Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:1603–1614 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.
12417
Shame, hatred, and pornography: Variations on an
aspect of current times
Claude Janin1
Training and Supervising Analyst of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, 17
rue de l’Abondance, 69003 Lyon, France – [email protected]
(Accepted for publication 19 August 2015)
Drawing on a number of clinical vignettes, the author seeks to highlight the
relations between shame, hatred and pornography in contemporary clinical
practice, and to explore certain metapsychological avenues that can help us
understand how these relations are established.
Keywords: shame, hatred, pornography, negativity, autoerotism, modesty, ego ideal
Shame sometimes seems to be lacking in the world, to have gone out of the
world; at least, this is what Klaus Scherer, a professor at the University of
Geneva, thought, when he said a few years ago, during a lecture2 he gave in
Paris: “Shame is a socializing emotion par excellence . . . It is not surprising,
therefore, that the evocation of shame is used as a means of socialization,
‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself for doing that?’” “It is interesting to note,”
Klaus Scherer continued, “‘that this technique of socialization, as well as
the phenomenon of shame itself seem to be disappearing.” While I am not
sure that shame is disappearing – and we will see that nowadays it is assum-
ing new forms – it seems to me that the rapport that exists implicitly,
according to Scherer, between shame and the other is absolutely fundamen-
tal. Moreover, in “Further remarks on the neuro-psychoses of defence”,
Freud argues that shame has to do with the idea that “someone else might
find out about” the shameful character of the act committed (1896, p.171).
Jean-Paul Sartre revealed a similar group configuration of shame in Being
and nothingness (1943), where he evokes the following situation: a man, prey
to jealousy, is watching through a keyhole what is going on in a bedroom.
It is probably his wife, in the company of another man. Here is what Sartre
wrote: “
But now suddenly I raise my head. Somebody was there and has seen me. Suddenly
I realize the vulgarity of my gesture and I am ashamed . . . But the Other is the
indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear
to the Other. By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of
passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to
1
Translated by Andrew Weller.
2
Lecture at the ‘Universite de tous les savoirs’ (UTLS), Paris, 1 November 2001.
Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis
1604 C. Janin
the Other. Yet this object which has appeared to the other is not an empty image
in the mind of another . . . Shame is by nature recognition. I recognize that I am as
the Other sees me.
(1943, p. 302)
A recent 2011 drama film by the American director Steve McQueen por-
trays a young New Yorker, Brandon, whose sexuality is compulsive. Pornog-
raphy and hatred of all other subjects – insofar as they have a psychic life that
he is lacking – seem to play an important role in this sexuality, whereas
shame, which is also the name of the film, seems to be strangely absent. The
alarm signal of shame, felt subjectively, or triggered by the presence of the
other, does not temper Brandon’s addictive behaviour. I think that the appar-
ent absence of shame in such a situation, where the very notion of modesty
seems to disappear, should be understood as the expression of a negativized
shame, a ‘blank shame’ (honte blanche) which is at the heart of current clinical
reflections on shame; it coincides with the apparent disappearance, in our
time, of modesty and the trivialization of pornography.
I shall try, then, in this paper, to draw out the relations between shame,
hatred and pornography.
I will begin with a clinical vignette. At the age of 25, Philippe, who belongs
to a milieu that is at once intellectual and worldly, is an ‘artistic agent’. This
profession gave him the opportunity to go from one conquest to another,
from one excess to another, as opportunities arose, by day or night. He
defined himself as an ‘S.A.F.’ (Sans Attachement Fixe), that is, as unattached.
He often stayed in big hotels, sometimes ‘squatted’ for a while with friends,
leaving suddenly for well-known tourist destinations, returning again just as
quickly, so that, in fact, he came quite regularly to his sessions. He also owned
a tiny apartment which he rarely used, but which he described as a sort of den
that protected him when his life got too terrifying for him. I wondered for a
long time what could possibly provoke this terror – because he said nothing
about it – but I finally understood that it resulted from a very particular and
repetitive situation: the circumstances of his profession would lead him to
meet a woman, in general physically and intellectually attractive, to whom he
would become attached to the point of making serious plans for the future
with her. At the same time, he would get involved in multiple affairs, outside
his usual milieu, with women he picked up in the street or in cafes or in spe-
cialized clubs, with whom he had compulsive sexual relations. He would then
break off suddenly with the woman he had met and take refuge in his den
until the crisis passed – until the next time, that is. What was striking in the
sessions was that Philippe was unable to say anything about this repetition: he
was aware of it, said he found it ‘boring and disconcerting’, would like to put
an end to it, but did not link it up with any circumstances in his history. I was
struck by the complete absence of affects in the narration of these situations
and, in particular, by the absence of the slightest sense of shame, which, I told
myself a bit naively, should normally be present in a configuration marked by
compulsive sexual acting out as well as by the absence of any attempt to grasp
its meaning.
