Sexual Behavior
Level I
Sexual behavior is undifferentiated: it is controlled entirely by biological factors. It is directed towards more or less attractive but stereotype representatives of the opposite sex. It is marked by lack of sensitivity and consideration for the needs of the partner. Sexual needs are imposed on the other without a feeling of personal relatedness; the other is an object of sexual gratification. In consequence a human relationship of love cannot be formed, equally there is no parental responsibility.
The dominance of biological factors is evident by the following traits: the lack of consideration for age, state of health, emotional condition of the partner, little inhibition in the use of force, little inhibition in sexual expression in the presence of others, sexual behavior is understood primarily in terms of its physiology and absence of retrospection and prospection in sexual fife. After the sexual act a state of depletion may follow which in some psychopathic individuals leads to violence, even murder.
Level II
Gradual loosening of the dominant biological structure of the sexual instinct takes place. This occurs through periodical states of reflection, changeable syntony with the partner, occasional retrospection and prospection, disequilibrium of sexual excitations and inhibitions. Sexual tension builds up easily, often with some inclination toward perversion but not without the consent of the partner. This indicates that sexual aggressiveness is not as strong as in primary integration. Certain sensitivity and responsibility for the partner and the family is present and may increase but because it is generally weak and unsteady it cannot be relied upon. These vacillations are a manifestation of the dynamisms of ambivalence and ambitendency.
At times the biological force of the sexual instinct diminishes due to inhibition arising from an increase of sensitivity, syntony, and consideration for the emotional needs of the partner and the family. Sexual experience is influenced at this levelby the interplay of stimuli and reactions but is not subject to clear hierarchization of values, only to occasional “moods of reflection”. Group opinion, the influence of advertising and vogues in sexual life play a big role (second factor).
In summary, sexual behavior in unilevel disintegration is governed by diverse tendencies. Occasionally they cooperate, but more often there is manifest need for a variety of sexual experiences, which may be unexpected and inharmonious. Stability and exclusivity of emotional bonds is not understood and is not sought, instead there is the facility for turnover of the objects of love. These diverse, fluctuating and alternating sexual tendencies correspond to diverse and conflicting disposing and directing centers, none of which gives direction or stability.
Level III
Reflection and valuation begin to play an increasingly significant role in the hierarchization of sexual fife. Their expression is sexual selectivity and a need for more personal and exclusive relationships. Selectivity is the result of a felt need for more meaningful emotional life; it is also the result of the ability to foresee the consequences of one’s actions. Exclusivity and stability of feelings begin to manifest strongly, as well as responsibility for the partner and the family. In sexual life emotional components prevail over physical. Sexual instinct gradually loses its character of a biological species drive and becomes an instinct with an expression individually human. The predominance of emotional over physical attachment finds its expression particularly in the need for exclusivity. Exclusive attachments lead to strong sexual inhibition, even impotence, when the partner leaves or dies. For example, in my clinical practice I met a 40 years old man, father of seven children, who became impotent after his wife left him. His impotence lasted several years until the time when his wife returned to him. This is an example of an inhibition of the lower level of an instinct (biological level of sexual drive) by a higher level of the same instinct (emotional and exclusive attachment).
Such behaviors develop as a result of the action of the dynamisms of spontaneous multilevel disintegration. These dynamisms promote the development not only of an increasing responsibility for the family but also of strong tendencies toward idealization of sexual life and seeking its fulfillment in deeply emotional relationships.
Astonishment with the phenomena of one’s own sexuality occurs when one is surprised and embarrassed by the strength of the biological level of sexual impulses arising easily and unselectively. For instance, a person experiences a wave of sexual tension but the mate is weak because of menstruation, or tiredness, seeing this he retreats and realizes with surprise that his biological urge is blind to more personal empathic consideration for the other. In consequence the urge is inhibited, looses tension, and subsides without a need of actual release.
