Graeme Daniels: Voyeurism

From Getting Real About Sex Addiction 10: Graeme & Joe talk sex addiction and personality issues
August 21, 2022

I'm working with the case recently of, of a guy who has really tried to stop looking at porn and hasn't been able to. Now, it's a little bit of an interesting case in that this gentleman, he doesn't look at porn to masturbate. He just looks at porn. And so that provides so, so there's not the kind of physical release as with orgasm, right? That we would, we would think about in terms of, you know, maybe purely sexual drive model of releasing tension and that sort of thing. But that is the effect. It relieves tension. But, but he sees it as addictive. And the, and the context, the relationships, he's, it is addictive as well.

Now, I think psychoanalysis, you know, would have used a term here and might still in a way that would be, I think a little misunderstood by the general public. And here's an, here's an example where I think psychoanalysis would think a term like sex addiction is a little bit redundant. Because what you're talking about is voyeurism. And voyeurism can become habitual.

And you can treat that as, as sort of an addict. But just saying sex addict, and I think this is your point, doesn't quite get to the nuanced meaning of what it is to be engaging in sexuality in a very passive way. Yeah. And you're, you're looking at, you know, other people having sex. But it's very, it's actually very anti-libidinal. I'm often struck by how many of the so-called sex addicts who are very hypo- sexualized, in my view. They're actually quite passive individuals. And they don't, they don't see sexuality in themselves. Sexuality is in other people, which is why they have to look at it. They're not engaged with it. And they actually have quite anorexic sex lives themselves. They do a lot of projecting on that, you know, as their wife, their partner or whatever, that's not engaging with them. They don't necessarily take ownership for that. But this, this is, we're actually talking about sexual passivity. And that touches again about, you know, how we're defining addiction. There's an avoidance of something. There's an uncomfortable feeling. And the addiction is a defense. It's away of coping, you're putting it in terms of control, which I think is correct. The person is trying to control something, something uncomfortable that's, that's happening.