The multiple aspects that involve sexuality (biology, psychiatry, economics, sociology, politics) serve Luigi Zoja to study the causes that have led to “The loss of desire.” (Fund of Economic Culture). The Italian Zoja, psychoanalyst of international prestige, has published, among other texts, “Paranoia, the madness that makes history”, “Death of others” and “Héctor’s gesture”. During his visit to our country we spoke with him.
Luigi Zoja: The information on the decline in sexual relations and the impact on demographic decline in developed countries, for example in Italy and Spain, where there is a marked population decline. There are couples without children or who have only one. In Italy we are below the necessary forty percent of births. I asked myself: What led to the loss of interest in the most intimate activity of human behavior, something that last century had uninterrupted success? Why is it that from permanent growth it started to decrease? Why does this change coincide with the turn of the millennium? Added to this was the realization that the majority of my psychoanalytic colleagues had not been interested in what an American newspaper headlined “The Sex Recession.” I assumed that it was due to his interest focused on the individual. His experience arises from dealing with evolved people, with a good cultural level and open training in sexual matters. Perhaps that prevented them from registering that the world of transformations, marked by liberating and humanistic aspects, such as the psychoanalytic revolution, is now different due to the changes carried out by right-wing and populism. From there I sought to follow the paths developed by a culture that, after having spread, could have entered into decline.
LZ: Sexuality, which was the great protagonist of the 20th century, due to a growing number of indications, could be heading towards its dissolution. Not only as a practice but even as a topic. In the last century, sexuality was one of the indicators that signaled progress towards a society open to a desirable human coexistence. Society that could begin after the eclipse of fascism and communism. Gradually, sexuality and eroticism were freed from pre-modern constraints, undemocratic laws and religious taboos. Freedoms that in some cases were driven by social demands and in others by commercial interests. But even with all the advances achieved, a fully free society was not achieved, which is one in which its members exercise freedom in accordance with laws and customs. During the last decades insecurities grew, unexpected restrictions arose, a “negative freedom” was installed that among other manifestations endorses the loss of respect, and old political and social fears began to emerge. Added to this was a virtual world for which we had not been educated. It is for all this that today people have more fears than in previous times.
Q.: After the sexual liberation of the 60s, the disappearance of taboos and prohibitions, what fears do you have about the loss of desire?
LZ: Today there are infinite “prefigurations” of sexual desire, which do not come from our interior, from the intimacy of our person, from what we call eros, eroticism, but are manufactured by the market or by the pressure of certain groups. There is talk of freedom, but we should begin by differentiating, as Isaiah Berlin did, between “positive freedom,” which opens the world, and “negative freedom,” which has to do with consumption and ultimately enslaves. When today we talk about total sexual freedom, these are just words; in reality, this is often experienced as a captivity within one’s own body and its functions, something that can dissolve the foundations of erotic life.
Q: Does this point out the problems caused by the digital dissemination of pornography?
LZ: Digital porn is rude. It postpones the first sexual experiences in adolescents, the discovery of bodies, or stimulates them, leading them to have, in comparison to what is observed, an experience of failure. My wife, who is a child and adolescent psychoanalyst, had the case of a boy under ten years old addicted to pornography. Her parents had given her a cell phone and older boys had taught her how to watch porn. He was mentally unwell, he was totally confused, he had ruined his adult sexuality, since pornography is the substitute for sexuality, now he would need years of therapy. In young people, pornography tends to produce a reduction in fantasy and the creation of internal images that feed desire. Before, pornography imitated sexual activity, since the arrival of networks, sexual activity tends to imitate pornography.
Q: Why did you add information from art to sociology, psychiatry, economics and law?
LZ: To understand human sexuality in the 21st century I had to open many lines of argument and was able to close few. I started thinking about facing psychological and even cultural issues, and I found social, global issues, with previously non-existent biological alterations that may be influencing sexuality and infertility, I observed that love is made less, with less conviction, less passion, more indifference and boredom.
Q: What are you writing now?
LZ: I have finished a book that took me nine years about “The Stories of Italy.” I started it when I discovered the various ways Italy is described in the world. It is the country that has the greatest number of narratives and about which the least has been said, either only details or a cursory generality. Italy has had different stories that it seeks to recover. There is Italy’s story of the monarchy. That of fascism. That of the Catholic Church. And there are, perhaps for that very reason, many stories that were separated.
