Freudian theory assumes a natural force (libido) as the origin of normal sexuality: so psychoanalysis was investigating why the normal sexual development may be troubled. "Normal" sexuality and pleasure are considered as simple and natural elements, by which we can explain other psychic phenomena. On the contrary sex is learnt: we have to explain it; how well normal sexuality is originated. And sexual pleasure is constructed: we have to investigate why it happens. Sexual pleasure is only the manifest element: we have to analyze it, like we do with a dream, to discover the latent elements. The author suggests his "Protomental Theory" (cited in texts from 1978 to 1998), according to which the origin of the sexual dimension can be explained on the basis of the affective-representational organization of an individual's early experience.

Freud considers sexuality basically as an excitement originating form organs: this would emanate particularly from the erogenous zones, needing to be released. The concepts of arousal and release are fundamental to Freud's concept of sexuality. The release of arousal could be the origin of satisfaction, or -indeed- satisfaction would consist in the release. This concept clearly rests on the neurological model of the "reflex arc", prevailing at the beginning of this century.

In his conception Freud is referring to biological or rather biochemical hypothesis: throughout his work we find the belief that there must be biochemichal substances, still unknown, responsible for what, on a psychological level, can be considered sexual excitement (Freud S., 1901; 1905; 1906; 1914; 1915; a, b; cfr. Opere IV 379 sg, 394, 521 sg, 524 sg; V 223 sg; VII 448; VIII 21, 478). Even when considering male rather than female sexual orientation, Freud insists that biochemical responsible specifically for heterosexual and homosexual arousal are still to be founded (Freud S., 1931; op. XI, 77). These biological notions are then moulded into the psychological concepts of libido and drive. Drive is defined as intermediate between the biological and the mental concept. It is considered the carrier which supports all mental life, essentially conceived in emotional-affective terms supported by instinctual dynamics. Affects are the mental representatives of instinctual drives.

Nowadays psychoanalysis is abandoning the drive-energy theory, at least as an explanation, in favour of object theories. These see the origin of mental and then sexual development in object relations, and therefore related to experience (relation experience) more than in an endogenous force: in "learning from experience". Can we therefore consider psychosexual development like learning from experience?

Studies on the gender identity (Stoller, 1968) indicate that sexual orientation is "learnt" from parental relationships, more than owed to genetics and biology. A genetically female child believed to be male at birth because of external pseudohermaphroditism, develops a male gender identity and a consequent masculine sexual orientation. If, after puberty, the external genitalia are surgically corrected, the male identity will prevail, influencing the adult sexual orientation. The opposite occurs to a genetically male child believed to be female. Sexual orientation, with its attendant attraction and pleasure - or the origin of sexual dimension (I use the term "dimension" here to indicate a very complex psychic structure) - and the relative gender identity, do not depend simply on how males and females are brought up, but, as studies on this subject prove, reflect the primary relationship between the child and its parents. Each parent establishes a different relationship with the child, depending on whether he/she considers it of his/her own or of the opposite sex. The sexual dimension thus originates from the relationship of early childhood and is related to the primary internal objects. Therefore it takes root in the global matrix of the whole development of the mind.

Many other studies show that human sexuality is essentially psychic. Well known are the anthropological contributions of psychoanalysis researchers (Roheim 1952) recently reconsidered by Pauletta d’Anna (1994, 1997), which show that sexuality, in each of its manifestations and outside the concept of normal or pathological, is determined by the social group. This derives essentially from how the newborn is brought up, i.e. in what phase of life the structure of the mind is "built", in the primary objects relations. The concept of "built" means something more than "psychically elaborated": it means acquired, or learnt from experience – we agree with Bion – keeping in mind that the concept of "learning" in this case undermines the instinctual concepts so long developed by psychoanalysis. Even animal sexuality is "learnt" – as the famous studies on monkeys by Harlow (Schrier, Harlow, 1965) and all other studies on other animal prove: parental care governs the psycho-sexual development.

