PSYCHOANALYSIS AND SEXUAL DISORDERS: MATURITY

Posted by admin on April 6, 2009 under Men's Health-Erectile Dysfunction | Be the First to Comment

It is important to note that one of the presumptions of the classical psychosexual theory, namely, that the achievement of genital primacy and full genital potency was synonymous with maturity of personality development, is no longer accepted in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. The psychoanalytic theory of personality development and the theory of the relationship between sexual functioning and personality organization have become considerably more complex since the original propositions were set forth by Freud. Contemporary psychoanalytic thinking would distinguish very carefully between genital capacity and the capacity for love relationships. In fact, the capacity to achieve mature and adult love relationships is influenced more generally by complex dimensions of personality development and psychic development, and is not simply a function of psychosexual development (Kernberg).

At a minimum one must include the parameters of psychosocial development along with those of psychosexual development in understanding such personality potentialities. The development of the capacities for mature and mutually satisfying love relationships depends on the resolution of basic conflicts on many levels of psychological development. Kernberg has indicated the importance of such factors:

The capacity for sexual intercourse and orgasm does not by any means guarantee the capacity for being maturely in love; nor does the capacity for a total object-relation without the resolution of oedipal conflicts and the related freeing from sexual inhibition guarantee the capacity for being maturely in love and for stable relation. The capacity for falling in love indicates the achievement of important preconditions for the capacity for being in love; in the case of narcissistic personalities, falling in love marks the beginning of the capacity for concern and guilt, and some hope for overcoming deep, unconscious devaluation of the love object. In borderline patients, primitive idealization may be the first step toward a love relation different from the love-hate relation with their primary objects. This occurs if and when the splitting mechanisms responsible for this primitive idealization have been resolved and this love relation or a new one replacing it is able to tolerate and resolve the pregenital conflicts against which primitive idealization was a defense. In the case of neurotic patients and patients with relatively less severe character pathology, the capacity for falling in love should, if and when successful psychoanalytic treatment resolves the unconscious, predominantly oedipal, conflicts, mature into the capacity for a lasting love relation.

*219/187/5*