Abstract
Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots was published almost twenty years after Robert Stoller’s unexpected and tragic death in 1990. The book’s existence came to light when Sybil Stoller handed Professor Richard Green a manuscript by her late husband that had languished on a bookshelf in her home for sixteen years, having been returned when his publisher discontinued its series of psychoanalytic books.
Stoller notes at the outset that the book is unique, even among his original contributions, in that it considers pornography not simply as a sexually arousing picture or text, but as a conscious daydream, a naked primal daydream that not only summarizes the individual’s erotic preferences but mirrors his or her character in ways that go far beyond the erotic component. Stoller’s transformative definition of pornography requires us to think in new terms about the transformation he has outlined from the sexually arousing object to the daydream. In this regard, it is important to note that the dearth of psychoanalytic attention accorded the daydream allows the unquestioned assumption that daydreams (Freud 1908; Person 1995; Goldberger 2008) can be dealt with solely in terms of manifest content and do not require the detailed analysis we know is required with night dreams.
As a psychoanalytic candidate at what was then the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute, I had the privilege of being in one of the few classes that Stoller taught to candidates. Because of the demands made on his time by his prolific writing, his editorial work for psychiatric and psychoanalytic journals, his university duties, and his presentations on the national and international level, he seldom accepted invitations to teach at the institute. He was an electrifying teacher, one who drew students—UCLA medical students, whom he taught regularly, residents, and psychoanalytic candidates—into the topic or text that he was teaching. The course I attended, like the book at hand, possessed an immediacy not unlike taking a walk with Stoller down Melrose Avenue, the porno district of Los Angeles.
Stoller, always precise about methodology, told my class how he conducted his research. He would ask the proprietors of the shops on Melrose to show him the covers, and only the covers, of the best-selling books. “Look at the details,” he told my enthralled seminar class: “All the details. Every little detail.” The book he showed us depicted a tall, wispy young man tied to a chair. Three sleek, bosomy, long-legged, black-clad, and black-haired women were working him over in ways that while both sexual and aggressive were evoked rather than explicit.
Stoller’s seemingly modest premise made such a walk down Melrose into an opportunity for genuine research, by both the author and the proprietors. Yes, research! Because if the pertinent dynamics were not captured on the cover illustration in every visual detail, the book wouldn’t sell and the proprietor and publisher would go broke. It was an astonishing methodology, one treating the manifest content of a pornographic cover picture as though it were a dream, to be anatomized into elements, which in turn invite associations, which then lead to the latent content, details of the wish of the dreamer—or the daydreamer, the one whose masturbatory fantasies would lead the customer to buy the book or the psychoanalytic reader to greater depths of understanding. Stoller’s psychoanalytic virtuosity is well revealed by this method of looking at pornography, since pornography, like the dream, is manifest content, and no matter how evident its meaning seems to be, it can best be brought out (using the method detailed by Freud in chapter 2 of The Interpretation of Dreams) by anatomizing the manifest content into elements to be considered in arriving at the deeper meaning of the dream—be it night dream or daydream.
Thus Stoller progressed from content to method: the pictorial manifest content viewed as the content of the dream, followed by a consideration of all its elements as if they are of great significance and point to latent content. Looked at this way, the cover illustration described above may be likened to a dream—not a night dream, but a daydream—yet a dream that has latent content: A rather slight, yet fetchingly attractive young man is tied to a chair, and thus rendered helpless. He is being made the object of some unclear, but clearly sexual and aggressive actions by three women. They are very attractive, dark-haired women, tall and sleek but bosomy and clad in tight black dresses.
With this picture in mind, let us consider the development of Stoller’s thought in the book at hand. He emphasizes early on (p. 4) that the porn that sells well represents what he calls a primal daydream: a daydream that carries with it the particulars of the individual’s erotic life and mirrors his or her character: pornography may be reduced to components that represent crucial details in the viewer’s life history. Further, the composite that we see as “the picture on the cover” can be “tested,” empirically and precisely, by whether or not it sells. We can judge by its success in the marketplace the extent to which the cover illustration grasps the pertinent dynamics, not just of one person, but of enough people to make the book profitable—it taps into something like a perverse shared unconscious. The artist and the proprietor must be exquisitely attuned to consumers’ needs or they are out of business. It is this synthetic linkage that Stoller pointed to when he emphasized that we saw the results of very precise, well-done research in the windows of the shops on Melrose.
