On Abraham's ‘The psychodynamics of orgasm’

Dear Sirs,

Dr Abraham's thoughtful and thorough exploration of the psychodynamics of orgasm was a delight to read from start to finish. At its inception, psychoanalysis was intrepid in its approach to all matters sexual and erotic in nature. Since the advent of sexology, as Dr Abraham points out, psychoanalysis has shied away from the bold theorising in which it had once engaged. Particularly with respect to orgasm, psychoanalytic investigations have been in a state of virtual quiescence since Masters and Johnson's studies first appeared. I hope that Dr Abraham's paper will engender further dialogue within the psychoanalytic community about this important topic.

Several of Dr Abraham's points in particular struck me as worthy of such a dialogue. First was his exploration of the female orgasm and his observation that it is ‘free’ in so far as it does not participate in reproduction. Hence, by its essence, the female orgasm is wholly erotic. To take this idea one step further, it seems that the female orgasm is also free in so far as it does not ‘cost’ the woman anything, unlike the male orgasm, which he must pay for with his semen. Furthermore, the man's orgasm comes at the cost of another orgasm in so far as most men require a relatively long refractory period between orgasms, as compared to women, who can have them in immediate succession. In this sense, as well, the female orgasm comes at no expense. Perhaps this explains why Freud and other early analysts felt the need to pathologise women's orgastic experience—their attempts at pathologising may have been an expression of their envy of the ‘free’ nature of the female orgasm. Why should he pay if she doesn't have to? Karen Horney likened women's penis envy to men's womb envy (1967). Perhaps orgastic envy might have been a more apt analogue.

A second point worthy of further elaboration stems from Dr. Abraham's clinical example of his female patient. As Dr Abraham explains, the patient remained consistently orgastica