On Becoming And Being A Subject Of Sexual Desire

Notes On Tensions And Dilemmas In Concepts And Terms

Conceptual tensions inevitably arise when exploring concepts as ineffable and thorny as desire and gender. Among the tensions in the current discussion are those between the immense, irreducible concept of desire and the more focused concept of desire for others. The latter refers to the experience of erotically desiring another and wanting that other to desire us, with all the affects, motivations, and complexities that erotically desiring others entails. Desire for others resides within the broader concept of desire but is permeated by and entangled with it. The term desire identification contributes to but also captures this perplexing entanglement in that it designates identifications related to the representation of erotic desire for others but, in name, refers to desire more broadly.

A tension between binarism and queerness also threads through this discussion (see footnote 2). An ongoing dilemma I face is that I risk being read as offering mere lip service to nonbinarism if I rely on the use of occasional disclaimers or being thought repetitive if I attend as consistently as I might wish to queerness and nonbinary complexity each time binary language is used. I work throughout to show as much as possible, while avoiding too much repetition, how queerness, and fluid/queer people, are in my mind (as are heterosexual) and how readers might hold fluidity and queerness, including their own, in their mind.

Confounding tensions between active-passive and subject-object also permeate this discussion. Desire for others is often bifurcated in our minds into a subject-object, active-passive binary whereby the subject actively pursues, desires, initiates and the object passively wishes to be pursued, desired, approached. However, the active pursuing of a desired object contains within it the passive wish to be desired by that object, and passively signaling approachability is in fact actively inviting pursuit and thus pursuing. ³ Thus, active and passive, subject and object, are inextricable. Additionally, desired objects are other human beings and are therefore also subjects. A desiring subject might experience a desired other as object, subject, or both in any given moment. Such tensions are inescapable in examining concepts as elusive and knotty as these and cannot be resolved but only tolerated and held in mind.

Concepts Of Identification: Freud And Laplanche

In considering the role of identification in the representation of desire for others, Freud’s concept of identification with the other (1923) and Laplanche’s of identification by the other (2011) are both incorporated. While Freud’s concept is likely familiar to most, Laplanche’s may be less so. Laplanche has reimagined identification as something done by the caregiver to the child beginning in infancy rather than (only) by the child with the caregiver later in development. Laplanche’s concept of identification by arises from his theory of generalized seduction, in which he details how the repressed infantile sexuality of caregivers is enigmatically communicated to infants through subtle shifts in touch, gaze, or affect during the bodily and relational ministrations of ordinary childcare. “The breast” is both nurturing and sexual, and the child registers the background “noise” (Scarfone 2014, p. 338) of the sexual. This registration of adult enigmatic messages is experienced by the child as “something” (Scarfone 2014, p. 339) having been implanted into its primitive body ego / skin ego. The infant feels impelled to master these enigmatic implantations and does so through “defensive and metabolizing processes” (Fletcher 2007, p. 1259) that Laplanche calls translation.

Enigmatic messages are enigmatic for the adult as well in that they emanate from the adult’s unconscious repressed infantile sexuality. Adult enigmatic communication is adult “seduction” of the child in that it initiates the child into the world of sexuality. It is traumatic in that the excess and otherness of adult sexuality intrudes into the infant’s psyche before the infant’s mind is mature enough to process it, but it is also life-giving in that it “kindles the infant’s desire, which if not kindled, can lead to the infant’s death” (Stein 1998, p. 600). Laplanche contrasts the life-giving trauma of implantation to the violating trauma of intromission, where, rather than birthing subjectivity, the other appropriates the child’s mind for its own use, leaving no space for the child to form its own mind (Scarfone 2013). This distinction has clinical implications for working analytically with sexuality and desire that will become evident. Scarfone (1994) adds that adults also enigmatically communicate translating capacities and that this is an enabling precondition for the infant to become able to translate for itself.

Stein (2007) underscores Laplanche’s focus on “the address,” “the signifier from the other to the self” (p.181) in the emergence of the subject. Butler (2014) orients us to gender address in caregivers’ enigmatic communications and offers examples of adult gender proffers: “You be the girl I never was.” “You be the man my husband refuses to be.” “You be the girl when I need you to be, and then the boy when I need you to be,” These proffers, Butler states, “never arrive with such propositional clarity” (p. 127). Adult unconscious fantasies for the child as a subject of desire for others must also be enigmatically conveyed, registered by the child, and subjected to translation and retranslation over time. We are identified by and identify with, in a phantasmatic dynamic, the “desire address” of adult unconscious infantile sexuality, the enigmatic identification by adults of us as subjects of desire for others. Adult desire address may be infused with or separate from adult gender address (or both).

Brief Theoretical Context

Historically, psychoanalysis has fluctuated regarding the relationship of desire to gender, due largely to anxiety about challenging heteronormativity (the cultural ordering of body, gender, and desire such that males must be men and masculine and sexually desire women and females must be women and feminine and sexually desire men). Freud advanced what was at the time a stunning challenge to heteronormativity when he stated that “mental sexual character and object-choice do not necessarily coincide” (1920, p. 170) and that we must “loosen the bond that exists in our thoughts between instinct and object” (1905, p. 148). Freud further challenged heteronormative order in his theorizing of bisexuality and polymorphous perversity. He conceived of bisexuality as a human universal whereby all children fantasize that they can be any anatomy, gender, or object-choice possibility and form identifications with many anatomical, gender, and object-choice possibilities. Polymorphous perversity unsoldered the sexual instinct from biologically predetermined outcomes in a delinkage that demonstrated the variability, lushness, and non-inevitability of sexuality’s and desire’s potentials.

