Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, by Thomas W. Laqueur, ZoneBooks, New York, 2004, 498 pp.

This is a book that would seem to be of direct relevance to psychoanalysts, abook which has drawn considerable attention, and which has received extremelyenthusiastic reviews, and laudatory send-offs by Adam Phillips and StephenGreenblatt. Its importance for us as psychoanalytic clinicians lies neither in itsintrinsic merits nor in the strength of its underlying arguments (both of which canbe questioned on varying disciplinary grounds); it lies in the connections Laqueurmakes between sexuality and cultural values and assumptions, in the questions heraises, knowingly and unknowingly, about the nature of privacy, the self, andsexuality.

Laqueur’s thesis is simple and strikes root in the current orientation of culturalstudies and social constructivism. ‘‘Masturbation,’’ he writes, ‘‘is the sexuality ofmodernity and of the bourgeoisie who created it. It is the first truly democratic sexu-ality’’ (p. 18). ‘‘Modern masturbation can be dated with a precision rare in culturalhistory.’’ It originated in 1712, and is ‘‘a creature of the Enlightenment’’ (p. 13).Laqueur dates modern masturbation to the publication of Onania, its founding text.He continues: ‘‘Situating this text—and the years around 1712—in the history ofsexuality and selfhood is in some measure an exercise in the history of medicine’’(p. 15). Many of the books that might have helped him formulate his ideas about thecultural history of ideas of the self (e.g., Bruno Snell, Aries, H. Ellenberger, E. R.Dodds) are missing from his footnotes, and there is no bibliography.

Thus Laqueur makes an historical assumption of dubious merit: he assumes thatthe publication of a book on masturbation in 1712 demonstrates how masturba-tion was thought about and experienced by those of the period, an assumptionwhich even the bravest of those French historians associated with ‘‘l’Histoire desmentalites’’ might shy away from. While Foucault in his work on the history ofmadness makes similar sorts of claims, he has a somewhat firmer grasp of history,of philosophy, and of the very complicated task of exploring what dead peopleseem to have thought. Moreover, as a specialist in literature, Laqueur assumes onthe basis of having read Emile that Rousseau is the herald of modern individual-ism and a fountainhead of our contemporary notion of the self, a notion whichhas raised the eyebrows of historians for generations.

Laqueur sets himself a double task. First he must demonstrate that the history ofmasturbation can help define modernity and modern notions of the self and mod-ern sexuality, whatever that might be defined to be. Then he must demonstratethat before 1712, masturbation either did not define sexuality and modernity inthe same way or was not on the radar screen. ‘‘The more general problem is this:Why, in or around 1712 (at the dawn of the Enlightenment), does masturbationmove from the distant moral horizon to the ethical foreground?’’ (p.18). Apart

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from the difficulties in assuming that a change of millennium ushers in a periodlike the Enlightenment, and leaving aside how variegated both reason and faith(even assuming these to be the same for us as they were for the inhabitants of the18th century) were during the 18th century, Laqueur asks a question which wouldhave occurred to nobody who did not already have a thesis for which ‘‘evidence’’was needed.

He writes: ‘‘The Enlightenment project of liberation—the coming into adult-hood of humanity—made the most secret, private, seemingly harmless, and mostdifficult to detect of sexual acts the centerpiece of a program for policing theimagination, desire, and the self that modernity itself had unleashed’’ (p. 19).Masturbation, according to Laqueur, became horrifying because it was ‘‘secret ina world in which transparency was of a premium; it was prone to excess as noother kind of venery was, the crack cocaine of sexuality; and it had no bounds inreality, because it was the creature of the imagination’’ (p. 21). In short, masturba-tion ‘‘became a problem when its core elements ‘imagination, excess, solitudeand privacy’—became suspect’’ (p. 21). ‘‘Beginning in the eighteenth century,solitary sex came to represent the relationship between the individual and thesocial world, a sort of crossroads where men and women, boys and girls could goterribly wrong...’’ (p. 22).

As analysts we might ask how the link between pleasure and excess becamefocused around masturbation. Why and how does masturbation become more rep-rehensible than infidelity to one’s wife, or than promiscuity in general? While La-queur insists repeatedly that the more pleasurable the sexual act, the more sinful itwas believed to be, (e.g., p. 138), his reasoning seems circular, since the very actof identifying an act as extraordinarily pleasurable above all others would seem toimply a need for a hierarchy of pleasures to match the hierarchy of sins. More gen-erally, Laqueur fails to examine what makes sexual acts pleasurable and/or sinful.

