Love, Stress & Sex • Love & Sex Divided

Love & Sex Divided
The whole sphere of love in such people remains divided in the two directions
personified in art as the sacred and the profane…love. Where they love they
do not desire and where they desire they cannot love.
—Sigmund Freud

“HE LOVES ME BUT RARELY MAKES LOVE TO ME!” Stella had only
been married to Don for three months. “I’ve tried everything. One
day when I went to the basement to bring him lunch, I tried to say
something sexy. He was standing there wearing his tool belt. I
handed him his sandwich and whispered in his ear, ‘I’d love to see
wearing that tool belt with no clothes on.’” Stella’s words backfired.
Stella’s voice sounded sad as she told me: “He took the plate his
sandwich was on and instantly pulled away from me. He had a
look of disgust, almost scorn, on his face.” Don’s rebuffs were a frequent
occurrence for these newlyweds. Don often recoiled from
Stella’s advances. This spurning of her advances is what led her to
seek therapy. Both Don and Stella were stressed: he by her wanting
sex and she by his rejection of her sexually.

As I talked with Don, I could see he was a victim of the same
kind of underlying problem that Elvis Presley suffered from. Elvis
avoided sex with his wife Priscilla after she gave birth and became a
mother. Just as Elvis was tied tightly to his mother, so Don was tied
to his mother’s apron strings.

Before Don and Stella came to see me. Don’s mother consulted
me. She was panicked by fleeting fantasies of picking up a butcher
knife and stabbing Don when he came to visit. There was no conscious
feeling associated with the murderous fantasy. What emerged
was that, indeed, Don’s mother was angry that Don was now married
and she was left with an uncommunicative husband. Don had
been her confidante; he had been her husband in an emotional
sense. Once Stella became his wife, Don lost his passion for her.
Prior to marriage, sex was great. Now the incest taboo was
unconsciously interfering with Don’s love life. [Don regained his
passion for his wife as he declared his emotional independence.]