Disquietude with oneself precipitates an experiential grasp of one’s deficiencies. To come face to face with one’s own sexual primitiveness, lack of control, or compulsions, is something of a shock. In consequence one becomes aware of deficiencies in other forms of behavior as well. A negative attitude arises toward the sexual instinct in oneself. Disquietude about one’s sexual behavior subjects it to inhibition, weakening, and differentiation which leads to its greater emotional complexity.
Inferiority toward oneself plays mainly a critical role in the evaluation of one’s sexual life; it is less essential in the diagnosis of the level of sexual behavior. It results from depressive feelings as a reaction to having yielded to various still primitive sexual manifestations and tendencies in oneself. The feeling of inferiority acts as a strong emotional factor in breaking away from the lower levels of sexual life. There is a feeling of distance from what one begins to feel to be ideal in sexual life. The individual becomes sensitive to higher, i.e. emotional and more inspiring experiences of sexual life, such as sharing experiences of beauty in nature, art, and experiences of trust. Recognition of higher and lower levels in oneself and identification with the higher ones results in a sense of confidence in opposition toward the lower ones.
Feelings of shame and guilt are essential for the diagnosis of the developmental level of sexual behavior. Shame and guilt loosen the cohesive primary structure of sexual instinct; they inhibit and weaken its biological level of control by bringing it to the higher emotional level of exclusivity and responsibility. Shame and guilt are most often recognizable in the concern over harm or embarrassment caused the partner in sexual life. Shame produces an impulse to flee, to disappear from the sight of others in order to reflect and sort out the disjunctions of one’s sexual behavior. Guilt produces the experience of heightened sensitivity to one’s primitiveness, carelessness, and inconsiderateness in relation to the partner, or to the family. Guilt generates a sense of responsibility. Guilt here acquires the deeper meaning of feeling responsible for failure in loyalty towards one’s ideal: for betraying one’s ideal.
Dissatisfaction with oneself is of great significance in the diagnosis of a level of a function. It is a more global diagnostic dynamists than those previously discussed. Dissatisfaction is an expression of strong discontent with yielding often to frequently arising sexual impulses. It is thus a measure of an already occurring separation from lower levels of biological functioning. Dissatisfaction brings about inhibition of primitive behaviors in oneself and prevents their unchecked expression. As a pervasive feeling it produces a state of alertness to oppose such expression in their incipience. Dissatisfaction intensifies the need for endowing sexual life with deeper emotional meaning. It thus builds a bridge toward higher more personal levels and more individual, levels of sexual experience.
Positive maladjustment is manifested by an awareness already on a higher level of the disparity between the situation at hand and one’s own evaluation of it. It is frequently concurrent with a program of abandoning the present level of reality “what is” and adjusting oneself to a higher reality of “what ought to be”. Positive maladjustment cooperates closely with dissatisfaction with oneself. It is, in a way an active demand to develop a hierarchy of sexual life. Positive maladjustment expresses an actively negative attitude toward primitive manifestations of the sexual instinct in one’s own life, in one’s social environment, in the exploitation of sex for effect or commercial gain, or in prescribing for others the norms of morality and individual sexual behavior. At the same time positive maladjustment is an expression of idealization of sexuality and of a need of “what ought to be” in sexual life. It may take the form of aversion to the rituals of dating, or to the competition for the favors of the opposite sex.
Creative instinct shapes sexual behavior by looking for new and more enriching expressions of sexuality. At this level of development creative instinct helps to experience the “other” and the “new” (most often also the “higher”) in sexual life. By itself the creative instinct does not enable one to develop universally toward the highest level. This is possible only in conjunction with the instinct of self-perfection. The creative instinct usually begins by a more or less extensive disintegration of the lower levels of an emotional or instinctive function, in this case of sexual behavior. This might be transiently manifested by some strong sexual primitivisms or perversions. This happens because the creative instinct by destroying sexual automatisms and stereotype sexual behaviors, acts, so to speak, upward and downward seeking new fields of expression. Nevertheless there soon arises a need for evaluation and selectivity of such expression. Emotional sensitivity accelerates this process.
