Egon Schiele was a controversial figure from the start, what some might now consider an ‘art monster’. Charged variously with ‘public immorality’, kidnapping and rape, he welcomed teenage boys and girls to his art studio outside Vienna, and maintained a relationship with a then-13-year-old Tatjana Georgette Anna von Mossig. (There were sociopolitical aspects at play in Schiele’s arrest and only the public immorality charge stuck, for which he spent about three weeks in prison.)
Around the time that Schiele was painting, Sigmund Freud was at work on his essay ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), in which he laid out the push and pull between what would later be termed Eros (the life instinct, often characterised by libido) and Thanatos (the death instinct). Schiele’s sinewy depictions of prepubescent boys and girls often display pubic hair, splayed vaginas and hard erections. But a particular hallmark of Schiele’s figures – and much of what adds to his controversy and their unsettling nature – are their regularly vacant, corpse-like eyes.
In Two Reclining Nudes (1911), two female figures lie on what appears to be a magenta-and-black divan but could just as easily be a casket. The girl in the background gazes out of the frame; the girl in the foreground lies flat and has one eye that seems to have spun in its socket making her appear like a lifeless doll. What might be blush under her eyes looks eerily like a bruise. Both of these girls are nude, their psychological states disassociated, one appearing near-dead.
Two Reclining Nudes (1911) by Egon Schiele. Courtesy the Met Museum, New York
Many of Schiele’s paintings are shot through with a prescience about death, rare for a person in his 20s. Drawing from the art-historical tradition of memento mori, Schiele upended the typical symbol of a compellingly placed skull – as seen in Hans Holbein’s ‘The Ambassadors’ (1533) – and instead portrayed anguish, ecstasy and a closeness to death. Sometimes he made his thematic considerations explicit, writing a poem called ‘A Self-Portrait’ (1910) that ends with: ‘I AM HUMAN, I LOVE/ DEATH AND LOVE/ LIFE.’ For both Schiele and Freud, death is orgiastic, inevitable, tied inexorably to eroticism.
Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve (‘The Ambassadors’) (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger. Courtesy the National Gallery, London
The theory of Eros and Thanatos may have been originally proposed by the Russian physician Sabina Spielrein (a friend of Freud and Carl Jung), about a decade before Freud published ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’. Undergirded by his clinical observations, Freud’s version rose to prominence. In his therapy sessions, Freud saw patients compulsively return to trauma, often in their dreams, and concluded that most people are drawn inescapably towards their own deaths – that is, Thanatos. Eros, or the drive towards pleasure and life, could be seen in the reverse, in the intensity of libido and other ‘life-sustaining’ pursuits.
The complex relationship between Eros and Thanatos is foundational to Western cultural output – and, in Freud’s wake, the basis of significant empirical studies in psychology. Though the concepts exist as opposite sides of a spectrum, in their collision one finds some of life’s most clarifying and intense moments.
J G Ballard’s novel Crash (1973), for instance, explores the eroticism of near-death experiences as a way to confront the fundamental loneliness of modernity and its technologies (symbolised here by the automobile). The sexual energy of the characters’ desire to stage and get into car crashes that are inspired by those involving celebrities points towards the obvious – death – and towards transcendence by way of fetishisation (here, a form of facing down death).
Is sex made grotesque, even absurd, by death’s presence, as in some of Schiele’s work?
Julian Barnes’s novel The Sense of an Ending (2011), which centres on a Cambridge student’s death by suicide and the narrator’s remembrance and misremembrance of their friendship, is likewise coloured by the horseshoe of Eros and Thanatos – the ways in which the spectrum on which they reside bends and, in touching, explodes. Unable to see his friend’s death as anything but a reflection of his hyperintelligence (that is, romantic), the narrator’s understanding is clarified only at the novel’s end when he learns that his friend likely killed himself after having impregnated his girlfriend’s mother who gave birth to a disabled son.