Freud was inconsistent, however, about the relatedness of desire and gender. Many have observed how, in subsequent revisions of Three Essays he demoted some of his most potent challenges to heteronormativity from the text to the footnotes (Dimen 1999; Goldner 2003; Gulati and Pauley 2019; Moss 2015). Others emphasize the third essay as the site of Freud’s ambivalent retreat (Saketopoulou 2017; Scarfone 2014): there he seems to flee from the sumptuous bisexuality and polymorphous perversity of the first two essays to the “straight”-jacket of prescriptive heterosexual outcome. Freud was never able to fully liberate sexuality and gender from heteronormativity, culturally imposed or internalized. Tragically, his successors almost universally disavowed his emancipatory aim (see Lewes 1988; Mitchell 1996; Roughton 2002). With few exceptions, the next fifty years of psychoanalytic theorizing proselytized strict adherence to heteronormative order and characterized any variation as psychopathology.

Heteronormativity’s authority was so absolute that it required the aggregated critiques of empirical research on human sexuality, second wave feminism, gay/lesbian studies, and queer theory to subvert it. Empirical sex research returned the clitoris as a sex organ to women (Masters and Johnson 1966). Feminist psychoanalysis recuperated women’s active desire (Elise 2000; Gediman 2005). Gay/lesbian studies unsoldered desire from the gender of the object (Abelove 1993; Corbett 1993; Magee and Miller 1997). Queer theory challenged the binaries of the sex/gender system (Butler 1990; Foucault 1980). Psychoanalytic feminist gender theorists, largely from the relational school, revived Freud’s project of loosening the bond between instinct and object (Dimen 1991; Goldner 1991; Harris 1991), synthesizing psychoanalytic theory with interdisciplinary studies and postmodern analysis to yield powerful deconstructive critiques. Delinking homosexuality from psychopathology was among those theoretical moves (Corbett 1996, 2011). This critique gained traction and was elaborated across diverse theoretical perspectives, some of which had rich traditions of theorizing desire (Birksted-Breen 1993; Fiorini 2018; Quindeau 2018).

Attention to desire and gender’s relatedness in this theoretical (r)evolution was necessarily weighted toward contesting compulsory heteronormative linkage. Recently, under the protection of the theoretical buttress provided by this liberatory work, a turn toward reconsidering how desire and gender may be linked (for some) has emerged. Corbett (1993) has theorized gay men’s supposed “femininity” as a differently structured masculinity, a masculinity that incorporates the experience of passivity in desiring relation to another man. González (2019) has problematized the disarticulation of sexuality from gender in contemporary gender theory and has theorized gender and sexuality as intimately interconnected but in no preordained way. Lingiardi (2015) has explicated how the psyche may enlist gender to defend against and/or express desire and desire to defend against and/or express gender in infinite variation and in entanglement with other psychic conflicts. I place myself within this emergent theoretical trend.

From Gender Identification To Desire Identification

In the following, I further disentangle the representation of same-sex desire from cross-gender identification, detail more specifically how desire identifications form and interact with gender, and clarify the link between desire identification and object choice. It is important to note that, for many individuals, gender does resonate as capturing aspects of their experience of desire for others (although this is highly individualized and varies widely). For instance, it can feel “masculine” (to some) to be “the pursuer” of a desired other. However, the presumption that this resonance with gender reflects gender identification is a logical fallacy that has been substantively challenged, theoretically and clinically.

Ehrensaft (2007) has posited that the wish to be a girl forms in some boys because they “see no alternative pathway to a world in which one could marry a man” (p. 283). Shuker (1996) has proposed that embodiments typically defined as “female masculinity” may reflect a female’s mode of signaling sexual desire to another female (p. 501). Butler (1995) has theorized penis envy as the girl’s wanting not just what the boy has but “what other girls want” (p. 133). Torok (1970), regarding opposite-sex desire, has formulated penis envy as repressed envy of desire that arises when the girl forbids desire in herself to avoid conflict with the mother and locates it in the penis, which she then idealizes. Each of these authors has theorized how psychic and embodied dynamics traditionally defined solely in terms of the representation of gender may be also, or better, understood as related to the representation of erotic desire for others. ⁴ Clinically, the literature on queer desire offers innumerable clinical vignettes illustrating how attempts by patients to describe their experience of desire in terms of masculinity or femininity collapse as they apply it to their lived experience (Burch 1993; Corbett 1993, 1996; Frommer 1995, 2000; Lingiardi 2015).

In fairness, the insufficiency of gender identification to explain the representation of desire for others may in part be due to desire’s inherent ineffability. Desire is enigmatic, phantasmatic, and disordered in its essence (Stein 1998), so intrinsically irreducible that language will inevitably fall short. Still, perhaps more of the experience of erotic desire for others could be understood if we shift our conceptual paradigm from gender identification to desire identification (i.e., the representation of desire for others). We could consider then, for example, that a male child in a heteronormative family structure identifying with a gestural mannerism of his mother’s (and its fantasied psychic meanings and energies) might not be attempting to represent how to be a woman but how to be a man’s love object. We could imagine that the unconscious can and does distinguish between being a woman and wanting a man’s erotic desire, even if heteronormativity does not. We could also consider that a male child identifying with a gestural mannerism of his father’s might be attempting to represent desire for a woman (in body and mind) in a way that is distinguishable from masculinity.

We could further consider that an adult female might identify as a woman, but, for instance, “stride” rather than “sway,” bodily and/or psychically, due to unconscious fantasies as a child that “striding” was sexually attractive to her mother. Or that a girl might identify with her mother’s modes of embodying desire for others (i.e., “sway,” bodily and/or psychically) but animate those modes to arouse desire in women. More complexly, we could imagine that children of any sex or gender can identify with any caregiver’s ways of embodying desire for others (as fantasized and translated) and animate those identifications to arouse desire in others of any sex or gender. “Striding” and “swaying,” and the psychic “moves” they signify, can initially be about the dance of sexual desire with any links to anatomy or gender accruing (or not) après coup (House 2017).