The term "psycho" used for animals, seems surprising. It seems less appropriate, however, if we stop to think how much parental care not only influences an infant’s development, but actually constructs it – constitutes it in fact. The question arises whether it makes sense at all to talk of nature determining development. The tactile, proprioceptive, thermal, olfactory stimuli arising from the relation between the young and its mother are organized in sets which get their meaning from the context itself, with the passing of time: time for continued "learnings". What remains in the memory are not the single afferences or series of afferences from the various sensorial organs, but – as it happens in all the processes of perception and memorization – the result of the input's processing and integrating with previous memories. This psychophysiological result corresponds to what psychoanalysts call the affective "significance" of experience with the mother "from" which the young can learn. So, from this experience the little monkey learns "meanings", or better he learns and keeps in memory constellations of sensorial signals ("signifiers") corresponding to those meanings. The animal will elaborate all these configurations to organize his sexuality. This process is much more complex in the human being, as illustrated by the concept of "internal object", taken as a "signal", it can be broken down into the afferences it comprises (Imbasciati, 1983, 1990, 1991, 1994).

Affectivity is fundamental in human sexuality: it intersects with the most physical aspects of sexuality and is its very fabric. Excitement, for instance, can arise in conditions of internal and external experience that differ completely from individual to individual: we have all kinds of examples in perversions. However, even in a normal situation, individual perception (probably unique) of what is exciting, is tied to the "meaning" (equally unique) of a certain sensorial configuration for that particular individual. This "meaning" corresponds in psychophysiological terms, to a specific elaboration of how the external configurations are processed, because in that individual’s memory certain configurations act as signals (signifiers) giving a particular colour to what the person receives and "reads" in the "here and now".

In psychoanalytical terms this is called erotic phantasy and we know its unconscious dimension. The same holds for sexual attraction which, even when there is no perception of excitement, always involves subliminal body changes and arises from "readings" – extremely variable from one individual to another – of afferential configurations which are read on the basis of the particular meaning given by the "signals" (signifiers) which operate in that individual memory. These induce the "experience" of attraction: the reading gives them their erotic aspect; the exterior is read like the signal (signifier) of an interior meaning. All this corresponds to what psychoanalysis calls affectivity, or to be more precise, unconscious phantasy, which is always tied to memories.

The concept of memories needs some examination: we generally consider the memory like a store where the images of reality are stoked up, and therefore, faithful to reality. We call them "representations", whereas we use different terms (such as "phantasies", "internal objects" or more simply various kinds of "affects"), to indicate more shapeless, more affective or deeper interior events. However, recent experimental psychology shows memory is by no means a stock of realistic images, but a core in constant transformation in which "memories" do not reflect reality and are certainly not just representations. Therefore we can consider a memory even for affects (Plutchik, 1980). These memories probably include some very old components and are very difficult to identify and conceptualize; however they are certainly "learnt from" experience.

Psychological disciplines have revised the concept of "learning" in the same way. It is no longer viewed as a process of "bringing inside what is out", but it is a complex elaboration and transformation of experience and memories (the HIP paradigm: Human Information Processing). This revision has brought it nearer to the psychoanalytic perspective than to the "conscientialist" tradition and popular acceptation.

Comparing the psychoanalytical concepts and some experimental psychology data shows more closely how the various aspects of sexuality, even the most physical ones, are the result of a mental elaboration. We can drop the old concept that the mind intervenes only to modulate, permit or inhibit "natural" processes basically biological. This prejudice leads us to consider mental elaboration as a part of pathology, while we tend to erase it in normal situations. For example, one of my patients who suffered from retarded ejaculation was very aroused by touching his partner’s anus. This gave him the phantasy of controlling his own anus so he was sure that he would only lose from his body orifices the small amount of sperm he knew he would ejaculate. We usually say that this reassurance "permit" him to enjoy orgasm or pleasure, implying that if there had not been that particular mental elaboration, orgasm and pleasure would have followed "natural" paths. We can also consider this event from a different point of view: the tactile afferences resulting from the finger-anus contact is "read" from the patient’s memories as a signal (signifier) which since old times has constituted a part of an experience perceived as pleasure and it was used in the construction of sexual dimension and tied to the release of the reflexes which constitute the orgasm.