Neither Ballard nor Barnes nor Schiele provide easy takeaways about the nature of sex and death, Eros and Thanatos; rather, each uniquely shows the ways in which their friction is foundational to the messiness of life. When facing death or loss, it’s not immediately clear what eroticism can do. Can the cocktail of death and sex act as a salve, a kind of radical liberation, as in Crash? Is sex made grotesque, even absurd, by death’s presence, as in some of Schiele’s work? Or does sex march us towards death, as one might infer from The Sense of an Ending? All of this is provocative. Most of it is beyond polite discussion.
There is a longstanding cultural desire to keep death and sex separate. Consider the traditional isolation expected from grievers in the US and the UK, which was still prevalent into the past century: the wearing of black in mourning; the social expectations around the proper length of time to mourn; sometimes, the injunction to remain out of sight. Abraham Lincoln’s reaction to his wife Mary Todd’s grief after their son Willie died from typhoid fever is a case study. ‘Try to control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there,’ he told Mary, according to her dressmaker, as he threatened to send his wife to an insane asylum. Yet she continued to have intense convulsions – ‘paroxysms of grief’ – that were not accepted but tamped down by her husband and societal expectation.
Such a reaction, of course, only compounds a griever’s feeling of loneliness, a state closely correlated with poor mental health. In some important ways, we’ve moved beyond traditional ideas about grieving. Few are setting timers on how long they must wait to re-enter society; few are visibly self-punishing in a hair-shirted fashion; and expectations of isolation have mostly relented. While grief still remains far from a public pursuit, the most intense kinds of self-flagellation and self-sacrifice have, fortunately, largely ceased.
And yet, the notion that a bereaved person might enjoy themselves, might freely discuss and engage in life, let alone sex, remains something of a cultural challenge. There continues to exist a prudery around sex among the grieving as we cling to lingering ideas that a person in grief should be somehow both morally and bodily pure: that sex and grief – the drive towards life and the drive towards death, Eros and Thanatos – best not mix. Sexual bereavement, for instance, in which people mourn the loss of their sexual relationship with their deceased partner, is largely considered a form of ‘disenfranchised grief’, placed on the backburner of what is publicly discussed. Far easier and more acceptable to talk about your love or your shared life together, while leaving out this more material, more basic longing.
Sex can be a palliative for grief because it focuses and transmutes the chaos and anger
In the public conscience, a few fascinating studies may be helping to change the conversation. The neuropsychologist Alice Radosh lost her husband of 40 years to a rare form of cancer in 2013. Grappling with her own sexual bereavement, in 2016 Radosh and her co-author Linda Simkin surveyed around 100 women, all of whom were at least 55. The majority of women anticipated that, once widowed, they would miss having sex with their partner, and would want to discuss that loss openly. What is most riveting to me about Radosh’s study – and what demonstrates the rancorous cycle of silence around grief and sex – is that more than half of these same women said they wouldn’t have thought to ask a widowed friend about their own sexual bereavement. Even as they understood how important it would be for themselves to engage with sexual bereavement, a sociocultural barrier remained that prevented them from thinking to talk about it with others in similar situations.
In a way, this isn’t surprising. Neither is the fact that seeking out sex while grieving is often beneficial for those craving the closeness and affirmation that, at its best, sex can provide. Anglo-American culture pushes us to get over grief as soon as possible – to seek ‘closure’. But sex can challenge that culture, helping to keep us present and rooted in reflection and in life.
Some sex therapists claim that sex can also achieve something of the opposite, providing a distraction from the pain of grief, thanks to its accompanying dopamine release. When researching my book The Grief Cure: Looking for the End of Loss (2024), I spoke to the sex columnist and author Sophia Benoit, who said that, because ‘a lot of grief is catastrophising’, in that sense sex can be a palliative for grief because it focuses and transmutes the chaos and anger. ‘Sex is: OK, I can do this thing that isn’t literally about death right now that is affirming or comforting or intimate – something that isn’t the feeling that grief is everywhere, everything’s over,’ she told me.
