The sudden and violent death of Robert Stoller, at the very height of his extraordinary creativity, is too painfully close to permit an objective statement regarding the impact of his pathbreaking findings on psychoanalytic theory and practice, and on our understanding of normal and abnormal sexual behavior. For those of us privileged to have known him personally, who have been enriched by his lucid, searching, sophisticated, and yet unpretentious approach to his subject and his ability to stimulate others to think independently and to struggle against theoretical and ideological biases, the loss of that life and of that mind is as distressing as our awareness of the void that it has created in our profession.
In Presentation of Gender (Yale University Press, 1985) Stoller, after describing how he became interested in the study of transsexualism, tells us that he was startled to note discrepancies between traditional psychoanalytic assumptions and what he had been observing. This recognition jolted him from a position of passive acceptance of those assumptions. His bewilderment soon gave way to curiosity and a growing enthusiasm for the direct observation of a subculture, an undertaking that extended his database far beyond what he could see clinically. This search for understanding led to his discoveries regarding core gender identity, the differences between male and female sexual development, and the interplay of biological determinism and psychological conflict. He concludes his account with a list of “idiosyncratic suggestions” for a program of psychoanalytic investigation:
Do what you enjoy.
Be very curious (an essential feature of skepticism, which in turn is an essential feature of scientific behavior).
Do not have a clear-cut plan.
Do not know what your conclusions will be or even where you are heading; do not head.
Have patience; then always be impatient.
Think it over; let it soak in; listen closely to the repetitions; let the discoveries find you.
Use whatever techniques for data collecting appeal to you, but never stop psychoanalyzing.
Find people more honorably committed to scientific method than yourself and stick them with the grubby work of properly confirming hypotheses.
Do not try for a grant if acceptance means you must accomplish what you promised.
Since no research anywhere comes to final conclusions, you need not rush. Act as if you will live forever; it will not make any difference if your estimate is wrong.
Even a casual acquaintance with Stoller's work makes plain that these suggestions, with their quiet wit and modesty, reflect the way he in fact functioned. What is beyond question is that his contributions opened a broad new perspective for psychoanalytic research in the area of sexuality, one that is just beginning to be appreciated by the field at large.
In contrast to Freud's assumptions that genitality in both genders is originally masculine, and that the little girl discovers her femininity only after the disillusioning finding that she does not possess a penis, Stoller's research on primary and secondary transsexualism in men, and on the much less frequently observed phenomenon of transsexualism in women, led him to propose a primary feminine identification in both genders.
Sorting out the interaction of biological, “biopsychic,” and intrapsychic determinants of gender identity, Stoller introduced the concept of core gender identity and distinguished it from gender role. He enriched the concept of homosexuality, which he saw as a broad spectrum of syndromes that required differentiation from transsexualism. He both broadened and deepened our understanding of the psychodynamics of transsexualism, homosexuality, and the perversions. He pioneered in revising traditional psychoanalytic theories regarding the unconscious conflicts that determine perversions, pointed to the central importance of the interaction of mother and infant in the crystallization of core gender identity, and described the role of the father in limiting or disrupting the infant's symbiotic tie with its mother—or in fostering it by his relative absence. He considered the mother's unavailability as a symbiotic object to the little girl a powerful determinant of female transsexualism.
Stoller clarified how the infant's biological sex induces specific responses from the parental figures. The parents' conflicts regarding their own sexuality and gender identity, if imposed on the infant in the first eighteen months of life, can result in a transsexual syndrome. Stoller observed patients in the analytic setting and studied their past history on the basis of whatever relevant information he could gather, particularly family histories and traditions and old photographs. He thus achieved historical reconstructions of early development beyond what was available from the analytic setting.
This mutual enrichment of psychoanalytic and observational data permitted him to map out new schemata of sexual development, and to discover new unconscious dynamics underlying perversion.
He discovered the central importance of traumatic and humiliating experiences in the lives of perverse patients, and the unconscious function of perversion in undoing and compensating for those traumas. He then proceeded to subject sexual excitement itself to his scrutiny. This was the first time sexual excitement became the object of psychoanalytic inquiry; his study led Stoller to the discovery of the importance of aggression as an essential component of sexual excitement, excessive in the case of perversions but universally present in all sexual fantasy, play, and experience.
In recent years, Stoller began to explore the world of perversion not only through the analytic lens, but in the actual terrain of perverse subcultures, the worlds of sadomasochism and pornography. Stoller has enriched immeasurably the psychoanalytic literature on human sexuality, perversion, and love relations in a fascinating series of books, the last of which awaits publication by Yale University Press. He has added an American thrust to what heretofore had been the province of French psychoanalysis. I believe he has single-handedly transformed our outlook on the field of gender, sexuality, and psychosexual development, and introduced a method of inquiry of enormous consequence for the future of psychoanalytic research.
It would be premature even to outline the implications of his research on the culture of sadomasochism and pornography, an endeavor in which psychoanalytic inquiry into individual sexuality and its developmental vicissitudes expands into psychoanalytic inquiry into cultural structures and mores, and the relation between the sexual life of the individual and the exploitation as well as the straitjacketing of sexuality in the societal and cultural realm.
Robert Stoller was one of our most original contributors. Careful to conserve his energy for scientific work and to protect his personal privacy, he avoided participating in the political arena of psychoanalytic and psychiatric
This article has appeared in a special memorial issue of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Bulletin devoted to the life and work of Robert J. Stoller.
institutions. Calmly sidestepping esoteric debates on the nature of scientific research, he illustrated with his work and his personality the richness and power of psychoanalysis as a research tool.
I would like to conclude on a more personal note. Bob had such wonderful qualities: gentleness, tact, warmth, generosity. He was fortunate in having Sybil to create an ambience of serenity in his daily life that allowed and encouraged his creativity. His passionate commitment to truth went hand in hand with an unusually gentle and nonaggressive disposition.
Above all, Bob possessed the rare capacity to view with a clear, cool eye the extraordinary facets of human behavior. Unfettered by convention, propelled by endless curiosity, he was as totally free from prurience as from moral fervor. Equally rare was his blend of sophistication and a kind of innocence that preserved his capacity for marveling at the varieties of human experience.
His profound conviction regarding the scientific value of psychoanalytic inquiry is reflected in the direct and unpretentious way in which he communicated his ideas, carefully refraining from premature closure, and above all in the enthusiasm with which he explored the unknown, the uncertain, the ambiguous.
He helped me immeasurably, and showed endless patience listening to my concerns and problems with my own work. He leaves us all with unfinished tasks, new territories he opened up for us to explore, new research tools, and the inspiring, moving memory of his passionate commitment to truth.
Erratum
Irving Kartus MD was omitted from the list of Directors of the C.F. Menninger Memorial Hospital in the article on the history of The Topeka Psychoanalytic Institute (TAP 26/4). He served as director from 1953 to 1959.