The Curious Case of La Petite Mort

La petite mort, (the little death) is an expression which means "the brief loss or weakening of consciousness" and in modern usage refers specifically to "the sensation of post-orgasm as likened to death.”

At a recent Psychoanalytic Conference (2019) entitled “#South Africa: Love, Hope and Perversion” there was much discussion about the kind of case where a man would take himself off for a vasectomy to avoid his wife falling pregnant. This apparently drastic step, a unilateral one, was assumed to be contrary to the wishes of his wife (in her late 30s) to conceive a baby.
 

Before discussing this particular issue, I wish to briefly preface my thoughts by noting a tendency in contemporary psychoanalytical dialogues to sometimes privilege ideology above data. In the current socio-political climate there is often a pressure to ‘de-nature’ and ‘democratise’ gender, to promote our valued principles of egalitarianism, which can make ideas about innate difference uncomfortable, calling into question the fundamental tenets of psychoanalysis.

Radical papers, such as Don Moss’ one on ‘The Perversion of Whiteness’, captures the positioning of a narrative that vilifies whiteness, maleness, and Eurocentricism, a “contagious condition…like a systemic illness”, to quote him. This ideological discourse might suggest that difference, any form of self-identity that infers there is an Other who is different, falls foul of some idea of civilised egalitarianism. On the other hand, Freud himself took the view - that it is Nature that dominates the human psyche, the undeniable terms that it dictates, that being embodied creates inescapable effects on the development of the brain, mind and all its drivers and contents.

The conference, and in particular a case such as the one of the choice to vasectomise the self, led to much lively discussion. In a profession made up largely of women, the discussion took on a particular form, and it is this process that most interested me. When the data is marginalised, ideological suppositions can easily root, because they are more comfortable, which one might interpret as related to the wish that as humans we are above the primitive stuff and just all the same. How do we dress up the unpalatable nakedness of our nature?

The discussion took on what I shall term a ‘gynocentric view’ of the male patient and his issue, and in particular his embodiment in neuro-biologically gendered maleness. He appeared (to me) be struggling with deep internal issues, some unique to him as a personality no doubt but some associated with his male embodiment and the intrapsychic manifestation of his masculinity. If we are reminded of the most basic element of Freudian theory - which Barratt behoves us to not forget - that the Freudian/ psychoanalytic project reflects an embodied mind - derived as the theory was from the actual data and evidence.

Freud’s work is a corpus of insights about the embodied nature of the psyche and how psychic structures and mental processes, that become symbolic and irreducibly emergent, are nonetheless rooted deeply in the experience of the body (and brain), through which the mental apparatus is given its form. Nowhere in psychoanalysis is the neurobiology that accompanies and drives the mental apparatus ever be-gone. The human psyche is, Freud would argue, so evidently an embodied psyche that without this acknowledgement, all psychoanalytic theory fails, the stuff of poets and philosophy. Freud’s neurological background facilitated the empiricist that he remained, despite his later theoretical forays into grand metapsychological theory. The wish that all embodiment ceases in the interests of equality, de-genderedness, political correctness, and what our intellectual sensibilities dictate, is to undo the very edifice of Freudian theory in which this discourse, and the conference, proclaims itself.

What relevance does this have for a case such as the unilateral vasectomy? I want to try posit an alternative view to the gynocentric one that seemed to prevail - perhaps described by one (male) analyst in the audience when he commented: “we seem to be missing something here”. Almost all men appear to experience a degree of energetic evacuation post-orgasmically, caricatured in many Hollywood movie as a disengagement, either for a moment, or by physically separating till an energetic recharge is possible. Some literature refers to this as Post-coital tristesse (PCT), the feeling of sadness, anxiety, agitation or aggression after sexual intercourse. Its name comes from New Latin postcoitalis and French tristesse, literally "sadness". Many people with PCT may exhibit strong feelings of anxiety lasting from five minutes to two hours after coitus. The phenomenon is traced to the Greek doctor Galen, who wrote, "Every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster.” In more severe forms, Post-orgasmic illness syndrome (POIS) is a syndrome in which men have chronic physical and cognitive symptoms immediately following ejaculation in the absence of a local genital reaction. The symptoms last for up to a week.

Many couples conflict over this male tendency, since in the purest outcome of intimacy, a woman is more likely to experience a post-coital glow during which she is energetically filled, and neuro-biologically awash in feel-good oxytocin and the desire to bond. The man, on the other hand, even in such a situation of intimacy, may feel depleted and rendered temporarily impotent. This radical before-after psychic shift is not always trivial. For some men, this change is so marked as to lead to post-ejaculatory dysphoria lasting from a few minutes to a few days. In some cases I have worked with, the post-orgasm drop is so severe as to warrant a diagnosis of a depression proper, in all its objective symptoms, were it not for the observation that after a few days (usually 2-3 days) the depression spontaneously lifts. In such cases, it is not uncommon to see that these men actually avoid having orgasms for fear of this severe energetic and mood drop. The French term La Petit Mort, the ‘little death’, captures well the temporary sense of loss that (perhaps counter-intuitively) appears to follow the male’s experience of his sexuality. It seems to make no sense, then, that consummation itself, the apparent pinnacle of the sexual act (what some feminists might describe as the pinnacle of the conquest) is associated with such (temporary) deep loss or self, potency, and drive. Evidence does indeed seem to point us in this direction.