For Cat Meyer, a psychotherapist specialising in sex and trauma, sex is also a way we might lean into grief. By having sex, being present and embracing our loss, she said, we might in fact transcend those painful feelings. This, she told me, can be done alone via masturbation practices or with a partner to whom you can, silently or out loud, express what you’re grieving, while they act as a ‘container’ for your emotions.
Heightened sexual situations provide catharsis, Meyer explained, letting us say the things we might feel deeply but are anxious to discuss, a smashing together of Eros and Thanatos. ‘At states of orgasm, the boundaries between us and the world dissolve, and we can really feel elevated beyond the heaviness of the pain,’ she told me. ‘At higher states of arousal, the threshold of what you can tolerate increases because of endorphins and dopamine … Things like disgust, fear, sadness, we can hold that a lot more easily.’ That is, we can look straight-on at what we might normally try to sweep aside or forget entirely.
Given the power that sex can provide in grief, perhaps, rather than seeking closure after bereavement, we should instead seek this kind of release? Closure – an essentially mythical concept – has always served others far more than it does the grieving person; it’s an easy way for others not to have to engage with someone’s grief, rendering it invisible. If it’s ‘over’, it’s no longer a ‘problem’. In sex, however, the loneliness of the griever can be reversed. At its best, the self can be found; death can become life.
Indeed, even if we’re often made to feel ashamed of it, sex might be exactly what we need in times of grief. To circumvent that shame and social expectation, to gain social ‘permission’ for release in grief, increasing numbers of men seem to be engaging sex workers as conduits for repressed feelings, including deep sorrow, shame and grief, according to several sex workers to whom I spoke.
Mistress Iris, a pseudonymous Kyoto-born dominatrix, explained to me that grieving men sometimes come to her to experience their greatest fears about their loss – and to ultimately realise that they are strong enough to get through it. With one client whose wife had died, Iris remembers that there ‘was a lot of verbal – and a lot of physical – pain-based play’. She started by whipping him, then asking him about his loneliness in bereavement. Iris brought together grief and sex to try to show him, through domination, that his belief that he would never get over his loss was flawed – that there was, in fact, a way through what seemed an otherwise unending grief, and that seeing how he might live alongside his loss was the most meaningful way through. No need for achieving ‘closure’.
His fear was that he was betraying his wife by dating again
Ultimately, she took this client into his fears – his loneliness, how he felt ‘pathetic’ – then exposed this as a false belief. She showed him how, instead, he already had the power to live alongside his grief. Here, Mistress Iris remembers the time with this client in her Los Angeles ‘dungeon’:
I’m ramping up [whipping him], and I’m getting to that upper level of his pain tolerance. I can see in his face that he’s getting there physically, so I start also talking to him – and this is going to sound really fucked up – like: ‘How many times did you look at my picture?’ ‘Did you touch yourself to it?’ … I can see he’s getting aroused. ‘Look at that. You’re pathetic.’ Those kinds of words and, of course, a lot more than that … Finally, he breaks down. He starts crying: ‘I’m a loser.’ ‘I’m pathetic.’ I was crying too, but he didn’t see me cry … And then, at that peak point, where he needed to be, where he’s emotionally broken down and crying, I lay on top of him, like a weighted blanket. I go into this process of emotionally bringing him back to a stable place, back to Earth. It’s a very soothing way of talking. ‘That’s a good boy. This is where you need to be. I’m so proud of you.’ These kinds of things. There’s a calmness. We sit and talk for a bit about how he’s feeling … He’s just feeling the calm. He doesn’t feel shitty. ‘You got to see yourself as what you were worried you’re going to be,’ I said. ‘And the world didn’t fall apart.’
Liara Roux, a pseudonymous filmmaker, author and former sex worker, also spoke to some of her clients about their grief, providing them a rare space in which they could be open about their loss. It was a ‘safe space’ for the kind of person who might bristle at the term. After she had sex with one grieving client, they talked at length about his late wife, working through the layers of his worries with women, discovering that his fear was that he was betraying his wife by dating again. ‘It was really moving,’ says Roux. ‘It was really an honour to be the person he picked to help him process everything.’ With many of Roux’s clients, they spent an enormous amount of time talking, she said. Much of it, working together to reframe their traumas and losses.