This separation of gender and desire for others in the mind is viable only for the moment of inception of an identification. Desire for others and masculinity and femininity rapidly intersect and become chaotically assembled (Harris 2005) and reassembled, translated and retranslated, developmentally. Gender and desire for others can assemble themselves in the psyche as separate or merged or both, become expressed through each other or not, with dizzying variability between but also within individuals. Thus, the resonance with gender that many experience may reflect desire identifications that later accumulated gender meanings rather than gender identification. ⁵

I have linked the embodiment of desire for others to the gender of the desired object in ways that might seem to imply that desire identification is inevitably linked to object choice. To clarify, desire identifications may be linked to object choice but also may not be, in that erotic desire for others may be linked in the mind to the gender of the desired other in any moment but may not in other moments. In the formation of any desire identification, fantasies about the sex or gender of the desired object, desiring subject, both or neither, may be present.

The Traumatization Of Erotic Desire For Others

When a child’s strivings to embody erotic desire for others are identified as masculinity or femininity by a caregiver, the child’s emerging erotic desire is denied recognition in the caregiver’s mind, recognition the child profoundly needs to be able to consolidate the self as a subject of desire (Benjamin 1991; Schiller 2012). Children can experience this renaming (of desire as gender) as a meaningful non-comment on their desire, a redirecting by the caregiver that implicitly signals that their desire is bad. The child can feel confused, rejected, and abandoned, left to fantasize why and to translate the enigmatic messages in that turning away. Such fantasies and translations often entail shame-laden states of badness, inadequacy, and wrongness painful enough to traumatize. Further, desire is at least in part an affect (Elise 2002; Flynn 2008) and as such requires recognition for its regulation. Benjamin and Atlas (2015) argue that in the absence of a figure who provides recognition, “together with the matching, marking and soothing of affect regulation, the excitement associated with desire can overwhelm the immature psyche” (p. 41) and lead to traumatic states of excess, overstimulation, and too-muchness. They illustrate how unreliable responsiveness in the caregiver can produce a “basic template” for affective arousal of “‘seduced and abandoned,’ or ‘excited and dropped’” (p. 45), whereas responsiveness from a recognizing other promotes “coherence of physically embodied communication and intentions—a template for sexual communication and regulation of arousal” (p. 44).

There are complications to the recognition of sexual desire, however. The extent to which sexual excitement can be recognized safely has been argued to be uncertain in that “containing or mirroring sexuality entails partial participation in it” (Stein 2008, p. 43; Davies 2001) and thus approaches incest. Further, Fonagy (2008) posits that misrecognition (of sexual arousal) is developmentally essential to adult sexuality. In his model, the mother “mismirrors” (Stein 2008, p. 60) the child’s excitement by looking away or minimizing it to manage her anxieties about her child’s and her own sexual arousal. This alienated mirroring is internalized by the child as an alien aspect of the self, a disturbing, disruptive, transgressive part of the self that, in adult sexuality, we are motivated to expel into another person through projective processes. This need to expel engenders psychic exigency for another person to “share the imposed burden” (p. 23) of sexuality that imbues sexuality with excessive, other, urgent qualities.

Benjamin and Atlas (2015) concur that “sexuality is bound to exceed what the relational dimension can contain” but note that “the capacity to hold and process this excess” psychically and bodily “varies considerably” (p. 42). They contrast the inevitable experience of sexuality as “disruptive, transgressive or excessive” to the traumatic experience of sexuality as uncontained and unregulated “that creates a sense of sexuality as dangerous” (p. 41). Perhaps we could retain a conception of sexual desire as not fully recognizable and thus preserve a developmental theory of sexuality’s alien, excessive character, but broaden the range of what we consider possible to recognize safely, both in children and in patients (more on the clinical relevance of this momentarily).

From a Laplanchean perspective, the coding of a child’s embodiment of desire for others as masculinity or femininity could be considered a powerful identification by the o/Other, one that is potentially dense with enigmatic messages. What meanings and translations might children make of their desire for others being not-identified-by the o/Other? How might they translate the insertion of gender into sexual desire’s place? What might it mean that gender is used to deny desire for others but can be infused with mandates and proffers for it? What parental desires for the child as a subject of desire for others might be bafflingly conveyed in such a naming?

Culture is also an Other that the child is identified by with powerful, mystifying messages. The concept of interpellation can elucidate how identification by the cultural Other might operate. Interpellation has been defined as recognition at the cultural level (Guralnik and Simeon 2010). When children feel their inner experience is recognized in language and culture, their developing self is validated; when misrecognized, self and mind are assaulted, and shame and trauma ensue. One way culture recognizes erotic desire is through representations of it. Representation confirms and contains (Stein 2008); absence is a powerful communication that redoubles exclusion from caregivers’ minds and reinforces shame. Guralnik and Simeon poignantly depict how interpellative misrecognition inevitably shames. They demonstrate how, when misinterpellated, the mind may “morph into” the alien identity as a protective measure (e.g., if a man’s embodiment of desire for a man is named “woman,” the man may question if he is a woman and defensively “morph into” the identity of “woman” in part of his mind). I view their notion of “morph into” as akin to “identify with.”

The assault on a child’s mind when the embodiment of desire for others is misrecognized as masculinity or femininity can be elaborated into a relational trauma with far-reaching consequences for the child’s sexuality. Erotic desire can become associated with attack and rejection, and thus fear and shame. Children faced with this assault can become motivated to refashion their desire for others, and their psychic and embodied expressions of it, into forms they unconsciously (possibly even consciously) fantasize loved others will accept. Too-muchness and dysregulation stemming from the absence of containment (of misrecognition) can lead to outcomes such as desire becoming over- or underregulated, excess being turned against the self in the form of aggression or omnipotence (Benjamin and Atlas 2015), or turning “the tension (and aggression) to one's body” (Stein 2008, p. 59) by converting it into a source of sexual pleasure.

