Is Benjamin a sex addict? The young listener, 27, soon to be 28, wonders: sexually very active before confinement, he has had no intercourse for a month and a half now. A forced diet which will end in two weeks with the lifting of the first restrictions, but Benjamin is afraid: will he be able to avoid falling back into the chain of stories without a future after May 11? In the show Without appointment on Europe 1, Wednesday afternoon, the sexologist and psychoanalyst Catherine Blanc answers him.
Benjamin's question, 27
"Before confinement, I had a very active sex life, I used to chain up one night's plans. Currently, I have no sexual intercourse but I manage rather well. do you have some advice to avoid that from May 11, this starts again more beautiful, even worse? "
Catherine Blanc's response
"Benjamin manages to manage this lack and it is extraordinary: upstream of this confinement, he would not have imagined that it could be possible. There was a kind of sexual bulimia, with blows of an evening without taking the time to measure each of these meetings. Sexuality for sexuality, the other being the object of this excitement and this sexuality.
The confinement coming, a week, two weeks, a month ... Life goes pretty well, that does not mean that the subject of sexuality has disappeared but now, it is his concern after the confinement that everything becomes again as before or even worst. This means that this front was not satisfactory: it was a bulimic before, not necessarily comfortable, there was an excitement but not necessarily of outcome as a man. He is experiencing withdrawal and frustration. He waits and sees that everything is going well, that we don't die from it. Rather, it is very good news.
So he's not that addicted, is he?
It is almost an idea that he makes himself addicted, as if it gave him a social function, identification, reduction. Suddenly, the field of possibilities opens up to try to bring out something else, by trying to make sexuality something other than a perpetual claim, but an opportunity for self-discovery, in the link to the other, and on the other, regardless of sexuality. It can be a real opportunity to re-envision sexuality and desire and to understand what it is: is it really sexual desire or is it something else that is active?
Isn't Benjamin likely to want to "make up for lost time"?
Making up for lost time is a bit like if the day the restaurants reopened, we ate four or five meals a day to make up for it. What is lost is lost. What we will have learned is a tremendous learning: the idea that we would have to make up for a sexuality that we did not have, would be to think that we would have reservations. And it would be to disgust the days when in a bulimic impulse we would be in a consumption without any measure.
We did not get lost during confinement on the pretext that we stopped a time of sexuality. On the other hand, one can profit from it by reopening the possible links in serenity, one can measure the taste if only to touch the other. This will be the first question: can we do it? We will have to take stock of all these pleasures that we may have forgotten about on the pretext of the urgency of penetration and reduced sexuality in our genitals. "