Sexual Sensations and Gender: The Psychological Positions and the Erotic Third1

A gendered person lives in and creates a gendered body. Through the sexual life of the couple, two gendered bodies come together. In this paper, I draw on case material to illustrate how a multitude of sensations associated with what it feels like to be a man or a woman are aroused, affirmed, and created as one dimension of sexual experience. I suggest that these sensations of gender may be organized through the three psychological positions, autistic-contiguous, paranoid-schizoid, and depressive. The movement among all three positions gives different shapes to sensory-based gender experience, each position making its own unique contributions to the qualities of what it feels like to be a man or a woman. In one case I consider the possibility that gender transformation occurred through an unconscious intersubjective erotic third2—the body of the couple—created between the patient and her husband.

Jeanette was in her fifties when she came to see me. She had lived in a Northern European country for most of her childhood, and was now a successful professional woman. She had a brief, sexless marriage in her thirties and was currently divorced. Jeanette recounted a teenage experience with a boyfriend. She had a platonic relationship with this boy for several years; then one evening alone in her parent's house, he touched her bare leg and attempted to move his hand up her skirt. Jeanette was overcome with feelings that she was literally exploding through her skin and tearing into pieces. She described feeling what she imagined it is like to be in the electric chair, convulsing with fatal electric charges surging and tearing through the body. Jeanette was left feeling completely taken by surprise by her sexual feelings as they appeared to come from nowhere, or to have been put inside her by someone else. Her sex was not hers; Jeanette was terrified of life in this world of unbounded, explosive sexual sensation.

In response to those fears, Jeanette had tried to create a world