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Shame, hatred, and pornography 1605
Philippe’s account gradually took on a richer quality enabling us to
understand that he had been an unwanted child and had been born a long
time after his siblings, since he was 18 years younger than his elder sister.
After being rejected by his mother at birth, an experience that left him
extremely distressed, he was brought up by this sister, who, when she got
married at about the age of 22, not only completely abandoned him emo-
tionally but left him exposed to the rage of a terrible mother who didn’t
want him. His state of destitution was all the more catastrophic in that his
father did not seem capable of opposing his mother’s sadism. These identi-
cal repetitions of his encounters, followed by acting out full of rage, then by
disinvestment and break-ups, gradually acquired meaning in our work in
the light of this construction of the patient’s psychic history, to the point
that they became considerably less frequent and were even modified.
But there was still not the slightest trace of any shame, so that I was
rather pessimistic about the solidity of the psychic changes that had taken
place in our work, even though they were by no means insignificant. Until
the day, at least, when I learnt that, after pursuing a stable relationship for
two years with Sonia, without any of the habitual acting out reoccurring,
they were gradually making plans to get married. As always, Philippe had
let this relationship develop at a distance from his parents and his family,
but he now took the decision to introduce Sonia to them. This was to take
place the following Sunday. But on the Wednesday, Philippe suddenly took
a plane – alone – for a far-off destination, where he went for walks and
cried uncontrollably, seeing himself as an abandoned little boy. The follow-
ing night, he had a dream: “I was walking around in this city, in one of the
‘red light districts’, but it was deserted; there were no women at all, and
what was also striking was that everything was white. Impeccably white. I
felt very anxious.” Philippe was silent for a moment, then continued:
I understand why I had this dream; it was to do with everything I have been trying
to give up in recent years and am looking for again in my dream, just when I’ve
got these plans for the future with Sonia. So, this white, is it the white of marriage?
No, certainly not . . . Why was everything whitened (blanchi) like that? ‘Oh, after
all,’ he said, ready to be diverted from his introspective thoughts, ‘on blanchit3 bien
l’agent sale!!’
The artistic agent in him was struck by his slip of the tongue – ‘agent’
instead of ‘argent’ (money): dirty agent . . . he understood that although he
had never experienced subjectively the slightest sense of shame, he was feel-
ing crushed by it: he hid his head in his hands, and cried. I now understood
that the white of the dream was at once the result of a counter-cathexis of
anality and the expression of the blank (blanc) of decathexis (Janin, 1995).
After this session, during which the representation of dirtiness had been
emotionally cathected again, Philippe was finally able to name the affect of
shame and to remember that a few years before beginning his analysis, after
the phases of compulsive sexual acting out I have mentioned, he had experi-
enced a huge amount of shame: “I was dying of shame.” Shame was thus
3
Translator’s note: blanchir = to whiten; blanchir de l’argent = to launder money.
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experienced here ‘in great quantities’, owing to the split between the affect
and representations; once this split had been overcome, a transformation
into ‘small quantities’ was made possible by means of associative work.
Shame was linked for him with a fantasy of identification with a woman
who was loved and mistreated, a situation that was not unconnected with
the few things he had told me about his compulsive sexual relations. His
associations then involved one of his sisters, who was much older and was
herself mistreated. He added a little later that during an evening with
friends, Sonia has spoken to him about a situation in which she had felt
ashamed. The friends present did the same, and he had felt both astonished
and relieved that such an intimate feeling could be talked about in this way
and shared with others.
Having given this clinical example, I now want to draw out the points of
convergence between these two affects of hatred and shame, both in the
psychopathology of everyday life and in sadomasochism, and to highlight
the relations between them from a metapsychological point of view.