Recognizing erotic desire for others, however, entails entering the ambiguous relational territory of enlivening but not exploiting the child’s (or patient’s) emerging sexuality. As noted, naming, mirroring, and engaging erotic desire can feel, and potentially be, dangerous, but, as Laplanche holds, it may be essential for vitalizing sexual subjectivity and human subjectivity more broadly. Clinically, Elise (2019, p. 28), in her elaboration of Kristeva’s semiotic chora (2014) into the “choreography” of analytic eroticism, Slavin (2002), with his “innocent sexuality,” and Gentile (2013), with her “space between the enacted and the owned” (p. 156) of symbolic erotic play, have each offered visions of a relational stance for engaging desire, an “ethical frame” (Elise 2019, p. 2) for implantation and the aliveness (sexual and human) that implantation offers.

Misrecognition of desire for others as gender in the child’s relational and cultural worlds (which intertwine) can leave the child with nowhere to turn to “see,” feel, or validate as “good” erotic desire felt for others. This is a profound rejection and, as such, a form of psychic assault on desire for others that can be akin in vastness and character to Saketopoulou’s “massive gender trauma” (2014, p. 779) where the transgender child’s gender identity is misrecognized at every turn, aggressively coerced into heteronormative alignment with the visible body surface. Here desire for others is aggressively coerced into heteronormativity. The trauma is to such a foundational and vulnerable aspect of the self that the protective strategies assembled to bear it must be potent. The psyche is especially compelled toward strategies that defensively transform desire for others into gender in some way.

Foreclosed Loves In The Representation Of Erotic Desire For Others

Judith Butler (1995) illustrates how desire can be defensively transformed into gender in her seminal theorizing of gender as constituted by melancholic identification. Butler theorizes same-sex desire as “foreclosed” rather than repressed, meaning that, in contrast to erotic desire for the opposite-sex parent, which is recognized by caregivers and therefore can be grieved and integrated, same-sex desire is “refused” recognition and therefore cannot be mourned. Anchored in Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), Butler contends that unmourned loss of the same-sex love object becomes melancholic and is defended against as Freud describes by identification with the lost object. She argues that all boys, regardless of eventual object choice, experience foreclosed same-sex desire for the father and unmourned loss of the father as an erotic love object. She further argues that this loss is coped with through identification with the father the boy erotically desired, specifically with the father’s masculinity. The boy becomes the masculine man he sexually desired and lost. Thus, unmourned same-sex desire for the father is both defended against and preserved in masculine identification. Butler’s discussion holds implications for considering love and loss in the representation of desire for others.

Interweaving Butler’s theorizing with Benjamin’s notion of identificatory love (1991), I posit that a second form of love can be found in the representation of desire for others, one that is also often unrecognized, foreclosed, and unmourned: the love of the person with whom the child forms the desire identification. To clarify, under heteronormativity, erotic desire for the father engenders identification with the mother as the father’s love object in children of any sex. Building from Freud’s depiction (1921) of identification as the first emotional tie to an object, Benjamin (1991) theorized that we form not simply an intrapsychic identification but a relationship with the person with whom we identify. She posited that we love, even fall in love with, those with whom we identify. It is identificatory love rather than object love but, in its own way, passionate erotic love. It is the love of an admired ideal one wishes to become like rather than possess but contains many of the qualities, intensities, and forms of significance for self as object love. ⁶ Like object love, identificatory love requires recognition for the child to be able to consolidate a sense of self as a subject who desires. Children need the model of desire for others whom they admire, love, and identify with to recognize, validate, and love them back in their identification. Benjamin outlines a host of deleterious, often sadomasochistic, psychic consequences when “likeness” between child and identificatory model of desire is “refused” (Butler 1995) recognition. In the context of Butler’s example, alongside and concurrent with the boy’s foreclosed object love for the father, is foreclosed, unmourned, and therefore also melancholic identificatory love for the mother (as a subject of desire for the father). I consider absence of recognition of the child’s love for the identified-with other to be a form of misrecognition of desire for others that can lead to traumatic states of rejection and inadequacy comparable to those occurring when desire for others is misrecognized as gender.

To present a brief clinical example, a woman I treated in a second analysis described telling her analyst about how as a teenager she wanted to be a “chick magnet” like her father and how she wanted her mother to look at her the same way her mother looked at her father. Her analyst commented that she might have wanted her father to look at her that way too. This may have been a reasonable comment in the context of the material, but my patient felt hurt and betrayed. What was emotionally present for her was not the wish to be desired by her father but to bond with him as a loving and loved protégée and “like” fellow comrade in the quest for women’s desire. The look she wanted was a look of pride in her budding desiring subjectivity and the bond of camaraderie she fantasized they would have shared as pursuers of women if she was a boy. She felt her analyst would never make such a comment to a man recalling identifying with his father as he emerged into his sexuality. Her analyst missed (and reenacted) the pain of her father’s rejection of her identificatory love for him. ⁷

The capacity to represent erotic desire for others, then, entails two dyadic love relationships, both of which require recognition: one of object love for the desired object and one of identificatory love for the identified-with subject of desire. ⁸ Thus, there are two potentially foreclosed, unmourned love relationships in the representation of desire for others and two distinct but interrelated sets of melancholic identifications. More complexly, children identify with caregivers’ ways of embodying desire for others apart from caregivers’ genders. Children romantically “fall in love” with one caregiver (or other model) and identificatorily “fall in love” with another in a multiplicity of configurations. They can also “fall in love” in both ways with one caregiver. These dynamics hold for children of single caregivers as well, in that the psyche is not bound by concrete external realities but finds models it can fashion as needed into fantasied objects to desire and subjects of desire for others with whom to identify. These objects and subjects are found by the child in the external relational and cultural worlds and in the internal world of the caregiver’s unconscious (Ogden 1987).

