Beyond the Œdipus Complex or the Sexual Mistake of the West Markup editor Writer of added commentary Translator Mehdi Saada Author Guy-Claude Burgerhttps://isni.org/isni/0000000056698613 In this book, Guy-Claude Burger recounts the interrogation that followed his arrest

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Platohttps://isni.org/isni/0000000121191408 Wilhelm Reichhttps://isni.org/isni/0000000121244395 Sigmund Freudhttps://isni.org/isni/0000000121272193 Carl Gustav Junghttps://isni.org/isni/0000000426604224 1Guy-Claude BurgerBeyondtheœdipusorthe Sexual Mistake of the West
Preface by Dr Guy MorvezenDoctor of General Medicine,Aeronautical Medicine,Neurology and Psychiatry,Psychoanalyst.

I was born in 1933 into a believing and practicing family, very enamored of humanism and the Cartesian spirit. My medical, psychiatric and psychoanalytic training allowed me to become aware of the complexity of human reality and of the number of questions which are still today unresolved.

I can understand the detractors of G-C Burger, because I was one of them, before knowing him, for several years. I had heard talk of his theories on anopsological diet around 1983, through the media. Certain of my own objectivity, I took him a priori for one of those cranks, at best a passionate idealist, of whom there are too many in natural medicine.

A fortuitous first meeting confronted me with this man in 1986. Skeptically, I listened to him expound his observations, his hypotheses, his conclusions. To my astonishment, his remarks proved to be coherent, the man appeared straightforward, sane, clear rigorous in his deductions. I was able to observe with my own eyes a surprising improvement in the health of various persons, clearly linked to the practice of his method of natural diet, sometimes even spectacular remissions in various chronic, even incurable, ailments.

I decided to try the experiment on myself, in order to assure myself that there was no subterfuge. My training as a generalist and neurologist made me attentive to the phenomenon of allesthesia (the change in taste of a given food), now scientifically recognized, and I had until then considered it a form of autosuggestion. My convictions as to the charlatanism of anopsology ( a barbaric name to my doctor’s ear) were shaken. I heard the inventor of the method express himself in a seminar, open the debate, he seemed animated by a scientific rigor worthy of his training as a mathematician-physicist, coupled with the sensitivity of an artist.

Intrigued, I extended my stay at Montramé to three weeks, in order to delve more deeply into the hypotheses whose formulation appeared to me surprisingly solid. I discovered in Burger an astonishing capacity for observation of human behavior, sometimes with the traits of a psychoanalyst, taking a new and penetrating look at human nature, and psycho-affective development. What to think of him? What to think of this metapsychoanalysis which he presents as being compatible with the very opposite theories of a Freud and a Jung?

Since 1986, I have studied the work of this far from ordinary man. Every year I made a trip to Montramé, first attending classes in anopsology, without finding faults in the reasoning, although the expositions sometimes lasted up to a week. Burger seemed to me to be the first researcher to know how to clearly formulate the hypothesis of genetic maladaptation to today’s diet and to draw the logical consequences in connection with human pathology, while at the same time respecting the basic tenets of medicine.

I asked myself then whether his metapsychoanalytical theory was cast in the same mold. I attended a first course in 1987, which surprised me by a novel and thorough analysis of psychoanalytical knowledge, and by a fundamental approach of the human being, his potentials and his aberrations. Nothing in this man’s discourse stands in contradiction with the contributions of various contemporary psychoanalysts; on the contrary, he proposes an innovative synthesis, perhaps difficult to comprehend for one who is too dependent on classical thought paradigms, but astonishing in its rigor ( I would even say inspired), which could easily clarify many as yet obscure points of the humanities.

Torn between the rumors concerning the man’s past and the pertinence of his explanations, I then decided to examine the matter more closely. I attended his basic course three times, then several more advanced courses, trying to find the fault, the contradiction which would betray the perfect image. Each time, his theory appeared to me more and more coherent, logical and revolutionary. I had numerous occasions, during this dozen years, to verify the exactness in my own experience and my daily practice.

A word about the extrasensory faculties, as they are defined by metapsychoanalysis. One might suspect that this is breach in the Cartesian spirit to which Burger lays claim.

Belief in the paranormal is often the sign of a psychopathological disturbance, a regression to the irrational animism of the primitives. Here, from what I was able to observe, it has to do with the perfectly objective examination of phenomena which, if they cannot yet be explained by scientific means, belong no less to reality, by dint of their verifiable and reproducible character. I was able to reassure myself, by examining certain persons who had developed astonishing paranormal capacities following the application of the rules of natural living defined by anopsological nutrition and metapsychoanalysis.

I am not an unquestioning supporter of G-C Burger. His words are sometimes disturbing, they disturb me as well, they cut to shred certain classical options, whose fragility and contradiction he exposes in plain language. After years of distance, sharing the opinion of certain of my colleagues who were just as skeptical at first, I can only state with certainty that we are dealing here not with a guru, nor a charlatan. The man has the genius of simplicity and the simplicity of genius, he gives evidence of intellectual honesty at every test. Doubtless he is to be faulted for being ahead of his time, which is rarely pardoned and has never helped researchers to be understood by their contemporaries…

Dr Guy Morvenzen
The Child will truly be respected when his fundamental instincts are respected. But respect first means understanding.
Warning In common usage, the word sexuality primarily evokes penetration. However, human sexuality differs from animal sexuality in that it has two functions: one aimed at reproduction, and the other whose purpose is not clearly defined in Western cultures. This gap means that there is no specific vocabulary for this second function. In what follows, the term sexuality will sometimes refer to the first function, sometimes to the second. In its second meaning, it will most often exclude penetration, particularly in the context of childhood sexuality.
Author’s Preface Speaking objectively about sexuality is no longer taboo. Relating sex to the sacred, however, seems inconceivable. We forget that the notion of sacred sex persisted throughout antiquity, right up to the dawn of materialism. It is present in all cultures, except for so-called Western culture. If you speak about it aloud, you are called a childish animist or a perverse manipulator. Speaking objectively about pedophilia is even more delicate. Questioning its origin, its presence in other civilizations, its pathogenic or beneficial nature, its possible function in psychic or psychological development… Metapsychic thinking is simply delusional. Yet, the child-adult relationship was commonplace until the 18th century. Freud, the great Freud, when he rediscovered the existence of incestuous drives, was himself unaware of them, or didn’t dare to discuss them. The only thing he wrote on the subject was that he left it to others to study what a society built on the foundation of an unrepressed Œdipus complex would look like. Many people harbor a certain mistrust of psychoanalysis. Far be it from me to advocate for it. Nevertheless, it has brought to light a number of elements that have been confirmed by a century of analysis and by countless practitioners worldwide. The expert psychiatrist The person tasked with examining you should you ever be put on trial (an increasingly likely occurrence given the evolution of legal practices) will rely on Freudian concepts to determine your dangerousness or irresponsibility: it is dear Sigmund Freud, indirectly, who will send you either to jail or to an asylum. It is in your best interest that his theories not be too outlandish… Among his discoveries, there is one that still scandalizes many a respectable mind today: the fact that children experience amorous impulses, sexualized to boot, from the very first years of their lives, and that these impulses are directed toward adults. If I hadn’t had the good fortune to experience wonderful love stories before puberty, I would tell myself that the father of the Œdipus complex had mistaken his fantasies for reality. These impulses cannot be observed anywhere, some will say. Some of them, neither in our offspring nor in our own childhood memories. So, one of two things must be true: either Freud was the victim of a mirage, followed by an army of disciples who believed they could discern his vestiges in the unconscious of their patients—not to mention the millions of analysands who rediscovered them on the couch. Or his detractors are simply turning a blind eye. With my physicist’s mind, more enamored of discovery than conformity, it seemed essential to me to conduct an experiment that would set things straight once and for all. My wife and I decided, as early as 1968, just before the great cry of the heart make love, not war, to give our children’s various instincts complete freedom of expression. A perilous declaration of war against the prevailing morality… It must be said that we were already conducting a radical experiment in returning to nature. At the age of twenty-six, cancer brutally confronted me with the vagaries of existence. And with the existence of suffering. Hoping to decipher the causes of this sinister disease, we resolved, retreating to an old farmhouse in the canton of Vaud, to simply return to the Stone Age. To eliminate all the trappings of civilization and reintroduce them one by one, hoping to identify those that would prove responsible for the various ills of modern life. We soon became certain that the 20th-century human body is still genetically adapted to a Paleolithic diet, devoid of any culinary artifice. All sorts of ailments and diseases disappeared when patients eliminated cooking, dairy products (which only date back a few thousand years), and grains (genetically different from wild grasses). By further excluding salt, seasonings, and mixtures, we were forced to conclude that humans, like animals, possess a remarkably precise food instinct, capable of indicating exactly what foods their bodies need. This includes medicinal plants. This is how instinctotherapy was born, a form of natural dietetics guided by the pleasure of taste, which proved its worth to thousands of people. The food instinct proved so superior to the precepts of nutritionists that it seemed logical to extrapolate to the sexual instinct. That is to say, to postulate that the instincts of love and sex, under natural living conditions, would have every chance of functioning more reliably than when punished by morality. This is especially true in children, not yet corrupted by environmental influence: why repress impulses that belong to a genetic heritage tested for millions of years? Knowing that the repression of infantile sexuality is at the root of neurosis, it seemed logical that its free expression would lead to non-neurotic psychic structures. The experiment was somewhat audacious. Would our children emerge from it traumatized? Lacking customary prohibitions, were they at risk of failing to develop a normal sense of self? Our only guarantee was what I had happily experienced in my own childhood. And also what ethnologists report about all sorts of so-called primitive tribes, who place no prohibitions on children’s sexual expression and are far less neurotic than our puritanical society. The stakes were high: endemic neurosis is, among the ills plaguing our civilization, the one with the most serious consequences. Discomfort, aggression, dissatisfaction, relationship problems, academic failures, romantic failures, existential failures, the dramas of jealousy, divorces, broken children, violence, delinquency, religious fanaticism, holy wars, genocides, consumer society and its corollary, pollution, and many other traits that disfigure our modern world are all trophies of this inescapable psychological disorder. The risks we ran ultimately paled in comparison to the gravity of the problem. An incredible discovery awaited us beyond the taboos. Not only was Freud absolutely right when he asserted that children have sexual drives from a very young age (apart from penetration); but it turned out that the various drives that constitute this infantile sexuality, when they do not succumb to repression, allow the development of psychic faculties that have been precisely lost in the West: metapsychic faculties. Those that give access to so-called paranormal phenomena. This was both very fascinating and very uncomfortable: how could such ideas be accepted by a society that rejects both infantile sexuality and the paranormal? Our discovery at least explained why extrasensory faculties are practically a dead letter in the current moral context: the drives intended to ensure their development are subject to draconian repression from the earliest childhood. We find them later in the depths of the unconscious, in the tangle of Oedipal conflicts, repressed in the name of the incest taboo. Psychoanalysts themselves are unable to say what nature intended them to be. The paranormal, too, is the object of a taboo in our rationalist culture. It is either labeled as quackery or feared as in the days of demons. With a slight exception for mediums, the last resort when things get complicated. The metapsychic, despite the courageous efforts of a few pioneers of parapsychology, still has no place in the institutional framework of knowledge. Only Jung has made it through, with his archetypes, rediscovered at the heart of the symbols of ancient China. And his collective unconscious, which he would have done better to name differently in order to be better understood. His Zurich Protestant morality forbade him from relating these notions to sexuality. To what he called the dustbin of infantile sexuality, which Freud had endowed with too much importance for his liking. Years of observation have finally convinced us that the repression of sexuality that occurs in childhood inevitably leads to the failure of metapsychic development. The individual should safeguard their early drives, not drown them in the hell of a repressed Œdipus complex. Above all, they should safeguard their « magical » content, the elusive arcana of a transcendent sexuality and its spiritual implications. They could then, throughout their life and their amorous experiences, use their sexual drives to draw from physical contact a higher form of energy, capable of nourishing a dimension of their being far more subtle than the biological. A « numinous » energy, in Jung, which seems directly related to extrasensory perception, even to spiritual evolution. Reread Plato, and you will see that these ideas were well known to the Ancients. This also explains the Kama Sutra, Tantrism, the Eleusinian Mysteries, and many other esoteric teachings that defy rational analysis. Supersensible perception is so carefully concealed in our materialistic culture that we no longer know what it represents or what its true purpose is. Neither the emissaries of various religions nor scientists are able to provide us with a satisfactory explanation. The phenomenon is too rare; some speak of miracles, others of imposture, but all seem to ignore its fundamental meaning. Should the paranormal accompany every moment of our existence, just as the enchanter Merlin accompanied legendary kings? Without it, we are condemned to make our decisions, form our judgments, and manage our behavior using only our intellect. Climbing the steps of our spiritual evolution like a blind man searching for his way up a mountain. Believing and praying without truly feeling the presence of the Divine and without directly receiving its messages. All that remains of love is a painful divide between the spiritual and the temporal, when it should be the site of a blissful alchemy, the philosopher’s stone alone capable of transmuting the mysteries of the body into the mysteries of the Spirit… In the Middle Ages, people who spoke this kind of language were burned at the stake. The last person who dared to speak of a sacred form of sexuality, Father Bruno, was condemned to be burned by the Inquisition in 1600. In a few centuries, things have improved: we speak of freedom of expression. Of human rights. Of women’s rights. Of children’s rights. But what rights are we talking about? The worst thing about love is that we unwittingly project onto others’ words the images we draw from our own sexuality, or from the sexuality we see displayed everywhere. Hence the persistent incommunicability and endless misunderstandings that characterize the unbelievable discourse on sex specific to Judeo-Christian society… : The interrogation method used in this work reproduces, as accurately as memory allows, all the police interrogations, hearings by the investigating judge, and interviews with personality investigators, psychiatrists, and psychologists accumulated during five years of pretrial detention.
Chapter I Seventh… Eighth ring… who could be calling me so early? There are policemen who are demanding that you come quickly Very… quickly. I need a moment to collect my thoughts. Went to bed at about three-thirty in the morning, it is now eight o’clock… I would have thought, if they were coming, that they would have surprised us during the night. I need a moment above all to change my state of mind. I didn’t sleep alone. It is so important to sleep close to someone you love. Like nourishment for the heart… But I am plunging back into the normal world. I will be interrogated, certainly. After this incredible scandal in the media.We both get up like automatons, stunned, clumsy. No time for a smile. Take your pillow! They can come in at any moment… I am twenty years old, I can do what I want! Take it! Quickly… This scene wouldn’t help. It would have been better if we had slept each in his own bed. With the image they were pressing on me, a chaste night would have served as evidence. I climb the stairs in front of the house. The others in the next room arrange the beds, with great speed. In closing the door, I say to them: See you soon! .. this shouldn’t take long. I emerge from behind the bay trees on to an alarming spectacle. The yard has been invaded, a veritable army of policemen. Two of them accost me. Ah! Now is the time! Where is your office? On the way, I look longingly at the long path leading to the village: blue cars, police cars are jostling in the yard, one behind the other. Even more of them outside, all along the way. A thick crowd of men in uniforms, a hundred of them, at first sight, in all shades of blue and of khaki, some with caps, many more in their berets. At the very end, massed right at the entrance to the property, some red, some beige, some lenses that glitter. Telephoto lenses, undoubtedly, they are at two hundred meters. Had the journalists then been informed? You understand why we are here…. They slide a piece of paper under my nose. Luckily, I’ve brought my glasses: Investigation of X, repeated death threats and corruption of minors… So they have opened an inquiry after that ridiculous complaint by a paranoid whom I had shown to the door. I had expected it. But the next part knocks the breath out of me: Rapes of minors fifteen years old by a person in authority…Rapes? Rapes in the plural, minors in the plural…. the words slam into each other in my head. The investigation is opened against X, I may not be involved. But who, here, could have raped children? I don’t have the time to think, they lead me back to my room. The search is in full force. Everyone was packed into the big dining room. The patients must not understand a thing. All the rooms have been turned upside-down. The mail, the printed material, the video cassettes examined piece by piece. They must be searching for porno tapes. In a VCR they find Basic Instinct. They put it in a bag and seal it. They have taken all my mail, emptied my filing cabinets. They also take Special Gay which the reporter from Liberation gave me yesterday, after having interviewed me: it shows three guys in a bed, provocative smiles. Found here, it’s evidence for conviction. Now they’re searching the photo drawer. Who are these people? A family living in the USA, old friends from Switzerland. The father is a mathematician. They hesitate: the father, the mother, the child, who pose, nicely dressed, in the style of young bourgeois…They put it on the pile. The disorder grows. They seem disappointed, they aren’t finding what they are looking for.Another policeman arrives, head shaved, with a small suitcase. They make me clear the room. Sit down over there! Stay seated. He looks at me mockingly. He removes from his case a whole assortment. Through the half-open door, I see him setting down small cartons, A, B, C, D… at the four corners of the bed. With strips of tape which he applies to the sheet, he must be searching for hairs. He applies several to the pillow. Under your sheet there are two more, what’s that? I left them by way of padding, to cover the zipper that connects the two mattresses. He also takes samples. The light blue, the one underneath, goes back six weeks, before my last trip abroad. What will they find. In leaving, I had made my bed. As much as the children came to hear my stereo… Often they are wild, they jump on the bed. There will certainly be hairs… They take me in a small blue limousine, in the back seat. We cross the thicket of journalists, waiting for hours at the end of the path, in the rain. I must really be interesting to the crazies! The interviews of the last few days have stirred up opinions. After the article by a certain Marie Casteret in l’Express, The Guru of Applied Pedophilia, the interviews didn’t stop. It was same journalist who had released a media campaign against me in ’88. There had been, it seemed, some death notices, people who expired for lack of care or for having eaten raw food. I was a dangerous charlatan and my method of natural diet a pure swindle. All that without ever having met me, without having questioned anyone around me, and without a word about the scientific basis of my research. That had been enough to set loose the judicial authorities. Filing of charges, search, judicial process, seven years of prohibition from practicing any activity in connection with anopsology. A gigantic inquest which ended in three months of prison, suspended. The sole charge found against me: I stated in my pamphlets that a natural and instinctive diet can improve or cure serious illnesses. Which is true, moreover. Without official certification, truth becomes a crime… Here we are already at the Provins police station. A lot of people await us. Inside, uniforms mill about, splitting the air in all senses. The doors of offices are closed as I walk down the corridors. I am not the only one on the hot seat. Whom else have they arrested? They explain my detention: twenty-four hours, with an extension of another twenty-four if necessary. With the file sitting on the desk, let’s say right away forty-eight hours… Two police superintendents, one from Paris, the other from Provins, argue over who gets to sit at the keyboard of a laptop. Name, date of birth. They start by having me explain what I mean by « metapsychoanalysis ». Between ’64 and ’67 I did a series of experiments on animals: field mice, cats, dogs, white mice. I wanted to reveal the influence of a natural diet on health. I was especially interested in the mechanisms of the dietary instinct. At the same time, I was able to confirm that the behavior of the animals changed systematically depending on whether I gave them a natural diet or a classical diet. Each time they received leftovers of bread, cooked meat, cooked dishes, as soon as these were digested, they showed a completely abnormal excitation: the white mice fought to the death in their cages, the cats arched their backs at a tuft of grass, the male pigs mated with each other. My two questioners eyed me, mockingly. How the devil to explain all this… They obviously didn’t know a lot, neither of biology, nor or psychoanalysis. They will take me for a madman… These first observations brought me to ask a question which seemed to me fundamental: how would the various instincts which are peculiar to a human being present themselves if he ate food that was 100% natural, like the primates in nature? In observing the influence of various types of food on the psychic state, I was able to confirm that instinctive behaviors are modified, in man as well as in animals, by certain excitation-producing factors present in today’s diet. You mean to say that your sexual behavior is different because you eat carrots and bananas? And rhinosceros horns every morning… The Chinese believe it to be an aphrodisiac. There are excitation-producing substances in the most classical foods of the traditional diet. At the time, these ideas seemed aberrant. But scientific discoveries have proved me right. We now know that there are in bread and milk exorphins analogous to the opiates of heroin, and other excitation-producing molecules in cereal grains… So, the whole world is drugged? If the psychic state of individuals is found to have been modified since these foods have become widespread, or for thousands of years, it is clear that we are not capable of imagining the natural functioning of the psyche. We don’t know exactly what the instinctive drives would be, whether they would be aggressive drives, love drives, or sexual drives. Not to mention the distortions due to education, repression, taboos and other hazards of the culture. In today’s conditions, it is impossible to define a referent of normality. This gap undermines the whole edifice of human sciences, in particular those which concern psychoanalysis. The instinct is at the origin of all individual and social behaviors. Don’t lose yourself in generalities. What interests us are the connections between your metapsychoanalysis and the child-adult sexual relations. It is important that I explain what made me question the current morality… At first I tried to define a diet adapted to human genetics, and to reveal the dietary instinct. Later, from 1967, I tried to find the natural determinants of the love and sexual instinct, as they are genetically programmed. In order to have natural behavior appear, it was necessary to remove the factors disturbing the dietary origins, but also, to the extent possible, the prohibitions and conditioning induced by education. As far as children are concerned, we avoided anything that would inhibit, cause guilt or deform the natural expression of their drives. Because, according to you, children have sexual drives before puberty? The idea isn’t mine. Already a century ago, Freud confirmed that human sexuality cannot be compared to animal sexuality. In the animal has as its sole goal reproduction: the sexual drives manifest themselves at maturity, and only in rut. In the human, eroticism doesn’t obey any biological cycle. The drives are practically permanent. Freud distinguishes two independent sexual functions: a reproductive function, which begins at puberty with sexual maturity, and another function present from the so-called Oedipal period. The infant feels very intense loving impulses, especially for its mother, and aggressive impulses against its father whom it perceives as a rival. Saying loving impulses does not imply sexual impulses! Don’t try to tell us that infants have sexual wants… So psychoanalysis is mistaken? The incestuous drives contain sexual components right from the start. In the current context, they cannot be realized. They are undergo a systematic repression under the effects of education, just like the aggressive drives, the famous fantasies of murdering the father: that’s what Freud called the repressed Œdipus complex. At the same time, repression does not mean disappearance, on the contrary. The conflicts associated with this situation remain buried in the unconscious for the whole of one’s existence. They are at the origin of endemic neurosis… What do you call endemic? That involves the whole population. The policemen take down each of my phrases, meticulously. Their zeal surprises me. But it’s not psychoanalysis that interests them. If we understand you correctly, it is enough to help the child to fulfill his incestuous drives to keep him from being neurotic? It’s even an urgent mission? Neurosis poisons the existence of each individual, it compromises the future of our civilization. It has incalculable consequences: fears, aggressiveness, guilt, depression, criminality, wars, perversions, pedophilia… The question is of supreme urgency, it should have been dealt with a long time ago. When Freud discovered, just one hundred years ago this year, the existence of a pre-conscious sexual instinct, he must have asked himself what was the usefulness of this instinct. Nature doesn’t put in place such important drives without a precise reason. Who says that this instinct is so important? We can measure its importance by the magnitude of the neurosis produced by its repression. Everyone has Oedipal problems, you know that as well as I do.One thing should have struck the scientists: an instinct destined to be repressed, to be sucked down into unconscious conflict and to reduce the effectiveness of individuals would contradict the laws of evolution. You haven’t responded to our previous questions: are you in favor of letting the child live out its incestuous drives? Let me first introduce the elements necessary to understand my point of view. If you make me skip some stages… OK, we’ll stay all night… As for us, we have time! My theses are the result of thirty years of observation and of reflection, I can’t account for them in three minutes.My wife and I have been practicing a 100% natural diet for several years, when we confirmed that our sexual drives changed in character. Exactly as in the experiment with the animals: a certain excitation of the nervous system which seemed to us normal when we ate like everyone else, disappeared. I never noticed that regular food was exciting. There are excitation-producing molecules in coffee, tea, chocolate, that’s well known. Everyone knows that cocoa is an aphrodisiac. But there are also foods which form the basis for traditional nutrition: in cereals, in bread, in pastries, in dairy products. Researchers have shown in the 70’s in the US that gluten, meaning the proteins in wheat and in certain other cereal grains, aggravate the excitation of schizophrenics. The same for the casein in cows’ milk. Not to mention to opiates in these products which resemble those in hard drugs… You exaggerate a bit there, no? It’s not the type of news one divulges to the media. If you have done a good job with your search, you will have found my scientific references in my library, you can verify this.At the time, we had simply confirmed empirically that our sexual drives had lost their urgent character. I was no longer tormented by my virility, nor my wife by her femininity. The need for release had disappeared. To call a spade a spade, did you become impotent? Far from it! It wasn’t a question of sexual need itself anymore. Everything became calm at the organic level, and we didn’t find the usual excitation in the classical positions of conjugal relations. Many other couples who have adopted the same natural regimen were able to make the same observations.In comparing these different situations, we had been able to make a sort of inventory of the conditions in which sexuality would intervene in a natural state. Without too much doubt, we had put together a referent of normality, in removing the influence of dietary artifice on the nervous system. It was a way of testing the genetic programming of the sexual instinct peculiar to the human being, and of discovering the significance of drives which do not serve reproduction.. So, your sexual excitation appeared in unusual situations. Which ones? Several families joined us on a farm I had in Switzerland. By mutual agreement, in the hope of discovering the natural functioning of various instincts, we gradually did away with all the taboos. The experience was a little crazy, we could have imagined that unbridled instincts would lead to the worst excesses.To begin with diet: children totally free to eat what they wanted were at risk of stuffing themselves with sugary fruits, of becoming obese, of suffering from all sorts of problems. We were able to see that the dietary instinct functions from the first moments of existence. What are you saying: everyone knows that Man lost his dietary instinct a long time ago… Experience has convinced me of the opposite. Our ancestors got in the habit of tricking their senses with food that had been transformed, that no longer had their natural flavors. A wild strawberry seems tart when you don’t need it, but a strawberry from the garden, seasoned with sugar and whipped cream, will always seem good, you can eat them to the point of getting indigestion without any tartness to stop you.With fruits left in their natural form, preferably wild, even infants know instinctively how to recognize the foods they need. They regulate their menu in a perfectly balanced manner, they close their mouths or turn their heads when the food we present them with would be useless or harmful. It’s enough not to force them. Diet, that’s easier to believe. But it’s not for that that you’re here. It’s nevertheless because we were able to see that the dietary instinct was innate, and that it functioned with an extraordinary precision, before any learning, that we took the risk of granting a similar freedom to the love instinct. The facts bore us out: in the absence of interfering excitation, the sexual drives do not manifest themselves where they are not needed, the taboos lost their usefulness. Instead of coming from the outside, the prohibitions came from within.In fact, there are not only love and sexual drives to set in motion certain behaviors, but a system, no less complex, of inhibitory drives – an unconscious self-control, if you like – which puts the brakes on these behaviors or directs them in rather precise directions, according to the various situations which may arise. And you think that all this is programmed in the genes? The more research advances, the more we are made aware of the incredible complexity of instinct in animals: the way salmon find their river of origin, the organization of colonies of insects, the maternal instinct in mammals. Life has had time immemorial to bring the programming of different instincts into focus. Nothing astonishing that they should be of a complexity beyond our rational thought, which is genetically much less ancient. The reptile brain, which manages instincts, goes back hundreds of millions of years, while our cortex developed only much later. Reason errs much more often than intuition… And children, in all this? To the children as well we gave a freedom of expression that was as complete as possible. How is it that this freedom of expression, to use your term, got you a sentence for indecent exposure, twenty years ago? For a very simple reason: the love drives of children are by nature directed at the parents, or at their substitutes. When one lets nature have its way… According to you, it’s not enough to let children be free to discover their sexuality among themselves. The adults have to mix in? That right there is the greatest error: the drives of the child impel him to discover his sexuality by contact with adults, and not at all with children his own age. I’m going to stop you right there: all kids play doctor, find all sorts of subterfuges to discover their bodies, and carefully avoid the presence of adults! Because they know that adults will forbid it.If we don’t impose any prohibition, any threat of punishment, if we don’t reject them when they try to approach, they lose interest in these little sexual games. They feel very powerful loving drives, directed at adults, and discover spontaneously the sexual drives that