The Complex Pairing of Sex and Violence [in Adolescent Treatment]

The Complex Pairing of Sex and Violence [in Adolescent Treatment] | Written in 2016 as part of graduate studies

I worked in an adolescent residential treatment facility for a year for my graduate clinical practicum experience. And thus, I became familiar with the mind and proclivities of the demographic with which I worked: males, aged 12 to 18. My clients were placed in treatment for a variety of reasons, most were generally typical of this phase of life—substance use, suicidal ideation or attempts, violence, promiscuity, or mandated after physical altercations. Again per this age and stereotypically this gender, sexual activity, fantasy and pornography were topics that commonly were in the room. Habitually, aggressive elements and violence were naturally tied to the topic. Considering the consumption of boundary-less online pornography is early and often in the life of a teenager, this is not horribly surprising. In some 80% of the cases that I worked with there were attachment issues stemming from abuse, neglect, family of origin ruptures, and adoption—the reactive or lack of attachment, accompanied a clinically understood distrust or even a hatred of females, Mom, M(other). Archetypally, most of these themes have been primordially programmed to include aggression and instinctual energy—and separately but equally—violent underpinnings toward females is culturally condoned. 

Even if culturally, sub-culturally (gender-separated treatment), and stereotypically expected, I was struck by how naturally sex and violence appear to be paired. Considering the wide range of birthplaces, ages, and upbringings of my clients, I became curious about the phenomenological origin within the wide culture that condones and creates this pairing. I posit that the origin and the excuse of this pairing is fostered by a combination of a Western cultural complex where, there seems to exist an incensed instinctual drive turned aggressively outward of which adolescents are particularly prone to enacting and literalizing; secondarily, an asserted anger and resentment toward M(other); and tertiary to this, the complex and aggression become fueled by a commoditized image of sex and woman. This triad is compounded with the typical effects of an adolescent upbringing, particularly involving Internet pornography, which we, in America, are still clumsily navigating.  

What interested me in this clinical setting, were how and what synapses, behaviors and assumptions came to be or became more firmly planted, in adolescence—when sexual activity generally begins—and from which direction (personal, familial, cultural) did they derive. Richard Frankel, a Jungian psychoanalyst notes, “without guidance, left on their own, adolescents’ attempts at initiation take on an extreme character” (1999, p. 61). Frankel continues regarding adolescent exploratory methods:

Like the repetition of a symptom after the experience of trauma, the compulsion to repeat these events, be it drug and alcohol use, acts of violence, or discriminate sex, may be better understood not under the rubric of the psychology of addiction, but as failed attempts at initiation that leaves one in a state of yearning for a kind of deliverance that never seems to quite manifest itself. (p. 61) 

Our culture, one without initiation nor ritual, operates via dopamine pump: check the email, check again; I liked that substance, I want more; this construct creates this emotion, repeat, repeat, repeat. Rather than allowing a substance or experiences to signify an initiation, they instead become literalized as threshold itself, with which to carry over newly initiated vision or life stages. Herein, our culture, under which auspices our adolescents are trained, simply crave and acquire more. After the initial experience of a new substance-construct, whether it is alcohol, pornography, a violent event or a combination, the “extremity of behavior may lead an adolescent to the threshold of an initiatory door. However, without the proper structures in place, he cannot pass through it” (p. 61). Yet, “a need then arises to constantly repeat the experience because there is an unconscious wish to be transformed by it” (p. 61). Typically, as with masturbation, if a teen is consuming pornography, they will hide it from their parents. In a healthy house, this is simply one way of an adolescent exploring their self-sexuality in a boundaried setting. However, hardcore pornography imagery does not typically mirror real life, and access to the extremes that adolescents crave without context, is immediate. Some of my clients became clinically “addicted” to pornography, compulsively purchasing videos on PayPerView, even though there are swathes of free imagery on the Internet; perhaps unconsciously to have the evidence appear on Mom’s credit card, and so get caught. Archetypally speaking, “children delegate fears onto their parents so they can develop more freely” (1993, p. 76). “It is the parents’ duty to worry because of this archetypal role,” and “parents carry part of the shadow in the context of this relationship” (p. 76). Considering early consumption of pornography and the risk of being subjected to imagery the consciousness cannot yet integrate (of which I saw related trauma), coupled with the cultural, boundaried construct wherein sexual arousal or experience is not shared with parents, perhaps traumatic sexualized imagery, and not just experience, unshared with parents or advisors, get relegated to shadow and never integrated. A Jungian approach infers that this shadow material, if never consciously met, will arise in some dark manner, and perhaps become literalized instead of internalized and imaginally-worked over. 

