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Why people choose sex as a solution
If
two people involved with each other are very verbal and trust words, then
they really don't need the physical equivalent. The words suffice. But
most of us have learned -- at least in the areas of tenderness and such
-- to distrust words. In other words, it's only the action we trust, and
even that isn't trusted very much.
RELATED
THEORETICAL MATERIAL
Melanie
Klein on sexual relations as reparation
Klein, Melanie. Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1946-1963.
New York: Free Press, 1975.
The
psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, in her major work about reparation, includes
the use of the sexual act, in which good introjected objects are exchanged
genitally. Klein sees the sexual relationship between a man and a woman
as potential for making reparation. She discusses the use of sex as facilitating
life, creativity, and work, where the persons in the relationship make
reparation through the exchange of good objects.
Refulgent
in Klein's work on reparation are religious notions such as cure, heal,
sacrifice, and atonement.
Klein
explores the direct connection between our healthy sexuality and healthy
psychic life. The feeling that one's sexual organ is good leads to feeling
one's goodness, opening oneself to the creative expression of goodness.
RELATED
THEORETICAL MATERIAL
Sandor
Ferenczi on sexual relations as restoration of lost harmony
Ferenczi, Sandor. Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality. New York: W.W. Norton
& Company, Inc.,1968.
Sandor
Ferenczi's theory examines the experience of sex as an expression of a
longing to restore a lost harmony, and the struggle to achieve it. Sexual
intercourse provides an environment in which the partners express longings
for a pre-birth experience.
According
to Ferenczi we attempt to achieve harmony, through the sexual act, by
"returning" to the mother's womb, where the painful disharmony
between the ego and the environment or external world no longer exists.
One is motivated to relive, not only the nourishing life in mother's womb,
but the struggle of our phylogenetic ancestors to adapt to land and air.
We bear, according to Ferenczi, not only the unconscious memory of our
immediate pre-birth life, but the unconscious memory of our prehistoric
life.
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