Having said that, it is easy for men to be accused of imposing a double standard when it comes to female sexuality: It's fine for men to be sexually promiscuous. Even indiscriminate. Such sexual activity is often culturally encouraged and admired. But when women openly and aggressively express their sexuality like men, we tend to view them as mentally ill, promiscuous, sinful or evil vixens. To be fair, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Though I would argue that psychologically, sociologically and biologically, sex holds a significantly different meaning for men and women. Sigmund Freud, the first "psychodynamic" theorist more than a century ago, was very clear that we (and I would say this is somewhat true even today, and certainly for Guggenheim's generation) live in a sexually repressed society. We are admittedly less sexually repressed here in America following the "sexual revolution,"free love" and "women's lib" of the 1960s and 70s, but, perhaps more so than our European cousins, still suffer from this Puritanistic aspect of what Freud referred to as "civilization and its discontents." Society, psychiatry, psychology, and, for many, religion, still dictate what is "right" and "wrong," "moral" or "immoral," "acceptable" or "unacceptable," "normal" or "pathological," "good" or "evil" regarding human sexual behavior. (See my prior post on DSM-V.)

Just because someone, male or female, refuses to accept society's standard regarding sexual self-expression does not necessarily make him or her neurotic, perverted, pathological, antisocial or aberrant. On this we can agree. In the case you cited of the famous heiress and art patron Peggy Guggenheim, I don't know how much of her sexual behavior was indiscriminating in its frequency. Indeed, I know nothing of her sex life at all. Nor am I familiar with her mental health history. So any commentary on her behavior here by me is completely speculative. But she apparently was indeed, as you point out, highly motivated to have frequent (if not totally indiscriminating) sexual liaisons with numerous men throughout her adulthood. So much so that you note the high number of abortions (estimated to be as many as 17) she purportedly underwent. And her sexual behavior was certainly unconventional in her day and socially frowned upon. The very important question you raise is: What was it exactly that motivated her "promiscuous" (meaning, in this case, excessive by "normal" or conventional standards) sexual life?

You seem to suggest that, generally, the primary motivation for such "promiscuity" has mainly to do with innate intense sexual drive, combined with a low extrinsic motivation for social acceptance or "honor." But what is "sexual drive"? I have no doubt that different temperaments, sometimes congenital, can include different, e.g., more or less aggressive or powerful libidinal urgings. But here we get into the nature of a so-called "drive." As a clinical psychologist, I think of "drive" as a combination of both biological (endogenous or intrinsic) libidinal energy, intrapsychic structure (including complexes), and external (exogenous or extrinsic) motivation. Or what psychodynamic psychotherapists call primary and secondary gain. In other words, for me, what "drives" us sexually or otherwise is a mixture of nature and nurture, as well as familial, societal or cultural influences. But I consider it a gross oversimplification to reduce motivation in the case of sexual promiscuity to pure biology. Human motivation is a quite complex matter. Much more so than animal motivation.

For Rollo May, this motivational "drive" of which we are speaking is what he termed the daimonic. The daimonic, wrote May in his magnum opus, Love and Will (1969), "is any natural function which has the power to take over the whole person. Sex and eros, anger and rage, and the craving for power are examples. The daimonic can be either creative or destructive and is normally both." The passionate psychobiological power of the daimonic is capable of driving us toward destructive and/or creative activity. Particularly to the extent it remains unconscious and, therefore, unintegrated into and disconnected from  the conscious personality. Much of the greatest art and most evil deeds are direct or indirect expressions of the daimonic. And it appears to me that Ms. Guggenheim was not only personally driven but both attracted to and fascinated by the daimonic manifested in the artists she worked and played with. (For more on May's idea of the daimonic and its clinical implications in both evil and creativity, see my book Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic.)