As natural nihilists and our greatest existentialists, the adolescents' propensity toward repetition-compulsion referred to by Frankel is partially a way to understand or hold a concept in order to achieve a new higher power newly uncovered. Compulsive consumption of pornography, beyond it being a natural age to explore sexuality curiously, is also pulling at the fact that sexual energy is instinctual libidinal energy. Our cultural obsession with sex, its connection with both life and death imagery and its archetypal transfer onto the life of an adolescent, and is represented by Eros and Thanatos, as studied by Freud (Frankel, 1999, p. 66). Robert Jay Lifton continues the thread that Freud wove, by positing that imagery arises in life cycle shifts as an attempt to make meaning out of change. Lifton argues “Adolescents are viscerally affected by an awareness of mortality and struggle to make sense of the resulting life and death imagery that pervades consciousness during this time” (as cited in, Frankel, 1999, p. 66). Per Freud’s view, “aggression, destructiveness and even guilt are seen as deriving from the death instinct” (as cited by Frankel, 1999, p. 67). Erel Shalit points out that  “Etymologically, aggression comes from ad gradior, meaning ‘I move forward’” (Shalit, 2002, p. 49) which points to the life cycle initiation, in this case, as aggressive, and sometimes literalized to violent, instinctual energy which comes out in adolescent activity, and becomes easily paired with sexuality and desire. Frankel postulates that “one consequence of [the] dichotomy in Freud’s theorizing [about the Eros and Thanatos connection] is that the death instinct is left vague and unembodied so that our everyday experience of death imagery is given no place” (1999, p. 67). Thus, at times the unembodied death drive, or awareness of death, becomes transcribed onto the sexual life and desire of an adolescent. The proximate interferences of libidinal energy (life, sexual symbology and existence) with death (non-existence, ending) “combine in the human struggle not merely to remain alive but to feel alive” (p. 68). The Eros-Thanatos archetypal imagery that arises to coincide, support and disrupt the phase of life shift an adolescent encounters are also represented and enacted by instinct. Freud noted that “the representatives of all the forces originating in the interior of the body and transmitted to the mental apparatus” (Freud, 1920, SE 18:34). In essence, the adolescent may not know the origin of meaning behind sexual instincts, aggression or the paring, however it emerges somatically then intellectually, if at all in the realm of the latter. Erel Shalit, a Jungian psychotherapist cites “slaying and sexuality make up the fundamental pair of life principles, Mars and Eros, aggression and relatedness” (2002, p. 48). Mars is separate from Thanatos, which is the inherent drive toward death, as Freud describes as ‘becom[ing] inorganic once again,’ and dying “for internal reasons” (as cited in Shalit, 2002, p. 48). “Mars, the warrior, must kill…Thanatos, the death instinct, [is] the inherent striving of everything living…” (p. 48). This reflects that sexual energy is also representative of libidinal, life energy. A movement forward, just as aggression allows. “Eros and Thanatos form a different dyad from Eros and Mars. Thanatos, thought, is not absent from Oedipus’ life story, which beings with his near-annihilation by the forces of death…” (p. 48). Shalit continues of this life-agression-sex-death connection: 

Freud speaks of Eros as the ‘instinct of life,’ and D.W. Wincing calls aggression, Mars, the ‘force of life.’ They form a pair of primary opposites, essential to human survival. Aggression is necessary for the fight into existence, as well as for attainting separation and individuation, but without Eros one remains a brutal barbarian, barely human (2002, p. 48).  