Recall that shortly before Stoller’s death we saw the emergence of a psychoanalytic pluralism that today is robust worldwide. I mention this because, as has been noted by Rangell (1982), pluralism must not be understood simply as the addition of new insights and ways of thinking to mainstream psychoanalysis. The problem is that what is added often replaces specific aspects of mainstream analysis that adherents of the newer school find upsetting or problematic and so wish to avoid. I agree with Rangell that what is almost universally eliminated involves the oedipus complex and its more frightening component, the castration complex. That is to say, the revisions almost invariably entail a deletion of the erotic. I have yet to encounter the erotic and the perverse per se expressed in the Kleinian, Bionian, object-relational, self psychological, intersubjective, or relational schools. Lacanian writings, though they appear to be the exception to this general trend, move very much away from the erotic to center on the importance of language itself and, for the most part, move away from anxieties about the anatomical difference between the sexes, the horror of castration (actually, fantasied past or future loss of the penis, not simply the gonads), and of mutilation or violent crashing of any kind seen as the equivalent of deliberate and traumatic penectomy. If I may use the analogy of movie ratings in describing the psychoanalytic literature, the field can be said to have in large measure gone from X-rated to PG.
These trends did not affect Stoller, whose many original contributions were almost entirely on sex and gender. He welcomed the chance to teach medical students—often a time-consuming enterprise that comes at the expense of the research so important for academic promotion. His presentations were exciting, so much so that a great many of the students he taught chose psychiatry as their specialty and valued dynamic psychiatry in particular. Although he was a psychoanalyst through and through, he did not join the faculty of the Los Angeles Institute (now a component of the New Center for Psychoanalysis). He told me in 1980 that being on the faculty would require attendance of meetings and regular teaching assignments that would compromise his other scholarly obligations.
Because the book’s publication was delayed until almost twenty years after the author’s death, readers today may not realize that Stoller was one of the first psychoanalytic authors to appreciate the significance of shame dynamics. Recognition of the theoretical and practical significance not simply of shame, but of shame dynamics, came in 1971 with the publication of two significant books, Heinz Kohut’s Analysis of the Self and Helen Block Lewis’s Shame and Guilt in Neurosis. Before then, though the affect of shame had been recognized early in Freud’s writings (in both Project for a Scientific Psychology [1895] and Studies on Hysteria [Breuer and Freud 1895]), psychoanalytic focus remained on actual or fantasied transgressive acts and consequent guilt. With that history in perspective, one can see that this book and others by Stoller were among the first psychoanalytic works to address the issue of shame dynamics. In Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots, Stoller emphasizes shame dynamics throughout and makes clear their centrality in his second chapter, “Pornography: Daydreams to Cure Humiliation.” This chapter, concentrating on shame dynamics as central to the dynamics of perversion, paves the way for the four chapters in the next section, “Into the Fires of Love: Fay Dreams Daydreams.” Stoller’s forefronting of humiliation is his prelude to the appreciation of the clinical material. This depth of understanding puts Stoller in the vanguard of psychoanalytic writers on the dynamics of shame.
In his seminars, Stoller surprised, even startled us by pointing to the problems arising from the use of anyone else’s data. We believed that “data” meant the reduced essence of the evidence. What surprised us was that Stoller used the word to mean not numerical, statistical data, but the experience of the encounter not easily captured in psychoanalytic writings. I want to note (and to emphasize) the methodological significance of the fact that in Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots Stoller does not privilege the vignette as the basic unit of psychoanalytic evidence. In fact, he seldom if ever uses vignettes in his works. This is a central, not an incidental, point. Not enough has been written on what I would call the shaky epistemology of the vignette in psychoanalytic literature: the insertion of a few paragraphs or pages of clinical material selected by the author to support a thesis. This use of vignettes is often vital to the illustration of a point the author wishes to make, but it does not demonstrate the aptness or validity of the author’s thesis.