go along with this form of love. Freud spoke of incestuous drives, he even called them immeasurable… So you’re for incest, into the deal? Can there really be a question of incest, at this age? The word is badly chosen, it brings on great deal of confusion, even in psychoanalysis. Everything you are making me say, by formulating the questions in that way, deforms reality. You start off with an image of sexuality which has nothing to do with what the child is seeking. It isn’t the erotic, gratifying side that interests him, but something that unfortunately escapes the majority of adults. You’re saying that we don’t know fucking is? Exactly, when you say fuck you evoke a certain image of sexuality. But there is an entirely different form of sexual contact: that which the ancients called sacred sex. It is to that form of love that the child aspires, far from any sexual playing. The nature of children, though, is to play in order to discover the world. Why wouldn’t they play in this area like others? Ask me rather why adults don’t understand anymore what the child is searching for through his love drives.A child, especially a small child, lives in a world of magic. In that world, desire doesn’t occupy the same place as in the world of reason constructed by adults. The idea of seeking pleasure in sexual activity is typical of adults Children expect something magical, a magic of love, such as the poets evoke when they speak of love… Mr. Burger, we’re not here to write poetry, but to put concrete facts on the table! The goal of justice is to reveal the truth. Exactly, if you want to reveal the truth, you can’t exclude a part of the reality. Once and for all, stop playing with words! Poetry is addressed to the imaginary. What interests us is the reality of acts. The reality of an act is not necessarily the image one has of it. By reducing what the child hopes to find in love to what you imagine, you project onto his attempt, or his experience, what you think you know of love. Unfortunately, you don’t know it all. What we do know is that our work consists of interrogating you on your schemes, and not being initiated into the art of poetry. Under the pretext of poetry, you can justify who knows what. The magical aspirations of the child may correspond to something entirely real which you are missing. In eliminating a priori this magical dimension, you betray the truth, you distort the function of justice itself. And what are we missing, in your opinion? Something which I have rediscovered, completely by chance. Something which has always existed, before our form of civilization destroyed it. And which is rediscovered automatically when we return to a natural way of life: this magical dimension that the child feels shows him the true goal of the love instinct. Let’s see: everyone knows that the goal of love and sexuality is the perpetuation of the species. That’s why sexual love makes no sense before puberty. Your reasoning is correct, but the premise is false. Procreation is only a small part of love. The most important for the survival of the species. This doesn’t exclude that love should have another, even more important, function. If that were true, we would know ! You don’t really want us to believe that when a bull jumps on a cow, he does it in the name of a magical dimension… Precisely, the human being is better than the animals. Even if the coitus has all the characteristics of animal mating, you can’t deduce from that that the totality of the love instinct has as its only goal fertilization. We can make noises like howler monkeys, that doesn’t prevent us from having at our disposal a language that is much more complex than that of primates. And what would then be the complex function of love? Access to the extrasensory… You have some pretty avant-garde ideas. But let’s get back to serious matters. You told us that children seek to express sexual drives very early, in favor of their parents or other adults. Now describe how things work in practice. First, the child never has sexual drives if he doesn’t feel this magic of love that I am trying to describe to you. It’s a sort of signal that tells him that contact with the person he loves can bring him what he seeks. His drives are expressed then without his even thinking about it, in a totally spontaneous manner. The only thing that can shock him, is that the adult doesn’t respond on the same level. So then what gestures does the child make? Describing a gesture that expresses love makes of it ipso facto an obscene gesture; because love is absent the moment one describes it. The gesture which is felt as sublime by the partners when they are in an amorous trance takes on a pornographic character if one retains only the physical aspect. The law takes into consideration the physical aspect of things. In that it reflects the fundamental error of our society: the cleavage between love and sexuality. It is a cleavage which degrades both the nature of love and the nature of sexuality. Love deprived of physical expression sinks into neurosis, and sexuality cut off from the inflow of love sinks into perversion. In children, this cleavage doesn’t exist, at first. It takes hold little by little, under the pressure of education. The parents, without realizing it, place the child in a dilemma: you will have our love if you renounce your sexual drives. The child insisting on fulfilling his incestuous drives would be met with a rejection, or a punishment. He acquires the certainty that he would lose the love of his parents if he did not renounce his natural drives.From time to time, nature tries to get over this cleavage: at the moment of love at first sight, sexual drives are in agreement with the magic of love. This is a chance we are given to rediscover the original unity. Then the division sets in again if one continues to make love after the magic of love has vanished.In the west, this cleavage runs through the majority of daily life, culture and morality. We even find it in the penal code, which speaks of sex while totally erasing love. If I understand correctly, you would like to justify pedophilic behaviors under the pretext that love and sex are one and the same. You are confusing it with what happens in love between adults. Don’t you see that relations that are quite beautiful between a man and a woman are repugnant between an adult and a child, even if the drives come from the child? You see them as repugnant because you are projecting on the relationship between a child and an adult the image of ordinary sexuality between adults. The image of the sexuality of reproduction, with its aspects of aggressiveness, desire, seduction, excitation, which would in effect constitute a serious shock for the child. Which again says that no adult is capable of responding to the child’s drives without traumatizing him? Unless the adult has been able to discover and construct this more subtle form of sexuality in his own childhood. Don’t you think you are verging on total paranoia there? You need a touch of paranoia to get rid of received ideas. What counts is to verify in facts which ideas accord with reality. Put your feet back on the ground for a bit. A relationship between a child and an adult is inconceivable, if only because of the size of the body… That would be true if we were talking about ordinary coitus. However, penetration is not a part of precocious drives. Freud showed that there is no unconscious representation of the vagina before puberty. We’re not talking here about what happens in the unconscious, but in the visible world. The relationship between child and adult has always been forbidden, you’re not going to be the one to demonstrate that it’s natural! Sorry to contradict you: this relationship was widespread up until the Enlightenment. It wasn’t considered a sexual relationship exactly, precisely because it didn’t include penetration, and it didn’t undermine virginity.The first law constituting the crime of indecent exposure of minors dates from 1832. Before that, one respected what happened in the intimacy of families, whatever the age of the partners. That’s still the case today in other cultures. Of course there is child prostitution in the Philippines and in certain underdeveloped countries. Is that what you’re proposing as a model of education? Prostitution is loathsome, it’s even worse with children. But we have to ask where this prostitution is coming from.There are at least six hundred thousand child prostitutes in the US, the most policed and most moralizing country in the world. That makes one child in fifty, almost as much as in Thailand, the destination of choice for sex tourism. So it’s a social phenomenon, which proves what? That western sexuality is sick, and needs immediate care. And secondly, that suppression is not the solution.It’s not by forbidding a patient to be sick that you will cure him. You must understand the origin of the sickness. For that, you must start by distinguishing between sickness and health. By the way, you’ve never gone to Bangkok, or to Manila, for example? I spent several hours in Bangkok to meet a grower of exotic fruits.You make me think of an anecdote told to me by a gentleman from Bordeaux, you’ll hear it yourselves if you listen to the course tapes you’ve seized. What the people who participate in your seminars say… Excuse me! This is a very respectable gentleman, a good Frenchman very involved in society, married and retired, without the slightest tendency to pedophilia. Enamored of travel, he went to a different country every year, and, that year, he visited the Philippines. Not wanting to stay in the capital, he had taken the bus in order to get closer to the population. He thus found himself next to a mother who had reserved only one seat for herself and her eight-year-old daughter. The child at first amused herself by running in the central aisle and approaching the other passengers, but after three hours on the way, she began to have enough. As she was becoming more and more cranky, the mother put her on her lap and asked our gentlemen from Bordeaux if it would bother him if she put her daughter’s legs on his knees, so that the little one could sleep better. He accepted, of course, when he noticed that the mother began masturbating the child, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You can imagine him blushing, asking himself what he should do, looking all around him to see how the other passengers would react, feeling that he would be accused of complicity in incest. But all the neighbors watched with big calm smiles, as if it were obvious, and worthy of the greatest discretion. As soon as the little girl reached orgasm, she fell asleep like an angel…It was that adventure that made our man decide to register for one of my courses. That happened in the Philippines. It has nothing to do with Europe, those people don’t have the same past at all, nor the same culture… Do you know the « Chronicles of Heroard »? Heroard was a court physician at the time of the birth of Louis XIII{e=« persName ref= »https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q737533”}. He recorded day by day, even hour by hour, the whole history of the young king. Those close to him, from the first months of his life, concerned themselves just as naturally with his sexual initiation. At that time, there weren’t the same barriers between ages, nor the same cleavages between different parts of the body. According to you, we should reestablish this form of morality in today’s society? It’s impossible, of course, for all sorts of reasons. The child who experiences something that he knows to be condemned by the community as violently as this relationship to adults, inevitably feels guilty. Either guilty for experiencing a forbidden thing, or guilty if he must one day accuse the adult he loves. He finds himself a prisoner of an internal conflict which will weigh on everything he might experience in love. The only thing I believe to be possible is a slow awareness. Today’s morality has nothing eternal about it. It belongs to one point in our history and must be questioned just like all the beliefs inherited from past centuries. Above all when it proves harmful to the development of the individual. It is enough to realize that one has made an error for the desire to correct it to appear. For example, people realized that it was wrong to condemn homosexuality; the need to change the laws appeared spontaneously, even in countries which condemned it most strongly. So you are also in favor of homosexuality? I don’t think you understand my position very well. I am not for or against anything. My goal is to understand nature, to know whether the different behaviors we observe in the human being are determined by his very nature, that is to say innate, or induced by culture and morality. So you are against culture and against morality? But no! I try to see to what extent the various parts of culture and morality are either in harmony with or opposed to the fundamental determinants of human nature. That still lets you justify behavior other people consider reprehensible. I don’t know what could be reprehensible about my behavior.Or are you referring to my Swiss affair? My wife and I took the risk of letting natural laws override human laws for a certain time. The experience proved us right, even if it caused us some troubles with the law. All that goes back thirty years, and cost us dearly enough. We weren’t going to start the same experiment in France! You didn’t tell yourself that one doesn’t do experiments on the human being like one does on particles? The suppression imposed by society for two hundred years on children’s drives is also an experiment. A particularly dangerous experiment, because no one knows how to define the parameters. The results are far from being conclusive. That’s what you say. For now, we note that you consider that morality is a mistake and that it prevents the child from living out its natural drives. Your theory then consists of condoning pedophilic relationships. And in order to free the child, the adult has to take the initiative… I don’t condone pedophilic relationships: I try to understand them. From what I have been able to see, it is always false approach a child with the intention of imposing anything on him, whether in diet, sexuality or mathematics. But I think it is just as serious to forbid him from fulfilling his natural drives. There is no real blossoming without the free expression of fundamental instincts. Seriously, you don’t expect us to believe that a little girl or little boy would put their hand on the sexual organs of an adult by themselves if the adult did not urge them to do it. All these theories just serve to justify your tendencies. It’s not about tendencies or theories. It’s about facts, observed facts. For years, we have been able to record the spontaneous behavior of a number of children. I wasn’t the only one to confirm that the drives described by Freud are quite real. When there is no obstacle in the way, the child develops very early on a sexuality which is every bit as diversified as that of a normal adult, with the exception of penetration.There is only one thing about it that is shocking: when we talk about love, we become obsessed with the image of ordinary sexuality, with the idea of penetration, pelvic movements, orgasmic noises and all the rest. This form of sexuality is totally foreign to children, it traumatizes them severely. Going back to your reasoning, it’s enough to exclude penetration, and pedophilia would be a good thing for humanity? When you speak of pedophilia, you are putting together two things that are radically opposed: the case of an adult who seeks to fulfill his own sexual needs at the expense of a child; and the fact of responding with all the necessary delicacy to the child’s drives. That’s what you recommend in your metapsychoanalysis course? I don’t recommend anything at all. I say that one must ask oneself for what reason morality confuses the two types of behavior.When speaking of relations between adults, we distinguish those which express a shared love from those imposed by one of the partners, which we call rape. Since psychoanalysis has shown the existence of precocious drives, we should have distinguished the case where the child expresses his own drive from that where the adult exploits his innocence. Freud passed right over that. And you want to make up for it with metapsychoanalysis? Metapsychoanalysis is not centered around the problem of the child. It consists in redefining the natural laws of love and its physical expression, in order to better understand the causes of the suffering and conflicts which burden love, whether it’s conjugal life or the Oedipal period. You are nevertheless advocating a theory of a non-repressed Oedipal complex, that’s the title of one of your articles. Spreading the idea that responding to the sexual drives of a child would allow him to avoid neurosis is an incitement to pedophilia. You are pushing fragile people to violate the law. I am doing exactly the opposite: I show that the law does not respect the vital needs of the child and that one day it will have to be changed. We must give minors freedom to control their bodies if we want our society to escape all kinds of violence and conflicts.The legislation passed in the last century shuts us up in a vicious circle: by forbidding responding to the child’s drives, it engenders neurosis; neurosis generates all kinds of delinquency, among them sexual perversions; perversion necessitates repression; sexual repression engenders neurosis, and things become worse from generation to generation. You speak of respecting the child. For you, the fact of engaging in sexual relations with a minor is not a lack of respect for his innocence? I think that respecting the child begins with respecting his natural drives, which constitute his innocence. And respecting a drive means that we must give it the response foreseen by nature. The same problem exists with the instinct for language: if one does not respond to a child who starts to talk, he cannot develop his language, nor his intelligence. He will have difficulty in overcoming his delay. Why would it be different for the love instinct?To refuse to respond the child’s incestuous drives is to deprive him of the opportunity to structure his psyche in the conditions foreseen by nature. If we follow you, it is criminal not to enter into a child’s sexual games? Certainly, we shall never agree… The child isn’t seeking to play, he aspires toward something else entirely than little experiments of touch it. He aspires toward a transcendent dimension of love. Like what we feel in those first moments when we fall in love.True love at first sight is not something rational, it takes place outside of the conscious will. We immediately see the other as though encircled by an aura, the whole world with other eyes, the trees more alive, the stars more brilliant. Children live in this dimension, they aspire to it permanently. Each of their love and sexual drives is located on this level. I speak to you of this from experience, because I was able to experience it, from the age of nine or ten years…Sexuality takes on the character of a game just in that child who is traumatized by prohibitions, or by indifference, or also by seduction. He then explores, with the means which are left to him, what he was not able to experience in a natural way. Play sexuality, which we see as normal in the precocious stage, is already pathological. In the same way as pornography for adults. There’s a rumor that you give out X-rated videos to children, in your center? Certainly not! We don’t have any porno films, that would be contrary to the very principles of the process.Pornography is against nature: it consists of cultivating sexuality for its own sake, separating it from love. If it has developed in our society, it is specifically because the sexual prohibitions have too long prevented the fulfillment of natural drives. Frustration has reached such a level that it needs an outlet. What one can experience on a subtle level is found, degraded, on an inferior level. One feels gratification at the sight of images which normally evoke disgust, or which would be of no interest.The prohibitions against nature are the sole source of immorality. We see the results of the search. You have quite a video library with films forbidden to minors. These are classic films, as shown in all the cinemas. I use them as subjects for work in my courses. Bu the cassettes are not accessible to the children, they are stored in cabinets locked with a key. The children can circulate freely in the buildings. If someone is in the middle of watching one of these films, couldn’t they see it? It is up to that person to see that no child is present. I see what they want to get at: in the best families, it can happen that a child enters the room where his parents are watching a film and seems a more or less indecent image; if it happens with us, it’s corruption of minors… You spoke to us of a magical dimension. Do you really think that a child can have the impression of magic in being close to an adult’s body, or his genitals? Any physical closeness stripped of love releases disgust, sexual fear, an impression of ugliness. It’s a natural reflex, inscribed in our instincts precisely to keep us from falling into a sexuality without love. This reflex is particularly strong in children, it is there in order to protect against anything which might break down their innocence or reduce their sensitivity to this magic dimension. Things are completely reversed when it is love that is in command. Repulsion gives way to this magic of love which I try to describe, which transfigures the image of the other, makes beauty reign, without excluding any part of the body. The second policeman starts to get impatient. He can’t stop moving around in his chair. Maybe he understands better what I am trying to explain? Honestly, you are getting to be a pain, with your magical-pants stories We aren’t here to hear fairy tales! A propos of fairy tales: they exactly restore the magic dimension which should exist in love, if you have the ears of a child…I know myself, in a thoroughly concrete way what the child expects of the adult, for having lived it very intensely. I was just ten years old when I first felt myself bowled over by an extraordinary wave of emotion which burst forth in my chest. But I don’t know if it’s any use for me to tell you… Go ahead. If you had problems in your childhood, it might make it easier to understand your case… I was leaving the Conservatory of music in Lausanne, holding my father’s hand, when we met a man of about forty. Something about him struck me at once. This is Mr. Pasquier, a professor of dramatic arts. I didn’t know anything about dramatic arts, but his face, his silhouette which I saw against the sky, the timbre of his voice, fascinated me. My father takes a chance and suggests enrolling me in his speech class. He, answering, looked me in the eyes. He seemed to me to have a supernatural beauty, a Buddha’s smile, the impression that he would transport me into a world of wonders. I still see that image today…From then, I lived only for the theater, my speech exercises made my heart pound, I was chosen for numerous roles as a child. I even did a turn playing the lead role in a play by Jean Giraudoux, The Lovers’ Lunch: the son of a divorced father who takes the place of his mistress. A distillation of metapsychoanalysis. I also played the little shepherd who took Tiresias by the hand, in Sophocles’ œdipus the King. The famous divine curse, which Freud made the basis for his psychoanalysis, resonated in my ears like a question which must one day be answered…At school, I dreamed all week of the weekend and holidays when I could go to see my good friend. Our – platonic- relationship lasted three years. Everything I learned during that period, the art of saying I want and I demand, the tone of voice, memorization, emotion toward the audience, and even what I learned at school, has stayed with me always, bathing me in a sort of light at the depths of my soul. As if I had received a reserve of love to feed all that I have done since then. You did say « platonic relationship » ? There you are contradicting your own theories. Platonic has taken on the meaning of chaste since the 18th century, with the rise of Puritanism. Plato never forbade sexuality in itself, he condemned the calculated pursuit of pleasure or of wisdom. As, by the way, did Genesis. The man you are speaking of, did he touch you? Yes, to the depth of my soul!It is I who dreamed of sleeping in his bed. He showed a great tenderness toward me. On his knees, I felt in seventh heaven. I pressed myself against his chest, against his cheek, I trembled with all my being when he took my hand. Nothing in his body repelled me, on the contrary.He obviously feared to go any further. Once, when we were going on vacation, I was alone with him in a train compartment. In playing at boxing, I aimed a light blow at his penis, after a great deal of hesitation. He frowned and told me that that would not do.I had the impression of being crushed. Like a great feeling of injustice. You mean to say that he should have responded to your advances and dropped his pants? I am trying to explain to you this subtle dimension of love, and you make it into a problem with pants. What counts for us are objective facts. What do you call objectivity? In emptying facts of their content, in stripping physical acts of the significance they have in experience, we substitute for them a subjective image: that of your own sexuality.Imagine that a journalist had photographed Tristan and Isolde, positioning his lens under the sheets, at the foot of the bed, and published his prints as a rape of a minor: everyone would cry shame and scandal. When in fact this myth is there to reveal to us the existence of a transcendent love- a transfiguring love, as the exegetes tell us.A true objectivity takes into account all the elements which characterize an act. The content is infinitely more important than the external form. The same gesture may reveal itself as contemptible if it is done with the intention of gratification or of perversion, or sublime if it expresses a true love, in all its magical dimension… Unfortunately for you, the magical dimension has no place in the courts! The two officers start in on another debate: should they bring a beer, or go get coffee? They hadn’t eaten anything at noon. A little snack seemed urgent. There is a pizzeria nearby.The printer brings forth painfully a whole stack of paper. It takes me a full fifteen minutes to skim through the pile and sign the sheets. I don’t recognize much of my own words in the way they have transcribed my responses. I try to protest.Another agent arrives. He is told to guard me. The handcuffs seem useless. He stares at me as though I had come from another planet. He pretends to file folders which are lying around on a desk. Without a word, he observes me out of the corner of his eye while I drink my glass of mineral water.Voices burst out in the echo of the corridors. The interrogations seem to be making good progress. No one is idle here at the Federal Police. Me they’re treating with kid gloves, I am too much of a media personality. But the others?Provided there are not too many rookies…
Chapter II My inquisitors are back. They argue over who of the two is to interrogate me. They seem nervous. Is it the effect of the black coffee? Or of a phone call with the judge…You would think it was a police war. If I have understood correctly, one comes straight from the Paris vice squad, a specialist in matters pertaining to minors. The other is the Chief Superintendent of the Provins police. Who will carry it off? Think of it: nabbing the great pedophile guru, page one of all the papers, who got off scot-free after ten years of investigation for practicing medicine without a license… So you were saying that one must absolutely allow children to realize their incestuous drives, if one wants them to be able to develop their sexuality? Don’t make me say what I didn’t say. I think that one would have to – in the conditional! – allow precocious drives the possibility of being realized in conditions foreseen by nature, to the extent that one would like to avoid the Oedipal trauma.These drives are at the basis of the whole of psychic structuring, their repression has repercussions on the whole personality, so it is much more than a question of sexuality. But that doesn’t mean that from today to tomorrow one has to let children do who-knows-what… Tell us more in detail about what happened in Switzerland, and why you were found guilty. That goes back twenty or thirty years, I’ve paid my debt to Swiss justice. How does that concern this investigation? It’s only to place it in context. I’ve noticed that this line of inquiry consists of extracting facts from their context, in order to reconstitute a scenario which one superimposes on reality. Don’t worry, we know how to do our work. You do it too well, actually: you re-transcribe my responses in your own language, leaving out what doesn’t suit you, then the investigating magistrate does another filtering, and finally there is nothing left of the real position…I will not sign my deposition unless you write down my responses without truncating them, using exactly my language. If you think that will change anything… So, in the course of our experiments with diet, we had become convinced, my wife and I, of the sureness and precision of the dietary instinct.I was able to see that babies are perfectly capable, from the first hours of life, of balancing their menu as a function of their needs, on the condition that they are presented with foods with no preparation. The newborn who needs glucides instinctively opens his mouth when you let him smell a banana, he is able from the first attempt to chew and swallow measured mouthfuls. Once his need for sugars is covered, he keeps his mouth closed and turns his head; if you try to force him, by sliding a spoonful between his teeth, he spits it out again at once. This from the first attempt, without ever having exercised his olfactory and gustatory senses.So one can see that the mechanisms, though quite complex, charged with assuring the regulation of the nutritional balance, are innate, that is to say genetically programmed. The same auto-regulation may be observed in adults: after a minimum of de-conditioning, the mechanisms of smell and taste guarantee a very precise nutritional balancing, according to the needs of the individual. A person who lacks vitamins is attracted by the odor and the taste of oranges; one who lacks zinc feasts on oysters, even without lemon; another who lacks proteins finds raw meat delicious, but later the taste turns disagreeable when the need is covered…Thousands of observations have brought us to regain confidence in instinct and to distrust reason, dietary rules leading quite often to committing serious errors. After several years, we decided to leave the children free to obey their instinct equally in other areas: the rhythm of nursing, sleep times, exposure to the sun, protection against the cold, the desire to learn, to play, to discover, etc. We were able to confirm that all these behaviors are to a large extent determined instinctively and perfectly well organized.The prohibitions and the obligations of classical education were shown to be almost useless, and often harmful. The children learned to read or write much better when no one forced them to do so, it was enough that an adult be there to answer their questions at the right moment. The same for math. In this way they built up extremely solid bases, they learned to express their own truth, rather than reciting what has been imposed on them. Even without going to school regularly (we left them free to go or not), they had no problem with their studies later on. They may have stored up less knowledge at the beginning, but what they learned, they integrated profoundly… You are good : you would train a horse by leaving the bridle on his neck… Children can’t be trained by bludgeoning them with conditioning. The human psyche is much too complex to obey the rules of behaviorism. When one forces a child to learn, he learns not to learn by himself. No one can really understand a new idea when he does not first have the drive to discover it. If one doesn’t push children to learn, they will go about it all by themselves! Children pushed to learn don’t want to learn anymore: when you stop pushing them, they don’t do anything anymore. That’s where you get the impression that they wouldn’t undertake anything on their own. When you leave them free, there comes a moment when they notice that they don’t know certain things. The desire to learn springs forth automatically.This desire is even stronger if the child feels love for an adult in its surroundings.All that this adult knows and does becomes a model of identification for the child. Something even more profound happens as well: one might say that the child falls in love with everything that interests the adult. In this state of opening, he learns much faster, without feeling it as an effort. The metapsychic certainly plays a role in this type of learning. It is what happened tome with physics and mathematics. While others suffered on their school benches, I had the impression of discovering wonders, ahead of the program.I think that this is the natural way of learning: through love. So you are rejecting the entire school system? Look at what is happening at the Department of Education: it’s a place of permanent conflicts. The young people sense that something is not quite right, but don’t manage to get to the bottom of the problem. So they protest against the forms and the reforms, violence erupts from all sides… And concerning the love instinct? There, as with the other instincts, we were able to see that any external pressure only compromised the natural harmony. You let the children do as they pleased? It was the only way to discover the natural functioning of the instinct. Each time we confirmed that a behavior was well coordinated, we were able to give them more freedom. Year by year, we were convinced that they knew better than adults how to put into play the transcendent function of love. You gave them more and more freedom. What kind of freedom was this? If they wanted to sleep in the parents’ beds, we let them do it. If they wanted to walk around naked in the house, we showed neither disapproval nor amusement, we remained totally neutral. The same if they wanted to snuggle up with an adult, climb over him, caress him… What happened on the strictly sexual level? We respected each gesture by the child, avoiding any sign of rejection or surprise which might have disturbed his innocence. A raised eyebrow, a little frown, an air of surprise were enough for the child to immediately close up on himself. He restarts his attempt once or twice, then he abandons it. He then compensates by sucking his thumb, having a long talk with his teddy bear, cries a bit, asks insistent questions, refuses to go to sleep if one turns out the light or if one closes the door to his room…Children seem to need a few hours of physical contact with their parents every day, like all small primates. Most of the time, they remain snuggled up against them all night, then wake up when the adult draws away. What do you do when you have conjugal relations? It was impossible in their presence. Instinctively, the child protests vigorously when he senses a desire of a sexual nature in an adult. A simple kiss on the mouth between parents makes him react. Already in the first years, as soon as he senses a hint of seduction, for example between his father and his mother, he becomes agitated, he catches them by the clothes, he invents anything at all in order to create a diversion. Even if he can know nothing of the intentions of adults, his unconscious perceives that this is a relationship of another order. He spontaneously distinguishes between the reproductive function, which he feels as something shocking, and the Oedipal function, to which he aspires with all his being.It is the behavior of very young children, compared to what I myself experienced before puberty, which led us to postulate the existence of two different sexual functions. I did not imagine that I would find confirmation of it one day in Freud and in Plato. You claim that the child is capable of discerning between two forms of sexuality, better than the adult? As soon as he is able to express himself, by gestures or by language, and before any interference by morality or education. He shows an innate capacity for discernment, every bit as precise and complex as for the dietary instinct. I have never seen anything like that with my kids. The child’s behavior remains indecipherable as long as one ignores the existence of two different sexual functions. When he protests with crying or bad moods, one blames it on poor digestion or poor character. Without theory to guide observation, one doesn’t pay attention to facts, one interprets them according to what one believes to know, one forgets them…With time, we were able to make a whole list of aggressive drives, organized in such a way as to denounce each error which might lead to failure of the transcendent function of love. They constitute a sort of natural morality, inscribed in our genetic patrimony.It is thus enough to let the child freely express his drives, negative or positive, in order to discover little by little the natural function of this part of the love instinct. So, for you, a baby has better judgement than an adult? The judgement of an adult is of an intellectual order: the adult ‘knows’ what is right and what is wrong. He thinks he knows. While the child ‘feels’ instinctively what is right and what is wrong. In these subtle areas, instinct errs much less than intellect. The proof is that instinct permits the rediscovery in thirty years of what the whole culture has spent centuries not discovering… You seem to be condemning seduction. But it is nevertheless a part of every sexual approach! Desire, seduction and possession can be observed in animals, you have to place them in the reproductive instinct: the attraction of the male by the female in heat, the show, the combats between rival males, the faithfulness of the couple in many species, the nest-protection strategies… These behaviors are useful to the survival of the species and the safeguarding of the genetic patrimony. In the human being, they are added to intellectual functions: it pays to know how to calculate well in order to seduce a pretty woman and to manage the family budget…It is completely different with the non-reproductive function: reasoning, mental representation, calculation, are incompatible with the subtle dimension of love. Every desire, every hint of seduction or of possession leads rapidly to failure, making the partners slide onto the biological level appropriate to reproduction. This is what happens systematically in classic love relationships… You say: ‘systematically’. You are then speaking of a function which never functions. Don’t you think that these nice speeches serve rather to justify your perverse tendencies? I don’t think I have more perverse tendencies than any other normal man. This different function of sexuality is simply less repressed in me, because I have had the chance to be able to experience it young enough, before the onset of puberty and its ‘animal’ drives. It was not difficult for me to distinguish between the two forms of sexuality, even if it did take a lifetime to know how to formulate it. If there were really two sexual functions, everyone would know it… An instinctive function can remain systematically blocked in a given society, and nevertheless have a primordial importance. My explanatory model permits us to understand exactly why this function has disappeared in our rationalist culture.A great number of experiments and cross-checking now permit me to postulate that there exists a specific function, inscribed in our genetic patrimony, and that it is directed toward an essential goal. Unfortunately, this goal, too, has been lost from sight by our materialist culture, with the result that the whole phenomenon remains completely hidden. A function that never functions, a goal that is lost from sight… And you expect us to believe that this is not a trick to camouflage your drives? So Freud invented infantile sexuality because he was a pedophile?Classical psychoanalysis has established over decades the existence of a precocious sexual function, present from birth, independent of the reproductive function. If that was an error, psychoanalysts would have closed up shop a long time ago. Observe young children, without suppressing them in any way, you will confirm as I have that these precocious sexual drives are a reality. I have two children, I never observed any of that. It is enough to tell them just once, like a policeman: ‘Don’t put your hand there!’ and the child will know that the gesture is forbidden. The taboo will be as deeply engraved in his unconscious memory as his gesture was the expression of an essential drive. On your part, you will forget your reaction, as one forgets everything one believes to be normal, while the child will have registered it for life. He will never again dare to show anything at all sexual in the presence of an adult, and you can convince yourself that sexuality doesn’t exist before puberty…No, if there is error in psychoanalysis, we must look elsewhere. Freud defines this precocious function with exactly these words: ‘A function which consists in obtaining pleasure from different zones of the body’. He conceals a cardinal point: every instinct possesses a purpose over and above pleasure. You have something against pleasure? I have something against the fact of reducing sexuality to a search for pleasure.Every instinct must have a purpose. A behavior which limited itself to pleasure alone would represent a loss of energy without compensation. That would be contrary to the laws of biology.If the dietary instinct were limited to obtaining gustatory pleasures, all the energy devoted to seeking nourishment and to digesting it would be spent as a pure loss. The energetic balance would be negative, it would be contrary to the principles of evolution. The mechanisms of natural selection are charged with eliminating this senselessness. The dietary instinct finds its biological significance in the fact that it responds to a very precise purpose: nourishing the body. The sexual instinct serves reproduction, I don’t see the problem! In effect, as far as the function of reproduction is concerned.It is even an excellent example that shows that the purpose of the instinct is located beyond pleasure. The partners obey a drive which pushes them to couple, they experience a pleasure at the moment of coupling, which favors learning of reproductive behavior and which stabilizes the couple. The pleasure plays the role of a catalyst, a motor, a fixative, but the true purpose remains reproduction. Even the partners are not conscious of it at the moment they are pursuing their pleasure. Up to that point, everything is perfectly logical.Things take a turn for the worse when one knows that another sexual function exists, of which the drives are just as important, and which is not aimed at reproduction: what good, for example, are homosexual drives, or all those which constitute infantile sexuality? Could they be limited to sensual pleasure alone, with no other significance? Once again, you stray from the subject. At this rate, we will still be here tomorrow morning… On the contrary, we are at the center of the problem. We are touching there on a gap which undermines the whole ‘program of sexuality’ peculiar to modern society. Everything that we think about love or sex, all the reasoning which justifies our behavior and our prohibitions rests on the ignorance of an essential function which marks the greatest difference between man and animal.Sexuality remains confined in a problem of reproduction, of biological inspiration, it lacks what would be most noble and specifically human. Even psychoanalysis was stuck in this rut, with the result that it is incapable of keeping its promises. Why couldn’t one consider pleasure as a goal? It gives relief to existence, it keeps the couple together, that isn’t enough for you? One cannot discard this way of looking at it a priori : man has surpassed the animal stage and can use his reproductive instinct for sensual pleasure; pleasure over and above the necessities of fertility, would serve to keep the couple together, favoring family stability…That’s the classical explanation. But is it really on the right track? Do couples stay together for the sake of pleasure? How many divorces, and children of divorce, are there? Doesn’t pleasure work in favor, even more, of adultery? Why would it appear at an age when there is no question of reproduction, confronting children with a permanent sexual temptation? Objectively, pleasure is rather the cause of a good number of difficulties.An affirmation which brings up so many contradictions deserves to be discussed. We have been content to invoke the stability of the couple because we didn’t have another explanation. As soon as we know the true purpose of this non-reproductive sexual function, the problem is resolved as if by magic. You still haven’t said what this mysterious purpose is… It isn’t easy to explain. It has to do with phenomena which are completely hidden by our rational culture: extrasensory phenomena, with the role that they play on the spiritual level. Oh, great! Now you want us to swallow your theory that you sexual acts have a spiritual goal? In ancient times, that was obvious. Sexuality was considered as tightly linked to spirituality. The notion of the sacred phallus runs through all of the history of civilizations. They spoke of the lingam in India, they represented the Kama Sutras on the porticos of temples, certainly not to invite the faithful to debauchery. In Greece, they celebrated phallophories. The Greek word which gave us ‘orgy’ means ‘worship’. You are venturing into dangerous ground. The sacred has served as a pretext for all kinds of moral drift. Everything depends on what you call sacred. If you continue like that, you’ll be taken for paranoid… So Plato, the greatest philosopher, deserves the same diagnosis? He wrote, a good two millennia before Freud, that there exist two distinct forms of love: a ‘popular’ Eros, which he associates with pleasure and reproduction, and a ‘celestial’ or ‘Uranian’ Eros, which allows one to attain the ‘Essences’. Which is to say, in his language, the true spirituality.Today we don’t understand these words anymore. When I read Plato for the first time, in my philosophy courses, I thought he was completely mad and that we, with our rational science, we held the truth. After forty years of reflection, I’ve had to admit that Plato was right, and that we have lost, in the detours of history, some essential values. I don’t see the connection with your theories of infantile sexuality! First of all, there is a striking correlation between Plato’s theory and that of Freud: with one as with the other, one finds two independent sexual functions. The ‘popular’ Eros corresponds without any doubt to the reproductive function of the Freudian system (or to the use one can put it to in search of sexual pleasure).The ‘celestial’ Eros is traceable for its part to the Oedipal function: Plato describes quite well this magic dimension – ‘the delirium of the gods’ – which we also find in Freud when he speaks of the ‘oceanic feeling’ in connection with the Œdipus complex. Both place this feeling in relation to a spiritual dimension (though Freud says he himself has never felt any such thing).And there is a third correlation: the Oedipal function and the Uranian Eros both exclude penetration, which our own experiments confirmed in large measure.There remains a sole discordance: Freud does not raise the question of the purpose – aside from the pleasure – while Plato is extremely clear on this point: he describes in his image-filled language how this celestial Eros (Uranus was the god of the sky) makes the ‘wings of the soul sprout’, which permits it to fly up to the Essences, which is to say to rediscover the authentic spiritual values. He says explicitly that the ‘wings’ represent extrasensory faculties.That is precisely what we have confirmed: an explosion of extrasensory phenomena when love is lived on this level. And why wouldn’t Freud have seen this? He was after all better placed than you… Freud worked in a time when the paranormal was banned from the scientific scene. He could not have introduced it in psychoanalysis without raising enormous opposition. Twenty years later, all the rhetorical prudence of a Carl Gustav Jung was barely sufficient to force the admission of a metapsychic dimension. All the same, something is not quite right in your explanations: by definition, Platonic love excludes sexuality, and you use Plato to justify going to the act itself! I have had the chance to be able to go back to the original texts with a specialist in Plato and in ancient Greek: the daughter of the philosopher Arnold Reymond, herself a privatdocent at the University of Lausanne. We were able to confirm that Plato does not proscribe sexuality in itself, he stigmatizes those who ‘couple like animals on four paws’: he is referring then to reproduction and penetration.He also shows, in a famous scenes where Socrates refuses the advances of Aristophanes, a young disciple who wants to sell him his beauty in exchange for his wisdom, that any desire and any calculation condemn the ‘celestial’ Eros to failure. The exegetes, infatuated with Puritanism, saw in these texts an ode to chastity… And what about pleasure? You said that Plato doesn’t speak of it in connection with this ‘celestial’ Eros, while Freud, on the contrary, insists on pleasure… You touch there on the heart of the misunderstanding. In a society placed under the sign of the repressed Oedipal complex, this more subtle function of sexuality is nipped in the bud, from the first years of existence, under the effect of taboos and the pressures of education. It can no longer attain its extrasensory goal. Finally, one no longer even knows that this goal exists. Paranormal phenomena are so rare that one no longer connects them with the experience of love. So pleasure ends up occupying the central place.When things function naturally, pleasure remains secondary. It is of another nature: compared to the physical satisfaction of normal coitus, it is something much more ethereal. Much more profound and more magical… Words cannot describe it, because our language is the product of a culture dispossessed of this transcendent dimension.Haven’t you ever felt, perhaps at the first rushes of young love, this type of magical wave which passes suddenly from one being to another, which intensifies when it leads to the bringing together of bodies, which fills the chest to irradiate the limbs down to their extremities, as if one were entering another world… Baudelaire speaks of the ‘green paradise of childish loves’. For me, all that is nothing but imagination. The extrasensory manifestations which appear when love is experienced on this level are verified objectively: they prove that it is a real phenomenon. Everything happens as though there were a sort of metapsychic energyFor more details on metapsychic energy and its axiomatics, see Essay on metapsychoanalysis with regard to Freud, Jung, Reich and Lacan, or two energies exchanging in the physical contact and fertilizing each other to feed the metapsychic functions. What exactly do you mean by ‘metapsychic’? ‘Meta’ means ‘above’. The word was created by Jung to designate that which goes beyond the limits of the ordinary psyche: intuition, creativity, dreams, premonitions, clairvoyance and other paranormal faculties. It is thus logical to call ‘metapsychic energy’ that which puts these faculties in action: ‘energy’ comes from the Greek ‘en ergon’, which means ‘in action’. Can you measure it, this energy? How can you prove its existence? No energy is directly accessible. The problem is the same in physics: one can neither see nor touch mechanical or electrical energy. Its existence is verifiable only through the effects it produces.To tell the truth, metapsychic energy is more directly perceptible than the energy of the physicist. One feels its presence through this impression of fullness, of the magic of love, of the impression of the infinite and of eternity which is linked to love. Its absence is recognized by a sensation of emptiness, of pain in the solar plexus. To me, the sensation of moroseness, of general depression which run through our society are nothing other than the sign of the loss of this energy, which is indispensable to spiritual development. So it’s enough to kiss to escape depression? It’s fantastic, your therapy… Wilhelm Reich, the greatest psychoanalyst after Freud and Jung, also speaks of a transcendent energy in connection with orgasm: he calls it ‘orgone’ and considers it at once biological, orgiastic and spiritual. For him neurosis, depression, the loss of creativity are linked to the poor management of this primordial energy. I am not the only one to use this language…The best proof of the existence of a metapsychic energy remains the appearance of extrasensory phenomena. Experience shows that there is a cause-and-effect relationship that is perfectly verifiable and reproducible. So, each time you have an orgasm, you have visions? Let’s sign up for the next course… Try to plug a lamp into a storage battery: the lamp will not light up if the battery has not been charged. If it lights up, you immediately deduce that electrical energy has been stored in the battery. Even if nothing allows you to visualize it before plugging it in.The model of reasoning is the same for metapsychic energy: the extrasensory phenomena appear where love has previously been experienced on this subtle level. In general, they don’t occur immediately after physical togetherness. Everything happens as though it were necessary to first accumulate something and that this something releases extrasensory phenomena as a result.The simplest hypothesis is to postulate the existence of a metapsychic energy, which accumulates in us with amorous contact, and then shows itself capable of feeding extrasensory faculties. Your argument appears logical. But it rests on elusive phenomena which are not convincing. You speak of creativity, for example: all artists are creative… Haven’t you noticed that most artists have loves which don’t conform to the normal? We say then, ‘those are artists, you have to pardon them their eccentricities…’ I think rather that they draw their creativity from their eccentricities. Goethe saw a direct connection between love and his own genius… You were speaking of clairvoyance: it is intelligence that permits us to see clearly in difficult situations… Let us understand each other well! This is not about clairvoyance in the ordinary sense. To see clearly in a complex situation is a capacity of a psychological order. I am speaking of paranormal clairvoyance, like that of true mediums.I was quite astonished myself that such a thing is possible: after a dozen years of trial and error, during which paranormal phenomena remained occasional, we were able to be present at a veritable explosion of visions, with almost all persons involved in the experience. Some of them even had several hundred in one evening. Visions… that’s nothing extraordinary. With a bit of concentration, everyone can visualize all sorts of images. Paranormal visions have nothing in common with visualization. They always arrive in an unforeseen form, and only when one does not try to visualize anything at all.The images are always surprising, very impressive, colored, charged with sensation and emotion. Sometimes, they occur as though inside the head, sometimes they substitute for normal vision; more rarely, they take on the form of an apparition, as if an object or a person were materializing in space.When the first phenomena were produced, I didn’t believe in them myself. With my training as a physicist-mathematician, I had always been very skeptical in the face of anything which did not have a scientific explanation. It took hundreds of verifications to convince me that this was not about hallucinations. When one has decided to believe something, one always finds good reasons… And when one wants to beat a dog, one always finds a stick… We ask nothing but to be objective. In that case, we will end up by understanding each other!A series of incredibly precise visions gave me the coup de grace : a young girl – the one who held the record with more than four hundred phenomena a day – suddenly saw, as if in a diorama, the different stages of a car accident: the place, the trees which bordered the avenue, the people seated in the car, their clothing (a young woman whom she did not know, dressed all in red, a red scarf on her head and red shoes, which is rather rare); then the shock of the car against the tree, a dispute between the driver and the passenger, a scene of breaking off… The next day, we learned that this accident had in fact taken place, at just the same hour and at the same place. All the details were verified without exception. The young woman was dressed in red from head to toe. There can always be coincidences… When these coincidences repeat themselves systematically, it is no longer possible to invoke chance. It becomes evident that information is being transmitted, passing through a channel as yet unexplained.If you embark upon this type of ideas, you will totally disconnect from reality! And if it were your idea of reality that was disconnected from this metapsycyhic dimension? What permits the defining of a real phenomenon is the coherence between the different perceptions one may have of it. Paranormal phenomena obey this rule. Different people will for example have visions which converge in response to a given question. The premonitory dreams which announce an unforeseeable event are easily verifiable. The coherence appears clearly when the phenomena are sufficiently numerous. When love functions as I am trying to describe it to you, there can be thousands per day.When the metapsychic perception is paralyzed, one constructs a fragmented image of reality. Our program of scientific explanation has not been able to integrate them for lack of sufficiently frequent observations. Since it can explain neither their origin nor their function, we prefer to deny their reality. With the goal of objectivity, we do not want to recognize anything but material phenomena.Nevertheless, when nothing remains but the material, we have the feeling that existence is not worth the trouble of living. This anguish is there to signal to us that an essential component of our conception of reality has been amputated. To see things far away, I have an excellent television! The most important thing, in clairvoyance, is not so much the possibility of seeing an event at a distance. It is symbolic visions: in this case, the images don’t necessarily correspond to real objects. They give, in the form of archetypes, the spiritual meaning of material events. You are taking us into real esotericism… Esotericism deals with non-verifiable phenomena. From the moment when verification is possible in a systematic enough way, one can speak of a scientific approach, whether it has to do with sensory or extrasensory perceptions.Imagine that your car, when you turn the wheel to the left, veers sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right, in a totally unpredictable manner: you would end up praying at every turn that it be to the correct side; you would develop a whole speech to reassure yourself; you would invent magic formulas to avert an evil fate. Soon you will have developed a new form of esotericism!And why? Simply because the cause-and-effect relationship in effect doesn’t function between your steering wheel and the wheels of your car.From the moment when one can enunciate a clear theory, with verifiable and reproducible cause-and-effect relationships, there is no more question of mysticism or of occultism, but of a perfectly authentic scientific process, even if it has to do with love and paranormal phenomena. If these phenomena are so obvious, why didn’t science recognize them a long time ago? When a phenomenon is too rare, it is difficult to treat it scientifically. The para-psychologists come up against the impossibility of making parapsychic phenomena appear at the appropriate place and time for experimentation. They end up not being able to draw general rules for them.The determining element was to define the conditions under which extrasensory faculties can develop sufficiently and in a sufficient number of people to be able to control the manifestations. When the faculties of clairvoyance appear in the majority of those who experience love in well-defined conditions, when the visions manifest themselves on demand, regardless of when and where, without limitation on their number, responding coherently to the question posed or bringing essential elements to the conduct of existence, then you are forced to admit that we are dealing with an authentic phenomenon, which deserves to be considered as seriously as any other psychic or psychological phenomenon. How do you explain that there are a good number of mediums and seers out there? They didn’t all take your course in metapsychoanalysis! You admit then that clairvoyance exists? That’s something right there… In my view, extrasensory perception is something perfectly natural. It is normal that some people should have faculties of clairvoyance.What interests me, is to put to the test the instinctive mechanisms that are genetically provided in order to assure the development of these faculties, and to define the rules to be respected so that these mechanisms function correctly. If you need a whole series of nit-picking rules, you can’t say that this is something natural… Unless the rules are natural rules.I believe that that is the fundamental point of the whole experiment: the only rules which should be respected are natural rules. It is enough to avoid the influences which certain disturbing elements inherent to civilization can have, and to let nature freely take her course. That is to say let the sexual instinct do its thing without imposing any restriction on it? Instinct brings with it all the necessary restrictions. When one avoids the disturbing factors, such as excitation of the nervous system due to diet, excessive frustrations, repression induced by morality, one never sees a single untimely drive appear.Knowing that the love instinct is innate, and that it is enough to respect a certain number of natural rules to see extrasensory faculties develop, it seems to me logical to consider these faculties as a perfectly natural function. I will think of you the next time I kiss someone… Actually, you have to kiss without thinking for the process to function. More precisely, not kiss at all: because we speak of kissing as a way of making love which does not conform to the natural laws of instinct. If nothing got in the way of nature, I believe that every individual would be a medium. You should be amazed not that there are mediums, but that there are so few!I questioned a number of mediums about their childhood. They can generally look back on a particular love experience, for example they regularly slept with a grandmother, grew up in a family that was particularly permissive, were implicated in a sexual affair… Nobody makes the connection. If what you say is true, there should be a crowd of clairvoyants among the people following the rules you impose? Say rather: ‘who have respected the natural laws of love as I have tried to define them’. You are right: there is a whole series of them. If this affair brings me to court, I will ask them to testify. I can promise you it will make people think! According to your theory, children who can live out their Oedipal complex, thus realizing their incestuous drives, would automatically be clairvoyant? You are defining a new model of man there… You don’t know how right you are. The child who can live out his Oedipal drives develops his extrasensory faculties from the first years of his existence. His psychic structuring is effectuated on a different model, one could almost say: the flip side of the normal model. His metapsychic structuring is put into place before or at the same time as his intellect. His intuition, his perception of the transcendent essence of things develops before his reason has gained too much importance. His intelligence is constructed on the basis of creative intuition and is organized in such a way as to draw inspiration from it.From the beginning, he integrates the extrasensory dimension in his image of the world, in the way he makes choices and establishes relationships with others. He feels in permanent contact with supra-sensitive reality and can read in it, day after day, the spiritual meaning of his fate. He feels love and its physical expression as a sacred path, natural religion, which leads to the divine. For him, the body and the spirit, sex and love, the material and the spiritual, the yin and the yang, form an indestructible unity. Not to mention spontaneous opening to a third person, thanks to the positive image of the first triangular constellation. He becomes what I call a normal man. For you, pedophilia would create supermen? The response to the child’s natural drives would cure our society of pedophilia. No adult who would have lived out his Oedipal complex in the conditions foreseen by nature would have any perverse attraction for the body of a child.In today’s circumstances, the psychic structuring is effected counter to natural laws. The child discovers the world in his cradle. Barely weaned, he has only rare contact with the bodies of his parents. His loving drives come up against the adults’ incomprehension. His first sexual feelings get bogged down in prohibitions and guilt, his metapsychic functions are nipped in the bud. His reason is built around his frustrations, over-invested with desire and curiosity, cut off from deep intuitions and from consciousness of the supra-sensitive.At puberty, things crystallize definitively. A sort of short circuit is produced between reproductive sexuality and the vestiges of the ‘celestial’ Eros. The Oedipal drives, suppressed for years, are swallowed up by nascent reproductive drives. The unconscious hopes to accede to transcendence, which should give its sense to infantile sexuality and prolong its immanence throughout existence, crystallizes into copulative sexuality. Penetration takes on an exaggerated place, eclipsing the subtlety of other forms of physical contact. The magic of love succumbs to the need for release and the search for gratification. Desire, seduction, possession invade the love life, opening the door to deception, jealousy and suffering.The adolescent feels ill at ease, he doesn’t understand the internal conflict, the short circuiting of drives of which he is the victim: he feels at once unloved and incapable of loving, prey to drives of hate and of revolt whose goals and origin he does not clearly perceive; he will forever be divided between spiritual aspirations and sexual needs which he cannot get to coincide; he will later search in religions and in superstitions for the access to the divine which he has not been able to find in love; he will need all kinds of outlets to channel his destructiveness: sports, politics, violence, perversion…In short, he will be what you call a normal man. I saw what looked like two predators ready to pounce on their prey. What had they understood of my speech? They must surely take me for visionary, or a crank… On the one hand, repressed Oedipal complex makes us lose access to the transcendent, on the other it condemns us to neurosis: the outcome is negative under both scenarios. The consequences are incalculable, not only for the individual, but for society as a whole. Even for the planet as a whole, which the West has contaminated irremediably with its value system. So say right off that you are going to remake the world! Social problems are nothing more than the totality of individual problems. When psychic structures in the individual are conflicted, collective life cannot help being conflicted. A small increase in tendencies toward violence, in rejecting others, in jealousy in each individual has repercussions from one to the other like a gigantic chain reaction. Above a certain threshold, there is finally no solution to the problems of society. All measures of repression, of reeducation, of protection, of compensation are made up for by a latent discontent which seeks to denounce the fundamental error of our culture: the failure of the transcendent function of love which, alone, might guarantee the fulfillment to which each one aspires unconsciously. What remains are strikes, revolts, wars, terrorism, as if it were necessary to destroy a system which forbids us happiness… You have a lot of political wit. Please note that we have listened to you right to the end.According to you, it is then extremely serious to prevent a child from living out his Œdipus complex. To not respond to his need for love is a criminal act, not only against him, but against humanity? The Superintendent is seated at his keyboard. In his eyes there is a flash of satisfaction. He whispers a few words in the ear of his counterpart. The fateful question can wait no longer. So then, how could you, humanly, not respond to the sexual drives of children who surrounded you? They had spent hours just to arrive at that. They watch for my response, with the certainty of a cat who knows the mouse will come out of his hole… We had already, in Switzerland, for more than ten years, done the experiment of responding to the child’s drives. The results were conclusive, on the school level, on the relational level, on the level of extrasensory faculties. The psychiatric experts on the team at my trial confirmed in the presumed victims, psychic structures that were ‘clearly above average’. Everyone was quite happy, and all who experienced that period still speak of it twenty years later as a moment of paradise.Only, society quickly decided to transform this paradise into hell: the invasion of the judicial authorities, the shock of interrogations, the scandal in the press, tearing families apart, placements in institutions, the weight of rumors, the looks of others, all these profoundly traumatized these children. It took them years to get over it, the wounds are far from healed. How could I expose other children to the same traumas? You should have known that the authorities would intervene… That’s exactly what the investigating magistrate told me at the time, and I learned my lesson.In fact, the problem is even more profound: even if there are no judicial consequences, the child who is able to live out his drives will sooner or later find himself made to feel guilty by the social environment. He feels different from the others, he carries the weight of a secret. Everything that he experienced in innocence and in happiness risks at any moment toppling over into shame and scandal. Anguish and guilt insinuate themselves into the most fragile zones of his privacy. He feels isolated in an environment which does not understand his way of living and reacting. The sexuality of others shocks him, he must hide his own sensitivity, he is seen as mad if he speaks of the extrasensory…Between the repressed Œdipus complex and the non-repressed Œdipus complex, the dilemma is hopeless: the repression ends in neurosis and the loss of the extrasensory, the realization in trauma and guilt under the pressure of the surroundings.The only solution is to first change morality, and to reestablish laws that conform to vital necessities. A revolution touching on a theme so controversial will be possible only through a slow awareness. It is to this task that I have decided to dedicate the years remaining to me. The investigators seemed tired. They have me sign one of the sheets that come out of the printer. I read each page to assure myself that the language of the police doesn’t betray my thought too much. I congratulate them on the quality of the text. This time, they really made an effort. The subject is not easy.Their smile doesn’t manage to hide the deception. But the gain is far from won. They must certainly have rather precise intentions. Why the devil do they make me go into such theoretical detail?It’s lunchtime. They have forgotten their caps on the table.The agent who watches me eat is amazed at my routine. He seems a jovial sort, good papa, quite enchanted by his trip to the chateau. He has interrogated the volunteers who receive the patients. He must have convinced himself that the sect exists only in the newspapers.I respond to his questions while enjoying my fruit. He seems interested in my ideas on the dietary instinct, and even on the love instinct.He asks me if I am a believer. I tell him that believing is inevitably believing in an image which one makes of God, instead of establishing natural communication with the divine essence.To have the need to believe could result in the loss of this natural communication…When the two others return, he wishes me good luck.