Identification and Empathy introduce the emotional components of attention to the subjective needs of the partner, and of selectivity and exclusivity of relationships of love. Sexual behavior becomes a function of the more significant and more pervasive process of building a relationship.
Level IV
The organization and synthesis of the inner psychic milieu, primarily by emotional-cognitive dynamisms, such as third factor and subject-object in oneself, results in deep transformations in attitudes toward sexual fife. The ideal of exclusivity and permanence of an emotional relationship develops as a deeply reflective philosophical attitude. (By ‘philosophical’ we mean the principles a person believes in and fives by as a function of an examining and searching attitude). The loved one becomes the subject endowed with individuality and uniqueness. A program of sexual life and of its sublimation is developed through retrospection and prospection. Meditation and highly developed empathy and responsibility for the family play here a crucial role.
Self-awareness and Self-control play an important role in shaping sexual expression at this level. It is inconceivable to find a primitive manifestation of sexuality in behavior if at the same time there is a highly developed self-awareness and self-control. Both dynamisms are essential to the diagnosis of this level of sexual behavior. The lower levels of sexuality are weakened and inhibited, and replaced by higher, increasingly more exclusive and more reflective components, together with an increasing responsibility for the partner and the family. Self-awareness and self-control are not to be mistaken for self-observation or just a form of introspective checking of inner events. Rather, they provide a strong active barrier against sexual behaviors of lower levels, which is maintained without effort and without tension. At the same time they augment the need to experience more often, if not solely, sexuality of a higher level, such as one offering unique, faithful, and ideal emotional relations.
Subject-object in oneself takes sexual life as an object of penetrating observations and experiences. It interrupts frequently and systematically the “habitual routine” and turns a person into a sharp observer of himself. Example: “In this moment of a sudden vision of myself I saw a dissociation -- on one side my attraction toward an almost perfectly beautiful body, on the other a repelling commonness of sexual excitement, its species appeal and its common animal quality. My ‘physical’ rapture broke like a soap bubble”. Sexual instinct, as in this example, is subject to a split between its lower level, which grows weaker and is being transformed, and its higher level approaching to personality and its ideal.
Third factor works toward a high level of sexual life by separating and selecting what is to be curtailed and eliminated from what is to be accepted and developed. Third factor determines what constitutes a positive or a negative experience in relation to higher and lower levels of sexual fife. It eliminates all that is animalistic and selects all that is authentic, individual, social, and empathic. Third factor thus chooses exclusivity of emotional ties, responsibility for the partner and the family, and the unrepeatability of the union of love. In cooperation with empathy, self-control, self-awareness, prospection, retrospection, third factor creates a ‘school’ of marital and family life. Example: “I would not exchange for anything her unique ‘power’ over me. Always unity of the physical with the moral and the spiritual. Union of minds and hearts, never the physical union alone. I feel disgust toward the tyranny of the physical aspect of love, but in its spiritual aspect I feel close to something like an ‘immortality of sex’ .
Inner psychic transformation acts in close cooperation with all other dynamisms of level IV. Sexual needs and their realization undergo a deep change so that their fulfillment occurs in harmony with the higher emotional and experiential aspirations of the individual. No external or internal sexual stimuli are accepted without first being screened and modified, if necessary, to harmonize with the ideal. Under the influence of this dynamism sexual behavior is characterized by exclusivity, responsibility, and uniqueness of emotional ties. It is marked by very deep care and concern for the family.
Education-of-oneself and Autopsychotherapy. Autopsychotherapy operates on the borderline of levels III and IV. In relation of sexual life autopsychotherapy may come into action at a time of emotional and sexual conflict in a relationship, or with the lower instinctive levels in oneself. Previous experience, memory of errors, failures and previous psychoneurotic sexual conflicts (Dąbrowski, 1972, p. 100) enrich the analysis of one’s sexual behavior and establish it at higher level. What remains from previous times are only traces of therapy, struggles and victories achieved in the development of the sexual instinct. In level IV, a program of systematic self-development, which results in lowering of inner tension but greater calmness and harmony, affects and smoothes out the unevennesses that may still be experienced in sexual life. This level of sexual life is clearly subordinated to the operation of empathy and ideal.
