La evaluación de las intervenciones desde la perspectiva cuantitativa

The

Kamasutra

can be viewed as an account of a psychological war of independence that took place in India some two thousand years ago.

The first aim of this struggle was the rescue of erotic pleasure from the crude purposefulness of sexual desire, from its biological func­

tion of reproduction alone. The first European translators of the

Kamasutra

in the late nineteenth century, clearly on the side of sexual pleasure in a society where the reigning Christian morality sought to subordinate, if not altogether eradicate it in service of a divinely ordained reproductive goal, regarded the ancient Sanskrit text, devoted to the god of love without even a nod to the divinities who preside over fertility and birth, as a welcome ally. To them, the

Kamasutra

was the product of a place and people who had raised the search for sexual pleasure to the status of a religious quest.

Lamairesse, the French translator, even called it a 'Theologie Hin­

doue' that revealed vital truths regarding man's fundamental, sexual nature. Richard Schmidt, the German translator, would wax lyrical:

'The burning heat of the Indian sun, the fabulous luxuriance of the vegetation, the enchanted poetry of moonlit nights permeated by the perfume oflotus flowers and, not least, the distinctive role the Indian people have always played, the role of unworldly dreamers, philo­

sophers, impractical romantics-all combine to make the Indian a real virtuoso in love. '51

Vatsyayana and other ancient Indian sexologists can certainly be viewed as flag bearers for sexual pleasure in an era where the sombre Buddhist view of life which equated the god of love with Mara or Death was still influential. But they were also inheritors of another world-view, that of the Sanskrit epics, the

Mahabharata

and

Rama­

yana,

in which sexual love is usually a straightforward matter of desire and its gratification. This was especially so for the man, for

;J Richard Schmidt, Beitriige zur lndischen Erotik, 1. Translation by Sudhir Kakar.

xl

Introduction

whom a woman was an instrument of pleasure and an object of the senses

(indriyartha),

one physical need among many others. There is an idealization of marriage in the epics, yes, but chiefly as a social and religious act. The obligation of conjugal love and the virtue of chastity within marriage were primarily demanded of the wife, while few limits were set on a husband who lived under and looked up at a licentious heaven teeming with lusty gods and heavenly whores, otherworldly and utterly desirable at once, and most eager to give and take pleasure. The Hindu pantheon of the epics was not unlike the Greek Olympus where gods and goddesses sport and politic with a welcome absence of moralistic subterfuge.

Vatsyayana and the early sexologists were thus also heirs to a patrimony where sexual desire ran rampant, unchecked by moral constraints. Indeed, Shvetaketu Auddalaki, one of the legendary composers of the first textbooks on sex, was credited with trying to put an end to unbridled sexual coupling and a certain profligacy in relation to intercourse with married women which is so prominent in the

Mahabharata.

Prior to Shvetaketu's treatise, both married and unmarried women were viewed as items for indiscriminate con­

sumption, 'like cooked rice', Yashodhara tells us [I. 1 .9]. Shvetaketu was the first to make the novel suggestion that men should not generally sleep with the wives of other men.

In addition to rescuing erotic pleasure from the confining morality of fertility and reproduction, the

Kamasutra's

'freedom struggle' also had a second aim. This was to find a haven for the erotic from the ferocity of unchecked sexual desire. For desire has an open, lustful intent, imperiously and precipitously seeking satisfaction for its own sake, a tidal rush of gut instinct. Human beings have always sensed that sexual desire may also have other aims besides the keen pleasure of genital intercourse and orgasm. For instance, the sexual fantasies of men and women are often coloured with the darker purposes of destructive aggression. 52 Without an imagined violence, however minimal, attenuated, and distant from awareness, many men fail to be gripped by powerful sexual excitement; aggressiveness towards the woman is as much a factor in their potency as are their loving feelings. One of the major fantasies of such men is of taking by force that which is not easily given; some imagine the woman not

52 Jean-Paul Sartrc, Being a11d Nothingness, part iii.

wishing to participate in the sexual experience but then being carried away by the man's forcefulness despite herself We find a variant of this 'possession fantasy' in classical Sanskrit love poetry composed about the time of the

Kamasutra,

with its predilection for love scenes where the woman trembles in a state of diffuse but nongenital bodily excitement as if timorously anticipating an attack, her terror a source of excitement for both herself and her would-be assailant. In the eighth canto of Kalidasa's

Kumarasambhava,

a masterpiece of erotic poetry also roughly contemporaneous with the

Kamasutra,

Shiva's excitement reached a crescendo when Parvati 'in the beginning felt both fear and love'. ⁵³

In women, the counterpart of violent possession, encompassing the woman's urge to attract, entrap, and control the male, is rarely expressed in the same way as in men, namely in conscious or unconscious fantasies of conquest, ravishment and mastery. Whereas one of men's violent fantasies is of penetrating the woman, in wom­

en's imagination the insertion of the penis into the vagina may become not only a loving acceptance but a seizure, for some even a wrenching off of the lover's organ, to be retained inside her as a victor's trophy. ⁵⁺ The male version of this fantasy appears in an attenuated form in the

Kamasutra's

warning that certain positions 'must allow a way for the man to slide back' [2.6.g], because, as the commentator cautions, 'If he moves inside her too roughly, she can be injured, and the man's foreskin can be torn off, which physicians call "ruptured foreskin".' It is more strongly expressed in the description of the position known as the 'mare's trap', in which she grasps him, like a mare, so tightly that he cannot move [2.6.2 1].

To fulfil its aim as an authentic textbook of eroticism, the

Kama­

sutra

could not gloss over the possessive violence of sexual desire. In its chapters on biting, scratching, and slapping, we again encounter the darker purposes of sexual desire, which, Vatsyayana admits, is combative by its very nature. His effort, though, is to civilize the violence of sex, ritualize the cruelty of intercourse. By giving examples of serious injury caused to women, he warns against the danger of playful violence in sex slipping into murderous cruelty.

Sexual desire, then, in which the body's wanting and violence, the excitement of orgasm and the exultation of possession, all flow

;, Kalidasa, Kumarasambhava, 8. 1 .

;., Kakar and Ross, Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, 198--9.

In document Sistematización y evaluación de una intervención familiar con adolescentes con comportamientos problemáticos (página 81-89)