Chapter III Just before you didn’t tell us what you mean by the triangular constellation. Explain please. The tone is drier, the looks more tense. Are they back at work on the orders of the judge? What can he expect from all this theory… The term is not mine. Psychoanalysis terms the tri-polar relationship which unites the child and his parents triangular constellation.The Œdipus complex is registered in a triangle consisting of three fundamental relationships: the relationship of the child with the mother with the drives termed incestuous; the relationship to the father, marked by the prohibition, to which the fantasies of murdering the father respond; and the conjugal relationship between the parents.It is in this triangular constellation that the psychosexual structuring takes place. Psychoanalysis gives it a primordial importance. Freud even goes so far as to consider it as a sort of genetically programmed tri-polar matrix: one finds it in children who have never known one of their parents, as thought the place for the missing parent had been provided in advance. What do you call the triangular constellation when adults are involved? You see the triangular constellation reappear all throughout life, each time that a love drive for a third person arises. Because you advocate adultery? I think we must ask ourselves if adultery belongs to the genetic determinants of the love instinct, or whether it comes from a disorganization of natural functions.This question clearly should have been asked a long time ago.If the drive for the third person is genetically programmed, it must have a purpose. That is to say, be useful for something, just like any instinct. I have attempted to determine what this purpose might be, and to understand why these things most often end in suffering, with the breakup of the couple, the tearing apart of the children, and all the traumas which follow. Is this a shortcoming inherent in human nature, or are we committing an error toward natural laws?This question doesn’t seem logical to you? Each one has his own logic… There aren’t thirty-six logical positions, provided you recognize the facts for what they are and leave out preconceived notions. That’s the advantage of the Cartesian process over irrational beliefs: it should, in principle, bring everyone into agreement…Adultery has for millennia resisted all efforts to eradicate it: the penalty of death pronounced by Moses, the pyres of the Inquisition, the exaggerated Puritanism of the last two centuries. By force of useless dramas, morality has changed, and the law has ended up following the movement.Despite the oaths of fidelity, and whatever pressure of prohibitions, adultery invades practically all the histories of couples, at least in the form of fantasies. We have the right to ask if this is then not a natural drive, genetically foreseen. And if it is genetically foreseen, we must assume that it serves for something. It must have some purpose. Love is made to live two by two! Love… or sexual intercourse?We observe in all love stories almost the same evolution: when two people are in a love relationship, it diminishes in intensity after a certain time, then one of the partners falls in love with a third person. Instead of considering this process as an exception, as a fault, one might see in it on the contrary a model of behavior which would make up an integral part of human sexuality.It remains to ask ourselves what could be the usefulness of this triangular opening.The fact that adultery brings suffering shows that it is not natural.In a context which is contrary to nature, a natural drive may cause suffering and appear to be, in the end, against nature. You have the gift of being able to see everything opposite. I am simply trying to explore all the possible paths of reasoning. As I did in theoretical physics.The triangular constellation constitutes the basis of the œdipus Complex: from this it is logical to think that it belongs not to the reproductive function but to the other function, to the celestial Eros. This way of seeing allows us to reconcile the necessity of the faithful couple with the need for a greater opening toward love.Well then, you are really twisting the logic there: if the couple is faithful, it cannot be open, at least not sexually!Wait a second: you are putting faithfulness to the partner and closure to loving a third person in the same basket. There can certainly be an indestructible faithfulness for a privileged partner, without that excluding the need for love with a third person. What are you talking about! This type of situation leads straight to jealousy, to family catastrophe, or to crimes of passion… That’s the classical scenario. We would have to look at what happens in different conditions of life and morality. My experience of returning to nature showed me that this situation of dramatic effects can easily be reversed.First of all, it is necessary to respect certain criteria: no parasitic excitation of the nervous system, thus no abnormal urgency at the level of sexual drives; neither desire nor excessive tendency toward possession or toward jealousy among the three protagonists; on the contrary, a profound trust in love as a source of energy, and not too much sexual frustration. If everything takes place in total honesty, without anyone pursuing egotistical aims or hiding anything from the others, one discovers a truly extraordinary drive, which transform the situation completely: the love of love… The love of love? You are foundering in abstraction! Love is made for loving one person, you can’t find love for an emotion… The capacity for abstraction is peculiar to man.Experience has shown me that one can fall in love with the love that circulates between two other people. As if their love induced an emotion even more beautiful and more pure than classical emotions of love. One must first get beyond all egocentrism and all fear of losing the love object. When everything goes well, the same loving emotion takes over the three partners. The injured partner, in turn, falls in love with the third person… We see what you’re getting at: you are going to justify orgies by adding a veneer of spirituality… Admit rather that you have a little touch of vice like everyone else! Vice is not always where you think it is.As you have been saying, it is the facts that count: if we can demonstrate that the triangular opening brings happiness and locking in two partners brings neurosis… For me, the issue is clear: I wouldn’t tolerate my wife cheating on me! Who says your psychic structures are normal? Another minute, I would have told him he seemed a little neurotic to me…. Me either, I wouldn’t tolerate my wife cheating on me. This intolerance surprised me from a mathematical point of view: if I truly loved her, why couldn’t I be happy that she is receiving even more love? It seemed to me logical to be grateful to a third person who brought her an excess of happiness…If A loves B, if B loves C, why shouldn’t A love C? That’s ridiculous! You can’t love a rival. Is it normal to see the third person as a rival? You see it in all the animals… And if man is more than an animal?Let me first describe how one can live in this sort of situation. There is another way for love than that of rivalry and jealousy. The whole thing is to discover it. And I am not the only one to have discovered it. Oh, great! Another –how do you say it- verifiable and reproducible phenomenon?Personally, I’ve never been able to verify anything like that. It’s the same with psychic phenomena as with physical phenomena: certain very specific conditions have to be fulfilled in order for the phenomenon one wishes to observe to manifest itself.Here it is a question of internal state. It’s necessary to first get rid of ordinary sexual desire, and of the fear of loving another. One must feel love as a sort of mystery which goes beyond the individual, like a fluid which flows all over and for all, and not as an emotion linked to the ego. There are no worlds to describe these things, precisely because they are not taken into account by our culture. From the moment when one succeeds in finding this state, a sort of swinging over is produced: jealousy, pain which one could feel is transformed, with all its intensity, into a surge of love, for the love which passes between the others… as if the new love were nourishment for the three partners. I know couples who manage quite well to tolerate mutual infidelities. Without the need for grand theories. They simply ignore the other’s adventures. That’s not it at all: to tolerate the partner’s adventures is generally to suppress the drives which oppose it. Suppressing drives as important as jealousy, rivalry, the fear of being abandoned, is not possible without internal conflicts, and these conflicts suffocate the subtle dimension of love. The tolerance empties the magic of love of its contents, it induces indifference. If it doesn’t store up hatred.In the triangular constellation as I have described it to you, these negative drives are reversed without being repressed. On the contrary, their intensity must be preserved, in order to find the same drive-energy when they have swung over to the positive sense.So we can observe a multiplication of love. The emotions which could feed jealousy and anguish are transformed into an explosion of happiness and of unconditional trust. It’s like an energetic tidal wave, which puts into action the subtle function of sexuality and tears down the barriers of the old repression. The proof that this is really metapsychic energy: the extrasensory faculties are released most often in this triangular situation. Things are probably even better when all three sleep in the same bed? Ah! That’s what they were getting to. But the law doesn’t prohibit more than two to a bed… Does morality have a veto over the penal code? The idea of a triangular constellation is independent of the fact that there has, or has not been a sexual realization. Nor does it imply a durable three-way relationship. In my language it designates the dynamic of drives which is put into action when a surge of love for a third person appears. Please nevertheless respond to our question: do you recommend in certain cases spending the night in threes? I am for giving each one his freedom. Does that seem to you immoral?Surely, if three people are together in the sack, having nothing in mind but screwing and the pursuit of gratification, it’s obscene, lecherous, pornographic and whatever else you like. But when a closeness is guided by love, by a love which circulates among the three participants, which makes them discover that love is something infinitely superior to the possession of a particular individual, the desire for a particular body, what would be immoral about that?I see immorality rather in classical relationships where one continues to make love by habit, by obligation or by calculation, as in most marital relationships. So, you recommend plain and simple, at least in certain circumstances, practicing three-way sex. You are really stuck on that! Once again, I do not recommend anything at all. I try to explain and to put into their proper place behaviors which have always existed.You must surely have seen Greek ceramics: you see in them multiple contacts. The exegetes were surprised to see meditative faces on the protagonists, as though they were in the process of performing a sacred rite… The Greeks are known for having some pretty peculiar habits. There are many other examples. For us, just two or three centuries ago, the droit du seigneur had the nobleman spending the wedding night with the young married couple and he was charged with the deflowering… Now there’s a good example of sexual exploitation. Sending all the virgins in the country off to that! So how do you explain that the priests, even the bishops, exercised the same right? Because they were all perverted?Today it seems aberrant to us: we don’t know that there exist two different sexual functions. This tradition could have been a way of preserving the transcendent function of love, in reactivating the triangular constellation at the moment when conjugal sexuality risked making the young couple slide onto the reproductive plane. The conjoined futures thus had a point of reference to distinguish between the search for energy and the search for a baby, which two are completely confused in our time. So you advocate reestablishing this custom? The problem is not there.I have to admit that the closed couple, as it has been conceived of for two or three centuries, functions poorly. I’m not the only one to say so. Unfortunately, no one can explain why, nor propose an alternative solution- not even the pope.So it is enough to distinguish two independent functions in sexuality, and everything immediately becomes clear. The couple remains the privileged place for procreation, with the essential tasks it entails: faithfulness, affection, security, protection of children, food, housing, education. This doesn’t prevent experiencing certain triangular overtures, according to encounters and affinities which fate may decide. If these relationships are on a high enough plane, and if neither possession nor rivalry intervene, they do not put the couple in danger. On the contrary, they guarantee it the supply of a metapsychic energy which somehow nourishes the conjugal relationship. Renewing the magic of love without which there can be no true familial happiness.Reich wrote already in The Sexual Revolution, his famous bestseller, that an outside relationship can help repair a degraded couple relationship. Using what recipe to avoid explosions of jealousy? It seems he knocked out a good number of women… That doesn’t mean he didn’t live right in other areas.The great error of Puritan morality is to have believed that love could be contained in conjugal relationships. A contract kills love. The magic of love stays alive only in the renewal of an ever-unforeseen present, in the unconditional acceptance of the reality of the Other and of his freedom. In the wonder of a ongoing gift of the self.As soon as one tries to enclose love in the mold of the ideal couple, whether in marriage or not, it is the mold which bursts and breaks hearts. The promises of happiness are submerged in habit and in boredom. Doubt, impatience, reproaches, suspicions, lies, end up by transforming love into hate. You can see it even in couples who say they are happy, by the reproaches which threaten at any moment to make the tension rise, by the impatience behind the affectionate words. In the exaggerated tenderness which must be put into the words… In order for a love to last throughout life, we must show conciliation, be able to renounce temptations which could destroy everything. It is this self-mastery which creates the beauty of love. It is a source of personal progress. There is progress of the sort that goes against natural instincts, and progress of the sort that understands and respects them. I think that it would be better to start off on this second way: it reserves for us the surprise of discovering in ourselves the potential that the first only buries deeper.When one falls in love, the unconscious seeks a source of essential energy, much more than a female to impregnate. In my opinion, love at first sight is nothing more than putting back the transcendent function of love. It has all the characteristics of a metapsychic phenomenon: it is not decided intellectually, it hits us in the solar plexus, it is often accompanied by telepathic phenomena.But if two people are isolated for too long, the reserve of energy is exhausted, the sensation of magic evaporates, there is nothing more to exchange.All that’s left is the trip to Venice to lead his partner up the garden path… I think you’re the one leading us up the garden path! Family has always been at the very basis of society, if you blow up all the most fundamental moral values… Isn’t it immorality to let young people believe that they can find happiness in a strict fidelity, when we know very well that the dice are loaded?We must once and for all look things in the face: even when one thinks he is touching happiness, with a charming wife, superb children, a house that is the envy of the neighbors, a dog, a fridge, everything he needs to be happy, there is still a profound dissatisfaction. Despite the best will in the world, it becomes unbearable, the slightest detail becomes a cause of irritation, the exasperation slips into every discussion. When doing the dishes can end up in an outburst…In examining things from closer up, we see that the unconscious is protesting, even if the situation appears to be ideal, because it deprives the partners of the essential. The promise of happiness which the priest makes to the young couple comes to nothing due to loss of the most precious energy, a loss which only the unconscious can recognize, since nothing in the prevailing morality gives us a clue. In this way a conflict without resolution is born between the conscious, for which all conforms to normality, and the unconscious, which reacts violently to signal a catastrophe.Little by little uncontrollable drives set in which degrade the conjugal sexuality. The familial atmosphere suffers the consequences. Despite the best will in the world, it is often transformed into a type of hell.It starts by a bit of depression, by an impression that things are not the way they used to be in the first days, an aggressiveness which insinuates itself into the everyday and culminates in domestic scenes and words we regret. The wounds tarnish the image of the other and little by little crystallize the cold in the hearts. And finally an irrepressible anger that explodes when the divorce comes… The silence of my questioners surprises me: have they had the same problems in their marital lives? Reich showed, for the pleasure of statistics, that the only happy couples are adulterous couples. The policemen were certainly no exception to the rule… Until the 18th century, marriage didn’t mean a closed couple. The nobles married for the bloodline, for rank or for money, they knew perfectly well that love had to be found elsewhere. In ancient China as well, the most graceful duty of a good wife was to guard the affectionate inclinations of her husband. You can read this in the I Ching, one of the oldest books of wisdom. Under these conditions, there was no question of betraying one’s spouse, because one told everything. Nor of divorcing, because it wasn’t necessary. The opening up of love guaranteed the unity of the couple. So, for you, infidelity is the condition for fidelity? You have a taste for paradox! As soon as one has felt love for love, the opening is not a synonym for infidelity, but for respect for the other.It is the closing which is the cause of infidelity. When the marriage is felt as a prohibition, as an impossibility of experiencing love freely, it is a hard job to show affection, to convince oneself that one is happy, to reject the nascent emotion for a third person. One feels oneself a prisoner. The unconscious always finishes by being stronger and by making the marital relationship explode in pain and hatred, or by drowning it in indifference. There one can speak of infidelity! And what do you do with virtue? For you, it doesn’t exist… Staying together in the name of a presumed virtue is not true faithfulness; it is a parody of faithfulness. This type of faithfulness is based on a contingent morality, on a contract, on a mental decision. On the wish to conform to a model, and not on the authenticity of the feelings. The virtue of which you speak is synonymous with hypocrisy, it condemns us to simulate love, to content ourselves with dried-out leftovers of a sentiment used up by time. You sweep aside any notion of duty? On the contrary, my goal is to show that one can do his duty without coming to an impasse. When the limits we impose unconsciously are not in agreement with our unconscious aspirations, the most beautiful decisions always end up in bitterness or breakup.I believe that a real duty can exist only in the prolongation of the genetic determinants of the psyche. The question is to know whether the love instinct is programmed on a binary mode, or on a compound one… My instinct is to smash the face of anyone who has designs on my wife! And if it’s your wife who has eyes for a third person?Try rather to see what happens when one locks love up in a classical couple relationship. As praiseworthy as the wish for fidelity of spouses may be, the need to bring in an external love will come up with one or the other. There are then two solutions: silence the heart and condemn yourself to a situation which is profoundly unacceptable; or break the existing relationship with the idea of constructing a new one. But can one construct an authentic love on the ruins of the previous one? In both cases, the reproaches, the guilt, the suffering will come along to the rendezvous.The scene reverses itself when the triangular constellation functions positively. Each new love is added to the preceding, enlarging it, giving it back its substance. It obliges the three partners to go beyond possession, egoism, dependence. And so to accomplish real personal progress. Life unfolds like a great fairy tale in which each episode brings a new happiness. Like a tree which lifts itself up a little more to the light each time a new branch grows…Which of these two formulas do you see as more virtuous? You can always talk, your theory leaves the field open to all kinds of perversions. What do you call perversions? We must start by agreeing on the words… Imagine what these kind of principles would do if they spread out in the population! It would be a catastrophe; there would be no more cuckolds, no more domestic scenes, no more divorces, no more abandoned children, no more sexual suppression, but happy families, parents radiating energy, richer cultural exchanges, a youth not guilt-ridden by its own aspirations…My mother said on her deathbed: If what you say is true, you have found Paradise! Don’t we all expect, intuitively, that love will bring us happiness?For a moment the Superintendent from Provins squirms in his chair. He gets up and says from behind a wreath of smoke: Useless to look into all this blah-blah-blah. Everyone here knows that you allowed a certain sexual freedom to reign around you. Admit it, once and for all! A certain freedom in the expression of love! The ideal would even be total freedom, because love knows very well what it must do…Only don’t say that I let it reign: this freedom puts itself in place, as soon as one has understood the true function of physical love. It becomes a synonym for respecting nature, of humility in the face of subtle forces which rule over us.It reestablishes the innocence of the amorous approach. But it doesn’t increase the frequency of sexual relations, if that’s what interests you.With a natural diet, the absence of parasitic excitation of the nervous system has the contrary effect that the sexual drives are much less commanding. All sorts of gestures, like putting an arm around someone’s waist, holding him to your chest, even sleeping next to him, become possible without the slightest sexual undertone.It is a good thing that gestures of affection rediscover their purity and benefit from a greater freedom. Don’t we say that we suffer from a lack of contacts and caresses in our society? We’ve been told that in your group you advocate homosexuality? Once again, I do not advocate anything at all. I try to comprehend nature.Homosexuality has existed since earliest antiquity. It is present in many cultures. We find it already in the unconscious of a child. For Freud there is at first a fundamental bisexuality, that is to say innate heterosexual and homosexual drives. We can observe homosexual overtures in the majority of individuals, notably at adolescence. Many artists are known for their homosexuality, in particular geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Oscar Wilde, Verlaine, Rimbaud. The wave of AIDS revealed its omnipresence, even among the great heterosexual figures like Rock Hudson…The only worthwhile attitude consists of asking, as with the adulterous drive, whether homosexuality is inscribed in the genetic programming of the human sexual instinct. And to the extent that it proves to be a natural function, what its true purpose is.It certainly doesn’t belong to the reproductive function. There I think we are in agreement! Between us, are you a homosexual? If I were a homosexual as you mean it, my wife would not have had six children. And I promise you they are mine… So you are heterosexual. The presupposition that says that an individual has to be either completely heterosexual or completely homosexual has never been proven. We have to ask where this cleavage is coming from. So everyone should be bisexual? In my opinion, everyone is bisexual by nature. But everyone is the victim of more or less energetic repression of a part of sexuality. In the homosexual, the heterosexual drives are repressed; in the heterosexual, homosexual drives are repressed.The natural state is not to be a victim of any repression. Can you see the mess that would result from that? On the contrary, there would be no more discrimination between homos and heteros, no more homophobia, no more guilt in adolescents who feel amorous impulses toward a friend of the same sex, no more of this hypocrisy about love…Think of the family dramas when parents discover that their boy is queer or their daughter a lesbian. Of all the lives broken in the name of a normality which nothing could ever justify. I certainly want homosexuals to be tolerated but don’t tell us it is natural for someone to have sex with someone of the same sex. It is contrary to the most elementary rules of biology. Sexuality in man isn’t necessarily the same as sexuality in animals.Communication using language is infinitely more complex than communication by sounds.Why shouldn’t human sexuality, too, be more complex than animal sexual instinct? Don’t you see that homosexual practices have something bestial about them… On the contrary: it is heterosexuality that lays down the law in the animal world. To condemn homosexuality is to condemn man to an animal sexuality. With a person of the opposite sex, the pleasure is so much greater… How can you make that comparison? This time, I succeeded in making him blush… The essence is not in the pleasure. It is the subtle energies which create the fullness of a sexual relationship and permit it to attain its transcendent goal. The quest for pleasure leaves us with the head full, but the heart empty… According to you, homosexuals do not seek pleasure? One may seek pleasure in all the forms of sexuality. But one can also let oneself be carried away by love. What real love leaves behind is much more than a memory of pleasure.So what is more gratifying, when all is said and done: the homosexual relationship or the heterosexual one?The simple fact of thinking that a relationship could be more or less gratifying prevents love from attaining the transcendent dimension. The magic of love is not compatible with a spirit of calculation or of comparison. So, all your theories are incompatible with the type of love which you pretend to describe! As I told you just before. The simple fact of theorizing destroys the subtlety of the love relationship. But without theory, we can’t free ourselves of taboos and false guilt, which in turn cause even more damage.That is why I have tried to construct metapsychoanalysis in the form of questions to ask oneself, without ever bringing definitive answers. The exercise is not necessarily easy. You place heterosexuality within the reproductive function. So all heteros are beasts… I never said that! I said that homosexuality cannot be placed within reproduction. But there can be a form of heterosexuality which corresponds to the transcendent function of love. Plato excludes this possibility of the Uranian Eros. He gives the monopoly to homosexuality. Perhaps he was influenced by the morals of ancient Greece.The big question, which I have never seriously confronted, is to know what specific roles these two forms should play in human sexuality. They don’t necessarily have the same function, even if one considers only the non-reproductive part of the sexual instinct. But heterosexuality still remains necessary for the construction of a family? It is necessary, but not necessarily sufficient. Nothing excludes, for example, that a certain homosexual experience not be essential for the heterosexual relationship between the parents, or future parents, to attain the level of happiness and of radiance which it should possess. Especially in the long run… According to what you’ve told us, you have some pretty anti-family ideas… I am neither for nor against the family: I simply ask why so many families are sources of conflict and of suffering.Is the human being genetically programmed to live in families or to live in groups? The ethnic groups who live in small communities seem to have fewer relational problems than our society constructed on the binary model.For Reich, the nuclear family (mother, father and children under the same roof) is seriously pathogenic. He sees in it the origin of almost all the ills of society. His position seems to me a bit simplistic: for biological reasons, one cannot suppress the family. It is not enough to denounce its drawbacks, we must rather seek out the causes which make it pathogenic. And what would be the social structuring closest to our genetic determinants.For my part, I have been able to confirm that a communal, tribal-type life does not exclude the family structure: families integrated into a group remain the place where the function of procreation is fulfilled, with all that is necessary for the proper raising of children, the nest, the nourishment, etc. The structure of the group responds to the other function, as a place for the exchange of energy, of creativity, of culture, of spiritual evolution.Note that the relations between persons of the same sex are favorable to the constitution of a group. And they were much more present in tribal-type societies than the missionaries wanted to see. You say: relationships between persons of the same sex. Is there something that keeps you from using simple words to say things? I did not say homosexual relationships because this word is charged with a content which has nothing to do with the form of love of which I am trying to speak. We right away see images of La Cage aux Folles, of drag queens, of leather shirts or red-painted nails. A real homosexual relationship has need for neither heterosexual decorum nor the etiquette of sadomasochism. It doesn’t need to clear its name. It obeys profound forces which are enough in themselves. You would then be against homosexual marriage? I think marriage should be left to heterosexuality. It provides a social framework that is useful for procreation. To want to lock homosexuality into it is a type of offering made to heterosexual society so that it will accept a difference which is difficult to assume. The best solution consists in putting each of the two types of relationships in its place. Once the energetic function of homosexuality is understood, its natural status reestablishes itself spontaneously.This balance existed in a good number of traditional societies, before we came to impose our supposed moral values. The ethnologists didn’t really see it. Everything that departed from marital relations escaped their eyes. The primitives, having a sensitivity which they did not have, gave up their intimate lives only with great difficulty. They felt that they would be scandalized, or that they would risk sanctions that the colonial masters inflicted on the natives.As for paranormal phenomena, Westerners considered it as the work of Satan, or as proof of infantilism. But never as entire phenomena whose perception had escaped them. That would have been to acknowledge a disturbing inferiority. For lack of personal experience of the paranormal, they could not understand anything of the animism of the so-called primitives. The missionaries saw nothing in the peoples they claimed to convert but the reflection of their own taboos. On a practical level, a group life still poses a lot more problems than a normal family life. With that number, there must be more sources of conflict, of jealousy, of all kinds of tricks… Sorry to contradict you. The experiments of group life which I was able to conduct twice, some fifteen years in Switzerland, then since ’83 in France, have proved to me the opposite. Group life is much more enriching, the cultural exchanges more varied, the spirit of solidarity, of sharing, of tolerance, of openness constantly stimulated. The children always find an adult able to guide them in areas which interest them, which even solves the problem of education.The extrasensory develops much more quickly thanks to the plurality of energies that are available and the flexibility of possible exchanges. The interpretation of symbolic messages is facilitated by the more numerous cross-checking, which feeds the spiritual life thanks to the work of daily reflection. There is something that happens between individuals, which vibrates in the air, which cannot be explained by ordinary psychology. Which gives communal life a flavor that is always new (providing that the love of love functions without too many snags).This doesn’t prevent family cells integrated into the group from benefiting from a sort of priority on the material and social level, from a spontaneous respect on the part of the others, which assures them autonomy and security.The two parts of the love instinct, reproductive and transcendent, are made to harmonize. It would be quite surprising if genetics had taken the trouble to program two instinctive functions which were incompatible. When one is locked into a system, one is always convinced he is right… I’m not the one making you say it: one must always have a counter-proof to come to a valid judgment. Why not experience group living!At first, for eight years, I had had the experience of the most normal marital and family life – not to mention twenty-five years spent at my parents’ house, which imprinted on my memory the image of a closed couple. Later, with all the people who gravitated to my experiment, I was able to follow hundreds of conventional families, watch their evolution, conflicts, divorces, suffering…The individual can find for his own personal evolution, cultural and spiritual, much more favorable conditions in group life than in the classical family system. It seems you organize group meetings in the evening. What actually happens between the participants? I see it coming: whoever hears group living automatically thinks of orgies. We are decidedly not on the same wavelength! We have an organizational meeting once a week: how did the week go, what difficulties were encountered, who will mow the lawn, feed the chickens, how will we divide up the chores… How are decisions taken? By a vote of raised hands, or by secret ballot if there is a particular problem. Always as according to the extrasensory, seeing as there are a good number of participants who have developed their faculties of clairvoyance…Then, those who wish may stay and share their personal problems, if they have some difficulty at the work level, or in their relationships with others. And in their sexual relationships, obviously! If they think that a group discussion might help them… Each one is perfectly free to express himself or to keep silent if he prefers. What do you do to help the walking wounded? Wounded? There are far fewer of them in a group than in a model family!You seem to think that I am the only one to intervene. Far from it: the advantage of working in a group is that each one brings different ideas. The discussions are never boring. With many, problems are resolved much more quickly than with two. And without the classical domestic scenes… But you do apply the great principles of metapsychoanalysis? The only principle which I apply systematically is to not apply principles, but to question preconceived notions whatever they may be. Including my own. But you must apply some method to solve problems. How do you go about it? By posing a very simple question: if there is suffering, hasn’t an error been committed against natural laws?This way of going about things presents a double advantage: each one is led to question himself actively about his own errors and the errors of others, rather than resigning himself to a painful situation. The same interrogations extend to the image we have of normality, to the principles imposed on us by the culture and which we apply often without even knowing it; we come in this way to rediscover the natural laws and to formulate them more and more clearly.This is how I have constructed, step by step, over thirty years of reflection, the ensemble of theoretical progressions which constitute metapsychoanalysis, in direct contact with everyday reality. Don’t you play a little at being the guru in these meetings? What do you mean by guru?This term is reserved for masters who bring esoteric teachings to a certain number of disciples, who are supposed to accept them as divine revelation. I don’t see that I enter into that category: I develop perfectly rational ideas, I respect all the rules appropriate to the scientific spirit. In a science, there are analyses, statistics… Analytic research is a path toward knowledge, but it is not the only one. Global research, in which the observer is integrated, can prove just as valuable.The analytic process can easily lead to erroneous conclusions. Even if one knows in detail the mechanisms which are hidden behind a phenomenon, there remains a large part of interpretation in the relationships between isolated mechanisms and the phenomenon as a whole.In empirical research such as mine, one is in reality starting from the other end of the road: the cross-checking between different observed facts allow the formulation of total hypotheses, for example on the purpose of an instinct; then the observations made from this point of departure, in more and more refined situations, allow us to constitute a more