His argument for the virtual nonexistence of masturbation as a problem before1712 suffers from the same want of depth. So far as the Classical sources are con-cerned, Laqueur concludes (on scant evidence) that ‘‘it was clear that the Greeksand Romans had a concept of masturbation similar to ours but that they regardedthe act itself as not especially problematic or interesting, morally or medically’’(p. 111). With the same sort of bludgeoned reasoning, Laqueur concludes of theJewish tradition, ‘‘What we think of as masturbation did not fit their conceptualcategories: idolatry, pollution and procreation’’ (p. 124). Laqueur, following in thecognitive-linguistic tradition which has produced both the structuralists and theantistructuralists (the postmodernists), tends to equate thought and language.‘‘One thing is clear. Between the late sixth and the twelfth century there was noword, no class noun, for masturbation,’’ although he adds that it ‘‘may be difficultto know what this lexical silence signifies’’ (p. 141). How reliable is it to makeassumptions on the basis of ‘‘lexical silence’’?

For Laqueur, private vice, whatever it was, meant little before the 18th century.‘‘The history of the new modern regime of guilt is thus part of a larger history ofthe self, of creativity, of limits, and of excess. It is a guilt born of a newly prob-lematic relationship between the individual and society’’ (p. 183). Laqueur claims

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that the kind of guilt that makes masturbation the democratic and modern form ofsexuality is itself created by a ‘‘newly problematic relationship between the indi-vidual and society,’’ which entails the sort of guilt he is speaking about. However,he fails to describe in any detail what this ‘‘newly problematic relationship’’ is. Sofar as I know, there is not a single social or political theorist from Plato to thepresent who has not seen this relationship as problematic, even when they thinkthat it can be dealt with using a simple solution.

In the 18th century solitary sex became unnatural because, according to La-queur, it was motivated by fantasy (and not a real object of desire), it was private,and it was immoderate (the more one did it, the more one wanted to do it)(p. 210). ‘‘Masturbation thus became the vice of individuation for a world inwhich the old ramparts against desire had crumbled; it pointed to an abyss ofsolipsism, anomie, and socially meaningless freedom that seemed to belie theideal of moral autonomy.’’ The sexuality of the modern self, ‘‘perfectly outsidecivilization’’ (p. 236), masturbation represented ‘‘socially inappropriate anduncontrolled privacy’’ (p. 226). ‘‘To masturbate was to masturbate excessively, tobe in the throes of unquenchable desire. Credit and masturbation traveled in thesame linguistic circles’’ (p. 293). Here, it would appear, Laqueur makes masturba-tion stand for unquenchable desire, too much of a good thing. But what, we mayask, makes masturbation any more addictive than other forms of sexuality?Laqueur’s answer would be: secrecy. But here his logic breaks down. He wouldappear to be saying that masturbation is secret because it is addictive, and it isaddictive because it is secret. Masturbation, believes Laqueur, stands ‘‘at thebeginnings of a modern sense of secrecy’’ (p. 241). It is ‘‘a moral problem of themodern self, a reflection of the very deepest problems of modern life’’ (p. 249).

In passing, let me note that Laqueur simplifies both guilt and shame, as he sim-plifies the concept of the self. When he writes, ‘‘Shame was almost by definitionpublic; one was shamed in the eyes of someone else. Masturbation escaped allthis’’ (p. 232), he bypasses the obvious relation of shame to superego conflictsand makes a statement of dubious reliability. Since masturbation is necessarilydone by the self (and not the Other), it cannot escape shame, since shame isabove all shame in one’s own eyes.

Laqueur mentions William Stekel, who believed masturbation was harmless,and G. Stanley Hall, who held the view that ‘‘masturbation is the most perfectvice and sin’’ (quoted on p. 51), and discusses Freud briefly (‘‘masturbationbecame his transitional object for going from seduction to libido theory’’) (p. 389).

Laqueur’s arguments, however we judge their accuracy, raise fundamentalquestions about perceptions and experiences of sexuality, sexual pleasure, and mas-turbation. What do we as analysts think the nature of perversion and its relation tosecrecy and privacy to be? How self-conscious are we about our judgments of bothnormality and perversion, and about our efforts to sort behaviors and practices outinto one category or the other? And to what extent and in what ways do culturalvalues contribute to that secrecy that makes masturbation (or any sexual activity)pleasurable? How are sexual pleasure and shame related? And how do the injunc-tions against masturbation serve as a reflection of attitudes toward privacy? Toward

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the imagination and fantasy life? These are fundamental questions with respect towhich we as analysts have something to say of relevance to cultural theorists and allthose writing on these questions. Let us hope that we will manage to make our voi-ces heard with greater effect on future authors tackling these subjects.

Benjamin Kilborne5 Lenox Road

West Stockbridge MA 01266Bkilborne@aol.com

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