“Eros, the life instinct, is the principal of unification…The sexual act, behind which we find Eros, is based on the tension that cause the very union that enables the creation of life” (Shalit, 2002, p. 48). This instinctual and natural energy driven by Thanatos and Eros enmeshed is one that our culture denies, hides and shames. As a cultural unconscious shadow, it then becomes enacted in the life of an adolescent who are archetypally ruled by black and white thinking and dangerous nihilistic proclivities and while they are being indoctrinated into their sexuality, thus reifying the alignment of sex and violence. 

Secondary to the pairing of sex and violence is the archetypal M(other) and how she represents a chthonic, unpredictable force which is particularly at play when psyche senses an entrapment and authority delineation (such as in treatment or in adolescence in general). M(other) is an image that has become erotic through the proliferation of pornography, as MILF is a sustaining high ranking porn query. Perhaps Freud’s model has a place in this arena, wherein we are culturally at odds with ourselves; there is no place for this form of eroticism and its taboo, instead it gets pushed to shadow material and exercised through instinctual urges that contain no known, appropriate outlets. Again, aggression arises with the Devouring Mother archetype, as M(other) is a split archetype in general. Jungian Analyst Lyn Cowan says of this archetype and its split: 

if the devouring Mother is labeled "negative," for example, what place can there be for "her" in the life of a moral person? Devouring and mothering can be imagined only in their negativity. The "negative" Mother must be domesticated, taught to accept and nurture; in a word, become "positive." This is one way moralism splits archetypes so that we think of them as inherently split, giving Ego the heroic job of "holding the opposites" together in some bearable tension (Cowan, 2013). 

Mother is either noble and nurturing or smothering and terrible. This is primordial, as are all archetypes, and fortified by the way our society treats women. Our culture is one that quietly and firmly condones the oppression and repression of women and sexuality while at the same time proliferating soft core pornography as overtly subliminal and omnipresent fashions. This has as much to do with patriarchy and capitalism as anything: 

Because our culture is a patriarchy, a woman's experience of ‘the masculine’ cannot be simply the reverse of a man's experience of ‘the feminine.’ For her, the very air she breathes, the boundaries of her consciousness, the contents of her personal unconscious psyche, and the complete cast of the collective psyche, are full of The Man: his image, his history, his definitions, his requirements, his expectations, his needs, his desires, his threats, his power, his laws, his religions, his gods, his money, and his ambivalent, unrealistic image of her (Cowan, 2013). 

These three constructs: an unidentified and overwhelming instinctual urge toward sex and violence, a split M(other) archetype, and the denigration of females—combine to create a super cultural complex that further confuses and relegates adolescent sexual drive and material to our cultural shadow. As Jung noted, “the psychopathology of the masses is rooted in the psychology of the individual” (Jung, 1953/1960, p. 218 [CW 10, para. 445]). Jungian analyst and psychiatrist Thomas Singer, psychiatrist, and author and psychologist Samuel L. Kimbles, posit that “When [societal] complexes are triggered, all of the emotion of the personal and archetypal realm gets channeled through group life and its experience” (2014, p. 20). “’Cultural complexes’ are lived out in group life and they are internalized in the psyche of individuals” (p. 20). When Jung noticed that a large variety of his clients were exhibiting “archetypes [he] observed expressed primitivity, violence and cruelty,” (1953/1960, p. 219 [CW 10, para. 447]), he took a cultural stance and cultivated collective curiosity to ponder what was happening on an archetypal level with his client base and where they and he resided. From this collective stance, Jung was able to observe the world forces that were weighing against Germany as a collective whole wherein he explained Germany was a “victim of a mass movement brought about by an upheaval of forces lying dormant in the unconscious, ready to break through all moral barriers,” (para. 448). Jung acknowledged through studying his clients en masse and on collective, cultural levels a compensation that was expressed through clients’ dreams, images and archetypes that lay contrary to what was going on politically in their country and culture at the time, the onset of World War I. He recognized that if these movements were not moved out of the unconscious into the conscious realm, it would result in not only individual upheaval— leading to “neurosis or even to a psychosis” (para. 448), but that this psychic shift would apply on the collective level as well. Jung went on to posit “we can only discover what the defects in the consciousness of our epoch are by observing the kind of reaction they call forth from the unconscious (Jung, 1953/1960, p. 220 [CW 10, para. 449]). Jung explained witnessing the overarching cultural power of a “revolution in the test-tube of the individual” and how “these forces    . . .broke through the individual’s moral and intellectual self-control. . . as they flooded his conscious world” (Jung, 1953/1960, p. 220 [CW 10, para. 450]). Shalit posits that “the complexes of the personal unconscious, in conjunction with the ego complex, are instrumental in the effective dialectic between ego and unconscious, and between ego and world. The adequately operating complex will enhance the ego—a person’s sense of identity and belonging in the world. If the complex does not operate properly, either overlooked by the archetypal kernel, traumatized by experience, or rejected by the ego, then the complex will take on a life of its own, becoming autonomous and pathological” (Shalit, 2002, p. 70)  