and more detailed system of hypotheses.The analytic process presents the danger that one will concentrate on isolated elements and make for oneself a false image of the global reality.The way to connect partial data depends on the preconceived idea one has of the phenomenon as a whole. The detailed knowledge of the microscope does not guarantee the correctness of conclusions that one draws on a microscopic scale.For example in medicine: after Pasteur, bacteria were discovered in the intestines. Bacteria having gotten a bad reputation, the researchers were worried. They decided then to raise axenic animals, extracting them from the uterus by caesarian section and sheltering them from any microbial contamination. They were then surprised that these animals, deprived of intestinal flora, were in bad health…When the global progression would have consisted of saying that all the animals in the world have always been in contact with bacterial in a natural environment, that they have necessarily genetically adapted to it, and that it would be dangerous to deprive them of it. This would have avoided the sacrifice of thousands of animals.A scientific process worthy of the name must always use the two forms of approach, analytic and synthetic. When we talk about complex and imponderable phenomena such as the relationships between love and the extrasensory, the global approach is the only one that permits us to initiate research. Ideas that are so removed from the norm as your own must lead to a sectarian position. In that case, Einstein and the first physicists who understood his ideas on relativity formed a sect. If you take yourself for Einstein… I am quite aware of my smallness, and of the enormity of what I defend.Sectarianism is tied to the spirit in which a new idea is developed: do we want to impose it on others, make use of it to exercise power, to exploit the general credulity, to get rich, or simply to develop it within the rules of objectivity and submit it to criticism.For my part, I have always been careful to define precisely what was axiom, hypothesis, conclusion, observed facts, fundamental magnitude, exactly as one does in physics. I am ready to change direction at any moment. I even systematically look for contradictions, in conferences, in my courses, in televised debates.My goal is to have my work known not only to a closed group, but to submit it to criticism by conventional doctors and psychiatrists. Hoping that they will deign one day to listen to a discourse which rather unpleasantly questions the bases of their specialties… But it’s still your charisma that brought together all these people around you. I don’t think I have any particular charisma. People who have been sensitive to my ideas have wanted to come to the source. They have been able to verify my hypotheses by the results obtained in applying my dietary methods. Those who are interested in metapsychoanalysis have been able to confirm the appearance of extrasensory faculties which they would never have believed possible. They have been able to convince themselves of the logic of the process by questioning me directly. If this constitutes a sect, then any research team is a sect, every class of specialized training is a sect, every enterprise that is a little innovative is a sect. If your ideas lock you into a system… The sectarian spirit consists in not accepting questioning or new ideas: it is society which is locked into its system and which shows itself to be sectarian in the face of the questions I ask!Neither anopsology nor metapsychoanalysis are ideologies. They are constructed in essence on ongoing questioning of the individual experience. This is about exploring the natural functioning of the dietary instinct and the sexual instinct., analyzing the structure of its drives, in order to understand their mechanisms and purposes. You can’t construct a sect around a research project or a series of hypotheses. You speak of hypotheses, but you use your ideas as though they were certainties. Provisional certainties, which allow us to set the basis for the continuation of reflection. The law of Newton was applied for a long time, then it became necessary to revise it as a result of Einstein’s work. The important thing is to know that the law or the theory that one admits must be questioned at the first contradiction. I dedicate one whole session of the course to putting the participants on guard against the illusion of certitude.Physics taught me that any theory, any explanatory model is nothing but the projection of certain outlines of thought on a reality which remains unknowable in itself. The model of the atom which was used at the beginning of the century, with the electrons gravitating around the nucleus, took on the look of a do-it-yourself project following the advances of quantum physics. As any scientist must do, I force myself to question each point of the theory as soon as the tiniest contradiction or the tiniest doubt appears. Metapsychoanalysis has continued to evolve with new observations. At the center of a sect there is, on the contrary, an ideology, a belief, a dogmatic system of thought, most often irrational, in open contradiction with logic or good sense, presented to the followers as a veritable intangible which it would be sacrilegious to question. A true guru would never say to his disciples: Question what I say so that I can make my point of view progress… So how does it happen that everyone makes you out to be the head of a sectarian movement?It’s the miracle of the media! It’s enough that there be some journalist somewhere who decides to destroy you, working at a good newspaper, who knows well how to exploit the psychoses dormant in the public. A good scoop, and the whole process is put in motion. They start with associations of family protection, then take a quarter turn when they think they hear talk of a sect or of pedophilia, without verifying any of the accusations which they inspire. Scarcely has the first article appeared, you no longer have the means to establish a dialogue, or to justify yourself. In this regard, our society is a totalitarian state, even if the power is in the hands of the media rather than in the hands of a tyrant. As soon as it concerns areas which disturb common spaces or the dominant morality, the journalists are the new inquisitors who condemn you and deliver you to public condemnation. There is a right to respond.A right to respond? There you’re the ones in the theoretical realm! It costs you thousands of francs to hire a lawyer, and the trial is great for the profits of the newspaper that brought you down. I speak from experience. From a distance, a new point of view always has something disquieting, each one feels threatened in his little habits, in his image of reality, in his security system. The media exploit the situation. The more dirt, the more they sell. The media are also ready to make new ideas known, serious discoveries…No journalist can take the side of ideas that are too new, under pain of getting on the wrong side of his editor. It is easier to stir up the great fantasies which make the crowds shudder: sects, gurus, swindles, pedophilia, traumatized victims, even if they don’t exist. Success is assured, people hurl themselves into the breach, grabbing at the articles. All the colleagues are obliged to follow suit, at the risk of deceiving their readers. Later on it’s enough to add some seasoning to the repetitions, to add a few spicy details, the sales will be stimulated, the benefits guaranteed. And there you are labeled as a guru, charlatan, swindler, pervert, on a national scale. Without the possibility of defending yourself.The judicial system can only follow the movement. If not, the population, in turmoil from the noise of the repetitions, will accuse it of not doing its duty, of being lax, even of complicity. I read this in France-Soir : The pedophile guru seems to have support in high places… Okay. You will admit that we have let you speak to your heart’s content. Now then, answer this question without thinking: at the end of your meetings, after having discussed metapsychoanalysis, how did you go on to put it into practice? Practice? By turning out the lights and groping for a partner?Metapsychoanalysis cannot be put into practice. It consists by definition of respecting the always-unforeseen subtleties of the natural amorous approach, avoiding all intervention by the intellect. You can’t use it to make decisions like going to bed with a certain person, separating from another, or putting any desire into practice.If it contains one part of theory, it is on the contrary to step back from behaviors imposed by today’s paradigms, in order to reestablish internal freedom, the innocence which is indispensable to the correct functioning of the love instinct. At the most, we can be inspired by it as a sort of decoding key, in order to better understand the errors which have provoked failures or suffering. Never to sketch out a behavior in advance. Calculation, previewing, destroy the subtle dimension of love… It’s quite complicated, your story. Could you define for us, in a few words, what you mean by metapsychoanalysis? It isn’t even easy to define psychoanalysis…Metapsychoanalysis is an approach to human sexuality based on the hypothesis of a genetic programming of the love instinct consisting of two functions, the one directed toward reproduction, the other giving access to a metapsychic energy charged with assuring the development of extrasensory faculties.To my knowledge, it is the first theory which allows for the joining in a coherent whole the theses of Freud, of Jung, of Reich, together with the information from antiquity and the Oriental teachings such as Tantrism and Tao. I have to smile, waiting for the rattling of the keyboard… To say that this definition will now be registered in all its glory in the annals of French justice. Maybe a historian, in ten thousand years, if they still exist, will find the traces…They tell me it’s time to break for the night. The judge, it seems, has decided to extend my detention. That was decided in advance. They tell me that I have the right to summon an attorney, since twenty hours have passed. I have the impression that that wouldn’t do much good. In any event, I tell them to telephone the attorney who had already defended me in my trial for practicing medicine without a license.I start again on the waltz of the signatures. Frankly, I’ve had my fill. The meeting has lasted fifteen hours. I can’t wait to find a bed to recover…After a quarter hour of rereading I see a black robe and ermine collar arrive at the half-open door. Rather anachronistic, the judicial ceremony at such an hour. From behind his glasses, the big man at the bar appears pale and haggard. It must be hard to wake up at three in the morning. Especially knowing that it is useless. Aside from the moral support.He will go drink coffee with the men in blue. I observe from far the dark colors. I still haven’t understood what I am doing in this bad whodunnit. They wish me good-night…Another uniform leads me deferentially into the basement. He gets me settled in a sort of concrete parallelepiped with a black hole ten centimeters in diameter in the ceiling. For ventilation, no doubt. The walls are grimy, rough, covered with obscene graffiti. What’s left of the sacred phallus after two centuries of Puritanism…They tell me I have forgotten to go piss. They watch me through the half-open door. Then they take me to my quarters. It smells vaguely of ammonia. There is no can, actually. The lock clangs and echoes in the corridor.Then, silence…On a concrete platform, a flea-ridden mattress and two blankets rich in various odors. By the flicker of the yellow night light, it was as dark as one could want.Medieval…Kafkaesque…Luckily, I was able to get a bottle of mineral water. There is no faucet. Having talked all day has made me thirsty. I hear the swallows run down my esophagus.I sink into sleep, trying to forget…Thinking of those I love…
Chapter IV Stand up! We’re going back to work! Three and a half hours of sleep… Something bitter burns just above my stomach. I tell them it was short. That I need a little time to wash up. We could have interrogated you all night. We ourselves haven’t stopped working on your file… In front of the cell next door, I recognize two hobnailed shoes, still encrusted with mud. They belonged to Jean-Claude, who was working on green spaces. They went to look for him in the garden, in the middle of his work. If I had known that he was sleeping right next door. About what could they have interrogated him so long?At the end of the corridor, the sight of a washbasin raises my spirits. Let’s hope that a bit of clean water manages to come out of the faucet. Unfortunately, there are no hand towels.They don’t release one foot. It’s good at least I don’t have handcuffs in crossing the corridors. I hear a cop say …the three others… and then he quickly closes the door. Three others whom they have also arrested?They sit me down facing the same desk. I slip, as yesterday, into a type of lethargy, a torpor that is almost agreeable. Almost as if I had taken Valium. Perhaps a reaction of the organism to overexertion…. OK. Now tell me about your metapsychoanalysis courses. You have a whole program, in four steps, it seems. That seems like it would attract people…. The tone is still mocking… But who so much interest in my theories? Do they want to attack me for my ideas? France, the country of freedom of expression… They must think that my courses drive people to debauchery. So you run four seminars of one week, with deeper and deeper themes? I don’t understand why you are so interested in what I am teaching! We have a complaint against you for corruption of minors. The judge wants to know what it is you put into people’s heads. Ah! It’s the judge who wants to know. What they did yesterday isn’t enough for him… A complaint lodged by a psychopath, whom I was forced to give the sack to because he was telling all kinds of things to the patients… For now, answer our questions. If I present to you all the material that is in these courses, we’d be at it for four weeks! Tell us what are the principal themes of each sequence. It seems that you advocate, in Meta I, the triangular constellation, in Meta II, homosexuality, in Metal II, pedophilia, and in Meta IV, sodomy. Is that precise enough? Is that what they have in their heads? If they are conducting their inquiry on the basis of the media… I recognize in that last bit exactly what was written in I don’t know which rag. I touch on these subjects. How could I do otherwise, when they are the object of all sorts of questions?It is important to see in what sense I speak of them. When a certain sexual behavior is observed in certain individuals and not in others, one must ask oneself if this behavior is natural, or if it is natural to forbid it. Perhaps nature itself is badly made, and the prohibitions are necessary in the face of natural drives! Precisely: we need to examine, in reality, where natural drives lead, and where their prohibition leads.The question is not simple: There are innate drives of prohibition and of inhibition, in the human being as in the animal. When you see someone hurting a child, you feel a knot in your stomach, you rise up despite yourself to intervene: a natural drive protects against mistreatment. There are many others, which correspond to the proper functioning of various instincts. The mother gorilla who sees her young one putting a poisonous berry into its mouth takes it away immediately. The dominant male prevents access to his females by his rival. The one who knows himself to be dominated refrains from postures that are too insolent. They didn’t learn that at school.In the human being, the prohibitory drives rise to the same level of complexity as that of the love and sex drives, which is saying a lot. So then the sexual prohibitions can be something perfectly natural? Don’t you have the impression that you are contradicting yourself? All sorts of arbitrary prohibitions can be superimposed on the natural ones. The hazards of history, the speculations of moralists, scientific errors, all these could have implanted in the tradition taboos that are contrary to fundamental needs, or contrary to good sense. After all, Nazi morality sent to the gas chambers children marked with a yellow star… With these kinds of examples… If the worst was possible, if the human psyche can come to such a consensus in so short a time, one would be right to suspect good old fashioned morality of containing certain prohibitions contrary to nature, fabricated by reason. Or by insanity. Even if they appear to us to arise of themselves, by force of habit, they can compromise the functioning of certain essential instincts.The taboo of virginity, for example: is it natural, or useful, or contrary to nature and harmful? The same for the taboos of masturbation, of homosexuality, or incest, etc. Fundamentally, one must ask oneself why the natural prohibitions did not suffice. Is it useful, or necessary, to add to them certain prohibitions of an intellectual order, transmitted by tradition and by education? Why weren’t the instinctive prohibitions enough? How would you distinguish a traditional prohibition from a natural prohibition? It’s not that obvious. The acquired prohibitions seem almost as spontaneous as the others, even more so because they are an extension of innate prohibitions, in that they complete or define them. The innate and the acquired are in a continual state of interaction. However, this distinction is indispensable; without it, certain natural behaviors would be masked, eliminated by education from a very early age. Which negates the reasoning at its base.So what criteria can we depend on?A natural prohibitory drive contributes to the proper functioning of the instinct and guarantees that it will attain its goal: the lioness who prevents her young from straying and exposing themselves to danger obeys her maternal instinct, the natural prohibition favors the survival of the species; the lion cub does not suffer from it, because he is genetically programmed to be raised by a mother who possesses this instinct.It is something else altogether when a prohibition goes contrary to natural laws. The young of a lioness trained to rebuff them when she brings them their food will develop an excessive aggressiveness; they will develop anxieties that will prevent them from participating in group hunts, will be rejected by the group, if in fact they manage to survive. Are you trying to prove to us that all the prohibitions which one does not see in animals should be suppressed? Far from it! I try to show that certain sexual prohibitions can be harmful, and others necessary.The harmful prohibitions are certainly not innate, considering that nature does not on principle encode injurious drives into the genetic patrimony. The prohibition on masturbation, put into place in the 18th century, seemed perfectly justified by all sorts of reasoning by doctors and moralists. It won over the masses in a few decades. Then it took two centuries to notice that it was contrary to nature and that there were grave consequences for psychosexual development. But how many children suffered from it during all those generations?Certain prohibitions which seem to us indisputable today may have similarly grave consequences. If you’re going to lay the blame on morality, then of course it’s to justify immoral behavior… You define the immorality of a certain behavior on the basis of morality. And if morality is in part contrary to nature?A small shrug of the shoulders… Exchange of perplexed looks… I must be a desperate case. The other Superintendent takes the initiative: So go on already with your course program. With what do you start off the first day? With the dangers which may arise from applying a theory in the domain of love and of the extrasensory.Every theory arises out of the intellect. Now neither love nor the extrasensory support the meddling of the intellect. A calculation, a wrong word, and the magic of love evaporates. The extrasensory is blocked by the effect of an internal tension, by a simple wish to know. The fact of intellectualizing is thus incompatible with the subtlety of the phenomena which are themselves the object of the theory.On the other hand, if one wants to rediscover natural functions, one must free oneself of conditioning, of the representations, of the schemas of explication, of the value judgments, of the taboos, often far removed from nature, which impregnate our unconscious from the earliest childhood. The culture and morality condition all our emotions, our decisions, our way of thinking. We are already prisoners of a theory, without being conscious of it, it is that omnipresent. A theory closer to nature, regrouping that which we know of natural functioning, would help us to recognize the straying from tradition. Who says that the right path is that of nature? Nature can also stray… You are right: one must not idealize culture, nor nature. But one has to start somewhere. Just as in any scientific process: one chooses a hypothesis as a point of departure, as plausible as possible, then one examines whether it is verified by the facts. If it proves weak on certain points, one modifies it as a result.For my part, I propose to put my money on the winner- nature: would the best way to save love be the total respect of the natural determinants of instinct? Are the loving and sexual drives programmed in our genetic code in such a way as to function in harmony and to help us attain the happiness to which we naturally aspire?It’s a bet like any other. Only the results can tell us whether it’s a winning one. But it’s a reasonable bet: nature generally errs less than culture. It’s had millions of years to get it right… You are quite taken with Rousseauism! The first movements of nature are always right… That thought of Rousseau’s was revolutionary, in an age when the natural was equated with the wild, and the wild with savagery… But it doesn’t pay to fall into inverse excess.By my reasoning, the harmony of natural functions does not constitute an axiom. For me it’s at most a working hypothesis: let’s first go down the paths of nature; if they are deceiving, we can always revise.Today, the concept of nature is no longer a vague terrain open to all sorts of phantasmagoria. Biology permits us to posit the equation: « Nature = Genetics ». We can define a natural behavior as having been inscribed in the genetic patrimony of the species.For example: is it natural to eat cereal grains? Is it natural to kill animals for their meat? Is it natural to slap children when they act foolishly? The same questions may now be expressed: are we genetically adapted to the consumption of cereal grains? Do the elements of our digestive tract conform to animal proteins? Is the reflex of corporal punishment innate, and within what limits?As long as it concerns animals, it is easy to respond to this type of question: it is enough to observe beasts in the wild state, far from any human influence. Chimpanzees eat only small quantities of grasses; they know how to organize themselves to hunt and to share prey; they punish their offspring by giving them little slaps. Even if there is a transmission between generations, this conduct certainly rest on a genetic base.It is much more difficult to draw conclusions when it comes to human beings. We are capable of inventing behaviors which have nothing innate, or of suppressing genetically programmed behaviors. How do we know if it is natural to make music, to send children to school, to punish sexual games, to throw criminals in prison, to build churches…::: There are always rituals and traditions. That is what constitutes the superiority of civilization… In effect, the animals have not yet had the idea of piling up stones to honor their gods. Nor of sending away their own to make them better!The outlines of behavior transmitted from generation to generation can bring certain advantages, but they can also thwart vital needs. The repression of natural drives is complicated by all sorts of secondary drives which, in their turn, require prohibitions. Finally, tradition covers natural tendencies, one no longer distinguishes between what is innate and what is acquired; we don’t understand why there are destructive reactions, explosions of violence, lurking depression; no one knows anymore how to untie the Gordian knot.Nevertheless, the distinction between the innate and the acquired is essential. It is much more serious to forbid a behavior which is genetically provided for than one induced by education. To prevent a trained monkey from riding a bicycle will not traumatize it; preventing it from playing with its fellows will result in a depressed animal, and a dangerous one. To forbid a child to play his stereo will traumatize him superficially; to forbid him to realize his love drives will have far more profound consequences.It is essential to know exactly which drives are programmed genetically in the child, if one wants to define a form of valuable education. One would at the same time draw a better comprehension of the adult love life. You separate in principle the innate and the acquired; it is said today that they are inextricably linked. Exactly so. Genetics determine only the outlines of behavior, one could say that it counts on an apprenticeship to refine the innate tendencies and adapt them to the facts of the environment. But it is necessary that this apprenticeship correspond to the potentials written in the innate. If it hinders their blooming, there will inevitably be internal conflicts. Man has many types of potential. With this reasoning, you can justify anything… No one has ever shown in conditions sufficiently close to nature that there are any bad drives, inscribed in the genetic data of the psyche, which need to be held back by exterior prohibitions.I have been able to confirm, on the contrary, that there are a whole series of innate drives which are perfectly organized so as to put the brakes on behaviors which could be harmful. A bit like combat between rivals in higher animals: the duels in which the males engage are regulated with an extraordinary precision, each movement is controlled so as to avoid too-serious injuries to the opponent or a useless death. Two systems of opposing drives are in balance: those which push toward the attack, and those which temper the gestures according to the condition of the rival. This is all played to the millimeter.We find the same principle of opposing drives in human sexuality: there are those that push to realize a sexual relationship, and those that slow down, taking into account the disposition of the partner and the data from the surroundings. These regulatory mechanisms go back millions of years (we find them already with the bonobos [?]). To add to them arbitrary limits risks compromising the natural equilibrium. Without morality, it would be general chaos. Men would rape women on every street corner… Rape did not exist among the Polynesians. And yet they didn’t have a repressive morality.You give there the typical example of a drive which takes on a compulsive form when the level of frustration imposed by morality goes beyond the threshold of natural tolerance. There are no destructive drives in natural sexuality. Read Reich: the harmful drives are always the secondary drives, induced by repression.On the other hand, certain prohibitions or certain obstacles are necessary to the proper development of the psyche. A child who is free to do anything he wants, for whom one facilitates everything, will not develop a normal ego. But everything is a matter of balance: the prohibitions must not go beyond the threshold of reason, or else the drives will not find even the minimal paths of expression. Then they will take all sorts of pathological forms.In training a dog, walking on the leash is one of the prerequisites; but if you leave him tied up all day, he will end up biting. Giving him a little slap from time to time will make him understand that you are unhappy with him; if you slap too hard, he will bark at the slightest noise and never let you sleep, or throw himself at the throat of whoever comes in.The human unconscious reacts like an animal: when repression goes too far, instinct finds one way or another to get revenge…From this we can now define good culture: that which poses certain structural limits, while at the same time respecting the genetic paradigms of the psyche in such a way that the different instincts can attain their natural goal.Today’s culture is caught in a vicious circle: repression provokes a general frustration; frustration makes instincts compulsive; there is no other way to keep a lid on but to intensity the repression; the situation goes on and we draw the conclusion that human nature is evil.Our society will not function comfortably until the day when morality respects the fulfillment of fundamental instincts. Who says that perfection is possible? Let’s talk first of improvement… Before taking off on a new theory, we should ask ourselves if the way of life imposed by our form of society give us satisfaction or not.It is the rule of the simplest hypothesis: an existing theory should not be rejected unless it comes up against contradiction. It would be fruitless to embark upon a general questioning if the current situation did not present any problems.I ask my trainees to tell me honestly what they think: whether they find that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds, they can quit the course and get their money back.Up to now, I have never yet seen anyone who declared himself to be truly happy in love. I have noticed, on the contrary, the unbelievable suffering, the marital dramas, the frustrations which undermine the existence of people whom one believes to be floating in happiness, if appearances are to be trusted. The happiness-suffering balance of the current system shows a net deficit. Universal happiness is something impossible. In animal groups, too, there are those who are unhappy and those who are excluded… There are, but they are rare, in fact. In the case before us, almost all individuals are involved.The situation justifies a general questioning. The difficulties encountered in our love life, the tensions, the conflicts, the sorrows of love, the hypocrisy which surround sexuality, the atrophying of the extrasensory faculties, the theoretical contradictions: the scene is sufficiently deceiving to incite us to look for other solutions.The process, as it is now conceived, brings us ipso facto to construct a theory of sexuality which is closer to natural laws. I need a theory to know how to make love to my wife?Has your wife developed extrasensory faculties? Making love is one thing. But these two words can mask possibilities whose representation escapes our materialistic image of sex. If the happiness were total, one could call it quits and hold on to the status quo. But as things are far from satisfactory, we must ask ourselves if the classical image of sexuality is not false or incomplete.All sorts of indications lead us to think that there is a subtle function which belongs to the sexual instinct, which remains blocked in everyday conditions. The point is to rediscover this function, and to understand the causes of its blockage, which cannot be done without at least a minimum of theory.I myself have a certain reticence to theorize in this area. Rational thought is an obstacle to love. It destroys the subtlety of the amorous relationship. At the same time, it is indispensable in rehabilitating the natural functioning of love, in breaking the vicious circle of repression.We must first ask ourselves where this paradox is coming from. And you evidently have the answer… One explanation would be that our intellect is not functioning naturally. For various reasons, our form of education implants in us from the earliest age the illusion that we can rely on certainties, state definitive laws, apprehend the totality of the real by reason. At the same time we are constantly tempted to use every scrap of theory to judge, to decide, to justify our behavior. And above all to condemn that of others… That’s how the normal brain works! I try to explain in Meta III just why our Western brain functions this way.We are so used to it that we take this functioning for normal. However, all sorts of signs are there to show us that something isn’t right: the permanent misunderstandings; the difficulty in changing one’s opinion; the sterility of political debates; the scorn of others and the certainty of being right, which one finds at the origins of genocide and of religious wars; the heaviness of the administrative system; the rigidities of the repressive system; the judicial errors and the resistance to revising the process; the visceral rejections with which scientific discoveries are greeted; the opposition encountered by ecology at the beginning, who knows what else. Einstein took twenty seven years to get across his theory of relativity…Everything happens as though our brain were substituting for the perception of reality a network of certainties, of which we are incapable of knowing the consequences. We construct theories to explain or improve things, and we find ourselves prisoners of systems which make us commit the gravest errors.Plato gives for the word theory an etymology which means contemplation of the divine. There was for him a spiritual order of phenomenon in the process of analysis and synthesis, surpassing simple intellectual knowledge. He even distinguishes two forms of mathematics: purely conceptual mathematics, which he despises, and the true mathematics, linked to a sort of ecstasy… If you go looking for Plato around every corner… In two thousand years, we have surely progressed! And regressed on certain points. Plato is at the origin of almost all the branches of our culture. I think we must be very careful before rejecting what he says, even where his discourse seems to us outdated.In my philosophy courses, I understood nothing of his explanations. It took me twenty years to notice that I had approached mathematics in a state of wonder, which transcended ordinary intellectual comprehension.When I was thirteen years old, a schoolmate for whom I felt a magical love, exactly as Plato describes, gave me a book on electronics, packed with complicated formulas. It was clearly above my age level, but I read it in order to prolong this love, as it were. To nourish my reading with this love. Miraculously enough, I had assimilated, in a month’s time, the basics of math and physics, without any feeling of effort. As if I had been carried away by a kind of state of grace, with its origins in love.That stayed with me for all that followed. I almost never had to work in these two subjects. Everyone knows that you learn faster when you have a little crush on the teacher… And what if it’s about something deeper?Einstein wrote somewhere: Nothing is more important that the faculty of wonder or delight: it is that which is at the origin of all art and all true science… One of the greatest minds of our Cartesian era reminds us that rational culture has its roots in the irrational! Genius is at its essence metapsychic… There’s often a thin line between genius and madness!I think that there Einstein describes exactly the same thing as Plato: a kind of ecstasy that accompanies true comprehension, and that seals the knowledge in the lowest strata of the conscious. Indeed, of the supra-conscious. We learn and discover infinitely more quickly with much more joy and much less effort, when we are in this internal state. It is a phenomenon which transcends the paths of logic and of rationality, thus by definition a metapsychic function.This is to show that there may be another way of perceiving a theory, putting into play a transcendent dimension of the conscious, far from the rigidities of the intellect. Under these conditions, a theory can free thought from its old ruts, without getting it stuck in new ones. It can open the spirit to profound intuitions without locking us into a new system of certainties. It can help us to become aware of errors which cause the love instinct to fail, without superimposing on this awareness an overly intellectual representation of the amorous process, which would deprive us of the freedom needed to obey the subtle. The whole trick is in knowing how to use theory without investing in the theory. To manipulate it always with a question mark, without identifying with it affirmatively… Don’t you think that these grand speeches serve you mainly to manipulate people?When my physics professors taught me quantum theory, I also had the impression of being manipulated. They obliged me to change the conception that I had had of elementary particles. It’s never pleasant to go from one thought system to another. One’s self-respect detests this type of gymnastics…Metapsychoanalysis implies a change in the paradigm which is more difficult to accept than the matter of particles. It touches on zones that are much more intimate and more emotional than the human soul. It automatically gives the impression of a manipulation. The more emotion is a part of it, the easier the manipulation! What do you call manipulation?By explaining something to someone, you are already manipulating his mind. When you tell a child that two plus two equals four, you are locking him into a system of certainties. The crucial point which insures that an education remains an education, is that each of the certainties corresponds to the nature of things, to a demonstrable truth, which the pupil can verify by himself, and which the whole world can share with him.If you persuade a feeble-minded person that the apocalypse is coming tomorrow and that he must give you all his money, you are locking him just as much into a certainty, but this one departs from the natural order, because you are stating something which cannot be verified, so that nothing permits you to be sure, in a purely egotistical goal: there we can speak about manipulation as you understand it.Metapsychoanalysis presupposes constant vigilance, never identifying with the explanations it tries to formulate. Any identification with an idea would be an obstacle to the subtle functioning of love. The method I use consists of having each one start from his own experience, making him look by himself for the causes of the failures and suffering which may have colored his past experiences. When I propose an explanation, I always submit it to the criticism of the audience. I ask the participants to formulate other explanations which may come to mind, in order to explore all possible paths.An education, in order to not sink to manipulation, must be more of a work of joint exploration and of questioning than an injection of knowledge.This method, by the way, also has the advantage of promoting the progress of the theory: by reconstructing it with the help of those present, I force myself to begin again each time at zero, questioning all the previously accepted points. If the Department of Education worked this way, there would be fewer revolutions… Up to now, you still haven’t said anything precisely about sexuality. Are you keeping that for dessert?