The Impossibility of Sex: Stories of the Intimate Relationship between Therapist and Patient - Softcover

Susie Orbach is a cofounder of the Women's Therapy Centre in London and a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. Author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue, she is also a cofounder of the Women's Therapy Centre Institute in New York. Orbach lives in London with her partner and two children.

The Vampire Casanova

I felt twitches in my vagina, pleasurable contractions. It was a sunny Sunday morning in spring, two years after I had stopped seeing Adam. I was chopping some fennel when he not so much entered my mind as tapped on my body, as he had so many times during the course of a five-year therapy. Adam was a chef and from time to time when I was preparing food, his presence would insinuate itself and I would be back in the physical ambiance of our therapy time together.

Adam was a fornicator, a lover, a stud; a man whose daily life was shaped by sexual desire and sexual conquest in a spiral of infatuation, seduction and vanquishing. There were never less than one love interest and two or three gorgeous "girls" on the go, not of course counting on the previously conquered, who would return for occasional trysts when they were in town or between boyfriends.

The year before he embarked on therapy the then 36-year-old Adam developed a problem that jeopardized his perception of himself. He had started to ejaculate too soon. Desperate to make the problem go away, he came to therapy. "Too soon for whom?" I asked. "Too soon for me. You know, too soon for me to really give it to her. To fuck her real special. Like no one else. Take her places she's never been."

The imperative of his sexuality and the potency of his penis fascinated me. It was so present and insistent that I felt swept back twenty years to before my generation's encounter with feminism thought it had remade sexual relations both in and out of bed.

What did coming too soon mean to him? That it wasn't complete? That his orgasm was a squib rather than a release and a connection? Was he anxious? Did he have to concentrate too hard on giving to the woman? Was he insecure?

"All of those, sure," he said on his first session. "See, I really love women," he said, slowing down as he realized he was sobbing. "Take Sarah who I was with last week. Now she's something special." He paused another second. "While I was romancing her, I really believed, you know, that I loved her."

Before self-reflection could count, before he could register how hearing himself was a new experience, he pulled himself out of his pain and slowly spoke what would be ours to sort out over the next few years.

"I'm a physically passionate man," he said as he looked into my eyes and mimed Me Tarzan, You Jane. "It's just nature. But something is getting in the way of mine. So, figure it out, Doc. Come on. Without fucking what's the point. Fucking is my life."

The bluntness of his words and the flip between Southern American formality and crudeness jarred with the softness, almost a sweetness, in his persona. I wondered about the clash.

Adam began to tell his story. Although few feelings came through, the preliminary shape he gave his life had a certain coherence to it. He was born on Long Island in the working-class community of Huntington Station shortly before the end of the Second World War. His father and mother had been childhood sweethearts and she had become pregnant before he went off to serve in Europe. The photos Adam had of his father in uniform and the stories his mother told about him portrayed him as an eager, if somewhat naive, young man, ready to serve his country and see a bit of Gay Paree. War was a romantic moment rather than the reality of bombs, scarcity, cold and death. While he was stationed in England, Adam's father got involved with a Yorkshire woman, who also became pregnant. He promised to take her with him to the United States (Adam often wondered if his father had entered into a fraudulent marriage with her). On returning to New York, Adam's father moved in with his mother and him for a year but when it came out that he had fathered another child, there were terrible fights and eventually he left for California. He kept in sporadic touch with Adam for a few years, coming back once for a few months when Adam was six, but his father dropped out of his life after his eighth birthday when he turned from being a heroic husband and father to a maligned bigamist.

Adam grew up very close to his mother. He was her companion, her little man. At twelve he was making decisions for the two of them, carrying the money she earned as a beautician, telling her how much they could spend. They moved around a lot, from New York to Florida and then around the state, either to catch up with some new man she was after or chasing a job opportunity that did not quite pan out. He learned to make friends quickly and to let them go easily. He was distracted from the pain of his dislocations by the abundant dramas his mother wrought in their lives.

At seventeen, after finishing high school in Vero Beach, Florida, Adam went back to New York, tried butchering, his father's trade, then acting and moved on to selling art and doing exquisite dinner-party cooking. He found his way into a glitzy social scene and discovered how sexy he could be to neglected married women. Wonderful at paying them attention, knowing what they longed for and dressed like a man with twenty times his income, Adam became extremely desirable. In 1972 when he was twenty-seven he married Elizabeth, a wealthy divorcée.

