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At the time of the research, a survey of local colleagues revealed they were not encountering this issue in their practices, a fact I found to be curious. However, since the completion of the research in the spring of 2005, these same local colleagues have begun to notice that their clients are talking about Internet pornography as a major source of marital distress.
As I began my research on Internet pornography, I found that Internet pornography was examined from the perspectives of morality (Perkins, 1997), domination and oppression of women (Dines, Jensen, & Russo,1998), and violation of women’s civil rights (Dworkin, 1989). However, the dominant model examined the issue from an addiction perspective (Carnes, Delmonico, Griffin, & Moriarity, 2001; Young, 2000; Schneider, 2000, 2001), which argues that individuals become addicted to the sexual stimulation of the Internet much as one becomes addicted to drugs or alcohol. In this model there is an addict and a co-addict. Treatment is prescribed for both addict and co-addict based on recovery from the addiction.
The addiction perspective increases our understanding of online behaviors and characteristics of the individual user from a particular vantage point. However, exclusive focus on Internet pornography use as an addiction has its limitations. The addiction model does not provide an in-depth understanding of individual human behavior and an exploration of unconscious motives. Nor does it always explain the role that compulsive use of Internet pornography may play in the complex marital relationship. Relying exclusively on an addiction model may obscure other important information such as the individual’s underlying pathology, untreated trauma associated with sexual, emotional and physical abuse, developmental interferences, failures, and parental deficits. Individuals are complex, as are the relationships in which they are involved.
I deliberately chose to research the experiences of the wives of the user from a psychodynamic approach. A psychodynamic approach illuminates the experiences of women, not just as enablers, but also as active participants as a result of their own unconscious processes.