… In my courses, I avoid speaking of sexuality. And not only in my courses. Precise descriptions can put parasitic thoughts or images in one’s head, which disturb the innocence necessary to natural functioning. The word locks us into our representations. While love demands great internal freedom to obey the subtle signals of the unconscious. The less one speaks of it the better… My two investigators are visibly annoyed. They expected to find a list of erotic recipes. I can’t suppress a smile.I scratch my nose with a pensive air while waiting for my lips to relax… You still can’t teach a course on sexuality without speaking of sexuality! It’s a seminar on metapsychoanalysis, not on sexology.Classical psychoanalysis is based on a theory of sexuality: but it concerns itself very little with the technical details of sexual relations. Metapsychoanalysis concerns itself even less, since it deals much more with the metapsychic dimension of love than with its biological dimension.Sorry to disappoint you… What do you do the second day? I destroy the foundations of the theory itself.How to construct a valid theory on the love instinct? One might proceed exactly as one would in physics, by establishing an axiomatic that is as rigorous as possible.As a point of departure, I take a working hypothesis: that an error against natural laws generally leads to a contradiction or to suffering ( if not, one could not speak of an error).Thus it is sufficient to go back to the roots of each form of suffering in love; similarly if one notices a contradiction or an obscure point in the conventional explanation, it is time to search for an error somewhere, rather than to be content with the status quo. You start with the idea that suffering necessarily results from human error. There can also be errors in nature… Pay attention to the logic: I never said that all suffering arises from human error; I said that every human error can provoke suffering. Certain suffering may arise from imperfections in nature.We have to search behind each form of suffering, of malaise, even where things appear to us inevitable, a part of life as we know it, to see whether it hides a human error which is its cause. Suffering generally being the sign of the failure of a drive, we thus give ourselves the maximum chance to discover the moral errors which lead to the failure of our instincts.As nature obeys rules of harmony, we may equally well expect to find human error, or a poor interpretation of natural phenomena, behind each contradiction. We would thus be able to put our finger on the points where our culture goes against the laws of nature. Isn’t suffering necessary to make us evolve? You who believe in spiritual progress… It is an idea which is generally accepted in the Christian world. An old, venerable attitude, passed down from the time of the martyrs. But acceptance brings to mind resignation, and resignation – stagnation.If you start from the principle that all suffering is useful, then do everything to endure all the ones that are possible: drug yourself, make yourself sick, commit all the crimes so you will never get out of prison, the more evil you create around you, the more you will help your neighbor to evolve… Don’t be absurd! Demonstration by absurdity is used in mathematics. Why not here? When a premise leads to a paradox like that one, it deserves to be examined more closely. To do evil is to do good: we see right away that there is a fault in the reasoning. Wouldn’t we do better to set to work, instead of resigning ourselves to suffer while passively awaiting redemption? If you are a believer, don’t you think that God would rejoice to see his creatures actively seek out their errors?To accept suffering is also to refuse to see one’s errors! That’s cheap philosophy, what you’re spouting there. All the world’s religions teach that suffering is part of man’s destiny. A religion that does nothing to examine the causes of suffering and to denounce the errors committed against natural law, thus against divine laws… isn’t that a cheap religion? You really have some nerve: attacking religion, attacking medicine, attacking morality, attacking the law… And you’re surprised to have troubles! Troubles indeed: when I had cancer at twenty-six, I found myself staring death in the face. I made a vow to dedicate the years I still had before me to search for the primary causes of the evils which overwhelm our civilization. I knew that would entail serious difficulty. But what are these troubles in comparison with the happiness of having one’s own conscience in order?So I propose to review all the sufferings and all the contradictions one can list in the areas which interest us the most: love life, sex life, paranormal phenomena, and spiritual life.If we manage to find a common denominator, a postulate that brings a logical explanation to these different forms of suffering, we will be halfway home.We would still need to verify the exactness of this postulate by concrete experience: if the same postulate allows us to experience love without bringing the same suffering, and to remove the existing contradictions without bringing in new ones, we can have the feeling of having done our duty…The most widespread form of suffering in our modern society is obviously endemic neurosis. Classical psychoanalysis has shown that it takes root in the repression of precocious drives. Thus we must examine quite objectively what are the errors which may be hidden in the general state of affairs with respect to infantile sexuality.We also find in the background a spiritual type of suffering: existential emptiness, escape into consumption, superstitions, competition, drugs and their illusions, the increase in sects. Each of these elements can serve as a port of entry for the same search.And of course, the suffering which touches on the fate of the individual, the sorrows of love, the difficulties of adolescence, the jealousy… For you jealousy is not natural? …the ups and downs of marital life, the impotence, the divorces, and children torn by them, the generational conflicts, the isolation of old age, the exclusion, the fear of death. Not to mention the social problems the educational failures, the violence, the delinquency, the general discontent… The system today threatens even the biosphere: the population explosion is directly connected to sexuality. All these scourges are surely not intended by nature.So then, in a moment of delight and wonder, to follow in Einstein’s footsteps, you have found the common denominator of all this suffering? After having failed at physics, you have succeeded in physical love… I measure the distance. No way to make myself understood. At times, I ask myself whether it’s me who is delirious… Prisoner of a thought system which I embarked upon, at the point of losing all my bearings… Total paranoia? Paranoids are convinced that they hold the truth… Whatever might be, facts are facts: these phenomena of visions—I don’t invent them. There are many who can confirm that they have a close connection to this other way of feeling love. A whole crew of young people who have been able to experience it in their guts and who count on me to know how to explain it… I understand that all this seems aberrant to you. New ideas always appear aberrant. If they were easy to understand, everyone would have found them long ago, and they would no longer be new ideas!:::: Honestly, I think that my thesis is on the right track. It accords perfectly with biology, ethnology, psychoanalysis and practically everything being taught today in the humanities. I am simply proposing a different synthesis of current knowledge. If this is the way to resolve classic contradictions, and find a way of living with love which makes people happy… The best point of departure would be to accept the fact that love and sex drives are genetically programmed. That everyone is willing to admit… I’m not so sure of that. Even if it is obvious for drives linked to reproduction (because we observe them in animals), the question remains for the polymorphous drives. Oral-genital contacts, for example: are they genetically programmed or not? What about mutual masturbation, sodomy, etc.? So, you’re going to prove that there is a gene for masturbation, a gene for fellatio, etc… The relationship between genetics and instinct is more complex than that. We will never find one gene for this, one gene for that, but rather a whole complex of interacting genes, even more difficult to interpret than the behaviors themselves. This does not prevent us from seeking a method that allows us to determine with reasonable reliability whether a behavior is innate or not, without worrying for the moment about the details of DNA.We can, for example, state a series of criteria, starting from elementary logic. If they are all met, we will at least have a basis for reasoning. First criterion: a genetically programmed behavior pre-exists, by definition, learning: it must therefore appear spontaneously in the child; it must be found in different types of culture; it must also be found in antiquity; If it disappears during growth, it will be due to a prohibition present in upbringing. In principle, every prohibition masks an innate tendency; otherwise, it would be unnecessary. If the drive is innate, the prohibition will not suffice to eradicate it completely; its counterpart will be hypocrisy, as everyone must hide from others what they do in secret. Innate behavior must have a purpose, since genetics only programs data useful to the individual or the species. Its prohibition must result in harm: the suppressed drive will take indirect paths, in the form of neurosis. In societies where such behavior appears absent, it must be the object of a taboo, that is, a prohibition incorporated into the unconscious, strong enough to provoke its repression, with the ensuing feelings of guilt. We should find similar behaviors in animals genetically closest to humans, for example, in higher apes. What we have known about bonobos for the past few decades is crucial for this last criterion. So, if monkeys masturbate in trees, it’s also a natural drive in man… If you prefer climbing trees… I’ll use masturbation as an example to show how these criteria work:- It’s found in all cultures;- It’s mentioned in ancient writings;- It appears spontaneously in children;- It disappears during the latency period;- The draconian prohibitions put in place in the 18th century weren’t enough to eradicate it;- It has been the subject of incredible hypocrisy;- Its repression is a factor in neurosis;- Where it’s not apparent, it’s taboo;- It’s surrounded by feelings of guilt;- And it’s observed in most primates…All the criteria are met. You have finessed the question of the purpose. Why would masturbation be useful? You’ve never been in prison! It can serve to release the excess drive energy which accumulates when sexual relations are not possible. But it can also have other functions – why not? The Jivaros speak of sacred masturbation… These criteria can be applied to each of the polymorphous drives, and we see that they are verified each time. We can then connect them to Freud’s theory, which considered polymorphism as phylogenetic, that is linked to the heredity of the species. I’ve never heard of oral-genital contacts in higher primates, nor homosexuality… certainly not pedophilia! Because there are taboos in the heads of the ethnologists who go to observe them.Fortunately, scientific journals are beginning to get away from excessive prudishness. They have lately been accepting articles which are less hypocritical, we can see that they presented a truncated reality, which was able to falsify many things. In the last few years, a whole series of every evocative articles and photos have been published, among them video reports on the bonobos, the chimpanzee closest to man. These primates can teach a thing or two to the most seasoned sexologist. Their genetic makeup being extremely close to our own, it is not longer farfetched to think that polymorphous behaviors have made inroads into the human genome for several thousand years. Behavior that is natural for an animal can be perverse for man. Absolutely. Again, we must be sure that the notion of perversion is clearly defined. Polymorphous relations were not considered as perversions until the advent of Puritanism. At that time, Puritanism relied on the idea, which was new at the time, that sexuality had the sole goal of reproduction. Polymorphous relations, not being useful for reproduction, had to be classified as perversions.To deal with the problem, we would have to begin with defining the purpose of polymorphous drives. Freud speaks of preliminary pleasures. That comes down to saying that polymorphism has the goal of preparing for sexual intercourse, to serve as a prelude to normal coitus. But this explanation comes up against a difficulty: polymorphous drives appear well before puberty. What could be there reason for existence, as preparation for coitus, in immature individuals, even in babies?Moreover, we find among the polymorphous drives all the homosexual drives. I don’t see what use these could have to heterosexual coupling. Nothing is easier than for a male to fertilize a female…In a more fundamental way, Freud groups polymorphous functions in an autonomous function, independent of reproduction, whose goal would be the attainment of pleasure. This manner of looking at things has profoundly influenced our whole modern concept of sexuality. It is at the origin of the idea of the right to pleasure which culminated with May ’68 and greatly revolutionized morals. It is also responsible for a certain degradation of the image of physical love, reduced to a problem of pleasure, with its pornographic outcomes. It puts us at odds with the ancient idea of sacred sex. On the theoretical level, one point seems to me obscure. Can I draw something for you? Amazingly, they pass me a piece of paper and a pen, with a half-smile… Go to it! We see immediately, by symmetry, that something is not right. For the first function, that of reproduction, we have: Drive – Pleasure – Impregnation. For the second: Drive – Pleasure – , and nothing in the last place. In principle, an instinct should have three components: Drive – Pleasure – Purpose. This is quite clear with the dietary instinct: the drive is hunger; the pleasure that of the palate; and it all serves to nourish the body. If one eats only for pleasure, for example dishes skillfully seasoned but with no nutritional value, the dietary instinct misses its natural goal; it is detoured into a goal of immediate gratification: that is the definition of perversion. A gastronomy deprived of any nutritional aim is in itself a sort of perversion. Then, Freud warned of a model of sexuality anchored only in pleasure: his psychoanalysis is then a gastronomy of sex… You make me laugh! Show me where the reasoning is not rigorous. There are many who reproach psychoanalysis for not being a science: it does seem to be more of an art, just like the pursuit of pleasure, esthetic or other. Gastronomy is an art, which consists of maximizing the pleasure of the palate; while nutrition is a science, because it takes into account the usefulness of nourishment for the body; it is then possible to say that it is right or wrong to eat this or that. One can claim a scientific approach to sexuality only on the same condition: that of knowing the purpose of the sexual instinct. It is clear for the reproductive function, but obscurity reigns when it comes to determining the purpose of the other function and its polymorphous drives. And you are the only one to discover it, this purpose? At the most, I have re-discovered it, it has been alluded to many times in the course of history. In our days it is eclipsed, almost totally unknown, even by specialists.Something told me that this gap could be filled in. I had always confronted my own conditioning. Finally, I applied a method of reasoning taken once again from elementary logic: If this purpose exists, if we are unaware of its content in the current sexual system, it is probably because it has been lost in the course of history: therefore we must examine what the ancients said of it. There is a good chance that we will find it in other cultures in our own time. We should find it within ourselves, on the condition that we experience love and sexuality in the appropriate manner. Other times, other places, and other ways: the cross-checking among these three ways of looking can bring a first response.To which other confirmations will be added: if this purpose belongs to our genetic programming, we should find traces of it in certain myths which draw their inspiration from the depths of the unconscious.We should observe its manifestations in children, before the traumas of education have buried it under the weight of neurosis. With abstract reasoning, you can prove anything… Don’t worry: concrete experience has always been my preference, already in physics.I have already spoken to you of this explosion of extrasensory faculties, arising at the moment when we have broken the yoke of the couple. I didn’t immediately see the connection with what I knew of antiquity and oriental cultures. Lacking theory, one is unable to recognize facts, even the most obvious ones, and to learn from them.Nevertheless, I was struck, already as a student, by the connection which the ancients established between sex and the sacred. The phallophories of the Greeks, for example: ritual processions in which a giant phallus, sculpted in wood, was transported, with all the splendor and reverence appropriate to a religious ceremony… The Greeks, the Greeks… You have nothing but Greeks in your head! Because they were the last ones in our Western world to live out these mysteries in daily life and to know how to formulate them, through their philosophers.The Orient has long preserved their trace. I saw, some time ago, a televised report on Japan: there, too, a phallophory, pure and simple. White-robed monks carried on their shoulders a phallus four or five meters long, in very realistic colors. They were going to place it in a sacred place. The first one opened the march by throwing grains of rice to bless the crowd. The Japanese watched the procession pass, in all innocence, crowded onto the sidewalks as we do for a pilgrimage. They seemed delighted. Some American tourists turned their eyes away, blushing with all their hemoglobin. And the reporter finished by saying that she hoped by this to show the Western world that there is another way of conceiving of sexuality, and that this might resolve many of the problems of our society… You deduce mountains from a simple odd fact… Then there is Tantrism. An esoteric movement of this importance cannot be nonsense, if it has survived for centuries and still exists today. It constitutes the state religion of Bhutan. It teaches that energy liberated by sexuality may be redirected to develop the spiritual dimension of the being.I would say, myself, that sexual energy has the natural function of feeding the extrasensory faculties and spiritual life. And you think that children feel a connection between sex and the sacred when they play doctor and fool around in the cellar? Their little games are a way of defying taboos. That’s the sad part: the prohibitions leave them no other way to explore what they unconsciously need to know. Instead of experiencing love, they experience curiosity and place their discoveries under the onus of guilt and disgust. Sex without love is by nature an object of repulsion.We must try to understand what a child feels when he falls in love, without having encountered any prohibition. What is he looking for: little erotic sensations? Or something transcendent… We read this in Gide, when he describes his first experiences with his little friends, hiding under a table: they are convinced they are making magic.They are not wrong. Aspiring to the magical, so characteristic of children, is nothing other than the prefiguring of the extrasensory to which is must accede.It is precisely this that experience has shown me: the purpose of polymorphous drives, missing in the Freudian scheme of things, is the development of the extrasensory, which have something of the magical, or the sacred. There is one thing that bothers us in your story: you are confusing the extrasensory and the spiritual. Don’t you find that a bit much? I don’t have the time to respond. My two torturers have more temporal concerns. They need a pick-me-up. The smells of coffee are coming from the corridor. They have set off the caffeine reflex.The rite seems to be part of the profession. Without stimuli, investigations would advance much more slowly…They entrust me to a colleague, another new face. Colder. Not even the ghost of a smile, nor the slightest greeting. He watches me out of the corner of his eye, suspiciously.Sleepy as I am, he has nothing to worry about.I won’t escape.
Chapter V The extrasensory is not spirituality as such. Just as visual faculties are not the landscape which they permit us to contemplate, or the page they permit us to comprehend.If you are blind, you cannot make for yourself an image or a graphic representation of an abstract idea through the testimony of others. As precise as these descriptions may be, you will have only the representation which you have constructed in your imagination. How will you know the beauty of a blue sky, if you have never seen the color blue. Or the joy of reading if you have never deciphered a line of writing.Without extrasensory faculties, the perception of spiritual reality poses exactly the same problems. To such an extent that in the end we forget that it exists: we replace it with an intellectual representation of spirituality, by an abstract image of divinity, by a series of beliefs, of moral principles, of religious dogma. Unfortunately, these representations only give more weight to intellect and make access to the spiritual more difficult. So, according to you, religions do a disservice to spirituality? If you suppressed religions, the situation would be even worse. They remind us that a spiritual dimension exists.When access to the transcendent does not function in the natural way, it requires a substitute. Unfortunately, the promises of redemption, of salvation, of eternal life made by religions lock us into a permanent dilemma between faith and doubt. Just as a blind person must trust what he is told in order to convince himself of the beauty of the stars, we make an intellectual effort to believe in the existence of a transcendent reality, to submit ourselves to a certain image which we believe to be that of God. But our unconscious signals to us that this is not the way: despite all our good will, doubts spring up.No ritual, no theology can replace the direct perception of the transcendent dimension. That which the true mystics seek. So, if everyone had visions, religions would be useless? I believe that the true religion, the one inscribed in our genes, is love. Everyone knows that: God is love. But that type of love has nothing to do with sex! If God is at the origin of Creation, it is also He who created genetics. The fact that He inscribed sexual drives in our genetic code, which express love spontaneously, could that be an accident? To the extent that experience shows that these love and sex drives allow us to develop extrasensory faculties, and that they are connected to spirituality, thus connected to divinity…As you say: God is love. But love happens through sex: why should sex be excluded from the divine?Personally, I think we would be better off revising our morality, and asking ourselves why we have de-sanctified the body. If God, in His great wisdom, created body and soul all of a piece, I don’t see why the body should be less sacred than the spirit.. All the same, it is the body that contains all the baser instincts. The functioning of the body as we know it is not its normal functioning.The notion of baser instinct does not belong to the natural order of things. It comes from the fact that our instincts cannot function correctly in the conditions of life and of diet which we have inherited from our ancestors. With food that produces excitation, the instincts are disturbed as a result of the abnormal activity of the central nervous system. Sexual sensitivity is always heightened and fills our thoughts. The mind is then tempted to use the abnormal excitation of the body to attain pleasures which go against nature, directing the drives away from their original goal.The ruses of the mind and the disturbance of the body fertilize each other to engender perversion… If I understand you correctly, without extrasensory faculties, one could not fully attain spirituality. And you are the only one who has the key to it… It is nature which furnishes this key to us. Each one has within himself, inscribed in his genes, all he needs to develop his metapsychic faculties, which constitute natural access to spirituality.So that all this can function, as I have been able to verify many times in practice, it is enough to respect some natural rules: a natural diet, a natural morality, a natural internal state, and the extrasensory faculties develop quite naturally. As if to say that they are a natural thing… But you still, at a minimum, have to inculcate in people some precepts, some principles of what true spirituality is… Giving advice, describing mystical states, ways of communicating with the divinity, or whatever, risk at the most locking others into an image of spiritual reality they would create for themselves. Christ said not to make an idol of him. In Greek, the word idol means image. Any image of spirituality is only an obstacle on the road to true spiritual evolution. A trap one risks falling into and not being able to advance further. And the visions, they are not images? They aren’t exactly images produced by the imagination. They don’t come from the mental faculties. You can’t fabricate them. You can’t induce them in others.Certain authors speak of the imagic, to avoid confusion with the imaginary. This problem is unfortunately not resolved by classical psychoanalysis. Freud concealed this dimension of the real in the name of scientific objectivity. Jung, on the other hand, practically made it the centerpiece of his psychoanalysis. Unfortunately, it is hard to comprehend what he writes when one has not had enough experience of the extrasensory oneself. Which doesn’t prevent one, thanks to your teaching, from attaining the states you describe as superior. Don’t you think that it is with this kind of promises that one forms a sect? If you make a discovery in physics and a certain number of students are very excited about your teaching, have you founded a sect? If I have been able to propose a theory which shows how nature should function, isn’t it normal that people would be interested in it, and that I would communicate with them what I myself have discovered?Once again: I do not proposing attaining higher states. I propose rediscovering a natural state. How could one reproach me the fact that this natural state is superior to that which we owe to conditions of ordinary life? There is a fundamental difference between my position and an esoteric teaching. I try to understand how the human machine functions when it is displaced from a natural reference point. I clearly enunciate my starting hypothesis. I propose no tricks or personal recipes which are supposed to bring some advantage. On the contrary, I show that respecting natural laws is a surer way than anything I myself could teach. And that, finally, the fact of having available extrasensory faculties is something as natural as having available the sense of sight.While an esoteric discourse imposes an ideology one must believe in, a ritual to which one must submit. It locks its adherents between a promise of redemption and the threat of the flames of hell if they seem to lack faith. It makes people dependent on a doctrine of an individual who presents himself as a sort of prophet. You make people dependent on nature… Dependent on nature… that’s the common fate of all creatures! I don’t see why man alone should escape it.You touch there on the problem at the core of Promethean civilization. Can we divert natural laws to our own profit, without having to reimburse the cost of our tricks? I had decided to experiment with a natural way, starting with diet and health. If others succeeded better by non-natural ways, that would be the proof that man knows better than nature.Besides, the natural way and the artificial way don’t have to be incompatible. Certain artifices can improve on nature, or render its manifestations more favorable. For me, I feel safer starting from what is natural (there are fewer risks of committing errors), and resorting to artifice only where problems arise.Example: a natural diet, rich in fruits and vegetables, protects against cancer; if a cancer occurs despite everything, it would be stupid not to take advantage of the artifices of medicine; but there is still a reason to practice a natural regime.Love seems created to guarantee our spiritual evolution; if certain rites or certain taboos can ameliorate the process, nothing prevents us from adding them to natural behavior. But we must start by knowing what natural behavior is, if we cant to be sure that the difficulties we encounter do not come as a result of our errors. Didn’t your wife die of cancer? Even though she practiced anopsology… My wife was very destabilized by all the attacks- media, financial, judicial and others – of which we had been the object for a dozen years. A court order prohibited me from giving my courses for years, she replaced me, that on top of all the work she did for the children and in receiving the patients. She no longer had the time to eat properly, nor to even get a minimum of sleep. The moment the first symptoms appeared, she took refuge in religion, thinking that prayer would save her. When she decided to embark on a course of chemotherapy, it was too late. We understand that you were quite indifferent to the loss of your spouse. Once extrasensory phenomena are a daily reality, death no longer represents the same suffering, neither for the one who goes away, nor for those who remain. The simple fact of being conscious that something other than the material exists makes one much less dependent on the survival of the body. Under these conditions, death no longer represents the same break.Visions, or premonitory dreams, foretell very subtly the end of an existence. They point to the spiritual meaning of events which mark our destinies, including death. They assure communication where it is no longer possible by material means. So that there is no more shock, no more feeling of senselessness or of tearing away at the moment of death.Seen from the outside, it can appear as indifference. It is more a way of being in harmony with creation. So you’re no longer afraid of dying? If you put me under the guillotine, I would have a surge of adrenaline. There is certainly a biological survival instinct, which reacts in the face of danger or the threat of death. But fear of death as such, no.What’s more, the people I love, love each other as well. I have the impression of living through that love. It feeds transcendent communication. Whether I am a mirror from this side or from the other doesn’t change much… So you’re not afraid of being on the other side of the wall? Prison? I don’t know why I should fear it. If that were to be part of my destiny, it might be beneficial, for all sorts of reasons… Frankly speaking, don’t you have the impression that you are constructing a whole philosophical system to escape reality, under the pretext of a return to nature? I don’t think that one can speak of a philosophical system.A system means, etymologically, an assembly. Philosophy takes on the features of an assembly of concepts and reasoning exactly when there is only intellect to apprehend reality. Without the extrasensory, we can perceive only the material aspect of things, and take refuge in a spirituality reconstructed by the mind.Lacking the supra-conscious which should give a direct perception of the sense of events, the synthesis of the whole is no longer possible. The mind can only assemble the disparate elements of a reality which has been cut off from its primary essence and create philosophical systems, often contradictory, which in fact serve as substitutes for the natural perception of the cosmos.The transformation which is produced as a result of experiencing these extrasensory phenomena (Jung speaks of metanoia) is not a thought system as it is intellectually constructed. It is an awareness that comes spontaneously, and that reestablishes the natural state of the being toward the total reality, material and transcendent. The cleavage between the material and the transcendent disappears as though by magic.Once one feels the evidence of a supersensitive reality, which goes beyond the material while being just as real, indeed more pregnant than material reality, one is led to think differently. Or rather: to be different. This transformation is made imperceptibly as a result of the ongoing experience of the extrasensory.It is a matter of reconstructing a psychic state which should have been spontaneously structured in the course of early childhood. We come to realize little by little that the mental representations which we took for truths are illusory, like containers empty of their contents. You are tossing overboard everything the philosophers said? In my opinion, the metaphysical philosophies put the cart before the horse: they think they can prove by intellectual means the existence of a higher dimension of reality, without providing the means of directly perceiving it. By doing this, they push us deeper into the empty mental representations of transcendent meaning. From which the metaphysical discourse sinks into sterile verbiage, into thought systems which have the unconscious goal of fleeing a reality which deceives because it is cut off from the essential.A true metaphysics would not be possible without integrating extrasensory perception. Which would unite at once the metaphysical and the metapsychic as being two aspects of one and the same thing.The theses of Plato and [[Jun]g] provide, to my knowledge, the best approach to the problem. Plato describes in great detail how love develops extrasensory faculties, then how these permeate the soul to reestablish contact with the Essences. Jung also confirms that paranormal dreams and visions constitute the best access to the Archetypes. These two terms, Essences and Archetypes, cover one and the same reality, even if the exegetes do not point to its identity. There too, is a cleavage…The difficulty arises form the fact the supra-sensitive realities are not accessible to the intellect and cannot be explained by words. They go far beyond our little logical and metal exercises which claim to be objective. [[[Ju]n]g] himself says that his detractors do not understand what he means by the idea of archetype. A true comprehension is possible only through a state of consciousness which is open to metapsychic perception, a condition only rarely realized in intellectual surroundings…The whole difference with esoteric or religious states is right there: this state of consciousness no longer appears as something superior, reserved for saints or prophets. We discover it spontaneously if we respect some rules of natural life: it is then deciphered as something perfectly natural. Which avoids the sinking into the pride and egocentrism which taint so many spiritual processes. And all this gibberish got you where you are today… The ways of the Lord are impenetrable… Destiny takes on forms we do not at first comprehend. Exactly because we have lost the access to the supra-conscious values that give it meaning.But we were speaking of something else. You were explaining to us the road you followed to find the purpose of this unknown function of love. I started off from a triple observation: the connection between sex and the sacred is found in antiquity; living traces are still found in cultures other than our own; we see it also in the experience we can have of it on a daily basis with a lifestyle that respects natural laws.This triple observation attests to the existence of a metapsychic type of function connected to sexuality. Since it shows itself to be independent of culture, it must be genetically programmed. An erotic-spiritual function engraved in the DNA? That short-cut seems pretty brutal. Do you see any argument against it? Aside from the prejudices of moralists, who reject sexuality… and those of biologists who reject the metapsychic!Cartesian thought would separate the biological from the spiritual: nothing has ever shown that this is possible. Life forms a whole. Nothing, outside of reductionist prejudices, prevents us from thinking that a spiritual function should not be inscribed in our genetic patrimony. Or at least certain instinctive drives made to put this spiritual function into effect.Many other elements argue for this sense. Freud points out the presence of an oceanic feeling in children, which