If hate and shame, organized in a configuration from which sado-
masochism is not absent, are the clearly identifiable stumbling blocks of cer-
tain zones of the cartography of love-relations, as the clinical example
above suggests, it is above all in connection with the clinical entity of maso-
chism that the relations between hate and shame are particularly visible.
Thus in the case of a patient presenting features of both perverse maso-
chism and moral masochism, Enriquez (1984) has shown that the patient’s
phantasy of the primal scene, a phantasy in which the woman is always
treated roughly, beaten, and tortured, was articulated with the first phase –
sadistic – of the phantasy ‘a child is being beaten’, a phase during which
the feelings of hatred for the other child being beaten by the father are a
source of sexual excitement and fascination, but also evidence that one is loved
oneself. The phantasy, “My father is beating the child whom I hate; he hates him,
for he is beating him; so, he loves only me. . .” can also be a variation of the phan-
tasy: “My father is beating my mother whom I hate (because she is separating from
me). He hates her, for he is beating her; so he loves only me.” And also, perhaps, of
the phantasy: “My mother can only love me, for my father is beating her. . ..” One
can easily see all the identificatory positions that can arise from a primal phantasy
which excludes the third and is played out without any nuances around the pair
hate/love and the turning around of sadism into masochism.
(1984, p. 131)
Freud, for his part, stresses the importance of the shame that accompa-
nies the phantasy ‘a child is being beaten’, so that the pair hate/love is in
fact here a trio: love/hate/shame.
Enriquez’s patient reminded me, in many respects, of a patient that I
once had in treatment many years ago. Like her patient, mine had had quite
a serious illness when he was very young, requiring intrusive medical proce-
dures: notably urinary probes, which, considering his young age, were prac-
tised once the boy had been totally immobilized physically by his father. In
adolescence, after his first sexual relations with the young girl who was to
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Shame, hatred, and pornography 1607
become his wife, a rather complicated ritual developed: in bed he would
complain that he was cold and could only warm up by wearing his
girlfriend’s warm mohair dressing gown. Once he had put it on and warmed
up again, he was able to have sexual relations with her during which his
passivity was a prominent feature. We can see here how he attempts to bind
the traumatic experience of being rendered passive during medical examina-
tions by resorting to perverse masochism. In other words, it seems plausible
to suppose that the experience of passivity during the traumatic event is
taken up and eroticized in a situation in which, identified with a girl, he is
beaten/fornicated/castrated by his partner who then represents the father
who had once immobilized him; hatred towards the excluded third, thereby
reintroducing the latter into the scene, is a means of dealing with the shame
experienced by being rendered passive.
At the same time, the unconscious shame present in the masochistic
phantasy of being treated like a woman is a triumph over his hatred
towards the object who subjects him to passivity: shame permits him to find
the object again. There is therefore an infernal association in masochism
between shame and hatred: ‘a little shame to forget my hate, a little hate to
mask my shame’, the masochist seems to say over and over again. One
more thing: this hate, as it appears in analysis, is a silent, negativized hate
which manifests itself through disinvestment. This disinvestment, Enriquez
wrote, is the result of feelings of hatred, experienced and suffered in child-
hood, which were linked to the impossibility of escaping from – a lack of
respect for – their needs, their demands, and their desires, all of which were
diverted by their objects and put to their own service. They were unable to
oppose this process and are thus faced with a lethal passivity which “makes
of the body a magma, a matter that is infinitely touchable and penetrable
. . . The orifices of the body . . . are indistinguishable and are reduced to
breachable zones” (1984, pp. 256–7).
But quite apart from the diverse forms of masochism, hate and shame
are associated, notably in their blank, negativized forms: an extremely inter-
esting field of reflection and study is opened up here for the psychoanalyst,
since it concerns a very particular cultural field, that of pornography.
If we accept that pornography is one of the erotic forms through which
hate is expressed,4 and if shame, in its manifest absence from pornographic
productions, occupies, in fact, negatively, the whole scene, it is understand-
able that those authors who have taken interest in shame have also reflected
on the phenomenon of pornography. I have already spoken about the
relations between shame and hate, but I would like to come back to them
briefly now in order to clarify further some of the issues at stake in this
discussion.