Another patient (female) who suffered from partial frigidity, aroused me while she was telling me how much she has wanted her mother to stay near her longer, when she was a child. There was nothing sexual in her talk, but projective identification led me to enter this patient’s sexual dimension: her desire for "fusion" with her mother which had become a stable component of her sexuality. She was aroused by a man only if she perceived in that relationship something she could assimilate – or hallucinate – as the accomplishment of her old desire for fusion with her mother. We can consider this phantasy from the opposite point of view: the patient could only get aroused and feel pleasure, in particular circumstances, when the relationship with a man, with all its various sensorial configurations, could be "read" in relation to that memory of desires or needs for fusion with her mother. A peculiar internal configuration, made up of various old half-lost memories, was the key to perceiving coital sensorialities as sexual and pleasurable.

I brought as examples these two pathological cases, where it is more usual to consider how erotic connotations and pleasure are assigned to an experience by a particular mental construction. We do not usually think of this happening in every so called "normal" sexual experience. Each individual has his/her own particular way of being attracted, or feeling pleasure, or being sexually excited by certain situations rather than others, or by certain parts of the body, or by visual, tactile or proprioceptive forms, or again by certain smells, sounds, words, clothes and so on. Though we can identify a range of these variations, usually considered "normal" sexuality, even this normal sexuality involves a complex process as the ones we consider in pathology process. It is highly subjective "reading" of sensoriality that constitutes the erotic dimension. This "reading" is operated by a corresponding mental structure and by corresponding engrams which act as the operative units for those readings, and which are "built" up during individual development. The sexual dimension is therefore made up of psychic constructions, which are memorized during the individual’s development and even though they are in a state of continual transformation, have settled as constituent structures of his/her sexuality. These primitive sensorial memories bring us back again to Harlow’s monkeys. We must lose the habit of taking the structure of sexuality into consideration just to explain how it modulates, permits and inhibits natural and normal "sensations".

Although they are subjectively experienced as coming from the genitals organs, they are in fact psychic elaborations. Each perception is a "reading" of afferences. Each reading assumes that some "afferential sets" are recognized as signals (signifiers) for interior meanings, that have built themselves up during the development of the mind.

 

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To clarify all this, and to move on from considerations arising from Harlow’s young monkeys, I can now consider a very elementary and special aspect of the sexual dimension: pleasure.

In the light of subsequent developments of psychoanalysis, Freud’s theories on the origin of sexuality seem less exhaustive nowadays. The essential point of this inadequacy is due, in my opinion, to the fact that Freud’s original theory was based on the principle of pleasure, conceived according to the model of the conscious experience of sexual pleasure. The human being usually experiences pleasure followed by a successive quiet phase: on the basis of the "reflex arc" model and generally of the neurophysiology of his time, Freud assumed a sort of substance in his theoretical model for subjective experience: instinctual energy (hypostasy: Imbasciati 1983 chap. XI; 1991 chap. 4). Pleasure was so conceived like a release energy, thought as biological. The pleasure principle thus became a fundamental tool for explaining a whole series of other psychic events and processes.

Pleasure however, as experimental psychology in the last 50 years has proved, depends neither on receptors (sexual receptors in particular do not exist: Imbasciati, 1987) nor on neurophysiological system – unlike pain –, but is a quality psychically attribute by the subject to an external or internal experience. Sexual pleasure is no different from any other pleasant experience. That is why we need to study how this particular "pleasantness" experienced by the subject is physically built: on what echoes of deep memories, through what processes, from what experience is "learnt" (learning from experience). We must also study its role in relation to the experience of the here and now, particularly in relation to the sensorial experience that evokes pleasure; and how the external objective sensorial features evoke subjective feelings, both conscious ones - in this case pleasantness - and unconscious ones, which we know are summoned up as well. With regard to sexual pleasure we must above all ask how and why, since it is mentally built, it takes on such corporeal features in a person's consciousness, that it seems to "happen" in the genital organs, or it originate from them.