would be the source of all religions, and so belong to the metapsychic. This feeling dominates the infantile ego and is thus a part of infantile sexuality. Then it disappears in the passage to the adult ego, at the same time as the repression of precocious drives intervenes. This is a reason to think that there exists a close connection between infantile sexuality and a metapsychic dimension.We see something similar in women: female sexuality aspires to something more subtle, more lofty, than what classic sexuality can bring. Many women suffer from this in their conjugal lives, without being able to precisely define their malaise. The man is more easily contented with the organic sensual pleasure which he finds in penetration; as a good male, he accomplishes his reproductive duty and feels satisfied. He doesn’t understand why his spouse feels a lack; nothing in the thought paradigms available to him allow him to figure out the problem. These misunderstandings are immediately explained by the existence of a metapsychic function of sexuality.In mythology, as in modern artistic creation, the search for the sacred through love is omnipresent. If we look closely, our whole culture is infused by a sort of quest for the Holy Grail, directed toward recovering an original state, felt as wondrous. Such a general phenomenon, even if we are barely able to decode it in our rational discourse, certainly has an innate foundation.So nothing more remains but to close the circle: we have on the one hand a non-reproductive sexual function, clearly innate, of which no one knows the purpose; on the other, a metapsychic function, apparently innate, containing extrasensory faculties, connected with the sexual and spiritual life. The idea which comes immediately to mind would be to consider this second function as the purpose of the first. All kinds of speculations are possible… At the start of a theory, one must always admit a certain number of axioms and postulates which are not provable. The main thing is that they be verified later by logical conclusions which can be drawn and above all by concrete observations. We can do no better in the exact sciences.My postulate can then be expressed in the following form: the sexual instinct which is peculiar to the human being consists of two functions, of which one has the goal of reproduction, and the other the development of metapsychic functions, consisting of extrasensory faculties and their spiritual accompaniments.It then remains to confirm whether the reasoning which we can construct starting from this point of departure is verified in the reality of amorous and spiritual life, and whether they allow the resolution of the contradictions of the previous system of explanations. This opens the way for a whole progression of research and reflection, which have come to constitute little by little what I have named metapsychoanalysis. If you start off with a hazy idea, everything you can construct in the way of theories will still be hazy… Your reticence is legitimate. Extrasensory phenomena are rare and unpredictable. Only verifiable and reproducible facts deserve to be taken into consideration if we don’t want to blow around hot air.Our postulate permits us to deal with just that problem. It explains, on one hand, the rarity of paranormal phenomena: in a society like our own, based on the repressed Œdipus complex, the transcendent function of sexuality remains systematically blocked, whence the impossibility for the individual of developing his extrasensory faculties. On the other hand, the experience of returning to nature allows the extrasensory faculties to retain their function, with the result that paranormal phenomena are no longer rare at all.We can observe hundreds per day, which completely changes the possibilities of observing them. The guidelines which they obey appear clearly, no one would say that they are hazy…Now a secular contradiction arises: the conflict between those who believe in the paranormal and those who reject it. Both camps are right. Paranormal phenomena are so rare in ordinary context that they are indeed hard to observe; many claimed miracles are illusions or hoaxes; the skepticism is justified. This doesn’t preclude certain of these phenomena from being perfectly authentic: even if these cases are extremely rare, their existence testifies to a dimension of reality which escapes the classic system of explanations, and which would be much more evident in natural conditions; which proves correct the champions of the paranormal.That is generally what happens when one finds the key to a problem: we can see that everyone was right, each one starting from his own view of reality. Belief in the supernatural will always increase superstition… The paranormal appears supernatural because we no longer know how nature should function. When it is everyday, we no longer need to believe in it.Our postulate allows us to explain the origin of superstitions. If the metapsychic function is genetically programmed, thus foreseen in the natural functioning of the psyche, blocking it necessarily entails a feeling of loss. The individual then tries to compensate for the frustration in devoting himself to any old belief, elevating simple coincidences to the level of portents, in taking off after some esoteric teaching without being sufficiently critical.Superstition is the direct consequence of the loss of the extrasensory, thus an indirect consequence of sexual repression. Note that superstition is present in many religions, in particular in those that advocate a repressive sexual morality. Following your reasoning, the extrasensory should exist in all primitive societies which have not been influenced by Puritanism. If that were the case, it would have been heard of long ago! The ethnologists who went to stick their noses into traditional societies debarked with their baggage of preconceived ideas. They couldn’t take seriously the natives’ reports of paranormal manifestations. For the most part, they decreed that they were evidence of a pre-logical state, an infantile stage dominated by magical thought. Not for one instant did they ask themselves if the Western world might have something to learn from them. The rare dissidents, like Lévy-Bruhl, who pointed to a transcendent perception of reality among the primitives (mystical participation), or Malaurie who says that he felt another dimension in the communication of the peoples of the Great North, were not able to get their message across to the public.Our Western culture is the first to deny paranormal phenomena, or to consider them as some kind of miracle, and thus the exception. We are also the first society to have known the torments of Puritanism. Our postulate is verified.It is even verified on a chronological level: from the time of the Enlightenment, the great thinkers inspired by Descartes saw in human sexuality only the reproductive instinct; this biological conception opened the way to a whole system of prohibitions; polymorphism was declared perverse; infantile sexuality was obscured by repression; the failure of the transcendent function of love became generalized, and the metapsychic phenomena became more and more rare. Finally, they passed into the ranks of the bizarre, of charlatanism, or of miracles. The way was open to materialism and to its corollary, superstition… You have a funny way of rewriting history! We can use the experience of psychoanalysis to explain the evolution of attitudes and certain historical events. Metapsychoanalysis could bring additional keys.It is perhaps there that that we may find the hidden power which drives historians to take on the past: a need to understand the causes which led history to the point where we are now. The simple succession of events is not very interesting in itself. The mystery that motivates us unconsciously touches on the why of the trajectory followed by our society. Our postulate supplies two missing links: the spread of neurosis and the loss of the metapsychic, which may explain the changes in attitude and the new political orientations.Our postulate should be equally verified in the present: we must make an inventory of the different contradictions in the current system of explanations and examine to what extent it permits their resolution (for example the obscure points which Freud himself notes in psychoanalysis). The same thing concerning the different situations of suffering which arise in the experience of love. In fact, suffering constitutes a type of contradiction: the aspiration to happiness is instinctively tied to love, so why does the day-to-day reality of love often lead to painful situations? We won’t finish this evening, if you start on that whole program! In that case, take my word for it: in more than twenty years of work, I have never yet found one fact which weakens the postulate, not even an obscure or contradictory theoretical point which cannot be explained. I can thus reasonably take it as a basis for constructing a new theory. Let my detractors find any possible inconsistencies…We can then distinguish from this point on, for the whole of human sexuality, two juxtaposed purposes: reproduction, and metapsychic development. It thus becomes possible to classify the different love and sex drives into two independent sets: one set of drives concerning reproduction and its obligations, and another set of drives directed toward extrasensory and spiritual development.These two sets will not be difficult to distinguish: the reproductive drives are a priori those which appear at puberty; the others may be recognized by the fact that they are manifested in the precocious stage, before sexual maturity. Go ahead with your set theory. We don’t want to frustrate the mathematician… By the way, we can borrow from Konrad Lorenz the concept of instinctive program, which he is the first to have introduced in ethology. He uses this name for a series of drives and biological mechanisms directed toward a given purpose. This notion can also be applied to the human being, since we see in man as in animals series of drives which are connected one to the other to lead to a given goal.The dietary instinct, for example, consists of the functions of odor and taste, hunger which drives the search for food, the visual or olfactory recognition of food, the drive of prehension and storage, then that of bringing the food to the mouth, the olfactory and gustatory mechanisms governing the portions of food, the reflexes of salivation, mastication and swallowing, as well as the mechanisms for rejecting an excess of food (satiety and disgust), a vomiting reflex in the case of indigestion, not to mention the process of digestion and defecation, including a search for a favorable place (quite generalized in higher mammals). The whole constitutes an instinctive dietary program of great complexity, the purpose of which is the optimal supply of nourishment to the organism and the maintenance of health.The same principles apply to the different drives linked to love. We thus get two independent instinctive programs: the one belonging to the reproductive function, the other to the metapsychic function of sexuality. I have proposed to call them respectively instinctive reproductive program and instinctive metapsychic program, or IRP and IMP.The two programs contain a large number of drives and physiological and psychological mechanisms, running through all the behaviors involved in the processes of reproduction and of metapsychic development. To designate the more specifically sexual drives, we can speak of the reproductive function and the metasexual function. It is better to say metasexual function than infantile sexuality, because this is about drives which remain throughout the course of existence, though they appear already in the precocious period. The human being forms a whole. Your way of cutting it into two may lead to aberrations. You are absolutely right. It is always dangerous to break up a reality into several parts, in particular a living reality, of which the complexity always escapes us. We risk losing sight of essential connections between the different components present. All analytic research presents this danger.There is, however, no other means to discover a fault in the functioning. When an engine breaks down, we must open it up to see inside it what does not work; as long as it is in detached pieces, it is even less likely to function; the outcome of the intervention will nevertheless be positive, provided that the mechanic replaces the defective pieces and knows how to reassemble them properly. We are in the same situation: the love instinct has broken down, it isn’t achieving its natural goal; we are interested in exploring the interior of the impulsive machinery in order to understand its mechanisms and analyze the causes of the breakdown. Once this work of analysis is finished, we can again make a synthesis of all we have learned, replace what needs replacing, and rediscover the global functioning of the wholeThe IRP and the IRM are certainly made to harmonize and to form a perfect unity. For example, they must certainly cooperate in order to bring a baby into the world, which contains at the same time biological and spiritual components.Nevertheless, the IMP would have to be capable of functioning independently of the IRP, because it is the only one present until maturity. One might expect it to constitute an autonomic function. This characteristic should make its study easier at an age when it cannot interfere with the IRP.Nothing, on the other hand, guarantees that the IRP can function smoothly in isolation: it appears after the IMP, at a moment when the latter has already had years to integrate into the psychosexual structures. One might expect that the IRP would need a well-structured IMP, as a sort of support, a framework, to find its correct place. And yet it functions all by itself in animals. Reproduction has other demands in humans. It’s not for nothing that one speaks more willingly of procreation… I don’t see the advantage of introducing this vocabulary of instinctive program. Unless it’s to impress the audience a little more… The choice of words is determining for the proper conduct of reasoning. A word represents a concept, thus a bundle of ideas which can supply markers or essential continuations to thought processes.The concept of an instinctive program implies for example another idea, taken from ethology, which might prove decisive for the continuation of the reasoning: you must know of Lorenz’s little geese?Lorenz showed that goslings fix the image of their mother on the third day after hatching. If they see something else at that moment, they will follow it thereafter as though it were their own mother (causing major problems, since an adult goose will violently reject goslings not hatched in its own nest). If one shows them a cardboard goose, they will follow the cardboard goose. If the goslings pass this fateful day in contact with a human, they will confuse it definitively with their mother and will follow it docilely.Lorenz thus showed that there is a sensitive period at the time that an instinctive program is installed, during which the data of learning are quite definitively fixed. At a precise moment in their growth, the goslings must impregnate the image of their mother in order to follow her without confusing her with another goose and to benefit from her protection for their first experiences of their surroundings. I don’t see the connection between the behavior of geese and access to the extrasensory… Classical psychoanalysis is based on the idea of the œdipus complex. At the start Freud used this term for the set of drives which the child feels for his parents during the Oedipal stage, both the love drives for the mother and the aggressive drives against the father, independent of whether they are repressed or not. He used the term repressed Œdipus complex for the set of conflicts and contents of suffering which take root in the unconscious under the effect of repression. In this language, the repressed Œdipus complex is thus an alteration of the psychic structures under the effects of education, while the Œdipus complex itself belongs to the sexual instinct. So, psychoanalysis does not give a sufficient definition of the œdipus complex, for lack of knowing the purpose of the drives which make it up. So that our postulate, in accordance with ethology, immediately furnishes a clear and distinct definition: the œdipus period is the sensitive period for the instinctive metasexual program.Effectively, everything that the child experiences in this precocious stage is fixed quite irreversibly in his unconscious. Including negative elements: the internal conflicts due to the repression of love drives and murderous fantasies, the guilt induced by masturbatory fantasies, parental images and various prohibitions. The neurosis is crystallized from the age of eight, and we know at what point it is irreversible. We drag along our Œdipus complex up to the end of our existence. The images of the forbidding father and the castrating mother haunt our unconscious, like the image of the cardboard goose takes the place of the real mother in the psyche of the gosling… If you claim to reason logically, the instinctive reproductive program should also start with a sensitive period. Indeed: the adolescent is profoundly marked by amorous experiences made at the beginning of sexual maturity. We can define puberty as the sensitive period of the instinctive reproductive program.We can thus give a very precise definition to two key periods of psychic development. This is essential for the clarity of the reasoning: defining an idea is at the same time relating a phenomenon to other phenomena, showing the logical links which can be fundamental for the edification of the theory.Our definition of the Œdipus complex allows us to make out the fundamental role played by this sensitive period: what the child experiences before the age of six or seven years will irreversibly determine his amorous experiences as an adult; if the constraints of the environment are such that he cannot express his drives, he will fix this impossibility definitively; if the IMP fails from the start, it will be a dead letter for the rest of his existence. The detours taken by the repressed drives will imprint themselves irreversibly in the psychic structures: that is the actual definition of neurosis, which we find in a roundabout way from ethology.Just as the gosling fixes the image of a cardboard mother, the child will engrave in his unconscious memory (in the superego) the image of parents incapable of giving him what he expects. He will bring these parental images, charged with destructiveness and suffering to his future amorous relationships and to relationships to others in general.A new series of fixations appear in puberty when the IRP is put into place. We thus understand the importance of adolescence as an initiation period. For example, the place given to initiatory rites in traditional societies. For you, sex then has two functions: a biological function and a spiritual function… Don’t you think that’s a lot for one organ? Good question: a postulate must be plausible, or it won’t have much chance of being verified.It is not unusual for an organ to simultaneously have several functions. Freud brought up the fact that the genitals also have an excretory function: Inter feces et urinas nascimur… I don’t think there is more distance between the metapsychic and procreation than there is between procreation and excretion.Many other organs assume several functions. For example, the mouth serves primarily for eating. In the human, it is also used for language, communication, thought, knowledge. It therefore has a biological function, common to all the animal world, and a specifically human function, that is intellectual, even spiritual. As long as one doesn’t use it to say stupid things… You should deduce from that that with the sex organ, you can also do stupid things…Absolutely! I fear in fact that the greatest part of sexuality, as we know it today, is a gigantic stupidity. And that it is at the origin of the great stupidities of our era in many areas.When a child cannot learn to speak under normal conditions, he will labor under a language handicap for the rest of his life, he will not be able to develop normal communication with others, nor even normal intelligence. Why shouldn’t it be the same for the sexual instinct?If the child does not succeed in learning the IMP during the sensitive period, he will never be able to make up for the delay: he will suffer not only from a sexual handicap, from the inability to use polymorphous drives correctly; but above all from a metapsychic handicap, which will prevent him from developing normal communication by means of the extrasensory, or a normal intelligence of spiritual values. Isn’t that exactly what is happening in our society?The repressed Œdipus complex has infinitely weightier consequences than psychoanalysis has allowed us to glimpse. If it were all so simple, it would have been known long ago!- It’s not so simple.In order for the child to correctly learn the IMP, the adult world must be capable of living this dimension of love in all its subtlety, in order to know how to respond correctly to the precocious drives. But for the adult to be capable of this, he must have had this apprenticeship in his own childhood. The vicious circle lasts for generations and the opportunities for observing the normal functioning of the IMP are too rare for one to still know that it exists.The adult has the hardest time re-discovering the IMP when he hasn’t learned it in childhood. As spontaneous as it is in the sensitive period (so at the Oedipal stage), it requires internal work once the failure is crystallized. There are many obstacles, both external (false morality, false representations of sexuality) and internal, due to the consequences of the repressed Œdipus complex.It’s not hard for the process to fail: a very precise conscious state must be maintained for the whole of the amorous relationship. The center of gravity of the consciousness must not be situated in the head, it must be kept in the solar plexus, as Tantrism teaches. It is as though the thoughts circulating in the brain should be silenced and re-centered in the middle of the chest, where one feels a fullness when one breathes deeply. All anguish, all calculation, all desire, all feelings of guilt immediately re-start thinking and cause the process to fail.It is not easy to maintain this balance, especially when sexuality has been made the object of guilt in early childhood. The repressed anguish and guilt in the unconscious constantly reactivate the intellect. As this repression is universal in our form of culture, each individual finds himself a priori in an internal situation which prevents him from finding the necessary state of consciousness. So you are speaking of phenomena which no one can observe, aside from you and your devotees. Do you think that’s very scientific? Antimatter could not be observed except by a handful of physicists, in extremely exacting experimental conditions. That takes away nothing from the reality of the phenomenon.To be conclusive, a phenomenon must be reproducible. If I had not made a small number of observations on the relationship between love and the extrasensory, I would not have been able to draw general rules from them. But they can be observed regularly when the conscious state of the partners is that which I am trying to describe to you.I believe that this is a natural state of consciousness. If, from early childhood, we had access to the subtle dimension of love and to extrasensory faculties, the intellect would not get the upper hand. We would be spontaneously centered in what we call the solar plexus, we would not need techniques like yoga, Zen, Tantric meditation. Nature did not foresee that man would fall victim to such a complete blocking of his metasexual function and such an alteration of consciousness. We find ourselves in a situation which necessitates a great deal of internal work to re-establish that which should not require any effort at allA natural diet plays a determining role in this respect. Without parasitic excitation of the nervous system, it is much easier to silence useless thoughts and to re-center oneself. This explains that I was able to make these observations: there exist places on the planet where people may be nourished as naturally as under the rules of anopsology.The problem of conscious state is not the only one which makes observing the IMP difficult. There is also the gap between the physical realization of love and the moment when extrasensory faculties manifest themselves. Sometimes, a vision can appear just after an orgasm. But that is the exception, usually more time is needed. Don’t you see a cause-and-effect relationship where in fact there are coincidences, or auto-suggestion? When you eat protein, you don’t see your muscles get bigger in the hours that follow. A sufficient supply of proteins is needed for many months to build normal musculature. The same is true for extrasensory faculties: It is as if sexuality were supplying a sort of nourishment, needing to be accumulated for enough time in order to produce its effects.It is for that reason that I have proposed to introduced the idea of metapsychic energy. My postulate is then formulated a little bit differently: the purpose of the instinctive metasexual program would be the transmission or the generation of a transcendent energy assuring the development of metapsychic functions. Extrasensory faculties are already a doubtful thing. How do you expect to be taken seriously if you speak of an energy which is by definition inaccessible to normal man? All the psychoanalysts should have introduced the idea of energy. Freud speaks of libido, a term which, by the way, has been poorly understood; Jung invokes a numinous energy, from the Latin numen which means divinity; Reich created the neologism orgone to signal the connection to orgasm.For my part, I think that one gains by simply distinguishing between a psychic energy of a biological nature, which acts at the level of the neurons and feeds the instinctive drives, and a metapsychic energy, explaining the phenomena which go beyond the ordinary mind and transcend space and time. These two energies are certainly not unrelated, they may be the two aspects of one and the same energy. But the fact of differentiating between them corresponds better to our usual way of perceiving reality on the model of a cleavage between matter and spirit.Energy is always inaccessible to direct observation. In physics, the idea of energy is at first nothing but a postulate; we admit, based on intuition, that there existed a magnitude, invisible, impalpable and not directly measurable, which must be at the origin of the different phenomena which one can observe and measure. Then, all the reasoning and all the predictions one might make starting from this idea show that the postulate was justified. We then consider the energy of a material system as a reality in the physical world, when it is a purely abstract magnitude. The energy in a battery can be seen directly, all you have to do is wire it to an electric motor, or to a bulb… What you see is the movement of the motor, or the light emitted by the filament, not the energy itself. On the metapsychic level, it is exactly the same thing. We can regularly observe certain manifestations in connection with amorous experience, like the activation of the creative instinct, or visions which come to explain obscure situations. To explain this cause-and-effect relationship, with the gaps in time which characterize it, I postulate the existence of a metapsychic energy: from the time that the phenomena we can observe are explained on the basis of this idea and the reasoning it allows us to develop do not come up against any contradictions, we have the right to consider it a reality. You can show anything by analogy. You are flirting with intellectual fraud in giving such a vague definition… It is not possible to give a clear and distinct definition of energy. No more in physics, the queen of exact sciences, than in the other branches of science. Energy is a fundamental magnitude, that is to say a magnitude which we cannot relate by a logical progression to other known magnitudes. Yet, once presented, this idea gives physics an extraordinary expansion, it allows us to re solve a host of problems which would remain insoluble or very difficult to resolve.The validity of a fundamental magnitude is justified by the pertinence of predictions and theories that it allows to develop. The way things are, one cannot comprehend reality more directly. That is the common fate of all sciences, I don’t see why metapsychoanalysis should be an exception. For now, our own theory is that a good cup of coffee will give us back the energy we need… An energy most subtle indeed!And that one, at least, has a smell and a taste that are not the least bit abstract. To each his fundamental magnitudes…
Chapter VI You were speaking of energy. Don’t you find the analogy a bit gratuitous: explaining on the same basis material phenomena and the imponderable phenomena which you attribute to love? That’s true: it could be dangerous to borrow a concept from physics and transpose it into an area which transcends material laws.But unfortunately, I don’t see any other possibility of explanation. The facts are there, the extrasensory phenomena seem to be activated by something that results from the metasexual relationship. The simplest solution consists of postulating the existence of a metapsychic energy, and examining whether this solution permits us to construct a satisfactory system of explanations.As I told you, we proceed in the same manner in physics: we postulate the idea of energy, then we examine whether the conclusions which we can draw from it are verified by the facts: to the extent that no contradiction appears, we declare the postulate valid, and we speak of energy as if it were an ordinary magnitude. We are in exactly the same position.Nevertheless, we must verify that the different properties of the physicist’s energy are found in this metapsychic energy. If not, the fact of using this idea could result in errors in reasoning, given the mind’s natural tendency to analogy. I don’t see that there can be an analogy between this elusive energy and the energy we use every day… There is a whole series of similarities. They have exactly the same general characteristics, except that one cannot measure the second.A first property: localization. Electrical energy is localized in a battery; mechanical energy is localized in a wheel that turns. Likewise, experiments show that metapsychic energy is localized in the body, specifically in the solar plexus, and that it circulates essentially in the erogenous zones.From this we understand that the body can play an irreplaceable role on the spiritual level, as a reserve of transcendent energy. This idea is found in the Eucharist, in the cult dedicated to the relics of saints, in the mummification rites among the Egyptians. In the mystery of the Sacred Heart, as well as in the ancient cult of the phallus, which presupposes a transcendent function of flesh.The body and spirit form an indivisible whole.It even seems, after certain experiments, that an energy of this type can impregnate matter, familiar objects, clothing. We see that the visions one can have of an absent person are more precise and easier to capture when one can touch a scrap of fabric, jewelry, or any object recently in his or her contact. As if the material were the carrier of a message coming from that person. You’ll start a fad for amulets… The tradition of the amulet exists since time immemorial. For scientists, it arises from a pre-logical animism. The primitives projected the functioning of their own psyche on an object, it was pure superstition.As for me, I stick to the facts I have been able to observe: visions are more direct if the medium establishes physical contact with the person involved, even if it is by means of matter interposed between them. The object acts as a sort of relay, a receptacle capable of restoring information related to its owner. I would not be surprised if the exchange of rings or of engagement gifts were, at their origin, a means or keeping a bit of the partner’s energy close to oneself, to better communicate from a distance. Today, we see only the metaphoric aspect of it, symbolizing the signing of a contract.The principle of localization would explain the belief, widespread in traditional societies, that spirits inhabit stones, trees, bones… These men undoubtedly had extrasensory faculties that were still sensitive enough to capture traces of metapsychic energy. Since we understand nothing of this, we consider them to be victims of their imagination. So then, they are the scientists and we are the charlatans… I’m not saying that. Of course there are fakes everywhere, visionaries carried away by their autosuggestion or their hallucinations. But a scientific viewpoint cannot allow itself to reject everything at once: we can always expect to find some truth behind the tradition, even if that tradition masks or deforms it to the point where we can no longer recognize it.Second property: accumulation. Localization implies that the energy can accumulate in larger or smaller quantities: electrical energy in a storage battery or a capacitor; mechanical energy in a gyroscope which turns more or less quickly; calorific energy in the water in a hot-water bottle or in the mass of a stove when we raise the temperature.Is it the same thing for metapsychic energy? We can see that a person who has experienced numerous amorous relationships (of the IMP type) is possessed afterwards of a certain inner reserve, which helps him to tolerate difficult situations, to not suffer from a period of enforced solitude, such as prison… To better tolerate the absence of sexual relations without having the extrasensory faculties suffer because of it.This reserve of energy is felt in the form of a fullness in the solar plexus, as if the heart were filled with spontaneous love, happiness to be shared with others, patience, tolerance. As though there were a sort of internal barometer, indicating the level of fuel. Conversely, when this energy is missing, for example when one is separated from his partner, one feels a sensation of emptiness, of loss which can reach the level of pain. It’s simply the pain of separation. When one is attached to someone… Attachment and love are two different things. You can be attached to someone once love has disappeared. Or love someone without necessarily being attached to him. Certain people even suffer in having to leave a spouse whom they have come to detest.It is not easy to distinguish between pain due to breaking off, which derives from attachment, and the deeper pain which signals the lack of energy, following the loss of the love which was its source. The pain of breaking off is a cocktail of several emotions: the fear of losing the love object, which can exist even if love has given way to attachment alone; jealousy because the person is leaving us for another; the self-esteem of the one who sees himself cuckolded by a rejection and by the inevitable rumors; the anguish of finding oneself alone against the world and its difficulties; and above all, the Oedipal suffering, reactivated by a separation which reproduces the rejection of the precocious drives by the parents.These components of suffering cover the other pain, more subtle and more underground, but also more permanent, which signals the lack of energy. This pain is manifest each time that the IMP does not function, it is practically omnipresent in a society built on the repressed Œdipus complex: it constitutes endemic depression, characteristic of our Western society.Note that our postulate permits us to explain the depression, even to assign it a purpose: the blocking of the instinctive metasexual program deprives the individual of the metapsychic energy he needs for his spiritual evolution; this means that all the efforts he makes to assure his earthly existence have no other meaning than biological survival. Depression is thus deciphered as a sort of danger signal: it indicates the risk of metapsychic failure which threatens the sense itself of our existence.It disappears rapidly, by the way, when the IMP regains its function. A little love, even a simple hope of love and physical contact, and the worst of depressions evaporate… The prospect of sexual pleasure is always titillating… The phenomenon is more profound: in the unconscious, sexual fulfillment seems to mean supply of energy. This symbolic relationship seems to be a part of the programming of the IMP. In the absence of repression, they are identical: every metasexual contact is a source of energy. Thus, the simple fact of foreseeing the relationship calms the unconscious and quickly erases the depression, just as the prospect of finding food calms one who is hungry and gives him the courage to go and search for it.The fact that the depression disappears even before the realization of sexual contact, at the simple prospect of a supply of energy, shows that it constitutes in and of itself more a signal than a state of absence.Localization and transmission presuppose a third property: transmissibility. Ordinary energy can be transmitted from one system to another: energy localized in a storage battery can be passed on to another battery; the foot of a soccer player slows at the moment that he transmits his kinetic energy to the ball; the stove becomes colder as it heats the air in the room.Is metapsychic energy equally transmissible? Experience permits us to respond in the affirmative. It is sometimes enough that a person well charged with energy holds another to him for the latter to have his first visions. It happens as though a fluid is passing from the former to the latter.Or when there is more intimate contact: sexual relations leaves a totally different sensation of fullness when the partner has been able to accumulate a good dose of energy from the past. And of course it’s for the guru to have