By Robert Coles | New Oxford Review |

In our time lust is far from a secret or hidden part of ourselves; rather, it is an everyday and evident companion, ever ready to connect with us — urged on us in advertisements, on talk shows, in the movies and on television: sexuality and sensuality and desire — the last for sex, of course, but also for all that has been sexualized, and that is a whole lot (our clothes, our cars, our food, for starters). But by lust I mean, here, no ordinary impulse or wish, no commonplace fantasy or daydream that has to do with a person, usually, or a place or a thing. The issue is intensity, fixity — how much of one’s life is given over to a particular concern. These days, the word “obsessional” gets used — a constancy, a tenacity of thought, of passion, to the point that the rest of our thinking life, and maybe our doing life, gets diminished.

Sin, in general, has to do with violation — a transgression that puts one at a remove, morally and spiritually, from God, as He is revealed to us, step by step, in the Bible, and afterwards through the religious life that has been an important part of our churchgoing history. It is not easy, in these last years of the 20th century, to talk about sin with the college students I teach, or with many doctors, psychiatrists. If I talk about sex, about obsessions, I am heard. If I talk, even, about the violation that an obsession can cause in someone, I’ll also be heard, though such violation is not the kind I just mentioned a few sentences back — rather, the reference has to do with “impaired psychological function,” with “diminished psychic energy” for other aspects of a life so heavily burdened by one or another fixation or fetish or, to use today’s pleasant vernacular, hang-up. Yet in our own secular manner, sometimes awkwardly and ponderously, courtesy of the technical language of psychology and psychiatry, sometimes more vividly, arrestingly, as in “hang-up,” we seem to know what the saints, the church Fathers, the theologians, the ordinary people of faith have known all along, that the assertion of any appetite is not be confused with the domination of a life by that same appetite. In our own way, too, we make our judgments — though of course (and alas) without resort to any divine order, any mention of God, of sin. We summon the language of the social sciences, usually, words far from objective or merely descriptive; rather, we make normative use of phrases, such as “primitive defenses,” “acting out,” or “borderline behavior,” “impulsive character structure,” “dysfunctional” — a manner of condemnation, or maybe a way for us to express our moral alarm, our very human worry and misgivings, without of course venturing into religious territory.

Yet those words and phrases often don’t work for us, even for us psychiatrists, and those who are all too eager to listen to us. We become aware of someone whose lusts have brought obvious ruin to others and we want more than the cool, slippery language of psychology or sociology to be spoken — we crave an outright judgment, though we may not be sure what particular moral code to call upon as a help in doing so. No wonder the late Karl Menninger asked wryly and plaintively, urgently and bravely, in a title he gave to one of his last books: “Whatever Became of Sin?” He was, thereby, reminding us that somehow a stand has to be taken with respect to certain kinds of human behavior — no small challenge to the moral and cultural relativists among us, for whom a yes is anyone’s prerogative, and a no is — well, just that, only that. For Menninger, no has to be grounded in something more than an individual’s decision — in laws, one quickly adds, though laws can be readily changed, challenged, overruled. Sin, in contrast, has to do with divine laws — and here was a well-known psychiatrist, from the American heartland of Kansas, wondering with some regret, some yearning, about the disappearance of sin as a credible notion for many of us so-called educated ones.

Since Dr. Menninger’s death (in 1990) things have only become worse. Lusts now are a mainstay of our talk shows — publicly discussed with no apparent embarrassment, let alone shame. Indeed, the ones who tell us of their various lusts, as they get expressed (and expressed and expressed), are applauded, admired, or referred to some so-called “therapist,” who may even be employed by the television show that has presented the lustful one to an audience of presumably entranced, rather than horrified or scandalized, viewers (and the payoff, the raison d’être of the whole business: Those viewers will soon enough be lusting after, then purchasing, whatever is being advertised in between the declarations of craziness and perversity which now, one suspects, fail to raise an eyebrow, even, in millions of us).

