Regression

Little is known about sensory life before birth but it would seem that the fetus' feelings must be extremely diffuse or "oceanic." Embryo and fetus pulsate in the uterus and are rocked by the mother's breathing pulsation. Self is presumably not differentiated from environment. It must be some time, if it occurs at all before birth, before the fetus has any sense of being separate from the mother.

At birth, the infant's visual sense is relatively undeveloped and focus is directed to a few objects near at hand. At the same time the skin is highly sensitized in the newborn infant with its needs for constant warmth, touching, and contact with the mother.

As the infant develops, it learns increasingly to focus visually. Most advanced exploratory activities involve coordination of locomotor movement (grasping, aiming, etc.) with visual focus on objects.

Although little is known about sensory development, the progression from relative sensory diffusion toward increasing sensory focus is clear. When we are overwhelmed by emotions or by melting sensations in sex, a reversal appears.

In the sex act we move through the same progression from an initial state of relative diffusion (generalized contact with the partner) to a relative state of focus on our genital tension and need. This focus intensifies until orgasm which is characterized by sudden sensory regression as perceptions diffuse in a soft explosion of sensation from the genitals outward into the body. This is followed by relaxation and further diffuse oceanic sensations of unity with the cosmos. The process is diffusion—focus—diffusion.

At the same time some regression occurs from the primacy of the visual sense to concentration on the more primitive sense of touch. At first we may concentrate on lovingly looking and gazing at the partner's eyes and body but this visual focus becomes more and more difficult to maintain. We begin to let go of vision and become absorbed in touch; finally we seem to let go even of touch and become swept up in movements of sensation all through the body. This can be described as a regression from the visual sense, through the skin senses, to a primitive "plasmatic sense," which is basically the sense of streamings.

This is of more than academic interest, since the sensory regression which is a natural part of love-making can be blocked as surely as can the physical movement of pulsation. Since it entails surrender, it is blocked by the assertion of control over one's partner or the self during love-making.

In controlling the partner, one is occupied with questions of technique, of maintaining performance, of adequately "servicing." Pleasing the partner is desirable, but the best way to do this is to let go of the self so that the partner can "use" one for their own pleasure.

Self-control is maintained either through rigid resistance to pulsation or through obsessive fixation on fantasies. Many writers on sex, like Comfort in The Joy of Sex, encourage people to indulge in fantasies while making love. Sexual fantasies no doubt help us know what we want in our love life, they can prepare us and excite us. But while we are making love? Are you really comfortable with the idea that your partner may be fantasizing that you are a film star or a neighbor, or that some other sexual activity (rape, bondage, homosexuality or whatever) is taking place? Don't you want your partner to be present? Don't you want to be present?

Fantasies may indeed ease lovemaking for some people by reducing anxiety: the anxiety of what they are doing in the present. But such an escape from the present creates a poor foundation for a natural marriage. If you habitually fantasize while making love, risk letting go of your fantasy. This will reveal the anxiety beneath, which can be discussed with your partner. Some of the explorations may already have helped in this direction.

To maintain a fixed fantasy while making love, it is necessary literally to "keep one's head," by cutting part of the sensory contact which leads to regression and by holding the neck muscles tight. To let go of fantasies, let go of your head, let it fall easily backward—neither stiff-necked and rigidly forward nor clamped backward and down into the shoulders. You may be surprised at how unfrightening the present contact with your partner really is: your security will be enhanced by an increased sense of your bodily self.

Orgasm Anxiety

One specific anxiety which seems to affect everyone at times, either as a passing panic or as a deep terror, is what Reich called orgasm anxiety. It is evoked at the approach to orgasm and may be felt as a fear of disintegration, explosion, disappearing, extinction. It provokes a very intense version of the characteristic emergency response.

Orgasm anxiety has many similarities to a terror of death which might, indeed, arise from the dissolving sensations which precede orgasm. In English, at least, orgasm has been known for centuries as "the little death." For the Elizabethans, in particular, the word "die" was used as we now use the word "come"—as in the line from the Dowland song, "to die with thee in sweetest sympathy." Death and orgasm are both losses of the self.

Orgasm anxiety is not the sum of all the emotional anxieties in the person's history. In fact, it is as these let go and the person becomes more able to surrender to feeling that orgasm anxiety can become severe. To make it worse, the fear of losing the self may be compounded by fear of losing the other person. This latter fear may be linked to infant experiences of punishment and loss of parental approval; it may be fear of looking foolish or otherwise unlovable. This anxiety can be worked through by the couple. It is worth noting that while love-making with a stranger is often regarded as more exciting than with a familiar partner, this can only be true in terms of foreplay. In the orgasm itself, the deepest excitement is usually possible only with a partner who is known and trusted.

Sex And Love

In many interim situations masturbation and casual sex serve immediate needs for the release of stress or momentary intimacy, but it has been argued that loveless, non-emotional sex or masturbation are just as satisfying as making love. This seems doubtful. It is not even mechanically efficient for excitation to be stirred up in the genitals alone, fed by fantasies from the brain, and then discharged in a spasm of local release. What happens to the rest of the body, to say nothing of all the concomitant emotions which fulfilling sex stirs? What happens to the heart when only the brain and genitals are allowed to become excited? Subjectively, the heart "melts" when making love, with emotional as well as genital feeling. When loveless sex is over, the heart may beat faster but the person feels nothing except perhaps a momentary thrill and then an even more profound loneliness.

Of course, all kinds of emotions are stirred in that feeling we call love. It can be the wild excitement of first passion or of reunion after an absence; it can be the calm glow of a secure embrace within the routine of marriage. If a marriage is emotionally alive it, too, will have rushes of excitement.

Evidence from developmental research indicates that most emotional disturbances originate in a premature break in the continuum of infant-mother contact. In our adult love relationships we try to establish a new continuum. As autonomous adults we are not seeking the perpetual fusion of an infant with its mother. Rather, we move—in yet another pulsation — between fusion and separation. Mature functioning is characterized not by dependence or independence (which is mainly an illusion) but by interdependence.

Every characteristic of your love relationship is partly what you have brought to it from your own history and partly the result of the association with the particular partner you have chosen. To be able to fuse with the person you love, you have to renounce some of your independence and admit vulnerability. You have to be able to share problems if you are going to share pleasure. You may sometimes lose yourself in your love but you will eventually return to your own self. After a while you will long to lose yourself in love again.

Sex without love denies this process and attempts a control of self and others which is finally an illusion as well as a reality of bitterness and despair. But even the freely-acknowledged interdependence of natural marriage is not without problems.