Transcription
In the human psyche, love and sexuality are two intertwined, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing energies. This observation was made by Ziggman Freud, who coined the words libido, or actually leveraged the words libido and eros. Libido is the sex drive. Eros is the life power, the élan, the desire to live. And he claimed that the libido, the sexual energy, is an integral part and possibly even the foundation and cornerstone of our desire to go on living.
Today, I'm going to discuss what happens when sexuality goes. What happens when the sex drive, the energy of sex, the libido, to use Freud's term, is misdirected, is somehow acquires unusual targets. My name is Sam Vagnin, a proponent of unusual targets, and I'm, uh, the author of "Malignant Self-Love: Narcissism Revisited" and a professor of psychology.
We use the word paraphilia to describe a situation where sexuality becomes highly unusual. We no longer use the word perversion. We no longer use the word deviance. We don't exert judgment. We don't sit in judgment of other people's, um, sex drive, sexual orientation, and sexual predilections and preferences. But we do recognize that there is a spectrum of human sexuality, and that the vast majority of people are somehow in in the middle or in the center, whereas there are outliers in terms of the objects and situations which cause sexual arousal.
Paraphilia is defined in the American Psychological Association dictionary, thus paraphilia in the DSM-IV-TR. Paraphilia is any of a group of disorders in which unusual or bizarre fantasies or behavior, unnecessary for sexual excitement. The fantasies or acts persist over a period of at least six months, and they may take several forms: preference for nonhuman objects, such as animals or clothes of the opposite sex; repetitive sexual activity involving real or simulated suffering or humiliation, as in whipping or bondage; or repetitive sexual activity with non-consenting partners. Paraphilias include such specific types as fetishism, frotteurism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, sexual masochism, sexual sadism, and necrophilia.
In the DSM-5 and the DSM-5-TR, paraphilia is considered a paraphilic disorder only if it causes distress or impairment to the individual, or if its practices harm or risk harming other people. Paraphiliac practices. So, paraphilia is a diversion of sexuality, the psychic energy of sexuality, the libido, from external objects to internal objects. And in this sense, paraphilias are closely aligned, or at least mimic, the main, the foundational process in pathological narcissism.
I divide paraphilias into several groups. The first one is the autoerotic, masturbatory group of paraphilias. These are paraphilias that involve using objects or objectifying people in order to attain sexual arousal, gratification, and consummation. Ejaculation is conditioned upon ejaculation, or orgasm, are conditioned upon the interaction between the individual and something that is perceived as an object. It could be a synecdoche, in other words, part of something, a part of the body, a piece of clothing, which represents the whole, or it could be the imaginary objectifying of breathing, living, talking human beings, treating them as objects, inanimate objects. Be that as it may, in all these situations, the sexual target, sometimes the sexual partner, are treated as masturbatory aids. These people, these paraphilias involve masturbation as the main activity, and autoerotism regarding one's own body as a sexual object, or even the exclusive sexual object.
Now, this is a very partial description of this group of paraphilias because I have a video that I've already made a few years ago, um, about the topic. So, go to the description, find the link, click on this link, and you'll learn a lot more about paraphilias that involve fetishism, body parts, items, objects, and why all these have to do essentially with a representation of the external world in the mind of the paraphiliac individual, so that the paraphiliac, paraphiliac individual can masturbate with other people's bodies, with other people's body parts, with objects, with pieces of clothing, items of clothing, and so on. These are all masturbatory aids, aids to masturbation. They all involve a perception of the body, of one's own body, as an arousing, exciting sexual object, a phenomenon known as autoerotism. Again, autoerotism is a key clinical feature in pathological narcissism. And this group of paraphilias is highly linked, in my view and in my work, to the various psychodynamics and processes and even theology of pathological narcissism in adults.
However, this is only one group of paraphilias. The second group of paraphilias is the situational narrative paraphilias. These are paraphilias that depend on a story, on a piece of fiction, on a narrative. These paraphilias emanate from the narrative. The excitement, the arousal, the orgasm, the whole process of sexual gratification, the redirection of sexual energy, they all involve a storyline. Within this story, which highly depends on specific contexts and specific physical situations, within this story, the individual, the paraphiliac individual, could be, for example, a savior using sex to save the sexual partner, using sex to save the community, a communal pro-social paraphilia, whereas there is a perception that one could leverage the sex act, even non-consensual sex act, to somehow benefit the community or the greater good or prevent something bad from happening. Similarly, in other kinds of narratives, the paraphiliac, paraphiliac individual perceives himself or herself as a master. So, these are subdominance-submission narratives, and they involve explicit, um, degradation of the partner, a defiling of the partner. Other types of narratives involve slave, a defined slave narrative, a rebellion narrative, where the sex is used in order to somehow narrate a social relationship. It's a sociocultural kind of mode of expression. Paraphilia is deeply embedded, some kind of ideology about, for example, class relations or relations between poor and rich. Be that as it may, in all these situations, there's an overriding script or storyline which goes hand in hand with highly specific, um, spaces, physical spaces. And within these physical spaces, the narrative is enacted. It's a form of theater production or a movie wherein the paraphiliac individual fulfills a certain role, and people around the paraphiliac individual are objectified. They become objects, as well as inanimate objects. All of them serve to enhance the narrative, the script, and integrate in it. So, these are the situational narrative paraphilias.
