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Players: Husband and wife.

Activists: Both.

Setting: Home or hotel.

Aim: Use paradoxical approach to get at couple’s inferiority/superiority feelings.

Game Plan: The couple may take turns being master and slave. If they have a twinship transference, either can go first.

If it is an idealizing transference, the idealizing partner should be the slave first, since that order is closest to their present relationship. The taking of turns at being the slave leads to interesting results.

It may begin after a dinner at a fine restaurant, or in the restaurant of the hotel where they are staying. Upon coming back home, the master sits down on an easy chair and looks at the slave sternly. (In this example I will have the man play master.)

“Come over here.”

“Yes, sir!”

“Kneel down before me.” “Yes, sir!”

“Do you realize that you are nothing and I am everything? Do you realize that you are just a slave and I am your master? Do you?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Do you realize that I know everything and you know nothing? Do you?” “Yes, sir!”

“Without me you would be nothing. Nothing! Do you hear?”

“I hear, sir!”

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For the husband it is a transforming experience, lifting him out of his own defensive posture—which might range from whining about lack of sex, to passive but begrudging resignation to little or unresponsive sex, to seeking extramarital situations and satisfactions. By dropping his defensive posture and allowing his own playful self to come out, he learns a more successful mode of relating.

Nude indoor volleyball can be played for fun and enlightenment by most of the couples described in this book.

On occasion, hysterics marry active spouses, hoping that such men will sweep them off their feet and take them away from it all. But the actives are more than likely to be of the narcissistic variety, interested in satisfying their own needs, not their spouse’s. For this reason, many such relationships swing from fantasy to disillusionment.

The games in this section have been designed as a five-part antidote to hysteria.

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If he demurs and does not launch into a recitation of his woes from childhood on, then she might try the playful approach:

“So, here I am!” She tickles him in a place she knows he’s vulnerable. “What do you think? Do you want to play with me? Listen, I have a riddle for you. What’s a zebra?” She sticks out her breasts. “Give up? A zebra is twenty-five times bigger than an A-bra!”

If he doesn’t start laughing and cheering up (he may, for example, become grouchier), the sexy approach may work:

“Hi there, handsome. What can I do for you?” She slides her hand up his leg. “I’m here to relieve you of all your worldly and sexual tension, and I’m ready to fulfill your innermost fantasies. Your wish is my compulsion!”

If the husband is in on this game, he will now find some way to play along. If the game is a surprise, the fairy godmother must keep trying until she finds the key to unlocking his resistance. That key usually turns on an understanding of his particular rescue fantasy (all of us have one). Once it has been found, the husband can be lured out of his depressive posture and into an enjoyable sexual experience—which may also lead to an unburdening of himself in a way he has not experienced before. And this could in turn lead to increased intimacy.

As with other games, this one must be played with conviction and zest. If there is any hesitancy, self-consciousness, or inhibition, that will sabotage the proceedings. Therefore, the active partner must be ready to truly throw herself into her role and enjoy it. This will have a therapeutic benefit on her too, channeling into a constructive groove her resentment about her husband’s depression.

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The interrogator starts fondling the confessor again. “Tell me.”

“I feel afraid of you.”

“That’s better. When do you feel afraid of me?” “I feel afraid of you right now. You’ve got your hands on my genitals.” “That’s true.”

“And I also feel afraid of you at other times.” “What other times?” “I’m not sure.”

The interrogator stops fondling the confessor. “Don’t stop.” “Then talk.” “I will.”

“What other times?”

“I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you. Please don’t stop. I feel afraid when you’re drinking.”

“That’s better.” The interrogator continues fondling the confessor until the whole truth is told. Then the two switch roles.

This game can last (intermittently, at least) for an hour, a day, a week, or a month, and constantly lead to new truths. By being truthful in the context of erotic play, the couple is enabled to open up in an enjoyable way. This provides positive reinforcement to the difficult task of breaking through barriers. Husbands and wives will be surprised at the things both their partners and they come out with. Of course, there may be some pain to deal with—unexpected truths that are difficult to hear and cope with. Then the couple must stop the game and deal with that pain, perhaps even with the help of a therapist.

Eventually (as with the other games in this section), boredom will dissipate while intimacy and passion return.