I will begin with a brief clinical preamble:
It was a beautiful spring afternoon, a few months ago. In the group of ana-
lysts that were meeting together that day, the atmosphere was, as usual,
pleasant and relaxed, and focused on the clinical exchange. One of us was
speaking about a particularly difficult patient who, in spite of undeniable
4
It is worth recalling here the very remarkable contributions by R. J. Stoller (1975, 1984), who, in many
respects, anticipates the theses developed in this article.
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1608 C. Janin
changes that had occurred over the last two years, continued to present our
group with considerable cause for concern: this brilliant young intellectual
woman, trained in the best universities of the world, had, early on in her life
– because history had so decided – experienced a dramatic exile, against the
backcloth of the deaths of loved ones and terrifying acts of violence. She had
remained fixed to that part of her history, without being able to benefit from
what, in spite of everything, she had been able to build: a home with a loving
husband, gifted children who were developing free of problems, interesting
intellectual work which was regularly given to her and which brought her into
contact with high-level interlocutors. There was nothing to be done: on the
slightest pretext, her terrible and devastating feelings of hatred were
unleashed against her loved ones, her colleagues, and, of course, her analyst –
the manifestations of which would leave her gasping for breath and
exhausted. We gradually understood that before these traumatic losses
inflicted by the wounds of history, other losses, just as terrible, had also
occurred: she had lost her father who had always devoted himself to his
affairs and given consideration and attention exclusively to his sons; she had
lost a paternal substitute who had been killed in a terrible battle; and, psychi-
cally speaking, she had lost a mother who had disinvested her quite suddenly
in early childhood. On that day, then, we were discussing a new session in
which she had attacked her analyst very violently and with considerable dis-
dain and haughtiness. One of us remarked that she had nonetheless quite
recently been showing very visible signs of a positive and well-tempered
investment of her analyst, and wondered out loud, dreamily addressing the
group, what benefit she could possibly derive from such a negative mode of
investment. Perhaps it was this dreamy question? Anyway, I heard myself
replying, in an equally dreamy tone: ‘One is never disappointed by the object
of one’s hatred.’ The group’s reaction surprised me: there was a long, general
outburst of laughter. I realized that the alexandrine form that I had unwit-
tingly given to this statement was intended to give a proverbial turn to my
intervention, and, further, that the laughter showed that, economically, what
I had just said had had an effect on the group similar to that of a joke, which,
in a veiled form, has an effect of truth.
One is never, in fact, disappointed by the object of one’s hatred. More-
over, it was through becoming aware of the unshakeable character of the
attachment that one has to the object of one’s hatred that I was reminded
of the very particular title of volume 33 (Spring 1986) of the Nouvelle Revue
de Psychanalyse, “L’Amour de la haine’ [The love of hatred], and realized
immediately that when it appeared, I had certainly not fully grasped its
meaning. And yet, on thinking about it again, I recalled that in this volume,
with his article La haine ill egitime [Illegitimate hatred], J.-B. Pontalis had
offered a highly intelligent commentary on Joseph Conrad’s short story,
‘The Duel’ (1908). This short story is about two brothers in arms during
the Napoleonic wars, who, over the years, fight endless duels with each
other, without being assuaged by their military glory. Referring to these
duellists in other circumstances J.-B. Pontalis has said that, “the excitement
of hatred . . . is sensed, perceived, exchanged and mirrored. The similarity of
the feelings counts more than their negative nature. The partners remain, in
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Shame, hatred, and pornography 1609
hatred, equal and alike, thus, one and united.” Didier Anzieu developed
what was basically a similar point of view with regard to another type of
couple, the couple in love, and I would like now to dwell on this for a
moment. “The original reason [for the constitution of the couple],” Anzieu
writes,
seems to be the fear of solitude, the archaic need to find support for psychic func-
tions in a primordial object, the necessity to ward off fears of returning to the state
of distress during situations of frustration, failure, and stress. It was the primordial
object that once protected against this distress. The state of being enamoured with
someone brings with it the revelation, in the quasi-religious sense of the term, that
this person is a reincarnation of the primordial object. In the state of amorous exal-
tation . . . the twin belief is created that the partner is the object who counts more
than anything else for me and that the partner himself/herself wishes to be this pri-
mordial object for someone, me in this case, just as the mother once wanted to be
the primordial object for her infant who, for his/her part, put her in the position of
being this object.
