Bedroom Battle

The hostility of it all

Outraged Victorians were so busy harrumphing over Freud's mentioning sex at all that they managed to overlook many of his truly inflammatory writings.

One turn-of-the-century essay, "The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life," retains the power to shock to this day. The father of psychoanalysis argued gloomily that most men are driven to debase their sex partners. Perhaps worse, he said, they are often attracted to women they consider inferior.

Can it really be that good sex depends on some degree of hostility? Even the master's most fervent disciples were not quite able to accept that unpalatable idea; nor would a good many psychiatrists and psychologists--let alone ordinary people with healthy and gentle sex lives--today. But lately some researchers have been edging in Freud's direction. Indeed, the purported links between sex and aggression --from love bites to rape--are increasing fare in the social sciences. Psychologist and Sex Researcher C.A. Tripp argues that for both men and women some conflict is important to sex; without it, many good marriages and relationships go sexually stale. These views are backed by research into sex fantasies by Masters and Johnson, among others, showing that violent reveries are astonishingly common.

But no one has made the case for this side of sexual inspiration (as carefully distinguished from practice) more bluntly than Los Angeles Psychoanalyst Robert J. Stoller. In his new book, Sexual Excitement (Pantheon; $11.95), he says: "It is hostility--the desire, overt or hidden, to harm another person--that generates and enhances sexual excitement. The absence of hostility leads to indifference and boredom."

Stoller is the author of four other scholarly books on sex, including the highly praised study Perversion (1975). He has become convinced by his researches --including a detailed case history of a woman drawn from his analytic practice --that conventional sexual behavior is based on the same drives found in extreme form in sexual perverts. In fact, Stoller says, "we try to make the outlandish folk function as scapegoats for the rest of us, but anyone--not just analysts--who collects erotic thoughts knows that many citizens, avowedly heterosexual, conspicuously normal... are also rilled with hatred and wishes, if not plans, to harm others."

Sex is a natural function, to be sure, says Stoller, but it is dominated by painful undercurrents from the past. Sex fantasies are not idle daydreams but carefully coded scripts by which the inner mind seeks to work out lingering problems from childhood. These scripts help determine whom the adult will be attracted to, how the sexual partner will be dealt with, and even what sexual positions are likely to be preferred. "Sexual excitement depends on a scenario," says Stoller. "The person to be aroused is the 'writer,' who has been at work on the story line since childhood." The writer then turns director, choosing sexual partners "because they are perceived as filling the criteria already written into the role."

The role, says Stoller, requires a victim. In real life the partner is supposed to play the part so that the hurt child can become a victorious adult in his sexual fantasies. It is a kind of theater in which the adult again and again conquers childhood fears. Says Stoller: "Triumph, rage, revenge, fear, anxiety, risk are all condensed into one complex buzz called 'sexual excitement.' " In Stoller's view, that buzz has an even harsher component: sadomasochism, the deriving of pleasure from inflicting or experiencing pain. As he puts it, "My hunch is that the desire to hurt others in retaliation for having been hurt is essential for most people's sexual excitement all the time but not for all people's excitement all the time."

Again, a distinction must be made between quiet impulse and extreme action: the drive to hurt need not be obeyed.

Though Stoller insists that only a few rare individuals may achieve excitement without any traces of hostility, he is not entirely pessimistic: many contented people, he allows, have clearly been able to outweigh hostility with affection and a capacity for closeness.

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