Lord forbid that those talk shows be regarded as sinful, that those who appear on them, not to mention the men or women, the circus trainers, who run them (“talk show hosts”) be regarded as sinners. I sometimes wonder what Dr. Menninger, whom I was privileged to know, would make of all that — the frantic search for more and more bizarre kinds of passion and lust, which are fed us (in movies, on daily television soaps, as well as the talk shows) as a matter of course: Here you are, folks, here is something to nod at, to find “interesting,” that dreary word, so carefully free of even a hint of judgment. As Dostoevsky, among others, kept reminding us, and especially in the Grand Inquisitor scene of The Brothers Karamazov, when people regard God as dead, anything and everything soon enough becomes permissible (protected by this or that amendment); becomes called, in tic-like incantation, “interesting,” or is merely frowned upon, called worthy of psychiatric attention. “I have noticed in recent years,” Anna Freud once remarked, “that the Super-Ego [the conscience] that my father took for granted is no longer the great power and authority in our patients that it used to be.” She was remembering the old days, when giant consciences did indeed drive some people to considerable distraction. Now, such consciences have become less and less influential, as we hem and haw with ourselves, never mind our children, as to what is off-base, wide of the mark and why — ever so fearful (God forbid!) of calling something wrong, unequivocally, and further, worthy of vigorous, explicit public condemnation.

What kind of conduct, if any, is to be considered beyond the pale, and why? Are any taboos defensible, even possible, these days, when incest, when every imaginable kind of sexuality, is the stuff of day-time television — granted, thereby, access to everyone’s home? In a third-grade classroom where I have taught as a volunteer in recent years, I have heard eight-year-old boys and girls talk about incest casually — an offhand response, on their part, to what they heard on Oprah or Geraldo. Those youngsters laugh and tease one another as they do so — and I am grateful, I realize, for the slightest evidence of nervousness, of embarrassment. But none of these children is shocked, outraged — or surprised and perplexed. It is as if they have grown up to expect intense, insistent, unrelenting desire — desire that won’t take no for an answer — to be around any and every corner, and that’s that. For them, in a ghetto, even the desire to kill is something one accepts as a daily event. The rest of us stop there, maybe only there, so far. We abhor “violence,” want more and more police and prisons to protect us from it. Yet, most violence takes place not on the street, but within our homes — is inflicted by one person in a family upon another, and is in some way connected to lust, to the jealousies and envies and rivalries, to the roar and rage of a frustrated or disappointed or threatened or abandoned love. Then there are our driving habits, speaking of violence: the fast cars we crave, the high speeds we seek, the murderous consequences of a lust to overcome time and space at anyone’s expense, a lust that smacks of the highest order of hubris, one the ancient Greeks, surely, would regard with far greater alarm than that of sexual prurience.

Lust enacted is obviously a letting go of restraint, of self-control — or maybe, in our time, it is a letting out, publicly, a display of what is humanly possible in the absence of the social and cultural restraints that can become familiar ones in millions of homes. Freud wrote of “polymorphous perversity,” the rampant impulsivity that children possess — soon enough, he observed, brought under wraps in what gets called a boy’s, a girl’s “socialization”: tender love mixed with firm moments of prohibition, the latter increasingly explained as the child increasingly can comprehend, but in no way weakened, undermined.

Now, many of us say we are not sure what is right and what is wrong; that we can see how others might advocate or practice what we don’t happen to find (again!) “interesting,” desirable; that the French aphorism tout comprendre, tout pardoner very much holds, aided and abetted by modern social science; that God is dead, or is someone’s private notion, and certainly has no place in our schools, our public places, only on our currency; that teachers and doctors and lawyers ought be “value-free” or “neutral” as they do their work since of course each person has his or her values; that if there is a common ground for values, it is to be determined by someone’s poll, and certainly not from on high (by custom, never mind legally or spiritually). So it goes, and here we are, to draw upon the ancient Greeks again, in a world where “whirl is king,” the moral whirl for which we congratulate ourselves with the attribution of “modern knowledge”: lust is everyone’s to have, to speak of, to realize expressively — the whole universe our living prey, and damn the consequences (for surely there are no sinners to be damned). — 1995

Robert Coles (born October 12, 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University. He is a contributing editor at New Oxford Review.