(1986, p. 203)
This original dyad, reconstituted by the couple of lovers, functions on the
model of a common protective shield, of a psychic skin for two, which
implies that each of the members of the couple makes a certain number of
demands on the other. When these demands are not fulfilled, when the
object’s alterity or otherness is perceived painfully, there is a risk of hatred
unfurling in the relationship, as I have suggested in the case of Brandon,
the hero of the film Shame. This unfurling of hatred, as Anzieu has shown,
reaches its acme in the domestic row, and it is when the latter has been
overcome that shame may erupt: ‘If someone saw us’, ‘if someone was to
hear about it’, are thoughts, as I have already said, that reveal the presence
of shame.
In domestic quarrels, the irreducible alterity of the other forms a painful
backcloth to the reproaches addressed to the object as well as to all the
object’s responses. Now the negation of this alterity is both one of the ways
a subject can free himself from this shame and one of the powerful main-
springs of the phenomenon of pornography.
In a recent book, Gerard Bonnet (2003) has explored the question of
pornography with much intelligence.
He starts out by noting how the ‘duty of exhibition’ pervades the social
field today: ‘Show yourself’ is the advice given by elders to younger people
who have to find their place in society, whether it be society in general, or a
psychoanalytic society! According to Gerard Bonnet:
Given that our most active tendencies have their and their dynamism in our sexual
unconscious, the mere fact of over-investing them leads to an intensification of their
sexual foundations. As evidence of this I only need to mention the quasi-propor-
tional growth of the social procedures of exhibition and pornographic enactments.
As social and professional demands become increasingly exacting, so pornographic
enactments become more and more obscene and virulent, as if social exhibitionism
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1610 C. Janin
could not be exercised without exhibiting its hidden side, as if it could not help
exhibiting itself in turn by revealing the basis of the demands that today’s society
imposes on those who want to find a place in it.
(2003, pp. 12–13)
The author then decentres this point of view by no longer considering
this production of pornography as a sort of by-product of repression; on
the contrary, he asserts that “the impact of pornographic images on minors
is not a secondary effect, but rather the unconscious aim” (p. 16). This
proposition can only be understood, in my view, if we refer to the idea
already proposed that there are links between pornography and hatred. But
which object, in the scenario of the young person would be the object of
this hatred? Bonnet, citing a remark made by Octavio Paz (1994), provides
some answers to this question: “The decline of our image of love would be
a greater catastrophe than the collapse of our economic and political sys-
tems: it would be the end of our civilization; that is to say, of our way of
feeling and living” (p. 124). This hatred, then, is directed at a human, all
too human civilization, as can be seen from the words of one of my young
patients, a graphic artist, who, though he was filled with shame linked to
his fears that the pornographic drawings he produced compulsively might
one day fall into the hands of his colleagues of the art school where he
taught, told me how fascinated he was by pornographic films: “The actors
seem to have no limits: ‘I think that they make love like Gods. . .’.” But
behind this invocation of the gods, I think that a terrible psychic reality
was coming to light. As this young patient had seen his first pornographic
films at the beginning of his adolescence on cassettes recorded by his par-
ents, I surmised that the ‘Gods’ he was speaking about might be his ideal-
ized parental imagos in their sexual omnipotence, protected in his
imagination from any form of castration and thus confused with the ‘actors’
of the pornographic sexual scenes. But I also noticed that this distinction
was connected for this young man with a split that had developed in pub-
erty during these traumatic voyeuristic experiences. Consequently the sexu-
ality of adults had appeared to be both representable and incomprehensible,
in a very different mode to the representations that an infant may have:
“The gods, my parents, really do those things, as can be seen in these films,
and so I must take this sexuality which is being shown to me – theirs – as a
model; even if, in their exchanges, they let me see another mode of relating
that is incomprehensible for me.” As a result, this young man had the feel-
ing with the young women who became his partners that the sexuality that
he was living was false: “Of course, it’s good, but there is something else
that exists according to these cassettes, but which is inaccessible, and that is
this universe of the Gods I was telling you about.” Owing to this observa-
tion, which had brought him to analysis, this patient not only consciously
hated himself, his partners, and his parents who had not shown him or
pointed him towards the path of this superhuman state, but also experi-
enced a completely unconscious, and even ‘blank’ sense of shame that was
revealed through a very particular form of shameless behaviour: as soon as
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Shame, hatred, and pornography 1611
he got to know his partners a bit, he would show his collection of porno-
graphic films to them and ask them to watch them with him, hoping that
these young girls would finally enable him to gain access to this ‘secret of
the Gods’ that he had been pursuing constantly since puberty. I would say
that in a way the false had become for him the only thing that was true, and
that the true realizations of his sexuality as a young adult had an irremediable
whiff of the false about them: splitting and perversion had thus become
lodged at the centre of his being when infantile voyeurism, reactualized at
puberty with the discovery of his parents’ cassettes, had turned into exhibi-
tionism with his partners. By putting them in the position that he had been
in himself at puberty, he was trying to cope with and treat his own trau-
matic experience: behind this secret of the Gods satisfied by their tri-
umphant sexuality, the question that was being posed over and over again
was in fact one of castration, but in a very different register from that of
the complex of castration – it was a terrifying castration for which he had
no solution except this shameless behaviour that had an unmistakeably
maniac component to it.
