lingerie etymology

I allude to a scenario that many infants experience. We have to remember that to the infant the parents are ‘god-like.’ The OEM has programmed us all as infants to look up to parent(s) in this manner.

When nursing, the infant is literally eating its mother while often the (often) sex-starved father looks down at his wife nursing their newborn with her sudden and tantalizing new figure. The female is usually wearing nothing but lingerie over her swollen breasts. A wordless interplay will take place more or less along the following lines: communication involves the father's expression that he’s eager to get “back in the saddle,” and his wife, after the long months of pregnancy, is eager as well to once again demonstrate her power to control the man with her full sexuality. Irregardless of whether the man is a wimp or a bully, his need for sex from the woman in order to feel ‘like a man’ once again is the same. It is undoubtedly picked up by the infant’s total submergence in – for lack of a better expression, his or her pre-ego identity-existence.

My impression of this experience deals with my mother making some kind of request of my father, and he disposed for whatever reason to suggest an alternate solution. She then, needing only to shoot off a hint of sexuality to yank his leash, spoke with such authority that my father (figure); this earthly representative of the Creator, promptly resembled a peasant holding his cap in his hand full of fear and trembling, bowing his head and quickly running off to do her bidding. Consequently, an early sexual vibration definitely communicating who’s boss was established while I lay at her breast, my tiny fingers clutching and touching the silky lingerie.

A sexual vibration defining who’s in charge can often result in a male claiming with complete sincerity that his homosexual disposition was something he was born with, rather than seeing it as the identification with the more powerful parent; in this case the female, and the dissapointment such an awareness brings.

What is impossible to determine at this stage is the archetypical sorrow and (dare I say it?) ‘resentment’ that even an infant can embrace when the heavenly identification of male faith, strength, courage, honor and integrity is replaced by an undeniable yearning for sensuality and carnality. The life in the spirit world experienced by an infant is the least understood – and most ignored – component of raising a child in a world gone mad.The power of sexuality mixes with the lingerie as life begins and is nurtured with mother’s milk. This being the first material most infants touch while being relieved of their firstborn anxieties at the mothers’ breast, is it any wonder so many men react with uncontrolled carnality when presented with a female wearing it? The extent to which men are affected by it is seasoned, I believe, by the intensity of the countless variations to the interplay described above.

HS Sullivan, from "The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry"p.295
Notes from Sullivan lecturing to other psychiatrists on SEXUALITY:

p.295 (CONTINUED FROM ABOVE) “… to think that one can remedy personality warp by tinkering with the sex life is a mistake, even though it is very convenient doctrine for psychiatrists who are chronic juveniles. It may provide them with fees for enjoying their interest in pornography; but if one is a serious psychiatrist, when one is presented with difficulties in the sex life of a patient as the reason the patient is seeking help, my experience has demonstrated rather convincingly that the patient’s difficulties in living is shown rather in his choosing this subject to present as his difficulty. In other words, people don’t go to psychiatrists to be aided in their sexual difficulties; but they do sometimes present this as their problem, and such problems show, when properly understood, what ails their living with people.

"... Quite frequently it is no trick at all to find something very much more serious than the sexual difficulty; and quite often the sexual difficulty is remedied in the process of dealing with the other problems. You may notice there is a slight difference here between my views and some of the views that have been circulated in historic times.”*
* ...obviously a dry reference to Sigmund Freud.

So-called HOMOSEXUALITY:

In Clinical Studies of Psychiatry (pp.160-2), Dr. Sullivan’s proposes a view of homosexuality and therapy which was not only ahead of his own time, but apparently remains far ahead of many doctors today. Today's gay psychiatrists create misunderstanding regarding Dr. Sullivan’s position. They do not propose a different interpretation, what they propose is (in Dr. Sullivan’s own words), “an atrocious miscarriage of the therapeutic process.”