Seeking “Role Models” Of Desire For Others: Beginnings With Chris

The most striking, and perhaps telling, aspect of the beginning of my relationship with Chris is that I can barely remember it at all. I remember her height and impeccable grooming and that she was an attractive woman about my age. I have a vague recollection of experiencing her as somehow both imposing and unremarkable. I clearly remember Chris’s painful childhood and her capacity to negate its trauma. Perhaps my experience of Chris as both imposing and unremarkable was a resonance with how she made her imposing trauma so unremarkable to herself. Chris grew up in abject poverty in the rural Midwest, with alcoholic, physically abusive parents. Over two summers as a preadolescent, she was sexually abused by a visiting uncle, in some instances with his wife (Chris’s aunt) observing. Chris’s adult sexual relationships had all been with physically abusive and/or married men, often including sexual trysts that involved another woman.

Early in our work, Chris began to sever relationships with people she came to feel were “just using” her. I initially saw those endings in a positive light, as external manifestations of psychic separation from an internalized exploitive object presence. Indeed, she depicted many of the people she distanced herself from as narcissistic, objectifying, or alcoholic. The severing continued, however, to the point where she renounced nearly all of her friendships and family ties. She also discarded any pictures, clothing, or objects connected to people she felt were “toxic.” When sensing what she called “bad energy,” Chris felt her only protection was to escape the source, invariably understanding the source as outside of her. The longer this continued, the more I became alarmed. I was uncertain how much to contain my anxiety and stay with her through this process and how much to intervene more energetically to encourage reflectiveness. When I would offer the idea that the source may have to do with feelings inside her, Chris would often tighten with what felt like controlled but palpable rage and admonish me that she would no longer stay in abusive situations. Her look conveyed that I could be added to the roster of abusers at any time. Feeling chastised, forewarned, and controlled, I would retreat and repair. At other times, Chris could open to my move toward her inner life, and we could meaningfully explore her feelings.

What had first appeared to me to be the kind of external changes one sees when there is true evolution in the internal representational world began to look increasingly more concrete, externalizing, and destructive. I began to wonder whether what was happening might not be representation at all, but something closer to the denial of representation that Bass (1997) describes, where concreteness protects from the psychic dangers of true representation by blurring the distinction between fantasy and reality, inside and outside. This is akin to Segal’s symbolic equation (1957), in which symbol and symbolized are minimally differentiated, if at all. I found myself fluctuating between alarm and reassurance, depending on how genuinely reflective, or not, Chris seemed at any moment.

I felt comforted by having found some working formulations to help me understand Chris’s concreteness (perhaps my own form of turning to a source outside of me) and had some faith that I could interpret the meanings or process (as Bass suggests) over time, but still I found watching Chris continue to systematically eject so many people and objects in her life harrowing. I was convinced that work in the transference was essential for developing reflectiveness and stemming the tide of what I saw as destruction, but I worried she would experience my moving closer to her as “bad energy” she had to escape. I treaded gingerly, cautiously approaching and quickly retreating in speaking about our relationship and her feelings about me, all the while conflicted about not saying more.

At length the severing slowed, and Chris entered what felt like a new phase marked by decreased externalization and increased internal engagement. She also began to form new relationships and refurbish her home. Perhaps denial of representation and true representation had been operating simultaneously, in an interplay that both defended against and allowed for genuine internal contact (for discussion of such a dynamic, see Ogden 2011). My fluctuation between alarm and reassurance may have mirrored Chris’s between symbolic equation and true symbolism. Chris seemed to have developed enough of a sense of safety with herself and with me to risk opening more to her internal world. ⁹

Chris began to contact and express previously inhibited thoughts and feelings of many kinds. Among them was sexual desire for women. She related stories of close female friends and coworkers in her adolescent and adult years for whom, in retrospect, she believed she had felt sexual desire. Increasingly, she felt she wanted a relationship with a woman. I had not anticipated this turn. Nothing in Chris’s presentation had read as “lesbian” to me. I again became alarmed. I wondered if uninterpreted transference desire for me was being expressed concretely as desire for “women,” but I stayed silent, apprehensive that trying to explore this possibility could lead to an irreparable rupture. A countertransference anxiety began to form in the back of my mind that my “inability” to help Chris know and express her feelings about me was “causing” her longing for me to manifest as longing for women, and thus, unduly shaping the orientation of her emerging sexuality. This fantasy was rich and multiply determined but clearly permeated with homophobia in its anxiety about same-sex desire. It was elaborated over time until, ultimately, it demanded my attention.

Chris began to seek what she called “role models,” scouring television and social media in an almost obsessional quest for women whose “look” she wanted to emulate. Celebrities such as Rachel Maddow, Jody Foster, and Sarah Paulsen were evaluated for their level of what Chris called “male energy,” some too much, some not enough. Chris disliked “masculine” women, who to her looked “stern” and “unpolished,” and was terrified that this was the inevitable endpoint of the slippery slope of desire for women. She feared this even as she observed and talked about many feminine-presenting women in couples. Chris followed a lesbian couple on social media, Ellen DeGeneres and Portia di Rossi, and in a session one day said, “Yesterday at work, I noticed I was sitting like Ellen sits. She’s the more male one.” She paused, met my eyes, glanced down, then returned, and cautiously said, “It felt right to me.” I was moved by the vulnerability of what she had just revealed and by what felt like her moving toward me in disclosing this, and I tried to move toward her in return by asking more about what felt right, what the position was, and how she felt about seeing this in herself. Later I said, “You said Ellen is ‘the more male one.’ Can you say more about what you meant?” Chris looked at me as though flummoxed that I would ask such an obvious question and declared, “The male is the one who leads, the one who is in charge.” I noted the absoluteness of her link of the embodiment of desire to a concrete sex category and saw it as not only consistent with her susceptibility to concrete modes when vulnerable but also as a pure, unquestioned internalization of the concreteness of heteronormativity.