Therefore pleasure is not an explanans of psychic life, but an explanandum; and as such seems to have been neglected by the psychoanalytic literature.

Before considering sexual pleasure as a natural "perception", we need to remind some fundamental links with the psychophysiology of perception, as the term is used specifically in the psychological sciences, not in the popular sense. A "perception" depends on a specific receptor and it is the receptor stimulated that governs its quality. Visual perception is such because receptors in the retina may be stimulated by light waves. Similarly the sound quality of acoustic perception depends on the existence of cochlear receptors which respond specifically to sound waves. The same goes for taste, smell, tactile and kinetic perception, and so on. Pain is due to a particular neurosensorial system of free fibres and spinal devices. So can pleasure really be called a perception?

The other pleasant experiences, not sex, do not involve the element of perception in the subject's consciousness: the pleasure of lying in the sun, for instance, although it goes with a sort of dermal perception, is felt as an "experience"; not as an actual pleasure of the skin. Similarly the pleasure of listening to music is not related to the ear. The pleasure of gymnastic, although it involves muscular perceptions, is not related to the muscles. I like playing the piano, but I do not feel pleasure in my fingers. However during sexual intercourse pleasure is related to the genitals as it were a "specific" perception.

Neurophysiological studies testify there are no specific receptors situated in the genitals. Some authors (Zwang L., 1981) mention corpuscles called "Krause's Finger's", but it is generally agreed (Foulton G., 1962; Milner P.K., 1973) that such receptors are a histological variant (physiologically meaningless) of the normal Krause's corpuscles that carry the afference for heat perception. The genitals have the same receptors as any other body surface - tactile, thermal, pain and pressure receptors - but not specific receptors whose sensitivity can be termed sexual because it depends on a particular feature of the receptor that carry a certain afference. The genitals actually have a very low density of receptors in comparison with the other body areas, and they do not even have any neurophysiological peripheral mechanisms (as for pain, for example) that might make erotic quality specific. Pain owes its quality to a neurophysiological peculiarity either of the sensory receptor (free terminal fibres) or of a spinal mechanism (Melzack and Wall's theory). No similar factors have been found for pleasure.

We must conclude that the erotic quality - that we consciously perceive with a distinction comparable to the visual quality of the retinal experience, or the auditory quality of the cochlear experience - is not due to any similar sensory receptors. It is instead determined by an elaboration, a code that gives it its particular meaning. A psychic meaning, owed to our previous experiences.

We should therefore perceive sexual pleasure in our consciousness with merely psychic aspects, and the sensory part as the concomitant medium: this may be true however only for a part of sexual pleasure and not for most of it. We perceive it as a psychic, affective pleasant experience, but there is another pleasure which is decoded by our consciousness as specific as if it were sensory. Thus we subjectively attribute pleasure to the genital organs, although this attribution is purely subjective, possibly quite wrong.

We can therefore deduce that some of our psychic structures had us to live the sexual process as alienated from mind into the body, whereas really we should feel it like an affect, a state of mind. Is it some sort of defence? Something, however, which all human beings have. We must in any case investigate the mental processing by which sexual pleasure tends to be extracted from the person's global experience and limited to an organ experience as if it were sensory; as if the organ had given us the experience and not us living it mediated by the action of certain organs.

The same stimulation can be erotic or not, pleasant or unpleasant depending on the context: the same stimulus can be erotic and pleasant, erotic and unpleasant, not erotic and pleasant, not erotic and unpleasant depending on the context. Therefore it is not the stimulus which gives the quality of eros, but it is the code we attribute to the experience. What we subjectively experience as sexual is the result of a meaning we attribute to a certain experience, and not due to biological factors. This conclusion seems to conflict with widely held opinions, related to common sense and to scientific belief. The "biologicalness", as it were, of sexuality is conceived as if it was rooted in instinct: but the concept of instinct itself has now been held up to criticism by ethologists and psychologists (Hinde R., 1977). What we call instinct is qualified as latent and early learning. The attribution of sexuality to the biological sphere, through the concept of instinct, is misleading, possibly even wrong.