Elizabeth misconstrued Adam's pursuit of her as true love (which it was at the time) and she was crushed by his philandering. She divorced him quickly, giving him enough money to start a restaurant. Designed by a friend, hung with paintings on loan from artists he used to represent, and given sufficient publicity as New York's coolest restaurant just at the time when food and eateries became a leisure pursuit of a large segment of New York's middle class, his restaurant soon took off. He became a respected chef and restaurateur. Meanwhile, his mother, who had moved to New York to be nearer to him after a failed love affair, died of cancer at the age of fifty-five.

Before Adam came to see me in 1980 his life was shaped by two preoccupations: being a celebrity chef -- rushing around judging competitions, doing guest-chef stints in other restaurants, creating beautiful tables for photo shoots, writing a cookbook with his assistant -- and having girlfriends, dozens and dozens of them.

His hectic life and pursuit of women worked well enough for him. He felt gratified by the attention he received, pleased to be the consummate lover and part of a glamorous set. There was plenty of excitement. He was always living in a mini-drama, often of his own making, where one or two of the women he was sleeping with would be on the verge of finding out about another. Concealment and the fear of discovery excited him enormously. I thought of the analyst Winnicott's observation: "It is a joy to be hidden but a disaster not to be found" and wondered what it foretold of what needed finding in therapy.

The scrapes Adam got himself into and the tension of his many work commitments helped him feel valued. He was clearly needed by others. If he had not hit this problem of early ejaculation, he never, he assured me, would be seeing me. "Everything was coming up roses till that point. Hell, I wouldn't have been here sitting with you, ma'am. I'd a been making you sweet sweet love." Extreme intensity exuded from him even in this play tease and I could sense how compelling the turn of his attention to a woman might be.

His discomfort in seeking help from a woman after many years of looking after women in one way or another was pronounced. He was awkward as he tried to give a fuller account of himself, to show some vulnerability, not to be the big guy who was always in charge.

Yet he settled well into therapy. He was relieved to be able to talk about his life, the ins and outs of his love affairs and the emotional patterns he wove. As we got to know each other better, more details emerged about sex and loving. He now frequently sought a different kind of sex, a more violent encounter teetering on the edge of bondage and rape. His sexual fantasy life had moved in that direction when he started to come too soon, and he had discovered that while masturbating he could sustain his excitement long enough with a violent fantasy to give him a satisfying orgasm. It did not work when he was actually with someone. With a woman, however much he wanted her, he felt precarious, anxious and that he "came too soon."

Adam was indeed a sensual man. I could feel it in greeting him. When I put out my hand to shake his on our first encounter, the presence of his hand stayed with me. After he left the consulting room, his smell was in my nose. When he stood up to leave it was as though the room were being emptied. When he talked about women, I could feel his love. Clichéd words which I might have tended to laugh at if they had come from a friend took on a lush, rich tone. He found women miraculous, beautiful, sexy, delicious and inviting; their movements, their smells, their pretty lingerie draped nature with tenderness. His open appreciation and joy gave me a new perspective on my gender's sexuality and I could almost see women from his perspective as wondrous, luscious, magical, holding secrets desperately worth penetrating.

He was nothing if he wasn't a lover, he said. He needed to pursue, to please, to have a woman's pleasure in his sexual capacities reflected back to him. He wanted to get to the heart of women, emotionally and sexually, so that they would be forever transformed by his touch. And they were. His intensity, interest and sexual certainty made it possible for his lovers to open up, to feel as though they were discovering their sexuality as adult women and to go where "they'd never been before." But despite his and their evident satisfaction and pleasure, Adam was always on to the next encounter, the next woman who could confirm him, who by opening her legs and her heart would make him feel he existed. Until his sexual problem.

The sexual problem that so dismayed Adam brought to a stop his habitual way of going about life, his way of understanding himself, his way of being with a woman, his way of giving and receiving love and his way of feeling good. All that he knew about himself was now thrown into question. In choosing psychoanalytic therapy, he was embarking on a journey to make some sense of the way he organized his emotional and sexual life, to question what motivated him, to fathom why his penis was forsaking him, to connect up, as he might say, with his emotional heartbeat.