(Clinical Studies in Psychiatry_pp163):
"As I have indicated earlier, I think that the whole business of the homosexual entity as an explanation is always to be looked pretty firmly in the face by psychiatrists who attempt to effect any great improvement in the mental health of the patient. One should determine whether this entity is the organization of a definite integrating tendency that satisfies a need or whether it is a complex mental disorder in which the homosexuality is present because it so perfectly fortifies some abnormal mental process, some dynamism of difficulty." (See Note:)

"Where a person has felt that life is eminently worth living only in the preadolescent stage, when he did enjoy great intimacy with another person of the same sex, irrespective of whether that great intimacy was what may be described as on the non-genital or the genital level, I am quite willing to deal with that person on the basis that he is engaged in actual direct pursuit of satisfaction from members of his own sex, or as in homosexuality, as it may be easily called.

But where such experience is missing from a person’s life, then I think one is doing a great violence to the therapeutic principle to accept the notion that that person has anything like a simple drive to secure genital satisfaction by any type of behavior with members of the same sex. To work on this assumption, and to deal with this patient’s 'homosexuality,’ is, to my way of thinking, one of the most vicious miscarriages of therapeutic situations. It takes out of the culture a group of terms, which, in referring to behavior, carry all the culture’s evaluations of that behavior.

You see, if the patient has not found great warmth and satisfaction in intimacy with a member of his own sex, but later on is told by a psychiatrist that such intimacy is what he is after–or has, by his own paranoid processes, come to feel that that is what he is after, and the psychiatrist agrees with him–then he and the psychiatrist are talking about something that is, in its ultimate essence, merely a revolting difference between him and good people. That is all.

In has no meaning in terms of something that he has experienced, that he has undergone, and that therefore is a part of him. But it does have meaning as a particular type of horribly derogatory formulation. Thus, to attack a paranoid state, for example, on the basis of an attempt to understand the patient’s homosexuality is an atrocious miscarriage of the therapeutic process. This is a very nifty way to make it beyond the most perchance that any intimacy will be established with that patient. The psychiatrist’s approach means” Abandon all hope of a feeling of personal security, and then we might be able to do something.” But the developmental processes which we all have to undergo make it simply inconceivable that there is any such thing as abandoning all hope of personal security. So of course, what the psychiatrist does is to provide the patient with a new paranoid world, in which the psychiatrist is unconsciously taking a very important part. And since he is much more patiently engaged in hateful activity than anybody the patient has previously found, the patient may attempt homicide on the psychiatrist one day. But other than that I can think of no spectacular result except the passing of time.

So it is quite important indeed to discriminate between, first the isophilic phase of personality development and the satisfactions that can be acquired then, and second, the innumerable unhappy caricatures of living to which the term homosexuality is sometimes applied.
The people who have gotten well into the preadolescent phase of personality development before possibilities of further growth failed, and come to us with their life problems formulated in terms of homosexual concepts, are still somewhat near reality.

But people who have not gotten as far as the preadolescent phase of personality development, and who come to us with their life problems formulated in terms of homosexuality, are showing a very much more complex distortion of interpersonal relations and offer a much more treacherous basis for therapeutic relationships because they are that much less mature. Thus this discrimination has prognostic significance.
It is a discrimination between what is a sort of frantic exploration on the base of what is verbal prescriptions, as compared with regressive retreats from hopelessly difficult situations to a time in the past that was actually satisfactory, with new collisions perhaps with the culture in the process. Naturally the latter is much the simpler to attack, and the prognosis–the outcome–is much more apt to become favorable.

But if, on the other hand, you combine these two into some doctrine of homosexuality as applied to factors in schizophrenia, paranoid states or what have you, then you have missed the whole point of interpersonal psychiatry, and your results will be sufficiently mongrel so that you will never be able to feel very secure about what is what. But, on the other hand, you will never have any convincing demonstration of being completely wrong.

Because the disorders of sexual adjustment are ruinous to other development, we must devote considerable attention to the patterning of this form of behavior.

isophilic (a term of preference for individuals approximately equal in general characteristics of personality); and
xenophilic (a term to relate a preference for individuals significantly different in general characteristics of personality than the subject-individual).

Within the zones of interaction between the individual and the environment, we have the erogenous zones of
oral, anal and genital.

We may classify autoeroticism, homoeroticism and heteroeroticism. We will expand our meaning in order to realize that erogeny includes the securing of pleasure-giving sentience directly from the interaction zones and mediately by pleasure given to another.