According to these psychophysiological references, sexual pleasure should be lived like other pleasant emotions. Instead, the fact that it involves such a strictly corporeal conscious "experience", as it were the perception of a specific sensorial organ, means that its elaboration in the mind is different from other pleasant emotions. Instead, the fact that it involves such a strictly corporeal conscious "experience", as it were the perception of a specific sensorial organ, means that its elaboration in the mind is different from other pleasant emotions. This is why, I have defined pleasure a "mental construction", using an apparently paradoxical expression. The adjective "mental" appears paradoxical because sexuality is experienced as corporeal in opposition to what is commonly intended by the term "mental". This paradoxical choice of words purposely draws the attention to a more detailed study of the psychic constructions which make this experience a unique pleasure, and above all, is intended to discredit the habit of considering at least normal sexuality as emanating from nature, without stopping to analyse it sufficiently.

Closer attention to the interior processes leading to the building up the conscious level of sexual pleasure opens path for further research which, in my opinion, have not been much investigated by either psychophysiology or by psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis should consider pleasure and sexuality as it consider the dream: a manifest psychic elaboration whose latent meanings we have to seek into the deep processes that have led to those conscious results. Besides the pathological aspect we are used to, we must also look into the behaviours and events normal sexuality is composed of; just as we were analysing a dream. Pleasure is surely the prime candidate for analysis.

Pleasure however looks like a simple event whereas obviously it is not. The sexual event and the erotic quality of the experience seem simple events to us since we automatically give them a summary explanation in terms of instinct and body. This simplistic and trustful explanation is based exclusively on what the subject consciously experiences. However if, on closer analysis, this "experience" turns out to be a complex psychic elaboration, we must study it in more details, in its interior processes regardless of the level of consciousness reported by the subject. In other words we must not take the subjective sexual element for granted as it were final and indivisible.

Sexual pleasure is not a simple element serving to explain more complex psychic processes, as freudian psychoanalysis sometimes seems to do, but it is itself a complex process to be analysed. Considering it like an emotion, we propose its analysis, which is more difficult than for other so-called "simple" emotions. Sexual pleasure is not a basic element in classification of the emotions (Imbasciati, 1986a, II chap. 4). It is not considered a specific emotion (Fraisse, 1963) but a very complex emotional state.

The variability of the erotic dimension in relation to the consciousness of the subject introduces us to this complexity. For the other emotions considered simpler, the parameter of being or not being consciously perceived appears less variable, and therefore less ambiguous, as a principle for determination of the emotion itself. However, we still study the unconscious process even for these emotions, and how they operate underneath the subjective consciousness. All the more so must we do this for the more complex erotic dimension, where we have a central conscious event called sexual pleasure, around which multiple polyhedric psychic states rotate, conscious and unconscious, extremely complex in their individual variability. Strangely however psychoanalysis, while it keeps on analysing the other psychic processes, seems to use the erotic quality like a known element, and a basis for explaining other unknown ones, rather than a phenomenon needing investigation itself: psychoanalysis has in other words considered sexuality as "explanans" and not as "explanandum".

Sexual pleasure however, needs specific psychoanalysis not only by observing the conditions in which it occurs, and not only by assuming an unconscious sexual pleasure for certain phenomena. This concept too, in my opinion, is superficial. We could instead focus on the unconscious process which generate pleasure, either reported by the subject or deduced from his/her behaviour. I think that such a research is misleading in that psychoanalysis refers to the freudian conceptual model of the Libido theory. This model, based on an energy, stresses the biological aspect, assuming pleasure with the concept of drive as an element we can use as "explanans" of the psychic aspect.

