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“Sexual addiction” is one of those terms that has become heavily saturated, in the Bionian sense. It has become so pejoratively laden, so concrete with assumptions and grouped together with other kinds of addictive or compulsive behaviours, that it has been challenging for psychoanalysis to find space to move beyond a chemical addiction model in order to focus on what psychoanalysis does best: going underneath symptomatology to sources of suffering deeply concealed within the psyche. However, as Whitman-Raymond (2021) recently put it, “Addicts have had a rough go of it within the psychoanalytic community” (122). Our sexuality is our birthright. The use, meaning and frequency of sexual behaviour is as idiosyncratic for humans as are most behaviours. However, when sexual behaviour becomes a means of expressing a displacement of conflictual emotions, historical trauma, an avoidance of one’s internal life or of intimate human relationships, this places it squarely within the psychoanalytic endeavour in many ways dissimilar from the 12-Step model of abstinence.
In his latest book, Vamik Volkan, esteemed psychoanalyst, scholar and prolific author, takes up the phenomenon of sexually compulsive behaviour by describing the course of supervision over a period of three years of the case of “Judy”, who described herself as “a hunter of men for sex” (xii). As told, Volkan’s supervisee Dr Rowan came to Volkan seeking supervision on a difficult case while a candidate-in-training when, after two years of one session a week treatment, Dr Rowan felt no movement had occurred, “no workable transference development” (1), and Judy had been successful at keeping him at a distance. Volkan then agreed to supervise the case if Dr Rowan were successful at reframing the treatment to four times a week psychoanalysis on the couch, which Judy ultimately agreed to.
In his introduction, Volkan sets out four aims for writing the book, the main one being to describe and explicate the psychoanalytic pr