According to Freud, the development of masculinity, for boys/ men, is associated with a primal anxiety of castration by the father, a term he associated not only with symbolism but embodiment and its accompanying physiological primacy, as he noted his positing the view that “the term ‘castration complex’ ought to be confined to those excitations and consequences which are bound up with the loss of the penis.” (Freud, 1909, p.8). Freud adds, “Anyone who, in analysing adults, has become convinced of the invariable presence of the castration complex, will, of course, find difficulty in ascribing its origin to a chance threat—of a kind which is not, after all, of such universal occurrence”. Castration anxiety is the conscious or unconscious fear of losing all or part of the sex organs, or the function of such. In the literal sense, castration anxiety refers to the fear of having one's genitalia disfigured or removed to punish sexual desires of a child.

But furthermore, there is perhaps a lesser documented dynamic peculiar to the male child/ man I have observed repeatedly in clinical work, and that is a fear of a different sort, castration by the mother. This relates to the appearance in the boy’s mind of a terror of engulfment, an incest-driven fear of castration perhaps best captured in the literature by the notion of the ‘vagina dentata’, “the one fear, the neurotic dread of sexual intercourse, which is symbolized in the same manner as vagina dentata by many people in many countries” (British Medical Journal, 1945, p.112). This primal fear suggests that any actual enactment of oedipal triumph not by the victorious conquest of the son but by the mother might lead to the incorporation of the boy’s ‘genital member’/ masculinity into the mother. And though Freud reminds us, his recourse to a normal erotic future is premised on a massive repression of the incestuous impulse to the mother, whereby “the complex is not simply repressed, it is literally smashed to pieces by the shock of threatened castration. Its libidinal cathexes are abandoned, desexualized and in part sublimated; its objects are incorporated into the ego, where they form the nucleus of the super-ego and give that new structure its characteristic qualities. In normal, or, it is better to say, in ideal cases, the Oedipus complex exists no longer, even in the unconscious; the super-ego has become its heir” (Freud, 1925, p. 257). In relation to the mother, and only in the symbolic realm, and under the guardianship of the boy, can oedipal associations be safely and successfully navigated? In the presence of an engulfing or violating mother, of which many cases present themselves of the shifting boundaries from over-involvement emotionally to actual sexual abuse, outcomes may differ considerably. Repression remains partial and incomplete.

The consequences of this can be two-fold, and both involve a loss in the deepest of psychic senses: firstly, in the act of coitus and ejaculation, there is a loss of energy and potency, depending on the age and individual personality of the man, lasting from 20 minutes to a few days. This energetic loss associated with potency and a temporary rendering of sexual incompetence may compel a retreat from the object to restore resources, since the loss of potency is also associated with a loss of masculinity in his relationship to his woman, and in deeper ways with his sense of Self. The associative (maternal) elements are hard to ignore - since the ejaculation that fills his partner offer the symbolic transfer of the baby and the fulfilment of her (oedipal) wish for a penis-baby, according to Freud. In many senses, for the woman, the orgasmic completion represents layers of gain - both energetic and symbolic in the wished-for baby that the penis-ejaculate represent. She gains a baby, and the eternal obligation and binding of the father to it and to her, even where a baby is conceived through casual encounters by design or accident. The biological father becomes bound with the mother and (her) baby, despite fatherhood beginning as a mere idea, unlike the embodied experience pregnancy and childbirth is for the mother.

The presence of love is not the only binding factor, but rather the psychological, legal, moral, and social imperative and pressure to fulfil the obligations of fatherhood and to offer a lifetime henceforth of psychological and material support. From a man’s point of view, the primal fear of this cascade is one of realistic loss of self, autonomy, financial independence, and freedom. The upside of love, family and his own wish or instinct to procreate do not seem to automatically do away with these fears but certainly may mitigate them. Nonetheless, for many men, once fatherhood enters the arena of the dyad, he is displaced from his love-object and pride of place in the mind of his lover. Without any obligation to reciprocity and needs, he may have, protest at neglect may be easily regarded as considered selfish in the natural triaging of the primacy of the mother-infant dyad. The father’s primary function is shifted to provision, support, absorption as the auxiliary ego to the nursing mother-infant dyad. For some men, whose role in relation to their mothers has involved some measure of her narcissism taking centre stage, the oedipal demands may encroach marginally outside the realm of the symbolic and lead to defensive reactions against the enactment of incest. The cascading series of losses for some men represents the ultimate deal-breaker, an annihilation of self from which no recovery can be psychically possible, a black-hole so to speak without an end, this fantasy representing for some men the early boyhood imaginings that the tunnel of the mother’s vagina is like a bottomless hole at once beguiling but engulfing and from which escape, it is imagined, might be impossible.