This aspect of shameless behaviour emphasizes, moreover, owing to its
maniac component, the extent of the drive defusion at work. From this
point of view, it is the foundational and protective role of modesty that is
prominent here. This protective aspect of modesty against the hubris of
drive defusion, this ‘trait of humanity’, to use the felicitous expression of
Monique Selz (2003), is brilliantly brought to light by Gerard Bonnet in his
analysis of the biblical episode of Noah’s drunkenesss (Genesis 9:24–29):
Noah has got drunk and is lying naked in his tent; one of his sons, Ham
(Cham), calls his brothers Shem and Japheth to contemplate their father’s
nakedness. They cover their father’s naked body with his coat. When he
wakes up, Noah blesses his sons, but curses Ham’s son, Canaan. The
hermeneutic tradition interprets this episode as a reminder that it is forbid-
den to consider the body as a mere object that can be consumed visually or
exposed to the gaze of others. Canaan, cursed by Noah, is condemned to
slavery: the child will lose his status as a subject, just as Noah, ‘reified’5 by
Ham’s attitude, has also lost him temporarily. By throwing the coat over
Noah’s nudity, Shem and Japheth invent, Gerard Bonnet writes, an “Ideal
of modesty . . . an invitation to pass from the partial [scopic]6 drive to the
imaginary stage which includes a vision of the sexual organs that is no
longer obsessed by its most exciting and immediate representation” (2003,
p. 102). With this metaphor of modesty as a protective ‘veil’ or ‘coat’, we
are encouraged to think of modesty as a protective shield that offers protec-
tion against the crudeness of the ‘thing in itself’, a crudeness that is embod-
ied by pornography. From this point of view, I would readily say that
modesty is the representative in culture of what I have called the ‘alarm sig-
nal of shame’, which assumes an intrapsychic status during the differentia-
tion of the agencies as the Oedipal conflict recedes.
5
It was tempting to see if the name ‘Ham’ (Cham) and the German word ‘Scham’ (shame) were related
linguistically; as far as I have been able to tell, they are not.
6
My addition.
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1612 C. Janin
The biblical episode of Noah’s coat therefore raises a fundamental ques-
tion: what is reprehensible in the way we perceive nudity? Is it desire? Is it
the fact of consuming the other with one’s eyes? It is not possible for the
psychoanalyst to settle this question; there is a fine line between the halluci-
natory fulfilment and the actual fulfilment of desire, and it is no coincidence
that the Catholic religion suggests that sin can be committed ‘in thought
and in action’. But what seems to me certain, though, is that the psychic
operation whereby the genital fulfilment of desire is possible presupposes
recognition of the other as a subject, whereas its imaginary possession
through the act of looking, that is to say, through auto-eroticism, presup-
poses its negation as a subject: modesty is anthropologically at the heart of
genital desire, modesty for oneself, but also modesty of the other, whereas
it is phantasmatically absent from auto-eroticism; and, moreover, it is this
absence which opens the door wide to shame.