What seems to be effective clinically when addressing cultural complexes in the individuals’ psyche is shadow integration. Jung’s conception of individuation, a process of becoming whole through entire Self-integration, includes “the gradual expansion of his or her consciousness and the increasing capacity of the conscious personality to reflect the total self” (Johnson, 1974, p. 3). The difficulty of the work of individuation other than the inherent complexity of knowing Self over time and comprehensively, is “the matter of becoming reconciled with the shadow—with the dark, unwanted, dangerous side of ourselves that conflicts with our conscious attitudes and ideals” (p. 3). Denial of the shadow creates a compensatory attack on the conscious level of the psyche, and literalizes material that could have been instead integrated into ones Self on an imaginal level. “Rejection of the shadow personality results in a division within the personality and the establishment of a state of hostility between consciousness and the unconscious (p. 3)  

The trouble is there exists a split, we repress the negative, dark unconscious as much as we repress the flesh and blood woman, so that culturally we are unable to individuate. Porn reinforces violence and aggressive sexual acts and their audience can be children who have experienced no sexual activity whatsoever. “Young people glean the myths or collective scenarios from information available to them. Often it is images from the media—especially the film and music industry— that offer children a wide spectrum of possible figures and scenarios with which to identify” (p. 17). Because of this easily impressionable age, the instinctual drive toward sexual matter and the cultural unawareness or shadow material that this construct exists—the cycle continues. Societal trends include how violence is portrayed, used, or ignored culturally, whereas violence was seen as brutal and unnecessary in the hippie period of the 70’s, it is encased in our current myth and seen as a way, in gang culture, in media, video games and pornography, to identify and “looked to as a possibility to bring oneself into being” (Guggenbühl, 1996, p. 18). I posit that Kalsched’s model of the self defense system is at play as a response or defense against the cultural complex becoming integrated consciously. We have systemically and societally encouraged a split between the false culture which condones and hides violent sexual acts and is apathetic to the effect it has on young members of society, and as a result there is a protective layer of dissociation that engenders unawareness or ennui regarding what is in effect, driving society forward, al gradior. The split  

occurs because the daimonic defense system is unleashed against the psyche for the purpose of converting annihilation anxiety into a more manageable fear. This self-protective mechanism preserves a fearful ego in the face of shattering trauma rather than permitting the ego to be annihilated altogether . . .  Fragmentation of the psyche is the result (Singer and Kimbles, 2014, p. 18). 

The daimonic systemic defenses Kalsched explains are “internalized representations of the original perpetrators of the trauma. Even more than that, they are archaic, typical and archetypal” (p. 18). So not only must we punish the not-good-enough, abandone-prone mother, we must sexualize and punish her. American culture, one in its adolescence prone to playing ignorant to dis-eases too difficult to digest, tends to act outwardly and repress inwardly. If we could take cues from adolescents themselves, philosophers of our time, we may be open to discussing, then integrating, the necessary and inevitable shadow. “We live in a world that moralizes against the daimonic incessantly and then goes on to enact its darkest possibilities. . . . When we repress the daimonic, it metamorphoses—undetected—into the demonic” (Dennis, 2012, p. x).