Cryptonomic analyses: On a sex worker-therapist collaboration

Celeste PIETRUSZA

Even if not working within the conceptual terms of psychoanalysis, sex workers engage directly with the affective and embodied dimensions of sex, love, attachment, the exchange of money, and many other dynamics that have parallels with analytic work. Likewise, while the ends of sex work and the position of the sex worker are different than that of the analyst, sex workers are nonetheless often in the midst of transferences that involve an intertwining of the physical, emotional, and sexual aspects of fantasy.

What, then, might be unlocked if we open up psychoanalytic spaces to the accounts of sex workers and their clients? I ask this question in the context of Division 39’s conference topic, Sex, through the work of psychoanalysts Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, specifically their reflections on what they call the psychic crypt or tomb. In this reflection, I draw from two preliminary interviews on touch, trauma, and somatic wisdom from an ongoing project. The first is with a sex worker, Jessie Sage, who has given permission for her worker name to be included in this account. The second is with a therapist who has coordinated care with Jessie to provide sex work services for her clients. I present their accounts here not to speak for or represent other sex workers or therapists but instead to consider in a form similar to the analytic case study how sex workers and therapists working together may collaborate in a queer, haptic, feminist ethic of what Torok and Abraham (1994) call “cryptonomic analysis” to access and unveil experiences that could otherwise remain outside of signification.

In our interview, Jessie tells me about the ways she attunes to her clients in navigating sexual fantasy, asking questions of herself almost as an analyst might of the transference: “Am I in the role of mentor? Am I in the role of a lover? A stand-in for their ex-wife? Am I in the role of almost a parental figure? Am I there as a caretaker? Am I there as a teacher? Am I there as a lover? Am I there as a therapist? She continues, “There’s all these different roles that people are coming to me for, and I can fairly quickly, based on how they’re talking, how they’re touching me or how they’re not, figure out what role they want me in.” When I ask more about the role of touch–that which is typically not engaged and left outside of analytic practice–Jessie asserts that in her work, “Touch is important to all of it. There are people whom I’ve never had sex with, but there’s always an element of touch, and not infrequently, someone will have an intense emotional response to touch and intimacy.” Specifically, Jessie tells me about her clients sobbing deeply in ways she feels exceed the specifics of their encounters with her. “I often don’t know what the source of the grief is,” she tells me, “but I feel like my role is holding space for that grief without taking it on myself…to just allow people to live it and experience it and not to be afraid of it.”

In the analytic experience, we likewise encounter and experience–on either side of the proverbial couch–these moments of explicable and enigmatic grief. While an analyst may hold space in a way similar to what Jessie describes, the analyst’s position is ostensibly different than that of a sex worker in its relationship to speech, free association, and making the unconscious conscious. Yet Jessie, like other sex workers with whom I have spoken, tells me that her clients–even ones in analysis or therapy–will often talk to her about first not only their sexual fantasies but aspects of their lives around which they feel shame, including trauma and abuse. “It’s facilitated by the low-stakes relationship and the fact that I have a stigmatized identity. I do think that helps,” Jessie says. “I think that there’s this opening up in sex work sessions that doesn’t happen in other places. And that opening up also gets entangled for the clients with feelings of intense attachment. That is also part of the job of trying to hold them in these spaces but not cross over into something that is harmful for them.”

I believe this aspect of a stigmatized identity that makes disclosure possible is important for analytic practice, particularly in the context of enigmatic grief. In certain impasses and blocks in analysis, marked by internal silences or resistances to signification or symbolization, Abraham and Torok (1994) suggest that a kind of psychic tomb or crypt may be present inside a person. This psychic crypt holds a specific kind of secret, not a conscious one, known and stashed away, nor a repressed one. Rather, this secret has the form of a loss denied and disavowed, a memory “buried without a legal burying place” (p. 141). Inside a crypt, Abraham and Torok describe, a person can protect and bury alive a transgressive, sexually charged lost love object, along with all its traumatic topographies. When there is a guardian holding vigil at the crypt, Abraham and Torok (1994) write that “there can be no thought of speaking to someone else about our grief under these circumstances (p. 130).