We could devote the same attention to all the other manifestations of sexuality, especially the so called normal ones, which are all too often used as explanans, instead of being analysed as explananda. The wide individual variability of sexual manifestations gives an indication of the quantity of "hidden" aspect in each individual’s deep structures is latent in it.

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The questions posed at the beginning of this article – why do we feel sexual attraction? Why is sexual pleasure so peculiar? How does the heterosexual desire originate? – and other similar ones, are no longer as simple as they seemed, and have become complex and enigmatic. Is this one reason why psychoanalysis has been lately so low key about sexuality? Is there an underlying tendency to abandon the freudian theory?

In 1955 Kelly put forward the first of a series of "constructivist" models of the mind: later neopiagetian and "cognitive" path was prevailing (Maturana, Varela, 1985; Watzlawick, 1986; Doise, Mugny, 1987; Gilli, Marchetti, 1992; Ford, Lerner, 1993; Camaioni, 1993; Harré, Gillett, 1994). These models’ common denominator is the belief that the mind is an autoconstruction, arising from a person’s earliest experiences. We can consider some developments in psychoanalysis as converging towards the studies mentioned in other psychological disciplines, so we can refer to a psychoanalytical "constructivism" (Imbasciati, 1994). The psychoanalytical point of view explores the construction in the context of object relationship, starting from the primary relations, maybe even fetal ones (Imbasciati, Manfredi, Tommasoni, 1997) and delves into the learning process in a correspondingly specific way.

In my opinion, the construction of sexual dimension fits into a "constructivistic" model as to give an answer to, or at least permit closer investigation of the questions I have raised. We should examine the pathology, for instance homosexuality, with new interest, but only once we have understood well enough the origins of the "normal" heterosexuality.

I have dedicated the best part of my research to these problems, developing a psychoanalytical "constructivist" theory of the mind. In a number of works I have set out my owns line of thought, according to a theoretical picture which would explain the extraordinary specificity typical of sexual experience, of sexual attraction, and pleasure, and the huge interpersonal range of sexual behaviour. So the term "dimension" means the acquired nature, psychologically built, of this aspect of the development and function of the mind.

This is not the place to summarize the reasons that led me to the theoretical conceptions I have developed. The reader will find them in the present bibliographic list. To stimulate further discussion, however, I enclose with this note some extracts from a book I have written. I suggest that the acquisition of the sexual dimension and its orientation can be defined as a process of adaptation according to Hartmann’s concept (1939): psychic structures and associated functions start to grow out of experiences related to the anatomy and communication (culture) the subject receives from birth and works out in his/her relational contexts. Sexual dimension is identified as a series of processes of symbolization which go from early internal objects and the relations whose elaboration they came from, to the adult relationship. The sexual dimension is an important part of the development of symbol-making (symbolopoiesis). Interwined with other processes of symbolization, it can be identified as part of the overall mental development. In this context psychosexual development is a stage in cognitive development (Imbasciati, 1983).

The above propositions are set into my Protomental Theory (1998) I outlined as the explicative-descriptive hypothesis of overall psychic development, starting from the neokleinian theories and particularly from Bion. The origins of sexual dimension, of gender identity, of sexual orientation, of pleasure itself and of all the unconscious sexual experiences which analysts know, dwell in the processes which emanate from the primary internal objects, from the first phantasies, from the early proto-representations and from all the subsequent and progressive symbolic articulations which constitutes or, better, build the structures of mental development.

The theory not only has a top level based on these psychoanalytical concepts, but also an overlapping psychophysiological top level, assuming the development of the progressive symbolizations in terms of elaboration of mnestic traces from the sensory experience. This second top level may be useful, in my opinion, in clinical practice as, focusing on it, will lead the analyst to look for remote, infantile sensory experiences of the various senses and to try to how they have been interwoven, integrated and even falsely superimposed together with all the other experiences, to form the individual deep structure. This is where we shall find those structures that have become part of his/her own sexual dimension. Exploring sexual dimension in this sense can be a useful key to further reaching exploration of the psychic structure and its origins from the primary experiences.

 

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