And then we have the acquisitive paraphilias. Paraphilias which are concerned mainly with acquiring a target, taking control over a target, manipulating someone or something. The three types of acquisitive paraphilias: The acquisitive anxiolytic paraphilia. This is a paraphilia where the paraphiliac individual would attempt to deanimate the sexual partner symbolically and metaphorically, luckily in the vast majority of cases. This deanimation of the of the partner, which in its extreme becomes necrophilia, but this deanimation of the partner serves to ameliorate and mitigate deep-set separation, insecurity, abandonment, anxiety, catastrophizing, anticipation of rejection, humiliation, and abandonment. So, the acquisition of the target has to do with a reduction, an attempt to reduce anxiety. The target's independence and autonomy, personal autonomy and agency, they're perceived as very threatening. It is by the animating the target one way or another, physically or metaphorically in the imagination, is by in deanimating the target, rendering the target inert, dead, immobile. Only then could the sexual interaction proceed without the attended debilitating anxiety. So, these are acquisitive anxiolytic paraphilias.
Then we have acquisitive idealizing paraphilias. These are paraphilias that involve cycles of idealization and devaluation whereby the sexual partner, the sexual target, the sexual object, even are somehow idealized. Even the concept of synecdoche is a form of idealization where an item of clothing or a body part is elevated and deified, expanded to include the whole. The part represents the totality. A body part, a foot, a breast, represent the total individual whose foot or breast they are. So, these are acquisitive idealizing paraphilias. The perception of the sexual target, be it another person or an inanimate object, the perception is always unrealistic, fantastic, counterfactual. Sometimes, um, the perception is almost hallucinatory, and the object, the sexual object or the sexual target, is either idealized or devalued, and the sex act, the sexual interaction, is an attempt to sustain and buttress and uphold this idealized or devalued perception, the secretary perception of the target of the sex. The arousal, the excitement have to do with the elation of conforming the external object to the perception of the external object within the paraphiliac person's mind. This close harmony, harmonizing reality with the the internal narrative. This harmonization creates an oceanic feeling, narcissistic elation. So, this is the acquisitive idealizing paraphilia.
And finally, there's the acquisitive self-enhancing type of paraphilia. These are paraphilias that cater to the paraphiliac person's grandio, fantastic, inflated self-concept or self-perception. The paraphilia is used to somehow, um, buttress or support the person's self-image, which is counterfactual and unrealistic, delusional. But the paraphilia is constructed in a way that it fits into the fantasy and lends itself to, uh, verifying that the fantasy is actually real, somehow sustaining the delusion. So, we have three types of acquisitive paraphilias: the anxiolytic type, the idealizing-devaluing type, and the self-enhancing type. We have also, we also have situational narrative paraphilias and we have autoerotic masturbatory paraphilias. Again, I refer you to the video that I've made a few years ago. There's a link in the description.
Any energy, any psychic energy, any cathexis, to use an antiquated term, can be redirected. The targets of the sexual drive are infinite in their variety. People get aroused and excited sexually by the most amazing things, and one's sexual trigger is another person's object. Or so people react differently sexually to the very same thing, to the very same person. That's why we are attracted sexually to certain people, and we are not attracted to other people. So, the energy, the sexual energy, is directional, but it's also in principle diffuse. It can acquire targets. It can rewire itself. It can rewrite itself. Sexual energy is there, ready to latch onto a sexual target in accordance with psychological needs, for example, to allay or reduce anxiety, in accordance with narratives or situations, and in order to acquire finally a sexual partner or a sexual object or a sexual target to guarantee gratification and satisfaction.
Paraphilias are situations, situations where this process goes, or where the part is substituted for the whole, where animate objects are perceived as inanimate or are actively deanimated metaphorically or even physically, where people are used, uh, as a kind of medication. The paraphiliac person self-medicates with people in order, for example, to reduce anxiety, where people fit into fantasies and scripts in the movie that play is playing on the, uh, in the paraphiliac person's mind. So, the sex drive is like a Swiss knife. It is multi-purpose. It is not true that sexuality is predefined and rigid, completely untrue. And so that's why people can transition from heterosexuality, for example, to homosexuality depending on the context, on the environment, on the situation. Sexuality is highly plastic and highly elastic. And inevitably, when you have at your dis, when one has, when you have at your disposal such energy that can home into home into anything basically and anyone, in the margins, in the fringes, there would be outliers. These are people whose sexuality is fixated on modes of gratification, arousal, and excitement which are perceived by other people as abnormal or deviant, pervert, perverted, or whatever.
And actually, these paraphiliac individuals are making love to themselves. It is the inversion of external and internal. The whole paraphiliac theater production, whole paraphiliac play or movie unfolds and unfurls and is projected inside the paraphiliac person's mind. And in this sense, there is a close affinity between paraphilia, the paraphiliac mind, and the narcissistic mind, which explains why narcissists are prone to sexual assertiveness, sexual aggression, kink, kinky sex, and much more prone to paraphilias than the general population. Because the mind of the narcissist is already pre-ordained and predetermined. It is nurtured on a diet of fantasy. The fantasy that involves a narcissist is the main trigger of sexual arousal and excitement via the dynamic of autoerotism. And then anything that enters the orbit of the narcissist can immediately be converted into a sexual trigger or sexual object or sexual target. Anything and anyone. Only the narcissist and the paraphiliac person make no distinction between things and people, and even things and body parts of people. Everything is reduced into objects which generate cathexis, libidinal cathexis, to use the language of, um, psychoanalysis and object relations. Everything is reduced, and everyone is reduced to representations, symbols that trigger internal narratives that redirect the sexual energy inward by creating representations of the external objects within the mind, imbuing them with libido, and then making love to them internally. Making love to one's own mind, in effect, rendering oneself one's exclusive sexual partner.