I offered, “You’re thinking of being the one who leads as about being male, but it sounds like it might be, at least partly, about the position you want in a relationship with a woman, to be the one in charge.” Chris said, “You mean, you can be the one in charge and not be the man?” I said, “Yes. Why not?” Small moments such as this of us parsing how gender and desire for others intertwined in Chris’s mind eased her absoluteness, and her thinking about herself grew more nuanced. In parallel, my anxieties about exploring how she and I intertwined in her mind also eased, and my work in the transference-countertransference grew more nuanced. I could now say to Chris, for example, “I notice that you’re looking for role models all around you, but you haven’t mentioned me. I wonder if I am in your mind in any way as someone to be like or not, or to desire or not, or both.” Chris thought and said, “No, I don’t think about that with you.” I said, “Maybe not consciously, but I wonder if part of your pursuing women on social media is that it is a way to pursue your curiosity about me, that they are partly stand-ins for me.” Chris nodded but did not reply. Chris could not go far yet with my move toward “us,” but she could consider and tolerate it now, which I saw as meaningful movement. It seemed to me that a presence in each other’s minds was beginning to kindle.

Chris entered a period of preoccupation with transgender male athletes and wondered if she, too, was transgender. She railed that no feminine woman could ever want another feminine woman like her and was angry that she might have to become “a man” to attract a feminine woman. Chris liked dresses and didn’t want to give them up and wondered if she was a man who likes dresses. I said, “Wanting to be a man may be part of it, but it sounds like you want feminine women to see you as someone they could desire, and you have an idea that for that to happen, you have to become a man. You know that idea isn’t true because you see feminine women together in couples all the time, but it feels true.” Chris took in my comment, pensively nodding yes, and said, “Maybe what I want is the male role.” Chris was now able to consider that she could assume what she saw as the “role” of a man without becoming a man.

Chris’s search for “role models” can be considered through Benjamin’s theorizing (1991, 1995a,b) that to develop as a subject of desire a child must form representations of self as a subject of desire and that the child does this “by forming a symbolic representation of another subject with whom to identify” (1991, p. 283)—in other words, a role model. Benjamin terms these identificatory figures “like subjects” of desire (1995b, p. 129). She emphasizes how heteronormativity positions the father as the sole subject of desire (with mother as object) and how, therefore, children of any gender must identify with the father to become themselves a subject of desire. ¹⁰ Traditional psychoanalytic theories depict comparable dynamics in which the wish to be loved by the mother (for example) generates fantasies of being the mother’s love object that spur identification with the father as the mother’s love object in children of all sexes and genders.

The proposition that all children form identifications with opposite-sex parents as subjects of desire for same-sex parents holds significant implications for erotic fantasy life, but its import is concealed by confining those identifications to a transient “negative” oedipal phase and accentuating a supposedly rapid, full reversal to the “positive,” for example, where the girl’s longing for the mother and identification with the father reverse into longing for the father and identification with the mother. ¹¹ In the unconscious, however, identifications do not fully reverse. As Benjamin (1996) notes, a tension exists “between renouncing and maintaining identifications” that is “an important aspect of psychic reality” (p. 33). The psychic reality is more that each of us forms desire identifications with others of many fantasied sexes and genders that do not fully reverse but remain, are elaborated, and seek recognition throughout life and that activate spontaneously and enigmatically in our erotic embodied fantasy life.

As I was working to help Chris parse her experience of core gender identity, gender role, and desire for others, I was also working to parse my own. In many moments, I felt within me the same binarism and concreteness I was challenging in Chris. We each face a psychic dilemma in which, to form ourselves as subjects of gender and desire for others, we must enlist the relational and cultural discourses available to us. We can feel enormous pressure, external and internal, to represent and present desire and gender to ourselves and others through those discourses. But the aim can never be achieved, the pressure never relieved, because gender and desire for others channel the real (Lacan 2006), the enigmatic (Laplanche 2007), and the unsymbolizable (Stein 1998); they collapse into and out of each other in those discourses and in us and are inherently beyond representation. Resisting internal and external demands to alleviate the discomfort of this irresolvability through the illusory certainty binary categories promise can be challenging, for developing children, for adults throughout life, for cultural and political systems, and for psychoanalysts.

Desire Identifications Activating Bodily In The Transference-Countertransference

In the next phase of Chris’s grappling with the representation of gender and of desire for others, searching for clothing took center stage. From exercise to work clothes, for over a year, Chris was unable to find anything that “felt right.” In session after session, for example, she described shopping for men’s and women’s athletic shoes, buying, trying, and returning pair after pair. She also became taken with the fashion sense of several male actors and vacillated, consciously and explicitly, between desiring them and wanting to be like them.

Each time Chris recounted a “trying on and returning” episode, I would associate to Freud’s depictions of children representing instincts through play (1915). I imagined children playing games as Freud described in which they “try on” the position of each person in a pretend aggressive or sexual situation (David Brand, personal communication 2015). My reveries brimmed with fantasied scenarios of children playing with sexuality in this way; first, autoerotically, by taking the roles of both subject and object of desire for their own body (e.g., by showing their body to themselves while being looked at by themselves), and then transporting the work of representation into relatedness, by showing their body to a caregiver while having their body looked at by that caregiver.

I began to experience Chris as showing her “outfits” (and body) to me and to experience myself as looking. I also noticed I was subtly, internally, “showing” myself to Chris. What I mean is that at times I noticed a certain tilt of the head, a raised eyebrow, or a sassy pose inhabiting my body. These expressions felt contained inside my skin—not overtly expressed, yet, I suspected, enigmatically perceptible to Chris. My embodied states felt situated within me in a place between dissociation and behavioral expression, a containing space of embodied reverie held within where my erotic activation was neither acted out nor disavowed. I did not feel I was internally flirting with Chris but felt instead that I was allowing my personal modes of embodying desire for others to remain present in the analytic field (Civitarese 2016).