If the reader accepts the foregoing argument, it is easier to understand
why many authors who have studied shame have extended their considera-
tions by tackling the question of pornography and, secondarily, that of
hatred: the negation, in hate, of the other as a subject, a foundational nega-
tion of pornography, inevitably leads to the return of the other, a vector of
shame, as can be clearly seen from the example given by Sartre in Being
and nothingness, which combines hatred with feelings of exclusion, voyeur-
ism and shame.7
It is clear, then, that it is important for the psychoanalyst to reaffirm the
relations between the sexual life of each subject and psychosexuality, as the
latter is firmly founded on the double difference of the sexes and of the gen-
erations, and on the postulate of the existence of the sexual drive, a frontier
concept between the psychic and the somatic. It is also clear that in connec-
tion with this psychosexuality of an instinctual nature, phantasized sexual
scenes – or enactments – emerge in these patients which always hark back
ultimately to infantile sexuality (which also includes the enigma of the par-
ents’ sexuality). This can be verified by the practitioner in his/her daily
practice, which is why human sexuality is highly metaphorical. From this
point of view, and in spite of its ‘essentially perverse’ content, as Christian
David put it, this psychosexuality is quite far removed from the porno-
graphic phenomenon, even if, in certain particular clinical configurations,
the latter may be an adjuvant to the former.
To conclude, I should like to emphasize that the long journey from the
infans to the adult involves the complex and essential relations of the sub-
ject with his ego ideal – relations that have been brilliantly described by
Laplanche and Pontalis in The language of psychoanalysis (1967). I shall
therefore cite them at length. First of all, they note that this
term [was] used by Freud in the context of his second theory of the psychical appa-
ratus: [It defines] an agency of the personality resulting from the coming together
of narcissism (idealization of the ego) and identification with the parents, with their
7
Among these authors, I shall mention the studies by Ruwen Ogien, with which I am in profound dis-
agreement; a detailed discussion of his theses can be found in my book La honte, ses figures et ses destins
(Janin, 2007).
Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2015 Institute of Psychoanalysis
Shame, hatred, and pornography 1613
substitutes or with collective ideals. As a distinct agency, the ego-ideal constitutes a
model to which the subject attempts to conform . . . It is in ‘On Narcissism: An
Introduction’ (1914c), that the term ‘ego-ideal’ first appears as a designation for a
comparatively autonomous intrapsychic formation which serves as a reference-point
for the ego’s evaluation of its real achievements. Its origin is largely narcissistic:
‘What man projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism
of his childhood in which he was his own ideal.’ This state of narcissism, which
Freud compares to a veritable delusion of grandeur, is abandoned as a result, in
particular, of the criticism which is directed at the child by its parents. It is note-
worthy that this criticism – as internalized in the form of a specific psychical agency
with a censoring and self-observing function – is distinguished from the ego-ideal
throughout the paper on narcissism: it ‘constantly watches the actual ego and mea-
sures it by the [ego] ideal’ . . . This type of process is the principle on which the con-
stitution of human groups is based. The collective ideal derives its efficacy from a
convergence of individual ‘ego-ideals’: ‘. . .a number of individuals have put one
and the same object in the place of their ego-ideal and have consequently identified
themselves with one another in their ego’; on the other hand, these individuals,
after identifications with their parents, teachers and so on, already harbour a cer-
tain number of collective ideals: ‘Each individual is a component part of numerous
groups, he is bound by ties of identification in many directions, and he has built up
his ego-ideal on the most various models’.
(p. 144)
As we can see, this ego-ideal (whose development and vicissitudes have
been illustrated by Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (1974) in an important book,
L’Ideal du moi) is, as it were, the psychical agency that makes it possible to
constitute an ethical code for oneself which guarantees, it seems to me, a form
of psychic life that not only reduces self-hatred, hatred for civilization and the
destructive aspects of shame of oneself, but also makes group life tolerable.
But we can also postulate that certain destructive aspects of a megalomaniac
ego-ideal exist, which, owing to its unattainable demands, can only lead to
hatred and shame for oneself. Secondarily, these are projected onto the other
who then becomes the impure, bad, and shameful one that has to be excluded.
In my opinion, a minimal code of ethics requires an ego-ideal that is devel-
oped enough to give the relationship to oneself – one of the forms of the rela-
tionship to the other – sufficient importance, sufficient, in any case, for the
ego to be able to form an opinion, without false shame, on the nature of
pornography, and on the negation of the subject that it implies. This negation
is perhaps a subtle and toxic form of what Hanna Arendt (1963) has described
so well, speaking of the ‘banality of evil’.
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