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The games are designed to lead to the resolution of sexual and emotional blocks. In a sense, they are an elaboration of the kinds of exercises devised by William Masters and Virginia Johnson as an adjunct to the sex-therapy program they introduced in Human Sexual Response. However, their exercises are aimed at the resolutions of such sexual symptoms as premature or retarded ejaculation, partial or full impotency, partial or full frigidity, sexual phobias, and the like. The games offered here are intended to reach deeper into the unconscious recesses of character formation; the aim is not only to relieve symptoms but to resolve characterological attitudes.

The main difference between the games in this book and the sex games that people normally play is that these games are not compulsive rituals but rather conscious, deliberate enactments with a special purpose. They are similar to the games people normally play in that they address the same fixations that compulsive rituals address, but they do so in a way that is designed to resolve (rather than maintain) them.

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Although the origin of male homosexuality lies in castration anxiety, the fear of the penis itself is essential to female homosexuality. Often the penis is seen by such women as a punishing, hurting, destructive, tearing, and biting organ. These fears and thoughts and feelings may impede the capacity for sexual enjoyment, to the extent that there is no sexual pleasure possible if it involves a penis.

For homosexual women, one way in which the male genital can be excluded is by regression. It must be remembered that the first love object of every human being is the mother, so that all women, as opposed to men, begin life with a primary homosexual attachment. When in the course of later development the emergence of normal heterosexuality is blocked, the regression to the homosexual attachment can be revived. Whereas the male regresses from a love of the mother as a sexual object to identification with the mother, the woman regresses from the love of the father as a sexual object to a love of the mother as a sexual object. Consequently, female homosexuality tends to have two important factors: the first is the rejection of heterosexuality related to the castration complex and penis fear, and the second is the early pre-oedipal fixation on the attachment to the mother. These factors supplement each other since the attachment to the mother may protect and reassure against the threat of castration.

The normal progression in feminine sexual development is through the little girl’s loving attachment to her father. If that attachment is successful, that is, if it is not excessively seductive and if the father is able to respond in positive ways so as to reinforce the young girl’s sense of growing feminine attractiveness and worth, she emerges with a more adequate sense of herself as feminine and as capable of attracting, loving, and being loved by a man who is in some way like her father. This dynamic is obviously reinforced when the father’s attitude toward the mother is one of loving respect and affection, so that it becomes possible for a little girl to grow up with a positive identification with her mother which then can reinforce her own potentialities for being loved by a man and finding fulfillment and self-esteem by growing into and taking on a feminine position and role in life. The natural outcome of this progression is to lead a young woman to seek fulfillment and life expression through the normal channels of marriage, motherhood, and family life. To the extent that this identification carries with it the positive, constructive, and competent aspects of both parents, the young woman enters life with a sense of her own capacity to strive, compete, accomplish, and produce as an effective and competent human being.

But this process is subject to many vicissitudes. If the father is unable to respond to and positively reinforce the young girl’s sense of growing femininity, this disappointment and disillusionment may draw her away from an increasing identification with the mother and toward an identification with the father. This paternal identification may lead her to seek women as love objects resembling her mother. This resolution not only avoids the oedipal competition with the mother but also has an element of continuing hostility toward the father expressed in hostility towards men in general. This form of feminine homosexuality resembles male homosexuality in which identification with the mother leads to a desire to be loved by the father in the same way that he loved the mother. In the female the identification with the father leads to a desire to love the mother in the same way that the father loved her. This pattern is frequent among homosexual women and leads to adopting an active masculine relation to other women. One hears the reverberations of these dynamics in claims from such women that they do not need any men in their lives, or that they can be as good as any man. Such masculine strivings need not be combined with homosexuality but may be, depending on the intensity of the early fixation to the mother as we have suggested, and on the particular outcome of the castration complex.

Frequently for such homosexual women, the retreat from the father is accompanied by an intense longing for acceptance, closeness, and intimacy with the mother or mother-substitute. Loving the mother figure as the father loved her may also be combined with the wish to be loved by the mother in a more infantile way and in a way which has never been satisfactorily realized in the individual’s life experience. Turning away from heterosexuality revives elements of the early relationship to the mother and may have a more archaic or primitive character than male homosexuality has. It brings back not only the patterns of behavior, wishes, and gratifications of the early relationship with the mother, but also the fears and conflicts related to that early involvement. In such homosexual relationships there may be a good deal of mothering and infantilization between the partners as well as much kissing, sucking, licking, and other oral components of the sexual experience.

