In Session 14: Talk Dirty To Me
The Lay Psychiatrist helps a couple negotiate explicit language
‘Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.” (William Blake, the Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
Journal of the Lay Psychiatrist, March 8, 2022 It hasn’t been that wise to talk about the source of neurosis as the strictures around the sacrum (sacred bone), which is the balance point of the body. Wilhelm Reich ended up ruined and imprisoned for advocating full orgasm as a cure for neurosis. Sexual misconduct wasn’t charged. They made his orgone accumulators fraudulent and then they got him on violating an injunction after he sent a part for one to somebody in a different state. He was one of Freud’s proteges, and a prominent psychiatrist. He died in jail.
On August 23, six tons of Reich’s books, journals and papers were burned in New York, at the Gansevoort incinerator, a public incinerator on 25th Street. The material included copies of several of his books, including The Sexual Revolution, Character Analysis, and The Mass Psychology of Fascism. Although these had been published in German before Reich ever discussed orgone, he had added mention of it to the English editions, so they were caught by the injunction. (Wikipedia)
Mrs. Peet and her husband arrived early
They were in the doorway when I looked up. “I’ve become absorbed in my thoughts and lost track of time,” I said, but the barb was lost on Mrs. Peet, who was coming straight for me. “Mister and Missus Peet?” I asked, but that barb was lost on her as well. “Missus and Mister,” she said, glancing back at the husband she’d left to his own devices. He looked like a golf pro in the kelly green knit shirt and khakis. The pot belly looked out of place. Too much cortisol. Something was stressing him out and my first guess was his marriage. He raised his right hand chest high and it quivered in what was intended as a greeting, then he looked around, spotted the yellow chair and went for it. Mrs. Peet was dressed in a tailored dark blue suit, one of those that you don’t have to know much about fabric to know it’s expensive, and she moved with cool confidence, putting her slender hand into my big maw and trying to do a firm handshake.
“Do you have a name other than Layman?” she asked.
I told her it was my daddy’s name and his daddy’s name, which is bullshit but she seemed pushy and that put me off. I felt the satisfying increase of distance between us as I lied. Then she smiled at me and it was like a trip switch. I felt like a dog that forgets what was the matter as soon as you feed him. “Maybe you should sit down and we can sort out the problem,” I said. “You told me on the phone that your husband is trying to make you use common slang during foreplay.” “Common does not describe it, Layman,” she said. “It’s vulgar language by any standard of decency. Last night he wanted me to say, pussy.” “What do you normally say, the name, I mean, for your …” She smiled at me again and I got another jolt. A real eros woman. She turned to survey the room, then crossed in front of Mr. Peet, very close, settling into one of the red leather chairs. Mr. Peet almost inaudibly moaned. It could have been digestive but I think he wants something from her he won’t ever get.
Mrs. Peet sat primly, staying alert.
“As to your question about the name of my mound of Venus,” she said, “If I have to refer to her by name I call her just that, Venus, like my mother did and her mother before her.” She winked. “Pussy is vulgar and disrespectful. I think because of the hard P. It might be more acceptable with the stress on a different syllable.” “There are just two syllables,” I pointed out, “so it would have to be the French word, poussé, meaning grow, or sprout, or shoot.” “I am fluent in French,” Mrs. Peet said. “I’m from Quebec. I can talk about my pretty poussé if that’s good enough for Mr. Peet.” I turned toward her husband.
“Mr. Peet, does that sound like an agreeable compromise, if Mrs. Peet calls her pussy, poussé?”
“That’s stupid,” he said. “I want some earth in the woman, goddamnit, not more air.” “Tell him the disgusting ways you initiate sex,” she said, and when he didn’t reply she reminded him. “‘I want to snake your drain?’ Is that supposed to put me I the mood? ‘Dr. Johnson wants to do a proctology exam?’ Why do you talk like that? I want to be treated with respect and dignity.”
Mr. Peet raised just one eyebrow. A remarkable talent, surpassed only by wiggling the ears on cue.
“Why do you want your wife to use vulgar language?” I asked him. “Why? Because there’s energy there. She’s never used any of it. She pronounces naked with one syllable, like it rhymes snaked. So we continue this nonsense by making pussy poussé? I don’t think so. Talking dirty is fun and if she’d try it she’d see what I mean.” I turned to Mrs. Peet. “Mrs. Peet, do you hear what your husband is saying? Are you willing to try it, so that you aren’t just dismissing out of hand that Mr. Peet might be right? That there is an erotic charge in it letting pussy be pussy?” “All right,” she said. “I’ll say it in French.” She turned to Mr. Peet and said, “Venez dîner au chatte.” Mr. Peet looked at me and slowly turned up his palms in a gesture of incomprehension. “I don’t know French,” he said. “Get back to me when you do know it,” Mrs. Peet said. “I think we are going to leave it there,” I said. “The hour, she is up.”
(For extended coverage on orgasm check out In Session 5)