Autoeroticism
Self-masturbation, the manual and related manipulation of the genitals, is only ONE FORM of autosexual behavior.
While autoerotic interests implies desire to secure one or more of the various forms of pleasant sentience deriving from one of the zones of interaction with one’s own body, it need not be only by way of self-manipulation. A situation (which is only) objectively appraised as one of normal sexual intercourse of a man with a woman may be, and often in fact is, for one or the other party – if not for both – one of autosexual behavior rather than that of heterosexual. The male using his wife’s vagina as a substitute for his hand is the most common example of these behaviors.

The conception of homoerotic and heteroerotic similarly refers to the desire to secure pleasure, but now by prehension of the pleasure of another derived from the manipulation, by the subject-individual, of some zone of interaction of the object-individual’s body.
The homoerotic interest manifests as inclination to the pleasure-giving manipulation of another person of the same sex; the heteroerotic, one of the other sex. Homosexual behavior is then the manipulation of the genitals of a member of the same sex, for the pleasure experienced in his enjoyment.
Heterosexual behavior is the manipulation of the erogenous zone of one of the other sex, for the satisfaction derived by prehension of the other’s pleasure as well as satisfaction of the lust dynamism.

Consequently, at the very least, we have the manifestations of the two powerful integrating tendencies, the need for intimacy and lust being classified as:
1. Autophilic / autosexual (sex with oneself;
Isophilic / homosexual (people similar to oneself;same-sex partner) and heterophilic / heterosexual (opposite sex); on the basis of the preferred partner in lustful integrations: and (categorigacally leaving out sex with beasts and the dead)

2. On the basis of genital participation or substitution – as
orthogenital, paragenital, metagenital, amphigenital, mutual masturbation and onanism (sex-with-animals and sex-with-the-dead).
Now I invite you to consider these. The first of these refers to the gross characteristics of integrations which seek the discharge of the lust dynamism, which are directly related to recognized lust and its satisfaction. Sexual behavior of a preferred partner (homosexual, hetrosexual or autosexual).
In (2), we consider the lust dynamism in terms of the genital participation in covert or overt, witting or unwitting, lustful performances; and here we are talking about a region of the body. Situations principally integrated by lust are sexual situations; but at the same time the patterning of this behavior depends on the part played by the genitals, as well as the lustful character of the situation.
On the basis of one’s genital participation with another, or with a substitute, I have named six rubrics, most of which are neologism of my own invention. Four are listed below, as well as mutual masturbation, and those dealing with sex-with-animals and sex-with-the-dead are dealt with elsewhere.

Orthogenital situations are characterized by a preferred integrations of one’s genitals with their natural receptor genitals – genitals of the sexually opposite type.

Paragenital situations involve using the genitals as if they were seeking an appropriate opposite type of genitals, but does so in behavior which is not related to the procreation of one’s kind. A common example is being masturbated by someone else, in which case the hand is the paragenital receptor of one’s genitals; other examples are the passive role in fellatio or the active role in pederasty/sodomy.

Metagenital situations involve sex without one’s genitals being involved at all, but the other person’s genitals are involved. The most obvious example is masturbating someone else; other examples are taking the active role in fellatio or the passive role in pederasty/sodomy .

Amphigenital (69). For this the French have adopted the term “soixante-neuf.” Either homosexual or heterosexual groups of two people take a singularly analogous if not identical relationship to the genitals of each and the substitutes of each. Besides these, there are the relatively primitive performance of mutual masturbation.

Since I have set up three classifications of intimacy, four classifications of the general interpersonal objective of the integration of lust, and six classifications of genital relationship, this results in seventy-two combinations, which shrinks to forty-five theoretical patterns of sexual behavior in situations involving two real partners.

From this statement, I would like you to realize how fatuous it is to toss out the adjectives “heterosexual,” homosexual, or “narcissistic” in order to classify a person as to his sexual integrations with others. Such classifications are nowhere near refined enough for intelligent thought; they are much too gross to do much except mislead. For example, to talk about homosexuality being the problem in this context really means about as much as humanity being the problem.