I was mindful of Chris’s history of abuse. Attending to boundaries was prominent in my mind, but I did not seek to embody safety by anxiously dissociating my erotic activation. I sought to contain but also sustain my libidinal energies. I wanted my erotic aliveness to remain accessible for me to analyze and for Chris to utilize via the libidinizing maternal erotic matrix theorized by Elise (2017, 2019) as analytic eroticism. Elise’s analytic eroticism is her clinical evocation of Kristeva’s maternal eroticism (2014), where Elise theorizes that the analyst enlivens and vitalizes the patient by allowing the analyst’s libidinal energy to be available for the patient to utilize. In ways more intuitive than conscious, I believe, I was pursuing the relational position of implantation as opposed to intromission, the delineation Butler (2014) describes between “those forms of impingement that inaugurate the sexual life of the child” and those that “exploit the child’s unknowingness and dependency for the purposes of abuse” (p. 122). In retrospect, I believe I was also intuitively offering my translatory function (Scarfone 1994).

I viewed Chris as “playing” with an array of fantasied (and binaried) positions in the representation of desire for others: subject versus object of desire, man versus woman, same sex versus opposite sex, and so on, in unlimited permutation. I saw her as “trying on and returning” varying “ensembles”—assemblies (Harris 2005)—of desire and gender identifications, seeking to experience the look and feel of each “outfit” of clothing, posture, gait, and relational position. The “right fit” Chris sought had to do with the fashioning of a habitable assembly (in mind and body) of what she thought of as the “femininity” of her gender and the “masculinity” of what women desire. Chris was processing those binaries inside her, utilizing clothing as an external site for that internal working through (again, in her characteristic symbolic equation / true symbolization dynamic). My sense was that Chris was identifying with me as a subject of desire and that I was offering myself to her to “use” (Winnicott 1969) as such. I also saw her as alternating between identifying with me and desiring me, with this fluctuation being given expression through her fantasies about being like male actors versus desiring them.

In a sense, I was “playing” with Chris in her embodiment of gender and desire for others in ways I could intuit in a way but not truly comprehend. I thought Chris needed me to look at, not away from, each look she showed me, and in that way offer my recognition of whatever ensemble of desire and gender she donned. I was concerned that my “looking” might enact her aunt’s “looking” at her niece being sexually abused. I still felt Chris needed me to look, but to look at her differently, as a desiring and desirable sexual and human subject to recognize rather than an object to dehumanize and exploit.

During this time, I became increasingly aware of a countertransference wish forming and intensifying where I hoped Chris would desire rather than identify with the male actors. I came to see this wish as connected to my earlier anxiety that my supposed inadequacy at working in the transference was “causing” Chris to desire women. It seemed an omnipotent fantasy had developed in part of my mind that if I was doing better analytic work with Chris, I could help her connect to me in other ways. Apparently, “other ways” had been deemed superior by this part of me, an unconscious assessment I doubt I would have made had Chris been a heterosexual male. While I might wonder if a heterosexual male patient was expressing uninterpreted transference desire for me as desire for “women,” I do not believe I would anxiously fantasize that I was influencing him toward heterosexuality.

My wish for Chris to desire rather than identify with the male actors had brought me face to face, disturbingly, with my own internalized homophobia. I believe I was, in part, resonating with Chris’s projected homophobia, but if so, her homophobia had found a ready home in me. Perhaps our homophobias had found ready homes in each other. I worked to look at, not away from, this aspect of myself, and, perhaps most important, to accept it nonjudgmentally. I began to realize that desire identifications I had unconsciously formed with certain homophobic tropes may have been activated; among them, the trope of parents afraid their “inadequacy” had “caused” their child’s gayness and the trope that “homosexuals recruit others” into homosexuality. I believed my capacity to open a deepening relational space for Chris and me to recognize her emerging desire for others hinged on my willingness to work through my conflicts about my own. My anxieties about erotic and emotional closeness with Chris were, of course, multiply determined. I am highlighting only those aspects related to my thesis.

Desire Identifications Activating Erotically In The Transference-Countertransference

As Chris continued to evolve and I to work through my conflicts about her desire for me, the transference-countertransference began to heat up. At the start of one session, Chris seemed to saunter as she walked past me into my office. She paused after passing and, turning slowly and sultrily partway back around, made eye contact with me over her shoulder as she handed me her check for the month. She held my gaze for an almost imperceptibly protracted moment, ephemeral and fleeting, yet erotically potent. She leaned indiscernibly forward as she extended her check in a move that felt distinctly as though she were offering to light my cigarette. Accepting her check felt like accepting her light, with me sultrily meeting her gaze in return. Having established her lead in our pas de deux, Chris turned and moved to the couch.

I consider my internal experience of “sultrily meeting her gaze in return” to have entailed an instantaneous activation of unconscious desire identifications within me. Not solely internal, however, the moment was more akin to Hartman’s interembodied interaction (2010), with desire identifications within us both becoming intersubjectively, interembodiedly, enlivened. It was as though embodied self-states of desire had become animated within and between us. I entered a Lauren Bacall self-state in relation to a fantasy of Chris as Humphrey Bogart, an embodied state in desire that I did not consider typical for me. Perhaps the Bacall self-state I rejected as not-me revealed a disavowed aspect of myself, for without some Bacall identification I believe I would not so reflexively have imagined her. Analysts with other internal representational worlds of desire for others might generate a multiplicity of alternative responses and fantasy figures.

To say “I entered” the Bacall state, though, is to attribute too much intentionality to the psychic experience. To say “the state entered me,” in some sense, feels more accurate. My response felt reflexive and instantaneous, triggered rather than chosen. This reflexiveness is characteristic of how desire identifications activate, galvanizing automatically, powerfully or subtly, in moments of erotic interaction. I consider my embodied state to have been constructed partly of dissociated desire identifications in Chris, projected by her and identified with by me. However, I mean by this not that desire originated in Chris, was communicated to me by her, and responded to by me, but that we were enigmatically activating and being activated by each other, animating each other’s inner worlds of identifications with and by others.