While Adam was desperate to get his penis working for him again and had consulted physicians about techniques to forestall orgasm, he found that he was curiously relieved when I suggested that his "coming too soon" might hold clues about aspects of himself that as yet he did not recognize.

The issue of symptom relief has always been a thorny one for psychoanalysis. In Freud's work it was the symptom, principally the hysterical, non-organic symptom that disabled the individual in many different ways that psychoanalysis at first sought to comprehend. Anna O's tortured limbs, Cäcilie M's paralysis and the widespread phenomenon of physical anesthesia were the material that Freud and Breuer drew on in 1895 in their groundbreaking Studies on Hysteria. Since that time psychoanalysis has swung between treating symptoms and interpreting them as metaphors, regarding them as manifestations of unconscious processes. Sometimes psychoanalytic patients have been relieved that in the analytic space they can speak of whatever enters their minds, that they need not slot everything about their experience into the narrow confines of their symptom. Sometimes they have been alarmed because their symptom, despite a most thorough analysis, remains entrenched. Clinicians walk an uneasy line between addressing the symptom per se, giving the person space to talk about it and how the symptom expresses, disables, enables and enunciates aspects of the individual, and at the same time offering the possibility that there are other ways of experiencing that the patient may not be allowing herself to acknowledge.

Adam was quite interested to know what stories he had invented for himself about his magical phallus and why, if it was so magical, these powers had now deserted him. He could see at once that his self-conception as a lover was a lens through which all his experience passed and although part of him longed to be free of sexual anxiety and to return to the status quo, he was intrigued by the notion that there was something to know beyond his symptom and perhaps beyond his sexuality too.

It was not long into the therapy before Adam registered that I was a woman. Since his only repertoire with women was either to look after them or make love to them, seeing me as a woman put him in a quandary. Interested as he was that I be the doctor in a metaphorical white coat who would help him examine his life, he could not keep me in that category. He had to flirt.

It would be inaccurate to say that he would flirt when he was anxious or to fill the space or, as happens in normal social life, as a way of smoothing over those awkward moments that can occur between women and men. No. Such a description would strip Adam of his essence. Adam was flirtation incarnate. He could not help but flirt. When we first met, this flirtation had been expressed as charm. As his therapy continued, however, he beamed his seductiveness toward me and the analysis of it, including his active sexual pursuit of me, became a central feature of our sessions.

For a few months Adam and I explored the life of his penis. Through this valued part of himself he felt able to give and receive love, to make women desire and need him. His penis, he felt, let him convey to a woman that he was interested in her emotionally and sexually as she had never been noticed before. The intensity of his appeal, the promise he held out that he would reach and move her, spiritually and sexually, became irresistible. A woman who gave a hint of returning his interest would receive an emotional assault that not only had her longing for him but left her feeling that without his attention she was somehow lost.

As I listened to his accounts of seductions I felt acute sorrow for Adam in his fierce search to connect. I felt scared too for the woman he was currently after. I would not have wanted to be in her position. I could sense that he picked his women up in one place, twirled them around and then pulled them inside out, so that when they were dropped they had been through a sexual and emotional revolution that left them reeling as they tried to pick up the pieces of their pre-Adam selves. Although he played it as a game -- game, set, match -- it was the women who would be knocked out by him. He could always go on to the next conquest, the next woman who showed him how much she desired him.
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In pursuit of a woman Adam was alive. Although he was aware that his encounters had a predictable pattern of pursuit, seduction and loss of interest, the chase worked for him. Adam's well-being, his sense of self, his raison d'être required a sexual quest, the challenge of teasing and coaxing the heart of a woman to open up so that he could capture her. When he secured the woman he was desperate for, there was a moment -- sometimes a longish moment before his interest dissolved -- when Adam felt loved and accepted.

He knew that he was sexually appealing. His distress over coming too soon humiliated him. It humiliated him that he had had to come to see me. By flirting in therapy he was bringing forward what he felt to be the best of him, inviting me to be entranced by those aspects of himself that he esteemed, so that as we entered into the not-so-nice bits, he was reassured that I could see his charm and accept hi...