1 - On Borges’s Sexuality

Summary

In this chapter I give an overview of what is known about Borges's personality and sexuality. Its purpose is to substantiate his experiences and establish a relationship between them and the preoccupations that reverberate through his readings and writings. Although most of the facts shown are already known, here I bring them together and I reorder them following the results of new research on stuttering, on male sexual impotence, and on incest, which have made it possible to rethink some of the facts and events in Borges's life.

Stuttering and Sexual Impotence

Perhaps the place to start is to remember that Borges stuttered. Although his speech problems have been noted by students of his life and literature, they have rarely been linked to other aspects of his personal experience, such as his social relations or sexuality. Yet, psychoanalyst Dr Miguel Kohan Miller, who treated Borges in the 1940s, said that “el enfermo que sufre de … una inhibición para hablar … por lo general sufre de varias inhibiciones,” and that “la impotencia sexual de Borges … era una forma de impotencia general”; thus, he explained, his therapy aimed at helping Borges with both his “impotencia verbal” and his “impotencia sexual.”

Recent research in speech pathology has also identified a relationship between stuttering and social anxiety disorder. Many adults who stutter are “characterized by increased fear of negative evaluation and anxiety in socially evaluative or new/strange situations.” People afflicted by this condition usually suffer anticipatory anxiety in speaking situations and fear embarrassing themselves in public speaking and when they meet new people; they also have heightened anxieties regarding the expectations of others and exhibit poorer emotional functioning. According to these studies, stutterers with social anxiety typically experience teasing and bullying in school, they become educational and occupational underachievers, they have a hard time becoming financially independent, possess low self-esteem, tend to evaluate mildly negative social events in a catastrophic fashion, and experience physiological arousal (such as sweating and shaking) in social situations; sometimes they also entertain suicidal thoughts.

It is possible to match these research findings with Borges's personality traits, behavior, and even certain events in his life, although we should not expect the evidence found in interviews, literary texts, documents, and other such papers to be formulated in the clinical reasoning and language of the research referred to above.