Chapter 6 Sex, Gender, and Sexualization: A Case Study

In this chapter our focus is on the many varieties of sexual experience conceptualized in the psychoanalytic literature and required for a more complete understanding of that aspect of human motivation. Thus, we address not just sex, sexuality, and sexualization but, more precisely, sex, sexuality, and sexualization as well as gender, gender self, gender identity, and core gender identity. The truly voluminous literature on this topic will be addressed only as it pertains to and illuminates the treatment of a young woman whose sexual development had been greatly compromised by self pathology.

Kathy K came into treatment six years ago at the age of 24, following her move to Los Angeles. Kathy's decision to leave the East Coast, where she had lived all her life and where she had attended college and graduate school, was occasioned by the remarriage of her father, a remarriage she experienced as a betrayal and as a narcissistic blow. Kathy's mother had committed suicide several years before, when Kathy was in her last year of college. Mrs. K had exhibited severe emotional difficulties throughout Kathy's life, difficulties related, presumably, to the fact that she had been in a concentration camp as a young woman, an experience she could neither talk about nor forget. All Kathy could say about her mother's trauma was that in some way it involved sexuality: her mother's youth and beauty had led somehow to her being spared extermination by the Nazis. Kathy felt that it was her mother's Holocaust experience that had prevented her from discussing sexual issues — or, for that matter, any issues