Book Review: Seduction and Desire: The Psychoanalytic Theory of Sexuality since Freud

From the title of this ably translated volume, published originally in German in 2008, one would expect to find within its pages a comprehensive review of recent theoretical work on psychoanalytic approaches to sexuality. Instead, what Ilka Quindeau, president of the Sigmund Freud Foundation and professor at the University of Applied Sciences, Frankfurt, offers in three overly long chapters is her own contribution to the subject, based unfortunately on synthetic reading and personal opinion rather than original research or casework. Whereas Freud’s Three Essays (1905), her avowed model for this project, focuses on perversion, puberty, and infantile sexuality, Quindeau has chosen as her major foci the seduction theory, gender differences, and sexual preference. Within these three broad rubrics she presents a number of mini-essays that allow her to explore a wide range of topics and produce something like a unified field theory of sexuality, albeit an uneven and ill-integrated one.

At the heart of Quindeau’s project is a modification of Jean Laplanche’s adaptation of Freud’s seduction theory (2006). Nachträglichkeit, translated by Strachey as “deferred action” (Freud 1895, p. 356 n. 1) and by Lacan (1966, p. 256), whom Quindeau does not address, as après-coup, is for French thinkers (including Derrida) evocative of the processes of memory. A child’s encounter with the adult world results in enigmatic messages that are continually reinterpreted, and the memory of which is continually reshaped as the child develops. Quindeau pushes this process even further, suggesting that a child’s sexual arousal leaves “memory traces in the form of neurological pathways” that lend meaning to later encounters (p. 6). Rather than a development from past to present or present to past, sexual identity thus emerges as a complex dialectic between inchoate desire, unconscious memory, and continuing development.

In Quindeau’s estimation, the Other is primary, all pleasures are erotic, and aggression seldom rears its ugly head. The desire of a child arises from its experience of being desired by an adult in primal scenes of seduction. Rejecting theories of development that posit two or more distinct stages of sexual development, she suggests that a process of repetition and reinterpretation serves to confirm these models of pleasure formed during early childhood. “Adolescence is not so much a new start as . . . a junction point . . . where various reinscriptions at various levels come together” (p. 68). Sybaritic infants, glorying in the ecstasies of the breast and the diaper, enjoy a nonendogenous, nonhierarchical, “polymorphously perverse,” multiply erogenous (as opposed to just genital) bisexuality that is, she asserts, fundamentally similar to the sexuality of modern adults (pp. 67, 70).

At least psychically. In a lengthy chapter 2, Quindeau explains that the sexual and gender identity of adults is formed through a lifelong agonistic process in which individual desires struggle with social norms in a landscape defined by gendered stereotypes. These dynamics stymie men’s recognition of their “inner genitality,” for example, and leave childless women feeling unfulfilled. Among the long set pieces in this chapter is an extended critique of object relations theory, with special barbs aimed at Nancy Chodorow and Judith Benjamin for failing to hew to Freudian orthodoxy. Just as Quindeau wants to collapse the distinction between infantile and adult sexuality, so too does she reject the difference between male and female sexuality: sexuality is “something that transcends gender,” and claiming otherwise ties us to a binary system that denies diversity (p. 187).

Having thus established herself as a foe of binary thinking, Quindeau calls, in chapter 3, for the abandonment of “the conventional differentiation in psychoanalytic discourse between homosexuality and heterosexuality” (p. 239), although she does find rich utility in the pathological classification of “perversion.” In her conclusion, the uncharacteristically brief chapter 4, she calls for the suspension of Geschlecht (sex/gender) differentiation in favor of a system unconcerned with categories. She peppers chapter 3 with several quixotic claims. Pointing (repeatedly—there is a great deal of redundancy in this book) to the popularity of Viagra, for example, she asserts that erectile disorder is generated by a repressed desire to commit incest (p. 208). Expanding on Freud’s offhand remark that “every sexual act [is] a process in which four individuals are involved” (1899, p. 364), Kernberg (2011) raises the figure to six: the pair and their unconscious oedipal rivals and ideals. Asserting the “dual bisexuality” of everyone involved, Quindeau ups the ante to fourteen (p. 216).

Quindeau’s arguments might be more convincing if she offered more in the way of justification than the forceful articulation of her personal opinions uttered ex cathedra. “I see,” “I think”, “I suggest,” “I agree,” “I take a different path,” “In my reading,” “In my vocabulary,” etc.: scarcely a page goes by without the assertion of her authorial presence. Quindeau also makes the logical leaps that too often seem to be our discipline’s peculiar weakness, a fault whereby supposition become incarnated as fact. Thus, her rereading of an early case by Freud (1895, pp. 352–356) begins modestly enough (“I believe it . . . likely that [Emma’s] scene with the shopkeeper was already accompanied by feelings . . . of lust or desire”). A mere two pages later, however, all qualification is cast aside (“the fact that Emma was already sexually aroused in the scene with the shopkeeper. . .”) (pp. 5, 7). Quindeau claims that interactions with adults cannot traumatize children in a clinical sense, because authorities have instructed us that trauma comprises “a triad of intrusion, denial, and arousal,” and she thinks it unlikely that such responses might be manifested in a prepubescent child (p. 13). ¹ For me at least, the clinical and ethical implications of such a repudiation of childhood experience are rather troubling.

Troubling, particularly since Quindeau’s resurrection of the seduction theory and the other models she advances in this book appear to be the products of inference rather than evidence. Although she makes a fleeting reference to her clinical practice, she offers no case studies to buttress any of her claims. Assumption and corollary rather than empirical research structure her argument. ² “Far more decisive” than clinical observation, she writes, “. . . is the plausibility of the assumptions and whether internal coherence exists, whether the individual assumptions cohere into a consistent theoretical structure” (p. 97). With criteria like these, it is no surprise that her argument often veers into sophistry. And so, alas, a tantalizingly titled and seductively packaged book proves profoundly disappointing in its substance.