Personal reflections on running, psychoanalysis, and sexual disinterest

CHAPTER 3: TRANSMOGRIFICATIONS OF ENERGIES After several of months of running, 12 miles most days, | felt an energetically calm, self-containment and a growing loss of interest in things sexual. My increasingly impoverished fantasy life led my training psychoanalyst to suggest that | was running away from the critical, females issues of my psychoanalysis. He said | was becoming more out of reach as | became more socially pleasant. This was decades before Prozac, Paxil and other serotonin reuptake inhibitors were inducing similar hyposexual, withdrawn states of cordiality in millions of Americans. Recall that Norman Geschwind, the Harvard Professor of Neurology, reported similar conditions of high energy sexual disinterest and abstract metaphysical preoccupation in patients with right temporal lobe epilepsy. For reasons other than the loss of church property rights and the spread of syphilis to the clergy, it felt like | was being readied for Pope Gregory VII’s Eleventh Century celibacy reforms for abbots and clerics of the Catholic Church. It was true that my feelings of dependence on my analyst for understanding and approval were being reduced as | ran into less emotional involvement. | was becoming a more rationally objective observer of others and myself. It wasn’t the first time that my over-ardent practice led to this warning. Baba Muktanada, my Hindi guru, told me to reduce my daily sitting time of meditation. He said my spacey 42 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013542