Chapter 11. Adult Polymorphous Sexuality

Much of the task before us in this Chapter has already been done or adumbrated in Chapter 9, but a certain amount of tracing of implications is still required. It is of particular interest that the psycho-analyst seldom hears much about his patient's adult sexual relationships, since the transference situation draws to it the associations related almost exclusively to the infantile and perverse aspects of sexual behaviour and phantasy currently contaminating the patient's sexual life. For this reason, adherence to the primary rule ensures a tactful preservation of the privacy of the adult love life of the patient, and therefore the privacy of his partner.

Recognition of this fact relieves the analyst of part of the pressure of certain countertransference anxieties, of intrusiveness and meddling, while also placing him in a position to recognise that dutiful reporting of sexual activities by a patient is almost certainly a breach of the primary rule involving an acting-in, and possibly -out, of the transference, in which the sexual partner is being made to represent an excluded part of the infantile self. The analyst need never worry about the content of information being withheld by the patient regarding his sexual behaviour, since the moment such withholding takes place the content itself is no longer to the point: the behaviour of withholding itself needs to be the focus of investigation.

Consequently, a conception of adult sexual states of mind hardly enters into the work of the psycho-analyst for his patients, but it does enter into every patient's (including analysts as former patients) self-analytic work. An adequate analysis should be expected to inculcate the desire, as well as establishing the capacity, for self-scrutiny as a way of life, sleeping and waking, so that the habit of self-observation and evaluation in no way interferes with the capacity for spontaneous response, in emotion as well as action. Its obsessional imitation, so often seen early in analy