As in his other works, Stoller presents us not with vignettes, but with extended case material, including, in chapter 6, lengthy verbatim interviews with Fay, a prostitute and aspiring porn queen. Fay’s two occupations are far from the same. Prostitution, by and large, is done solely for money, not for sexual gratification or affection. Stoller notes that prostitutes do not like to be kissed. They are at work, not out on a date. Pornography, as Fay makes clear, goes beyond sexual gratification to power: Fay emphasizes her pleasure in imagining “a man looking at me and jacking off” (p. 93), a fantasy that perhaps drives her wish to be a porn star, not just a prostitute. Stoller’s interviews with Fay are presented in great detail, allowing readers access to far more verbatim data than a vignette or series of vignettes could ever capture. We get Fay’s picture of her cold, unaffectionate mother and of a father who overdid physical contact, putting his daughter naked and struggling into bed, where she slept in the nude (p. 150). This nightly practice, if explored in ongoing treatment, might have shed light on the deeper meaning of her adult activities, of her views of men and women, and of the importance for her of power over men; she seems to experience sexual excitement as rebellion, hatred, and a means of attaining that power. With Stoller’s help, we see Fay as quite reflective, and view the exhibitionistic aspect of her makeup as exemplifying “the erotic form of hatred” (the subtitle of Stoller’s immediately previous book [1975]). Fay does not like people. Erotic activity is really the only activity in which she can feel, through which she gets something from men and exercises her power over them. In the following chapter, we see the dimension of Fay’s being at war with society.
At the end of the introduction to Part II, Stoller’s wit and playful access to his unconscious mind through associations is evident in a brief comment on his arranging to meet Fay through Bill, an acquaintance they share. “Bill announces he is to bring Fay to meet me. Auto da Fé.” (The auto-da-fé was a public trial of presumed infidels or heretics by the Inquisition, usually followed by a gruesome execution that might include burning at the stake or cutting the throat of the accused and jumping on the body so that blood would spurt dramatically out of the wound.) That wordplay points to Fay’s view that men inevitably fetishize her (not her characterization) and dehumanize objects.
Later in the book, Stoller takes note of Freud’s phallocentric bias, his presumption that the natural state of human existence is male (hence, male fantasies about penectomy and female fantasies that they somehow have lost the phallus). To investigate this issue, Stoller, together with the anthropologist Gilbert Herdt, conducted fieldwork among the Sambia of New Guinea (p. 177), in whose culture the natural state of humanity is presumed to be much more basically female. (This is not the same as the mammocentric orientation of, say, Kleinian work, which I have found to have little if anything to say about erotism per se).
The book’s final section, “Beneath the Daydream,” contains a single chapter, “Eros and Polis: What Is This Thing Called Love?” in which Stoller compares his psychoanalytic approach to sexual desire to that of Roger Scruton (a conservative philosopher and religious moralist [1986]) and Alan Soble (writing from a Marxist feminist perspective [1986]). We are thus given philosophical, religious, and feminist perspectives on sexuality from nonpsychoanalytic academics. With this interchange, Stoller gives us a taste of the facility with which nonpsychoanalytic disciplines can avoid the erotic entirely. I confess I found this chapter a bit tedious and difficult to read, but on reflection it proved of great value in contextualizing a psychoanalytic approach to the data as compared to the methods of other disciplines.
It should be noted that the title of the book is not at all offhand: recall that the central vision of The Interpretation of Dreams is that not one, but two, wishes are embodied in the dream and accomplished by the dream work: the infantile sexual wish and the wish to sleep. We may extend that line of thinking to what might be called the daydream work, the aim of which is both to express sexual excitation and desire and to modulate the anxiety stirred up by doing so. For dreams to be sweet, something must modulate the anxiety of the underlying wish, and for (day)dreams to be sweet, it helps if the erotic plots are public rather than private, that is to say, projected into the shared communal situation of pornography, so that private erotic plots are not too alarming for the individual. At the point at which we meet her, Fay’s wish is to change from prostitute to porn star so that she may become part of a shared cinematic daydream designed to arouse men with whom she will never have contact.
Sweet Dreams: Erotic Plots is an important final contribution (though it was not intended to be final) by one of the finest and most reflective psychoanalytic writers on sex and gender. This book will require from the reader some effort to grasp Stoller’s perspective as a whole. But I found the book, combining as it does his passions for psychoanalysis, anthropology, epistemology, and philosophy of science, well worth that effort. The book is a significant advance in psychoanalytic thinking about the erotic and the location of that thinking in the larger picture of our understanding of sexuality.