Codifying what many of these sex workers already know, the researchers behind a study in the International Journal of Sexual Health in 2024 interviewed 10 psychologists and psychotherapists specialising in grief therapy, and found that grief can be disruptive to sexual intimacy for a variety of reasons, including ‘emotional availability, traumatic experiences, and the nature of the loss’. Yet they also observed that sexual intimacy in times of grief could be broadly liberating, assisting partners in ‘communication, mutual empathy, and understanding in overcoming these challenges’.
How we choose – or don’t choose – to use sex as a means of grieving depends also in part on mostly unpredictable shifts in libido. Writing to Freud in 1922, the psychoanalyst Karl Abraham suggested that ‘a fair number of people show an increase in libido some time after a bereavement’ and have a ‘heightened sexual need’. The fact that many people experience changes in libido after loss is a finding that’s been essentially confirmed – and complicated – by contemporary researchers. Emily Nagoski, a former director of wellness education at Smith College in Massachusetts and the bestselling author of Come as You Are (2015), studies what’s known as the ‘sexual excitation system’ (SES) and the ‘sexual inhibition system’ (SIS) in our bodies. She’s noted that in times of grief (and contrary to Abraham’s findings) the SIS is powerful and that the libido often decreases. During COVID-19, for instance, many people’s sexuality started to shut down due to the omnipresence of loss.
At other times, however, libido can increase amid feelings of loss. ‘There’s many, many responses to grief, including some people finding they’re incredibly horny and craving sex,’ says Benoit, the columnist and author. ‘We overthink that grief will shut down your sex life … That makes people feel really guilty and gross when they do want it.’
The important thing is to see both responses as natural. Sex can stymie intimacy but can also enhance it; libido can increase but it can also decrease. There exist instances when reaching for sex, especially in the case of loneliness, makes logical sense – in times of war, for example, when the search for pleasure and connection takes on increased significance. At other times, Eros and Thanatos feel further apart than anything in the world. In the immediate aftermath of losing a child or a partner, when they are gone yet you endure, your short-term impulse may well be to follow them into oblivion or, at least, to stay far from pleasure.
It’s important to destigmatise the desire for sex after loss
In one small psychology study, for example, two-thirds of bereaved parents interviewed after experiencing the death of their child said they had taken a break from or stopped having sex, feeling perhaps that they didn’t deserve pleasure, or even connection. Even though most of these couples said they believed that touch and sex were important in these trying times, most found it too difficult to re-engage. In some cases, couples said they’d stopped having sex because they said it reminded them of the act of creating their child.
These findings are heartbreaking and, while wholly understandable, I wonder to what degree social expectations continue to play a part? It’s important to destigmatise the desire for sex after loss, to strip away the search for closure in favour of connection and living with grief rather than trying to bound beyond it.
Grief is, in so many ways, neverending – an experience to live alongside with, rather than paper over – and the business of living, of connection and beauty in sex are part of that.
Though Schiele, Ballard, Barnes and many other writers and artists have shown the provocative and liberating nature of smashing together Eros and Thanatos, these two drives are, ultimately, not so much in opposition as intertwined. Look closely at Two Reclining Nudes. Schiele has stripped bare any classical notions of beauty. The girls are not courting a viewer’s gaze, Schiele is not depicting them for us. In fact, in looking away, perhaps even disassociating, these girls seem hardly attentive to anyone at all. Now turn to Schiele’s self-portraits. Elongated, emaciated and naked, he made these not to eroticise himself but, as with Two Reclining Nudes, to express the raw truth of his psyche, the lingering presence of death even in youth, the rot of age even in a new body. Schiele knew that only at our most vulnerable do our psyches rise to the surface and become apparent. There is no indignity in sex and exposure. No indignity in death or grief, either.
