nwrpa symposium 2011

Symposium 2011

Perverse States of Mind with John Woods

John Woods is a Consultant Psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic in London. He is a Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists, the Association of Child Psychotherapists and the Institute of Group Analysis. He is the author of Boys Who Have Abused; psychoanalytic psychotherapy with victims/perpetrators of sexual abuse (Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2003) and Compromise a play about psychotherapy (Open Gate Press 2005.)

 

John talked about his work with adolescents who use Internet pornography in an addictive or impulsive way. He likened the Internet to The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, a picture associated with R.D. Laing, which has some delights and some perversions (see page 8.)

 

He works at the Adolescent Department of The Tavistock where there has been a huge increase in the number of referrals of adolescents troubled by their addictive use of Internet pornography. They now make up a quarter of all referrals and the majority have related criminal convictions. His colleague Richard Graham believes there is a physiological effect of addictive Social Networking Internet use which can generate autism. ADHD, hyperactivity and difficulty in compromising. Pornography particularly has this effect.

 

This pattern of use starts around thirteen and teenagers are the most affected social group. Research has shown that teenage males exposed to pornography are more likely to see women as objects, engage in risky behaviour and become tolerant to violence. Internet use also carries the illusion of secrecy, that no one can see or know what one is doing. A further illusion is that the activity is not illegal. The web sites themselves encourage addictive behaviour. Viewers are shown pop ups which lead to more perverse images. This process is insidious and desensitising and pornography is increasingly mainstream.

 

There are a number of organisations working to protect children and adolescents online. The police Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, safermedia.com, The Internet Watch Foundation, mumsnet and digitalsafety.com. Jill Manning in her testimony to the Civil Rights Committee in the USA gave an objective and detailed account of the effects of pornography on family life. In a joint BBC and Portman survey a quarter of the young men surveyed were worried about the effect on their work and sex life and were definitely not having the fun promised by porn.

 

There are a number of theoretical models which are used by therapists working with this client group. Patrick Carnes is the author of Out of the Shadows and In the Shadow of the Net. He has an addiction model of Internet porn use. This has similarities with 12 Step programmes and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. Clients need to accept their lives have become intolerable and unmanageable. Because it involves masturbation it is a physical sexual experience. There is an increased tolerance of porn which is used for affect regulation and as a form of self medication. Porn, rather than sex with a real person, becomes a reason for being and the primary relationship of the addict. In some ways it can be harder to give up this addiction as we cannot cut our sexuality out of our life. There is the addictive cycle of a belief system leading to impaired thinking and porn use becoming unmanageable. This leads to a deeper cycle of preoccupation leading to ritualisation, sexual compulsivity and despair. It is at this point of despair, self loathing and disgust that therapy can enter this cycle of addiction.

 

As John Woods is a psychoanalytic therapist he and his colleagues have developed a psychodynamic model.  Like all psychodynamic models it is oriented to unconscious fantasy, the search for meaning and attention to transferential processes. Typically harsh fathers and neglecting and frustrating mothers are part of the addicts internal world. He also believes from experience that group therapy is preferable. Individual therapy can reinforce a harsh superego and take longer. For a very compulsive person a much more active therapy is needed.

 

Johns model for therapy builds on previous psychoanalytic ideas about perversion. For Edward Glover perversion is a disavowal of reality. Robert Stoller suggests that perversion is an erotic hatred and inevitably entails an expression of unconscious aggression in the form of revenge against a person who, in early years, made some form of threat to the child's core gender identity, either in the form of overt trauma or through the frustrations of the Oedipal conflict. In perversion sexuality is used to control or destroy the object. It is a means of revenge and, in fantasy overcoming an original trauma. Porn is a an attack on the self because no actual sex is involved. Hence there is an inherently frustrated wish for sex and love. The disavowal of reality lies in the way sex is separated from relationships and without any concern for the object.

 

This model offered by John emphasises that porn presents a compelling image which connects to conscious sexual fantasies and has the capacity to strike straight through the conscious to the unconscious. Hence porn links with unconscious representations of object relations, residues of childhood experience, remnants of childhood theories of sexuality and primitive anxieties and wishes.

A critical part of John’s model is the shame shield. The Internet forms a virtual space, a foreign object, which intervenes between our inner world and the external world. The shame shield does what it says. In this virtual space, and behind the impermeable shield, there is the delusion which denies the reality of abuse and removes any self contempt. The importance of therapy is that it is a third element that is an alternative to this virtual space. The importance of group therapy is that it offers a more manageable negotiation of shame and the sense of being looked at than an individual therapy would. An integrated model of therapy is offered at the Portman which combines time limited focal therapy and self help.

John illustrated his theoretical points with male and female case studies and, in a more literal sense with the art work of Louise Bourgeois. Her picture and some of her art are shown below. For reasons of confidentiality I have not included any direct information about his clients.

His case studies showed the way in which porn addiction involves an escalation of use which takes it deeper into the personality until these young people are driven mad by their compulsions. They inhabited a secret world and some became socially phobic. It showed parents who were not paying attention and may be wrapped up in their own conflicts. While these adolescents felt despair in the face of their addiction, they gained a strong feeling of power. While this is is power over the fantasies of Internet porn, they also had convictions for violent and sexual offences in the real world, and some of these were offences against younger children.   

Louise Bourgeois is a French sculptor who spent most of her working life in the United States. For John her work expresses something about states of mind including perverse ones.  Isolated shapes try to get in touch with each other. Merged horizontal figures lie on a bed. A group of chairs surround circle of mirrors. This represents group life and the fear of merger. Some works seem to have a debased view of sexual intercourse, with no fun or intimacy. Like porn, but in a beneficent way way, art can penetrate into the deeper levels of our personality.

John ended the day by conducting an open session. Among other points raised were the question of whether a perverse sexual orientation is as natural and instinctive as any other sexuality, or how much abuse intrudes on normal sexual development to foster a perverse sexual orientation. Another inhibition is the shame about sex which fosters the kind of secrecy which can open a route to perversion. There was also a recognition that we all have secretive compulsions which offer enjoyment but actually make us unhappy. There was a question of whether we can separate the normal and the perverse. The coercive use of other people as objects and the degree of compulsion and the lack of freedom and creativity seems a key boundary between the two. In the spirit of openness there was also a more heated discussion of whether perversion is gendered.

John Wood’s skill as a group therapist was evident in the way he fostered a continuing conversation around the theme of perverse states of mind throughout the day. As well as the developing linking of people and themes, a sign of the richness of John’s presentation was that people attending were making useful and illuminating reflections on their own therapeutic work. Others said that his presentation also had a relevance for our inner world and personal lives. The generous and active involvement of the audience was the most obvious way we showed our appreciation to John.

We also appreciate the hard work of our members who organised the day. Our thanks go to Ruth Bowhill, Frank Kelley, Caroline Pirquet, Nick Poole and Tony White.

The pictures shown below are first The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, followed by the work of Louise Bourgeois, and finally a photograph of the artist.