Arch Sex Behav (2010) 39:213–215 DOI 10.1007/s10508-009-9549-8
LETTER TO THE EDITOR
(Self-)Abusive Prophecies, Rigorous Science, and Discursive Templates: Commentary on Malo´n (2009) Diederik F. Janssen
Published online: 26 September 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2009
In his article entitled ‘‘Onanism and Child Sexual Abuse,’’ Malo´n (2009) proposes a comparative-historical and constructivist reading of two etiological plots, with a prospect of identifying the latter in terms of scientific ‘‘fallacy,’’ theoretical ‘‘hegemony’’ and ‘‘incoherence,’’ ‘‘invasive’’ properties of hypotheses, and the reign of ‘‘apocalyptic,’’ ‘‘hysterical,’’ and ‘‘irrational’’ views. Malo´n’s key objection is that the historical trajectories of both plots partake in ‘‘the same errors and excesses’’ that, ultimately, inform a general ‘‘Western’’ containment of eroticism. Although contending that we are ‘‘completely immersed’’ in a ‘‘social hysteria,’’ Malo´n’s critique works in the direction of a revisionist etiology that liberates sexual experience from its tendentious evaluation. Malo´n should be congratulated both for engaging in this late modern quagmire and for his focus on interpretative practices. Interpretative practices, Malo´n convincingly suggests, constitute the core substrate of both Onanism and child sexual abuse (CSA), requiring a situating of both notions in various programmatic frameworks. Indeed, the fundamental conundrum of the age-intimacy nexus in Western psychological theories of trauma, from Freud’s seduction via Ferenczi’s confusion of tongues to Laplanche’s (Lacanian) enigmatic signifiers, is what a ‘‘sex’’ act can be said to signify. There is reason to pause, however, when facing deconstructive approaches to science that remain within the domain of scientific ambition, including Malo´n’s, Money’s, and Rind’s (both as cited by Malo´n) among others. The ‘‘condemnation’’ of Rind’s meta-analytic work on the subject a decade ago, chronicled by Malo´n, warned that whereas CSA in the U.S. is importantly ‘‘about science,’’ it is at the same time placed
D. F. Janssen (&) Berg & Dalseweg 209/60, Nijmegen 6522 BK, The Netherlands e-mail:
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outside a dialectic model of controversy.1 An insistence on ‘‘objectivity […] precision, rigor and coherence,’’ accordingly, may be mistaking the nature of the beast. What seems to be needed is a sociology of science, not a scientific sociology. Deconstructive and critical approaches to psychopathology (e.g., Parker, 2002; Parker, Georgaca, Harper, McLaughlin, & Stowell-Smith, 1995) ideally reach beyond an insistence on scientific rigor; indeed, this line of inquiry seems most productive if identifying ‘‘clinical consensus’’ as a constitutive force within specific discursive constellations (feminist research or the forensic apparatus, for instance) and as it relates to overarching theoretical projections, such as ‘‘morality’’ and ‘‘culture.’’ Genealogical similarity between Onanism and CSA as historical etiologies, as sketched by Malo´n, may pertain to a general template of biomedical discourse formation, but it does not necessarily point to a continuity in semantic function, that is to say, in discursive instrumentality. I think this is relevant: if a critique of sexological consensus is to be transformative, it may have to read the technologies of representation against the semantic contingencies that police the direction of the debate. Foucault (2003) at this point has famously proposed an importantly incomplete transition from a ‘‘symbolics of blood’’ to an ‘‘analytics ofsexuality,’’ encoding a (correspondingly incomplete) movement from ‘‘fallen girls’’ to ‘‘abuse survivors,’’ from ‘‘respectability’’ to ‘‘int