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Gender identity: The sameness, unity, and persistence of one’s individuality as male, female, or ambivalent in greater or lesser degree, especially as it is experienced in self-awareness and behavior. Gender identity is the private experience of gender role, and gender role is the public expression of gender identity.

Gender role: Everything that a person says or does to indicate others or to the self, the degree that one is either male, female, or ambivalent. It includes, but is not restricted to sexual arousal and response. Gender role is the public expression of gender identity, and gender identity is the private experience of gender role.

Gender identity/role: The term used to express the unity of gender identity and gender role which are opposite sides of the same coin. Gender identity and gender role both belong to the self. One’s own gender role is not synonymous with a socially prescribed or conventional gender role stereotype, even though it in some greater or lesser degree reflects this stereotype.

Gender identity/role differentiation: The differentiation of gender identity/role is the product of the interaction of prenatal (phyletically prescribed) and postnatal (social-environmentally prescribed) determinants or events, the latter outweighing the former in their overall influence.

Psychosexual differentiation: A term which historically antedates the term, gender identity/role differentiation, and which is sometimes used synonymously, despite the confusion of its also being used as a synonym for gender identity differentiation.

Genotype: An abstract term referring to the hereditary or gene-determined contribution to individual development. The genotype interacts with the envirotype to produce the uniquely individual phenotype.

Envirotype: An abstract term referring to the environmentally determined contribution to individual development. It interacts with the genotype to produce the uniquely individual phenotype. The term recognizes the fact that substances and events from the environment enter the cells of the body, including the cells of the central nervous system (CNS). There is an intrauterine, antenatal environment as well as a postnatal, extra-uterine one.

Phenotype: The product of the interaction of genotype and envirotype. Both set limits on each other. The genotype, in order to express itself, depends on a favorable envirotype, and the envirotype cannot process what the genotype does not supply.

Critical period: A time-limited phase, specific to a given aspect or phase of individual development, during which a state of sensitivity or readiness of the organism must be met by phyletically specific external stimuli in order to permit that aspect or phase of development to progress optimally. For example, speech cannot be acquired until the sensitive stage is reached, at which time there must be stimulation from hearing other people talk. At the conclusion of the critical period the development which has taken place is likely to remain permanent.

Identification and Complementation: In the differentiation of gender identity/role, identification signifies that an individual establishes a mental schema in the brain by imitating and copying or modeling the behavior of members of one’s own assigned sex. Complementation signifies the mental schema through learning the behavior of members of the opposite assigned sex and through reciprocating with gender-appropriate responses of one’s own assigned sex.

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Not all men love women, nor do all men hate them, nor does the one attitude exclude the other. There has been a good deal of speculation and little factual knowledge concerning the characteristics of the two sexes and their interaction, though this area of behavior is secondary in importance to bread-winning behavior only. From the inception of sexual reproduction, that is since females began to bear children, the child-versus-mother relationship has been the first social and emotional experience in everyone’s life. The first prenatal impressions are intrauterine: the first serious shock of separation is childbirth; the first sensations of hunger, thirst, satiation, comfort, warmth, and security are experienced in the context of child-mother relationships. But the respective parent roles are changing rapidly, and these changes must have affected the personalities of the offspring.

These sociological changes in family dynamics have produced new psychological phenomena. The neonates need today, as never before, tender love and care, and their feelings of security (and power) depend on being accepted by the parents. Today’s toddlers and preschool children fear their fathers much less than the previous generations did. Rarely does a mother threaten the child with “telling on him” to the father; in a great many contemporary families maternal authority has become equal to or greater than the paternal.

It is therefore not surprising that breast envy has become a phenomenon. Some of my male patients have had dreams indicating their wish to be a woman. In some dreams the breasts have appeared as a cherished possession, and the confusion of penis and breast has been quite frequent.

On the basis of my clinical observations, I venture to hypothesize that neither men nor women can completely resolve their Oedipal involvements, whether the positive ones (with the parent of the opposite sex) or the negative (with the parent of the same sex). Some residuum of the “first love” for the parent or the parent substitute seems to remain forever in almost all people.