When working amid therapeutic discourses that center on uncovering or healing trauma, it can be tempting for therapists and even analysts, I believe, to too hastily try to break into these tombs or, perhaps, more gently try to coax the guardians into stepping away from their posts.

Abraham and Torok (1994) insist that the psychic secrecy of this crypt is essential for the subject and the love object’s survival. Crypts, they assert, are constructed to protect an idealized love object, a love object who also carries their own shameful secret. As such, it is the beloved object’s secret that melancholic subjects themselves must encrypt or conceal. As analytically-oriented therapists, we may have the ideal or wish for those with whom we work to “say anything,” however, our professional licensing, as well as position within broader social-cultural contexts of therapy as a “good” thing may be at first too much light to let into a dark crypt. The patient may fear that their love object may directly or indirectly be harshly judged or even condemned. Abraham and Torok (1994) write that those who carry crypts “have no other choice but to perpetuate a clandestine pleasure by transforming [their pleasure]...into an intrapsychic secret” (p. 131). The presence and pleasure of this psychic secret can create an internal silence or resistance of signification or symbolization, blocking “the active expansion of our potential to open onto our own emerging desires and feelings of the external world” (p.100).

In the experience of long-term analysis, through the articulation of fantasy through the transference, Abraham and Torok describe how a “cryptonomic analysis” can “reveal the processes that inhibit the emergence of signification” (p. 104). Torok describes in a 1959 essay that “it is as if a patient had said, ‘I know I can communicate my fantasy to you–a fantasy that is actually produced for you–because you are not going to push me over the cliffs of my conflicts. On the contrary, you will help me resolve them” (Abraham & Torok, 1994, p. 36). Fantasy, she continues, is “expressive of an attempt at working through a problem and is combined with a desire for collaboration” (p. 36). Unlike the sometimes slow-moving unveiling involved in analytic practice, this communication can happen pretty quickly in Jessie’s work. Jessie tells me that she believes the archetypal roles she inhabits as a sex worker do activate and uncover, at times, some previously unlanguaged wounds. While it is beyond the scope of her work to resolve her clients’ conflicts, she described to me how when she does feel this push from a client, she has sought collaboration with therapists and even referred her clients to therapists. As such, she also plays with the balance and edge of the cliff while not pushing them over.

In an unexpected expansion of the interview protocol I intended when beginning this project, Jessie also referred me to speak to a therapist who has referred a client to her. This therapist, whom I’ll call Ann, found Jessie while looking for resources for a client who had limited sexual experiences. Ann’s client went on multiple dates with Jessie and spoke to Ann about some of the details of his experiences. Ann noticed, over time, changes in this client and the way he related to others in the world, signifying and verbalizing not only his sexual desires but other things he needed and wanted. Ann believes these changes could not have happened in their work together if it were not for his dates with Jessie and said she wished that as easily as she makes referrals to a psychiatrist, another therapist, or a personal trainer, she would like to make referrals to sex workers just as easily. “I can’t provide what a sex worker does…and there needs to be someone–and there is–someone who can.”

In their ongoing collaboration, Jessie and Ann continue to navigate turns in their work with this client and, in a contemporary context, facilitate a new kind of cryptonomic analysis through coordination of care that provides space for fantasy and becoming. Ann says she does not inquire into her client’s ex- periences with Jessie but instead gives him a place and space to speak about what exceeds his dates. “It’s such a tender space to be,” Ann said, “to have one other person who knows what you feel, your deepest, darkest secret or whatever it is.” These cryptonomic analyses, however, cannot be unlocked if the somatic knowledges of sex workers are neglected or considered to be in a wholly different order than psychoanalytic free speech.

References

Abraham, N. & Torok, M. (1994). The shell and the kernel, volume 1. (N. T. Rand, Ed. & Trans.). University of Chicago Press.

Contributor

Celeste Pietrusza, Ph.D is an analytically-informed psychotherapist in private practice in New York and California.  She works in conjunction with the Greene Clinic in Brooklyn.  For Celeste, writing, like clinical work, is not possible without community.  She thanks Nat Newton for their encouragement and support on this essay and the editors of this issue, Roula Hajjar and Safia Albaiti, for the invitation to contribute and suggestions along the way.