Sexual Healing

Gillian Anderson’s recent book of sexual fantasies reveal how transgressive we can allow ourselves to be in private. Sex is like play, imagination enhances satisfaction and pleasure. We use stories to solve problems and create meaning.  Fantasies reveal a problem or dilemma and then try to solve it.

We are attempting to be the author of our lives. Crucially, for Anderson, in fantasy the woman “is in charge, she can decide with whom, when, where, how much, how often, when to stop, when to continue".

    Sexual Fantasies contain our own Microdots. Microdots are ongoing stories of how we see ourselves, a scan of all we have ever known. Psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Robert Stoller, coined the term Microdot, in his book ‘Sexual Excitement’.  A microdot is ‘a photograph the size of a printed full stop that reproduced with perfect clarity a standard sized type written letter’ (Stoller 1979, p. 165); during World War II they were used by the Nazis to hide messages. Stoller (ibid) described the highly unique scripts that fuel sexual arousal as encoded images and fantasies. A sexual fantasy or  microdot consists of the condensation of highly charged representations of relationships that came from exciting and disturbing childhood experiences. 

    Sexual arousal, is highly subjective and takes place in the mind as much as the body. Our fantasies can contain our past traumatic histories in the form of emotionally charged images and fantasies. His book aimed to show that the function of day-dreams is to state a problem that has been disguised and then to solve it, the problem and the solution being the poles between which excitement flows. He wrote it before the internet influenced how we relate to our microdots. 

      These Microdots carry messages that reproduce and, ideally, repair past traumas and humiliations that we carry with us from childhood. For example, if  we have experienced pain in early relationships, our microdots warn us not to submit to another. They are also helpful in understanding why some people are so compelled by certain sexual scenes on the internet. If Microdots reframe our trauma, it is not surprising that powerlessness is a recurring theme. For example, when feeling abandoned or rejected, we may be drawn to fantasies of being dominated. This can be seen as a desire to control the experience of becoming the object of an aggressive act. We can reverse roles and even enjoy own submission. We become excited by having power over another. 

      When microdots become receptive or stuck, we are at risk of becoming addicted to a disembodied sexuality that does not need or take account of another body. Internet pornography fulfils this perfectly. In a simulated fashion, we can experience being the subject and object of another’s rage. Ironically, these ‘compelling scenarios’ could reinforce an original experience of being a caregiver’s object. Because the viewer can disengage whenever they want to, this allows for control of the experience, something perhaps they desperately wanted in earlier relationships. 

  Whenever we open ourselves to new relationships, the original archetype of intimacy is constellated. The microdot comes to life. We re experience our original fears and longings. But as Jung said, most of the biggest problems in life are insoluble. How do we relate to our essential helplessness? Perhaps, asking that question can allow emotion to bring our microdots or fantasies to life. This is truly exciting because it can begin the process of opening up to new, potentially more satisfying kinds of relationships including sexual. 

References

Stoller, R. J. (1979). Sexual excitement: Dynamics of erotic life. Routledge.