Although there is a good deal of evidence for the universality of the Oedipal involvement (though it is necessarily different in different cultures), one may doubt the universality of penis envy. In over twenty-five years of clinical practice in this country, I have had a great many women patients. Going through my case reports, I noticed that the penis envy was more frequent among the older generation, brought up in traditional father-controlled families with clear male supremacy, than in the younger generation of women brought up in families with tenuous or nonexistent father supremacy. Freud’s observation of identification with the stronger parental figure seems to have been corroborated by my cases.

The male wish to be a woman was noticed by a few psychoanalysts a long time ago. Some men, who are not homosexual at all, identify with their mothers and later with their girlfriends. In some cases, feminine men deny that becoming a girl may mean the loss of the penis, and they emphasize that they actually do have a penis, but they act as if they were girls clearly identifying themselves with the powerful mother.

This gradually increasing incidence of breast envy requires further analysis in a sociocultural perspective. It seems that many ideas, theories, and even empirical studies have been influenced by the sociocultural setting. For instance, Terman and Miles found in 1936 that men are self-assertive and aggressive while women are compassionate and sympathetic. But these were the ideas of the thirties. Today, several studies indicate that aggressiveness is not limited to one sex only. Women emerge not as infants or mothers or both, but as people displaying as many diversified personality types as the other sex does (Wolman).

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There is no doubt that Freud’s pioneer study on the relationship between infantile sexuality and adult personality was truly revolutionary. For the first time, the seemingly bizarre and incomprehensible sexual preferences and activities of the adult neurotic could be traced to the individual’s long-forgotten infantile sexuality. In short, the neurotic was repeating his or her childhood sexuality in the pattern of his or her adult life, despite the inability to retrieve the memory of the childhood sexuality. Freud’s main contribution to a theory of the development of the ego came more gradually. He defined the formation of personality as based on the defensive identification with and introjection of the lost libidinal object. Beginning with his study of Leonardo, whose homosexuality was explained by Leonardo’s identification with his mother in response to his loss of her, Freud began to differentiate between anaclitic identification (primary identification) and secondary identification, which was a reaction to separation and loss. In his study of Mourning and Melancholia, Freud applied the same categories of identification to explain the clinical manifestations of depression. During normal mourning, Freud stated, the source of pain is the loss of the love object in the object world; during melancholia, the patient is concerned with the loss of an ambivalently attached, internalized object. Finally, in The Ego and the Id, Freud formulated the developmental origins of personality, based on the three divisions of personality: id, ego, and superego. The formation of the superego depends upon the child’s identification with the parent who has been his or her rival in the Oedipal struggle. This identification is the root of the child’s value system, pattern of social conduct, and aspirations. The process and motives for both primary and secondary identification are largely unconscious and unknown to the child. There might be apparent similarities between the child’s personality and the personalities of those with whom he or she has identified, but these similarities are not based primarily on conscious imitating, role modeling, or social learning, even though all these are important and do contribute. The most decisive reason for giving up the Oedipal conflict and substituting the superego by way of identification is fear of castration at the hands of the aggressor parent. Boys’ sexual desire for the mother increases their anxiety of being castrated by the father. For girls, a feeling of having been already castrated augments their feeling of penis envy and identification with their father; they then give up this masculine striving and adopt a feminine identification, substituting their wish for a penis with the wish to have a child by the father. It is because the female develops her “genitality” by a more complicated method, that Freud believed that her Oedipal struggle rarely is resolved completely. He felt that the female’s superego was not as stable as that of the male and that she always carried the vestiges of infantile sexuality in her personality.

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Although masturbation is used less frequently by married than by unmarried people, it continues to be an outlet for many. Among Kinsey’s married males between the ages of twenty-six and thirty-five, almost half masturbated occasionally, along with about one-third of the female sample in that age range. Hunt found about 72% of his married male sample in that age range still masturbating, along with two-thirds of the wives, a quite remarkable increase.

Consistent with Hunt’s data, the Redbook study found 68% of their sample, all married women, masturbating often or occasionally. Reasons given included husband absent (38%), relaxation of tensions (31%), and enjoyable addition to intercourse (31%).

A recent Danish study (Hessellund) of thirty-eight couples married a mean of years found that 60% of the men and 37% of the women masturbated at least occasionally. Analysis of the relationship between intercourse masturbation for this sample led the authors to conclude that, since intercourse frequency was determined by the wife and was generally not more than twice a week, masturbation functioned as a supplement to the sexual activity of the men and as a substitute for the women.

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