Identification and Empathy. It is hard to separate the activity of these dynamisms from all other dynamisms of organized multilevel disintegration since the emotions of empathy are now the dominant emotions in shaping a relationship. The sexual aspect of a relationship becomes sublimated. Love and friendship may flourish without much interference of demands from the biological level of the sexual instinct.
Identification and empathy shape understanding, sympathy, desire to help in various difficulties in life; they also express a distance and separation from lower manifestations of sexuality, such as the distinctly physiological, selfish aspect of sexual release, which acts outside of empathy, exclusivity, intellectual, esthetic and moral rapport. Moral emotions press for separation from such manifestations of sexuality. A person on this level of development cannot display symptoms of undifferentiated, irresponsible and nonexclusive sexual behavior. Such a person will love in an exclusive way, will long for fully individual contacts, will desire to create with his partner a “school of life together”, will need him intellectually, morally, esthetically for his own and their mutual growth, and for the sake of others as well. Such a person will value more highly mental, emotional, and physical individuality of his partner than his sexual potency. Such is the way to higher levels of sexuality.
Identification and empathy also promote an understanding for all manifestations of sexuality including such aspects as perversions or inversions, which are often considered only in the narrow context of rigid and insufficiently studied “norms” of human sexual behavior and emotional development. Such “norms” are provided either by social standards or by psychoanalytic theories. Let us discuss as an example necrophilia and homosexuality. In certain individuals necrophilia is a function of association of love with death. In others, who may be very idealistic, there might be a fear of actual sexual intercourse, but at the same time there is an attraction to the body of a dead person because it might feel less threatening. There may be no urge to undress the body or perform the sexual act, rather, it all occurs in the imagination. Masturbation may serve to release mental and sexual tension. In homosexuality again the expression of feeling and affection may be more important than the actual physical contact and sexual release. When emotional and human factors play a directive role then there is no interference with individual development. Such behaviors are understood as forms of stepping out of the rigid norms of common stereotypes of sexual behavior and its procreative service to society and the nation. These two dynamisms form an attitude of affirmation of sexuality in its expression on higher levels, and at the same time the acceptance and affirmation of divergent ways of sexual experience which may lead to the higher levels.
Level V
In addition to profound responsibility for the partner and his development there is also an even greater responsibility for the development and sublimation of sexual instinct in others. There is an effort to make the hierarchization of sexuality an individual reality in human life. The means to it are envisaged to be through a subordination of sexual instinct to a highly developed hierarchy of values, moral ideals, emotional and ideological closeness with the partner and responsibility for the family -- one’s own and the larger family of mankind. Friendship replaces sexual love. Spiritual union is realized through love (Kierkegaard).
Autonomy and Authentism establish the highest level of exclusivity, uniqueness, unrepeatability, and responsibility for the partner and the family. There is complete independence from the primitive (animalistic) levels of sexual instinct. Autonomy is characterized by reflection, thoughtful and idealistic, yet not naive, approach to the loved one. The physical and sensual aspect of sexuality is transcended. The power of sex is perceived and experienced as the universal power of life, to be treated with reverence and guarded against shortchanging it through moments of pleasure. However, individuality is perceived as shaped by the history of personal experience and by its aspirations.
Responsibility takes development and its direction as a whole, of which sexuality is just one of many aspects. We see an increasing attitude of responsibility for the “I-and-Thou” relationship in marriage and in friendship. No aspect of sexual aspirations and realizations at this level can be isolated from the context and experience of responsibility, as well as empathy.
Personality ideal. Under the influence of personality ideal sexuality is approached through an ideal of uniqueness, the highest exclusivity, unrepeatability, and in a certain sense, transcendence. This is expressed in the highest attitude of “I-and-Thou” in respect to the partner and the family.
Empathy together with personality ideal inspires the highest level of love that transcends separation and death.
