a kind of pan-sexualism bothered Freud, but not as much as it has later theorists; Freud sometimes courted this charge, as I have suggested earlier, while his descendants have successfully negated it. By the time of Freud's visit to the U.S. in 1909, he had emerged from a period of intense theoretical and clinical work during which he had still not credited the reality of sexual instinct in the infant and child (Sulloway, 1979, pp. 111-112, 210-213); the fact that he had felt forced to change his mind on this, and to expand his definition of the sexual body to include the whole of infantile and adult life must have made Freud leary of any temptation to play down the role of the sexual. But of course he did not mean to endorse the later Reichian attitude in which healthy sexuality and health itself were closely correlated. As Sulloway has shown, Freud in fact was gathering heavy opposition in professional circles in Europe at about the time of his visit to the U.S. in 1909, more in fact than in the earlier years when he published his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (Freud, 1905b) or his Interpretation of Dreams (1900). An awarness was growing that Freud was not merely endorsing the importance of the sexual body. He was showing its connections with too many other areas. There were others in Europe who courageously emphasized the need for attention to sex, but none who both dared to write about it in plain language (instead of Latin euphemisms, such as Kraft-Ebbing used), and who at the same time connected sexuality with neurotic symptom formation (Sulloway, 1979, pp. 205, 457).
Chapter Five of the book The Sexual Body: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.