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Here is an irony of psychoanalysis in the Digital Age: in an era of cultural drift toward one-person sexuality (porn use up; teen sex down1), we no longer ask our patients about masturbatory fantasies.2 And in our journals, we rarely discuss autoerotism, which was a mainstay of psychoanalytic thinking for the first hundred years.
There are good reasons for this.3 But it leaves some of us feeling under-equipped, particularly those of us who see patients who worry that their sexual “inner life” is not as exciting as it should be. These patients wonder why others seem to get so turned on by what they see or fantasize about, and why their own sexual fantasy lives feel elusive or “dead” by comparison. In my experience, these people can function well enough with their partners—the sexual act is not the problem. The problem is feeling cut off from their own personal eros by some kind of obscure but powerful internal psychic structure. They say things like:
I hadn’t realized my mother was so powerful in my mind until she died and suddenly I was masturbating to men.
(2024). It’s time to talk about pornography, scholars say: more adolescents than ever are watching it. What’s needed, researchers say, are frank conversations and ‘porn literacy.’ The New York Times, Dec. 12, 2024.
(1995). Has sexuality anything to do with psychoanalysis? Int. J. Psychoanal., 76: 871-883.
(2018). Gay-friendly psychoanalysis and the abiding pleasures of prejudice. Studies in Gender & Sexuality, 19: 265-278.
I was sexually turned on by girls but I didn’t masturbate. Even when I was with a girl I never felt it was ME having the sex. It was like my mother was in my head with a direct pipeline to the Vatican.
As a teenager I couldn’t masturbate. I was aware of a kind of silent censor that lived in my head. It was saying: “You are not going to be able to get off on ANYTHING—until you’ve started actually fucking women.” It worked.
Contemporary Freudians don’t seem to have a theor