I thought more about my Bogart-Bacall association and wondered if the image of this couple may have functioned as a kind of memetic, prelinguistic starting point for my translation of Chris’s enigmatic communications from visceral registration into thought and language. I then wondered why “Bogart-Bacall” was the meme my unconscious generated. I wondered if the couple might have been part of my scouring for role models of gender and desire for others as a child and if I might be unconsciously identified with my fantasies of them both and of their erotic dynamics. I wondered if my unconscious may have enlisted their relationship as a kind of “screen metaphor” to represent a “feel” of erotic relating that I had enigmatically sensed broadly (and possibly at home) and identified with. This internal engagement in the psychic work of opening to my foreclosed desire identifications, of seeking to recognize the unrecognized in me, was an embodied experiencing of what I sought for Chris, and thus a lived intervention.

Threading through this interaction, interwoven with its libidinal enlivening, was also a disturbing undertone. Moving my hand toward Chris’s to accept the check she offered felt like participating with her in something illicit. I hesitated, to the point of consciously thinking, “I can’t not take her check.” As she turned to move to the couch, I stood momentarily paralyzed, reverberating internally with mystifying, transgressive feelings. I was intensely activated to think about them, to rationalize and “excuse” what I had engaged in, to make sense of it in some way, in a state that might mirror the infantile experience of feeling impelled (Fletcher 2007) to translate. It seemed as if “something” (Scarfone 2014, p. 339) of the sexually coerced preadolescent Chris, including her identifications with the feeling states of her abusers and her, and with what she had translated as her abusers’ embodiments of desire, had been implanted in me. It was an implantation that, as Stein (1998) describes, calls out “to be elaborated, symbolized, and translated into knowledge” (p. 600). It was as though Chris’s unconscious was recruiting mine to help her parse her life-affirming implanted desire identifications with and by caring others from her intromissive, violating identifications with and by her abusers and abuse enablers.

Weeks later, Chris described being sexually aroused by an image of a woman looking seductively back over her shoulder. I flashed to when Chris looked over her shoulder at me while extending her check and wondered if identifications with Bogart and Bacall figures had been activated in her in that moment, in a man/woman, active/passive, masculine/feminine coalescence, a psychic and embodied state that rejected and transcended boundaries of sex and gender in a singular focus on (re)presenting erotic desire. These thoughts did not yet feel speakable but remained present in my reverie (Ogden 2009).

Later in our work, after Chris had developed significant nuance in her thinking about her desire and her gender, she spoke about wanting a suit. Intrigued, I asked what appealed to her about a suit.

Among the many themes in this exchange was Chris’s striving to feel/don power through a suit and through visible, concrete reassurance of the existence and size (thus power) of her genitals (again, in her symbolic equation / true symbolism dynamic). I viewed this need to feel powerful as belying how powerless she must feel over the intensity of her desire, a profound sense of vulnerability to desired others that she experienced as their power over her. In Chris’s mind, to feel power over desire she must separate at least part of herself from being not “100 percent girl.” But that did not mean she must turn to masculinity. She sought a subjectivity of her own as a female, feminine, powerful subject of desire for women.

Holding Chris’s aims to embody desire for others in my mind as separable from her aims to embody gender helped create a space in the relational field where desire for others could emerge and be recognized by us both. I believe my attending to Chris’s internal experience that was not girl but not masculinity conveyed my openness to recognizing whatever might emerge into that space, including both erotic and identificatory love for me. I resisted foreclosing recognition by naming what was emerging as desire or gender prematurely, thus offering a relational holding that invited desire for others, and its traumas, to become recognized, understood, parsed, and grieved together. ¹² We could now more deeply mourn Chris’s powerlessness over the many violations of her desire (among which I include heteronormativity), her internalization of those violations, and the losses of self, love, and aliveness she endured as a result. The presence in each other’s minds we began to kindle so long ago, of Chris as an emerging human and erotic subject, and me as a recognizing human and erotic other, had taken hold and was on its way toward burning bright.

Chris’s wish for a suit would typically be considered a wish for masculinity. Yet while masculinity may be part of such a wish, the emotional energy in that moment was in the suit’s meaning as an insignia of desire for others. The suit symbolized her genitalia on display to both signal desire to women and induce desire in them. The suit made her a suitor, suited for pursuit. We might ask how the psyche can fashion a man’s suit into a symbol of women’s genitalia. I view this as evidence of the mind’s capacity to separate the meaning of a suit as a signifier of “man” from its meaning as a signifier of desire for others, in any gender and for any gender. If a suit is one of the “mytho-symbolic expressions and representations provided by cultural surroundings” (Scarfone 2014, p. 339) of desire for others and what others desire, then one way to fashion oneself as desirable to those others is to assume and personalize that culturally available symbol.

Conclusion

For the patient quoted in my epigraph, George Michael embodied an ideal assembly (Harris 2005) of masculinity, femininity, and erotic desire for others as a person who desires women and who wishes to be desired by them. The fact that George Michael’s desire was actually for men was not a relevant consideration; the psychic imprimatur was her fantasy that he knew what women want and knew how to, as Chris might say, own it. The fact that George Michael was a man was similarly not germane. “The chicks loved him,” and that is where the psychic power lies for people of any sex, gender, or sexuality who want “chicks” to love them too.

I have described desire for others as developing separably from gender, with its own identifications and relational loves and losses. Desire for others becomes coded as gender and may recruit, submit to, or defy that naming. It may be used by, confused by, or refused by gender, but it never relinquishes its quest for recognition. I hope to have offered an expanded understanding of how holding desire for others in our minds as separable from gender can allow greater recognition of desire’s relational history. Increased recognition can create a shared naming of desire as desire, a holding and containing of one person’s desire for others in the minds, and bodies, of two. Ideally, through this holding and containing, we can offer mourning of foreclosed loves, and in this way help enliven our patients in their becoming and being subjects of sexual desire, a becoming and being that is ongoing throughout the course of our lives.