Read Freud's Three Essays. Then re-read Foucault's History of Sexuality (I). All that confessing! And so now reading Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain:

"The shielding, 'holding' gestures of the domestic are overtly present in the ordinary clothespin: one piece of wood is held to another piece of wood by a metal arm and the three together now act as one to enable other things to be coupled to each other and to itself. In Oldenburg's 'Clothespin,' these successive acts of inanimate holding find their origin and destination in the inclusive sentience of the human hug, for the monument holds within itself the gracious and self-confident embrace of two lovers. The scale of this clothespin, its complete ease in the presence of City Hall, its recognition that the enduring and monumental reside in the daily, its discovery of the broad pleasures and magnanimous intelligence in the narrow reflexes of punning wit, its identification of pressing with expressing and holding in with reaching out--all these are translations of and tributes to the central, overwhelming characteristic of the domestic, that its protective, narrowing act is the location of the human being's most expansive potential." This impulse is highlighted and then annihilated in the torture room.