Is Sex Neurotic?

"The psychoanalysts I've talked to are uncertain about my theory," says Robert Stoller, a psychoanalyst and professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Medicine. No wonder. Stoller has managed to come up with a far darker view of sex than Freud's. His theory, which he admits he has put forth with some "trepidation": except for a few rare individuals, human sexual excitement is usually generated by hostility. If his thinking is correct, Stoller writes in the Archives of General Psychiatry, "we must bear the idea that sexual pleasure in most humans depends on neurotic mechanisms. It is disappointing."

Like some other theorists on sex, Stoller believes that ordinarily there is no sexual arousal without scripts--the dramas and fantasies that people create in their minds to trigger sexual excitement. These scripts, he says, are shaped by early traumas that lead to unsolved sexual problems. Without a suitable script--in a situation such as a gynecological exam or a staid nudist camp&$151;there may be touching or nudity but no arousal. With a script, sexual conduct, almost always involving hostility, becomes a way of turning frustration and defeat into ritual triumph.

Hostile Themes. Each script, Stoller writes, "is an autobiography in which are hidden crucial intrapsychic conflicts, screen memories of actual events, and the resolution of all these elements into a happy ending, best celebrated by orgasm." Unfortunately, most people work with a story line that includes the harming of someone else. Thus each person picks a lover who fits the script by resembling an important figure of his childhood--a parent, for example, against whom he is seeking revenge.

While accepting preassigned roles, the characters must remain a bit unpredictable because some risk and mystery are essential to sexual excitement and the ritual victory that goes along with it. Says Stoller: "If unvaryingly predictable, [the characters] bore one; on the other side, if they do not stick close enough to their assigned role, anxiety results and they are traded in." He believes that the loss of risk and mystery explains why so many lovers are rapidly abandoned and why many married people describe their mates as no longer sexually exciting. The hostility of sex, he says, also explains the aggressive thrill of voyeurism, the need for many men to get away quickly from a lover after sex, and the hostile themes in most popular pornography.

Stoller, who has been studying gender identity and sexual perversion, concludes that the same psychic factors found in perversion are also found in the sexual lives of most people: hostility, mystery, risk, illusion, revenge and the reversal of a trauma or frustration. "We try to make the outlandish folk function as scapegoats for the rest of us, but anyone--analyst or other--who collects erotic thoughts knows that many citizens, avowedly heterosexual, conspicuously normal . . . are also filled with hatred and wishes, if not plans, to harm others." The difference between normal person and pervert, he feels, is one of degree (and, of course, actual behavior).

So far, says Stoller, no sex researchers or psychoanalysts have entered the lists to rebut his theory, but he admits that his friends and peers consider it a downer. "People seem to want to take sexual excitement for granted and don't want to investigate it further," he says. "My theory makes sexual excitement to be just one more example of what others have said for millennia--that humans are not a very loving species, and that is especially so when they make love. Too bad."

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