Freud’s analysis that men’s erotic life involves the ‘debasement’ and desire to possess the (female) object and penetrate it, an apparently aggressive mix of the erotic and aggressive drives, whilst psychoanalytically true as Freud aptly described in his paper on love, and which inverted from a feminine perspective involves some desire to be possessed and penetrated, must be distinguished from a feminist critique of masculinity that interprets these psychoanalytic precepts as evidence for a discourse of perpetrator and victim, of debasement in a feminist, rather than psychoanalytic sense. More relevant here, is that this is not the only part of this universally gendered experience. For some men, the act of coitus is not accompanied by the experience of penetration or conquest but engulfment, an incorporative association that makes the penis disappear, and in that disappearance the loss of the phallic masculinity, and perhaps even of the Self itself. Such an association to engulfment can make the energetic loss (and accompanying testosterone drop following orgasm) profoundly effect his penchant for fusion with the vagina and in its stead an avoidance of coitus, sometimes ejaculation, and sometimes of women or relationship itself. Freud’s point is that “The feministic demand for equal rights between the sexes does not carry far here; the morphological difference must express itself in differences in the development of the mind. 'Anatomy is Destiny', to vary a saying of Napoleon’s” (Freud, 1924, p.423).

The fundamental differences in the physiology and neurobiology of men and women make the associative elements in human sexuality primary in its expression, the evidence suggesting we examine these differences from the bottom up, as it were, without the epistemological error of wishing away the data. How a man perceives the engulfment of his body into his partner and its consequent associations to energetic loss, pregnancy and the binding pressures that accompany it into what some men experience as an endlessly bound future, may evoke significant anxiety and terror. Rather than viewing a unilateral decision to have a vasectomy as an attack on women, misogyny, the symbolic murder of the unborn (and un-conceived child), unbridled aggression, and what have you - I would suggest that a formulation regarding a deep terror of loss of self in all its manifestations may plausibly underpin such an apparently drastic step.

Were this case to which I refer have been female, the more likely direction of interpretation would have been, following her unilateral choice to have a tubular ligation, that it is her body and she is not the object of male ownership, her husband included, that have the right to dictate the terms of what she does with her body. Yet, the husband in the case presented, did such a thing - and the general tenor of the interpretations in the case discussion at the conference involved concepts such as his doing (unconscious) violence to his unborn child, his misogynism and attack on his wife and her representation of all womanhood, the narcissism embedded in his patriarchal assumptions that have done grievous injury to his wife, attacking her through his action and depriving her of her inalienable right to have a baby, and being married, essentially his baby. What right did he have to deprive his wife of her needed baby?

Taken from the internal world of this man’s (unconscious) point of view, a curious case of la petite mort might more plausibly explain his action - and the gynocentric view of his apparent misogynism might benefit from the acknowledgement that ideology comforts our unease with difference and even natural divergence of psychic experience, but does not explain adequately the actual data. As Freud would perhaps remind us, the data itself must be the guide, no matter how uncomfortable it may be, rather than our wish for a utopian egalitarianism replacing the wonderful complementarity of psychic and anatomical difference between the sexes. The title of the conference “Love, Hope and Perversion” should not direct us to hope without evidence, which might lead to a perversion of experience and the reality of difference. “Thus”, said Freud (1912), “we may perhaps be forced to become reconciled to the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the demands of civilization” (p.191), or for that matter to the ideologies to which we attach ourselves. Perhaps, the curious case of the vasectomy becomes rather the curious case of La Petite Mort. And in an atmosphere that appears most persistent, in which everything white, male, heteronormative, and European seems to demand an apology for its apparent ‘perversity’, it might be worth remembering that all the precepts to which a psychoanalytic conference owes its very existence were all discovered by just such a creature.


References

Long, W (2019). Shame, envy, impasse and hope: The psychopolitics of violence in South Africa

Freud, S. (1924). The Passing of the Oedipus Complex. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 5:419-424.

Freud, S. (1912). On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love (Contributions to the Psychology of Love II). The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XI (1910): Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Leonardo da Vinci and Other Works, 177-190.

Freud, S. (1909). Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume X (1909): Two Case Histories (‘Little Hans’ and the ‘Rat Man’), 1-150.(1945). The British Journal of Medical Psychology. Psychoanal. Rev., 32(1):102-112.

Freud, S. (1925). Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 241-258.

Barratt, Barnaby (2012) What is Psychoanalysis? 100 Years After Freud’s ‘Secret Committee’. London: Routledge.

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Adrian is a qualified Psychologist (Clinical), based in Gardens, Cape Town, South Africa.

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