a reserve of energy which he can dispense to the others, as long as they respect his power and give him their money! You are reinventing sacred prostitution… I promise you I have other ways of earning a living! Sacred prostitution? Now you’re going to tell us that prostitution is a path to spirituality? The idea of sacred prostitution was common in antiquity. Today, we no longer understand how the ancients thought. Why did prostitutes live in temples? Why did they have the right to all kinds of honors, like the geishas who still exist in Japan? Maybe because they assured the circulation of metapsychic energy at the level of the population, even initiating the IMP. If that were the case, their role was primordial. They guaranteed the social equilibrium, not in offering men sexual release, as one would imagine it today, but in assuring an energetic exchange that is indispensable to the functioning of the extrasensory faculties and to the spiritual serenity of individuals.Our postulate would then lift the contradiction between the sacred nature of prostitution in antiquity and the way we conceive of modern prostitution. There is nothing despicable or repugnant about a transmission of energy, on the contrary. While making money from pleasure is a diversion not only of the IMP but even of the IRP. The quest for pleasure that is detached both from the metasexual function and from the reproductive function constitutes a double perversion. And you prove concretely that there exists a transmission of energy? The first time I observed the phenomenon was in Switzerland in 1976. I was saying good-night to a young mother who had lived for a short time in our group. At the moment when I kissed her on the cheek, she paled and said to me: I’ve just seen a giant nutcracker. No one understands what that could have meant. When things were a little calmer, I kiss her again, thinking that it was a coincidence. At that same moment, she has a second vision of the same nutcracker. This time, we ask questions more seriously: if the psy channel insists this way, there must be a reason.The discussions were in full force, when we saw the young doctor who worked with us arriving, looking furious: This is impossible. Old Schöni ( our farm helper at the time) is eating nuts at midnight, the whole place can hear it. The property owner who was renting us several rooms in the villa where this took place had already had several incidents with us: there was a strong tension in the air, which provoked the sending of the image of the nutcracker.It was in part a warning: a quarrel with this woman, influential in the village, would have compromised the continuation of our experiment. The most important role was played for the young mother: these two visions proved that something other than the material exists, obliging her to shake up her Cartesian image of reality.As for me, they showed me that a sort of fluid, real enough, can pass from one being to the other, on the occasion of a simple contact of cheek against cheek… I take your word for it: so then why should sexual contact be necessary, if the simple contact of the skin suffices? At that time, I had just experienced an extraordinarily intense love, with contacts and orgasmic fulfillment almost daily for three years. I was like a fully charged storage battery. At the slightest contact, extrasensory phenomena appeared regularly in the people around me. At first I didn’t understand what was happening to me, then I saw that it was a general phenomenon. These visions arose in all the people who experienced love on the IMP model, which we called at the time the second level, and could be observed even in those with whom they had simple physical contact.It is thus that the idea came to me that metapsychic energy could be transmitted by physical contact. At the same time, occasional visions did not assure that extrasensory faculties would be acquired forever. The young mother with the nutcracker had no further visions after that. While where there are true amorous relations, the visions are acquired definitively. The true source of this energy was in sexual relations. {e=« u » who=p”} Admit that all this is a little difficult to believe… You are in a good spot to do an investigation; it will be easy to verify what I say. {e=« u » who=p”} That’s not the kind of thing that interests the judge.He should be interested in it, because it is at the base of the theory. If not, why make me summarize my courses?I was thus able to persuade myself that this metapsychic fluid possesses the properties of what is generally understood by energy: localization, accumulation, transmission. With yet a fourth property: transformation.Electrical energy can be transformed into mechanical energy by means of a motor, or into luminous energy in a neon tube; the chemical energy of the gunpowder is found in the bullet in the form of kinetic energy.Likewise, metapsychic energy can take several forms. From one form directly linked to sexuality, which one might call metasexual energy, it can pass to a motor form: creative inspiration; to a luminous form: visions and other extrasensory faculties; or again to a form of transcendent communion with spiritual values, or numinous energy, to use Jung’s term. They taught me at school that noble energies can degenerate into heat. Doesn’t your metasexual energy have the tendency to degenerate, into perversions, for example? It can indeed degenerate. They analogy is even surprising.Electrical energy is transformed to heat when the current runs through wires endowed with a certain resistance; likewise mechanical energy under the effect of friction between the various parts of a moving system.As far as love is concerned, there is also resistance and friction: the internal tensions and the conflicts between the partners. The energy is then transformed into something that can hurt or injure, just as heat can burn: into suffering.For the pleasure of the analogy, we might note that the heat produced by friction and resistance, in a physical system, can damage the system to the point of destroying it or compromising its functioning: melt the bearings, blow a fuse. In the same way, an excess of amorous suffering can leave irreversible traces, alter the personality, block extrasensory faculties.The parallel goes even further: noble energies degenerate very easily into heat, with just a few faults in the material system; later, it requires complicated systems to re-transform the heat into noble energy, and you can only regenerate a part of it (this is the second principle of thermodynamics).It is equally easy for love to be transformed into suffering, but then it is very difficult to reverse the suffering and turn it back into love. Beyond a certain threshold, this reversal is no longer possible, or only partially: one may transform an old love into tolerance or friendship, if it didn’t end in hatred.Curiously, we find in amorous relations the famous idea of entropy: order easily degenerates into disorder, but the disorder is difficult to restore to order. So with your physics, you’re going to solve all the problems of love… You mean to say: with my physics or with my physique? Mocking, again with the mocking. One would think that they don’t understand a word of what I am explaining to them. Or that they don’t want to understand…We can even find a last analogy: ordinary energy is displaced mainly in the form of electromagnetic waves, but these waves do not only transport energy. When the rays of the sun enter through the window and warm the atmosphere, there is not only a supply of energy: the light transports at the same time a certain quantity of information. We can tell immediately that it is nice out, that the leaves on the trees are moving in the wind, that a plane is flying in the sky.Likewise, metapsychic energy does not only warm the heart and bring a sensation of happiness, it also carries information: the message transmitted by a vision, the solution to a problem through intuition, the foreknowledge of an important event. This is why I prefer to speak of energy-information.Whatever it may be, the analogies with physical phenomena are sufficient to justify the recourse to the concept of energy. You take a surprising short-cut from information to spirituality. Light transports information which permits us to become aware of certain material facts: metapsychic energy is another sort of light, it transports a spiritual type of information that enriches consciousness on a superior level. Jung speaks of archetypes and of the space of the Sense, he specifies that the archetypes are at once symbolic and emotional, thus thought and feeling, and that they play a primordial role in spiritual evolution.Note that ordinary light, in crossing a pane of glass, or in being reflected on the pages of a book, can also carry information of a spiritual nature: through words, you even feel the transcendent contents of that which inspired the author and which constitutes the true message of the text. Matter and spirit are made to cooperate… So, too, the mind and the sexual organs? Let’s now talk about the practical advice you give for the exchange of energy in sexual relations… I’ve already told you: metapsychoanalysis is not a manual of erotic recipes.It is made to help each one hear his own intuitions and drives better, so that he can find his own way as a function of his individual potential, his affinities, the specifics of each particular situation. To give practical directions would be counter to this freedom, it would be opening the door to an intellectualism which could only restrict the availability and the capacity for this inner listening.On the other hand, it is indispensable to learn to scrupulously respect the subtle energies, they alone know how to tell us what is right or wrong, even in the matter of physical contact… To say that in another way, you invite people to do what they want, scorning all prohibitions… There you are making a double error. The wants, in the sense you mean, have nothing to do with what I am talking about. They are a mixture of organic need owing to an abnormal excitation of the nervous system, of mental representations of pleasure, of the need to compensate for the frustration or to re-discover past satisfactions, etc.When everything happens naturally, the metapsychic energy is released and guides the drives. It knows how to set limits far better than we ourselves would. It is this connection between energy and drive which we must learn to sense in ourselves. It can be seen spontaneously if the IMP has not been subject to Oedipal repression. We would have learned to feel it and to respect it from earliest childhood. But since everyone has a repressed Œdipus complex, no one is able to see it… Indeed, we are locked in a vicious circle: one would have had to experienced the IMP to be capable of feeling the subtle energies which would render us able to live out the IMP… The goal of metapsychoanalysis is just that, to help us out of this impasse. We must start by learning to distinguish between authentic sexual drives and sexual drives which are disconnected from the deep unconscious. And it’s evidently you who decides which are the good and which the bad… Because I am the great pedophile guru and I must be driving people to debauchery? I thought an investigation had the aim of showing the truth. If you start off from the fantasies of journalists… We know our job pretty well. You don’t know mine very well at all. Everything I do through metapsychoanalysis has the goal of teaching people to find their way by themselves, instead of searching in a belief, in a teaching, or in outside advice.My process is actually the same on the dietary level: each one leans to recognize with his own instinct the foods which suit him, by observing his different sensations, olfactory, gustatory and gastric. Whence the efficiency of anopsology, since the body can benefit at the right time and in the right quantities from substances contained in natural foods. A minimum of training is necessary to learn to respect instinct, then each one flies on his own. There I follow you, the indications of the senses are something concrete. When it comes to energies of an unknown sort, permit me to have my doubts. Nature has provided a whole system of feelings and drives which guarantee the sexual instinct an auto-regulation which is just as precise as for the dietary instinct.It is enough to learn to recognize these drives and these feelings. In the end it is very quick when one has at hand a theory which describes the natural functioning of the instinct. It is much easier in knowing the purpose of the metasexual function, because we can verify by the appearance of metapsychic phenomena that the drives activated are the good ones. So you push people to activate drives that your personal theories declare to be the good ones. You see how you manipulate them! That would be true if I had fabricated a theory which guarantees my personal way of seeing things. But metapsychoanalysis is not constructed this way. It is the result of the work of a group, which has lasted thirty years. Many of us have asked questions and proposed answers. All the people who participate in the experiment, plus all those who participated in my seminars. I only did the work of synthesizing and formulating all these ideas, in such a way that they form a coherent whole, as must be the case with any theory.I’ve never been tied to one particular model. I have modified the theory on many occasions, each time that a new fact put it into question or that certain objections proved justified. And I will modify it again if it becomes necessary.The principle at the base of metapsychoanalysis is that it must remain in a state of permanent inquiry. It is not a matter of applying a certain outline, but to learn to question oneself about what natural functioning should be, to look for what might be the causes of a type of suffering, to ask if it is right to have a grudge against someone.I never say: do this, or do that. If I give advice, it is that of distrusting all advice, whether it comes from me or someone else.Each one can find his truth only in himself. You yourself said that a scientific theory, as opposed to an art, allows you to say that something is right or wrong. So it is a way of controlling the behavior of your flock… It could be, if I imposed a model of truth on those who participate in the experiment. While in fact I try to take into account what the others feels as right or wrong in constructing the model. Anyway, from the moment when we can attribute a purpose to the sexual instinct, verifiable empirically, we are in possession of a criterion that permits us to determine whether this or that behavior conforms to natural laws or not. A correct behavior would be that which permits the IMP to attain its goal. The appearance of the extrasensory, or the definitive acquisition of extrasensory faculties allows us to decide. Conversely, if no phenomenon of this type shows up in the more or less long term, we must fear that the relationship has missed its goal. And if your postulate were false: if sexuality had nothing to do with the extrasensory? We would have to start over. That’s why empirical experiments are essential.I only started to construct the theory after many years of reflection: the first visions appeared around 1968, the idea that sexual drives being were related to metapsychic energy dates from 1977; I organized a first seminar, in which I submitted this idea as a postulate needing verification in 1980. All the observations made later have confirmed it; I think that we can consider it as a valid basis for further work. If this postulate leads you to put yourself at odds with morality, you should have asked yourself some questions anyway! From the beginning, I did nothing but ask myself questions. When an idea appears logical and capable of explaining the facts, but it nevertheless conflicts with morality or general beliefs, we must question not only the idea, but also morality and beliefs.It turns out that my postulate permits us to explain the road taken by morality. The thinkers of the century of Enlightenment first set forth the equation : sex = reproduction, by analogy to animal sexuality. For them, the animal was a machine, and human sexuality had to be explained rationally, on the animal model. In animals, there is practically no sexual manifestation outside of mating season.The moralists of the following centuries deduced from that that any form of sexuality not aimed at procreation was to be characterized as perverse. The Puritan logic then took to condemning homosexual relations, relations between persons of different ages, infantile sexuality, polymorphism as a whole, that is to say everything that forms the specificity of human sexuality and which had been tolerated up to then. Well, morality has become a lot more flexible, in our times… Unfortunately, the psychoanalytic revolution which followed Puritanism has remained the prisoner of certain taboos. Freud is credited with recognizing that human sexuality included a function not dedicated to reproduction, related to infantile sexuality. But he could not attribute to it any other purpose than the obtaining of pleasure, because he denied the existence of a metapsychic dimension. At the beginning of the century, any scientist who did not deny the paranormal was faced with being banned from the profession. At that time, the whole theory was being written in a logical derogation of pleasure. This profoundly influenced the whole modern concept of sexuality. We speak of the right to pleasure, we tolerate masturbation in the child, believing that it is enough to avoid frustration, we rehabilitate homosexuality out of concern for fairness, instead of asking whether it assumes a natural function, we invent drugs to guarantee erection, pornography pervades the moral climate and infiltrates into the best families. Finally, there is no more line between moral behavior and perverse behavior.If we admit that the purpose of human sexuality is to get metapsychic energy, the fact of seeking pleasure immediately appears as a perversion. It is even a particularly serious perversion, knowing that the stakes of the missed goal is the spiritual meaning of existence.By the way, our postulate even brings an explanation to why the Church{e=« orgName » ref=« https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9592 ») opposed concupiscence at the end of the Middle Ages: there is actually a connection between the pursuit of pleasure and spiritual failure… So, if I follow you correctly, each time we make love and we don’t have extrasensory phenomena, are we frightfully perverted? Who says you will not someday have visions? You never know what might happen under a uniform…To make love as it’s done in our society, with one’s legitimate spouse, is to conform to the dominant morality. The paradox comes from the fact that this morality itself is a perversion. And attacking morality as you do, that’s not a perversion? The dictionary gives for perverted the following definitions: who presents a deviation from elementary instincts, who commits immoral acts.If morality were in conformance with elementary instincts, these two definitions would converge. But if morality is falsely set up against elementary instincts, the contradiction is flagrant: the behavior which respects the elementary instincts will be declared immoral; and that which respects morality will depart from elementary instincts. It is clear that such a morality is a form of perversion. Logically, morality should protect the individual against errors which would make him miss the spiritual goal of the sexual instinct. But today’s morality is constructed in ignorance of this goal, it guarantees all sorts of behaviors which lead to the failure of the IMP: the model of the closed couple, the rejection of a third, the jealousy, the nuclear family, the suppression of infantile sexuality. Conversely, it brands as anathema certain forms of relations which are an integral part of the IMP. The morality thus misses its goal, which should consist in safeguarding the spiritual function of love. Because your morality consists of kissing The French term employed here is « baiser », which has the double meaning of kissing and having sex, in a rather vulgar sense, as opposed to « making love ». three in a bed… You use the term « kissing ». That’s an excellent example of the evolution which physical contact has undergone over time.In the Middle Ages, one kissed crosses, one kissed the feet of a saint, one kissed the hand of a woman to give her a chaste homage. The future knight kissed the sword presented to him by his sponsor as a sign of devotion and loyalty. In the 12th century the kiss made its entry into the love life, still more or less charged with sacred meaning. Then, in the 16th, kissing takes on the sense of sexually possessing. That was the passage from the spiritual content to the biological content, just at the edge of rationalism. It’s still significant…Time passes, and the kiss takes on the traits of a family rite devoid of content: we give a kiss on the cheek to greet each other, to signal a link independent of any spiritual, amorous or sexual content. Finally, to kiss is used in two apparently distinct senses: to refer to a more or less vulgar way of making love, or to deceive« tromper ». It also means cheating on a partner., to con« rouler », litterally translating to… roll someone on the ground ?.Such a semantic slide is not by chance. To my mind, it expresses an unconscious force which tells us that our way of making love is a deception…It is for the same reason that coarse words are recruited for the sexual vocabulary: cunt« espèce de con », meaning the same as cunt., fuck off« va te faire enculer », translating to « go get sodomized »., beating my balls« s’en battre les couilles », meaning broadly to not give a shit., etc. We feel somehow that the sexuality presented to us as normal doesn’t give us what we seek more deeply. Go down the list of swear words and you will see what the collective unconscious is protesting against! When you say in the name of God, I don’t see where the sexual content comes in… The unconscious also knows how to denounce an error touching on the spiritual, for example against a false image of the Divinity. If this false image exists, it is because sexuality misses its transcendent goal. We thus find sexual error at the root of all profaning of spiritual values.Our civilization is locked into a rational program which denies the relationship between sex and the sacred. The logic of the system appears faultless. In fact, it owes its semblance of coherence to the necessary harmony of the different functions which belong to the IRP.The range of drives set out in the animal world to assure reproduction has been maintained with the passage from primate to homo sapiens. Whence the illusion that we can content ourselves with this biological functioning, composed of autonomic complex of drives, closed in upon itself: the satisfaction of establishing a family, of raising children, of furnishing a comfortable nest, of kissing one’s wife regularly, is a type of happiness…But we are more than animals, our sexual instinct does not have just a biological function. It is also there to bring us subtle energies which should permit us to develop our metapsychic potential and to attain our spiritual destiny. This, even if our culture is ignorant of it, our unconscious knows: finding no means of expression on the field of the conscious, monopolized by the system of materialist explanations, it cannot but protest by the means remaining to it: malaise, depression, aggressiveness.The ancients knew this essential rapport between love and the spiritual, between sex and the sacred. In our modern civilization, a sort of skid has happened: we see rather a rapport between love and sentiment, between sex and desire. We confuse sentimentality with spirituality. Family happiness and the quest for the Holy Grail. When they are as different as the crucible heated by the flame and the alchemical reaction taking place within it.The shift into the cult of sentiment happened just after the spread of repressive morality… You’re saying that Puritanism is at the origin of [Romanticism]? Sexual repression gives rise to guilt; guilt blocks the subtle function of love; this blocking prevents the access to the extrasensory; once the perception of the supra- sensitive has been blocked, we search for a compensation in sentiment; and sentimentalism is the quintessence of [Romanticism].[Romanticism] is generally presented as a deliberate reaction against the rationalist era inaugurated by Descartes two centuries earlier. The driving force which gave it so much importance is rooted in my opinion in the deepest layers of the psyche: in the sudden worsening of Oedipal repression, which followed the suppression of infantile sexuality in the 18th century. The aspiration toward the transcendent which could not be realized through the normal functioning of the IMP was transformed into a search for emotion, and an over-investment in the world of sentiment.Unfortunately, this did not resolve the problem. Sentimentalism takes the place of the magic of love, without being a true source of metapsychic energy; the lack of energy induces depression, and depression drives one to seek help again in sentimentality. [Romanticism] is a vicious circle, it cannot but self-destruct.Do you know Werther by Goethe? The work dates from the start of the Puritan era. The young hero is the victim of a failed triangular constellation: his suicide clearly points to the failure of a love condemned by the repressive morality which had just set in. The theme of despair, which we find at the heart of the Romantic outlook, is a way of denouncing the existential impasse represented by the new morality. Everyone senses that the most beautiful flights of sentimental poetry are in the end devoid of spiritual content.We can see in the proclamation of suffering, characteristic of Romantic art, a gigantic simulated suicide, a sort of call for help of the collective unconscious, destined to attract attention to the loss, not formulated, of the transcendent dimension of love. It was at the same time a danger signal, announcing the risk of an even more serious skid into a compulsive intellectualism. The failure of the hope placed in sentiment could not but end in an excess of reason and material things. It was at the height of [Romanticism], in the middle of the 19th century, that the positivism of Auguste Comte brought in the era of the materialist metaphysicians. The industrial era started before the Romantic period. Intellect was already in full force… Papin built the first steamboat at the beginning of the 18th century, but he was forgotten and died in misery. The people of the time were not as fascinated by material progress nor by technological tricks as they were in the next century.The exaltation of sentiment, the spearhead of [Romanticism], and the infatuation with objects, engine of the industrial era, invaded consciousness in the 19th century. As a sort of bipolar explosion of the fundamental unity of the being, the two paths along which the repressed impulsive energy of the IMP flows. From then on transcendence was confused with emotion, happiness with possession.The confusion of the spiritual with the sentimental would give way to an even more serious confusion: that of the spiritual with the intellectual. This can even be found in music, for example with Schoenberg: after his last work, which pushed musical [Romanticism] to its outer limits (die verklärte Nacht , written in 1899), he engaged the musical world in dodecaphony, intellectualization par excellence of melodic inspiration, being based on the negation of natural harmonic relationships. Just like abstract painting which seeks its identity in the negation of natural forms.The cult of rational science set in and translated the new hegemony of the intellect onto the subtle components of the consciousness. After the abuses of power by the Church{e=« orgName » ref=« https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9592 ») and the missed return of the supreme Being, a new goddess was needed to guarantee universal happiness, material security, access to knowledge and other promises which the religions were not able to keep.At the dawn of the new millennium, we began to notice that this omnipotent goddess had brought us neither happiness nor security, nor the knowledge our grandfathers had hoped for. It seemed more to be leading us to our destruction, unleashing forces which no one can control…I believe that the phenomenal investment of our time in intellectualism has as its unconscious driving force the short-circuit produced between sex and desire. When sexuality does not attain its transcendent goal, frustration exacerbates desire, which prevents the return of the magic. The failure of the spiritual function of love awakens existential anguish which drive the consciousness even further toward the mental processes , emerging finally in a deranged materialism. With the consequences we know well: lurking dissatisfaction, insoluble economic problems, political conflicts, ideological wars, a society of consumption, exclusion, violence, ecological impasse…If we look at it more closely, we see that the desire to possess, to dominate, to incorporate, are behind each of the ills that tear our social space. At the root of these egotistical desires, which today form the background of interpersonal relationships, we can recognize the sublimation of compulsive sexual desire, the result of the loss of the IMP.The apology for desire which psychoanalytic discourse has become, starting from its pleasure principle, has not been a stranger to this process. Freudianism was both symptom and catalyst. So, you condemn everything that has been done in these last centuries: all the Romantic creativity, all the advances that intelligence has allowed, technological progress, science in general… and even psychoanalysis, which you are the first to claim as inspiration! To be contradictory… I think on the contrary that the over-investment in affect and in intellect is a necessary reaction of the collective unconscious, destined to make us explore the mechanisms of degradation which the conscious cannot decipher. A gigantic detour created by our culture with the goal of piercing, once and for all, the mystery of the loss of the transcendent.The blocking of the metasexual function deprives individuals of energies essential to their evolution and provokes a general increase in the level of anxiety. The loss of the daily guidance which should assure the extrasensory plays a role as well. The natural reflex would then be to resort to the intellect to find the cause of the misfortune. But, no solution can be found by rational means, in view of the sexual repression which is itself inscribed in a rationally-appearing problem. The system closes in on itself.The psyche then reacts by exploring all possible paths, in the hope of rediscovering the trace of lost values. The investment in sentiment and the investment in intellect, [Romanticism] and scientism, have been the two tentative principles which succeeded the failure of religions.It took one or two centuries to exhaust the false hopes of the Romantic flight. From this came, a posteriori , a certain disdain for [Romanticism]. Then another century to explore the possibilities of the intellect and sound out its limits. The faith in reason is still the most certain thing we have… The over-investment in the intellect does not lead to the rational; it skids into the irrational. We imagine being able to attain, through reason, states or things whose senselessness is hidden by the compulsive desire caused by our deep frustration. We think we can solve a political problem by force and get bogged down in endless wars. We believe we can become wealthy by cutting down forests and don’t see that we are destroying the planet. We fly to the moon thinking we can colonize the universe, but don’t tolerate a relocation of a few kilometers. Between intellectualism and paranoia, there is a thin line…The homage paid to rational science eventually translates into the unconscious, thus irrational, hope to discover the causes of the existential void we suffer. The scientific process is rational in itself, but the use we make of it to reassure ourselves or justify our errors toward nature is irrational.Science can never replace spirituality, even if we confuse them unconsciously. The formal beauty of the logical process, the euphoria of knowing, the faith in technological performance may give the illusion of accomplishment, but this accomplishment stops at ordinary thought and emotion. It imprisons us in what Oriental wisdom calls the illusion of the material. The more we are engaged in these satisfactions, the more we are tempted to forget the paths of true spiritual accomplishment. And the more our unconscious protests. Whence the aggressiveness, the jealousies, the violence which poison our Western world more and more.The intellectual process nevertheless remains of primary importance in the search for our errors, to the extent that these errors are located on the physiological and psychological level, accessible to rational analysis.Personally, I think that it is science, or more precisely the joining of all the sciences, which will permit us to resolve this impasse. Not in bringing us a superior knowledge which is not its purview, but in bringing us the analytical knowledge of errors we commit on the level of the material and the biological.Without science, we cannot comprehend that an inappropriate diet is enough to modify the functioning of the psyche. The action of disturbing molecules on the nerve centers can be explained only by the acquisition of biochemistry and neurology. Ethology sheds light on the influence of earliest childhood on the psychic structures, through notions of instinctive program and sensitive period. Theoretical physics permits us, perhaps, to explain by the exchange of particles charged with information the role of erogenous zones in the access to the extrasensory…Psychoanalysis has gone further, to the heart of the problem. Freud showed that neurosis is rooted in the repression of Oedipal drives. Jung was able to see the relationship of neurosis to the repression of numinous energies, and its role in the de-spiritualization of the West.If we add to this that the instinctive metasexual program is the source of numinous energies, and that the Oedipal is the sensitive period, the conclusion is immediate: suppression of infantile sexuality is at the origin of neurotic materialism which is in the process of destroying the world… We have forgotten this fact of millennial importance, that God has always talked to mean through dreams and visions. Carl Gustav Jung
Chapter VII You were speaking of the collapse of materialism as though it were abnormal to earn money and to deal with material questions. Don’t you think that the abnormality is more in your stories of sexuality and the extrasensory? {e=« u » who=“#g} If the point of reference is abnormal, that which is normal appears abnormal.The problem is to define normality. I don’t see any other criteria besides natural laws, and the absence of contradictions… It’s been a long time since culture was emancipated from nature! You know the saying: What’s normal is mad, and what’s mad is normal?It exactly translates the fundamental contradiction of psychoanalysis. Freud starts off from the principle that repression of infantile drives is a normal thing; then he shows that their repression is at the origin of neurosis; so, neurosis is a normal state. Thus, the normal is abnormal… I’m not a psychoanalyst, but I’ve heard it said that one can overcome his œdipus complex. No one can entirely overcome the œdipus complex. I’m afraid psychoanalysts have contented themselves with this half-measure in order not to have to ask the real questions.The situation, though, is clear: infantile sexuality exists, with its incestuous drives which Freud himself describes as immeasurable; the repression of these drives leads to the greatest trauma of the precocious period (again according to Freud, and confirmed by a century of analyses); so in all logic, we should ask ourselves if the repression of infantile sexuality is a logical thing or not.To my knowledge, no one has asked objectively what to do to avoid it. The psychoanalysts with whom we’ve spoken tell us that the Œdipus complex has to be lived out in the imagination, and precisely not by acting it out. On what experimental or theoretical basis has psychoanalysis based this opinion?I will answer you right away: on an economic basis, because it would not have survived if it had affirmed that parents should be in a position to respond to the precocious drives of their child. It is enough to bring up the subject to be banned from society!As for me, I have been able to see that the child who is left alone to live out his Oedipal drives in all innocence can structure his IMP during the sensitive period foreseen by nature, and that he will come away with the greatest benefits for his whole sexual and spiritual life as an adult. What you are calling normal is immoral. What morality are you talking about?Once we ask the purpose of infantile sexuality, we can distinguish two models of psychic normality.An institutional normality, defined by the repression of the child’s incestuous drives, from which flows the neurotic structuring with its multiple consequences, compounded by a failure of extrasensory faculties.And a normality based not on tradition or on chance prohibitions, but on the respect of the natural demands and potential of the child. Isn’t true morality respecting natural values? It is God who made nature, the natural laws are also the divine laws. So the morality desired by God is natural morality…Everyone considers it moral to respond to the first manifestations of language. Why not respond to the first love drives? Objectively, what is the difference? We need to examine seriously the consequences of such a response.I see nothing but positive effects: the absence of repression fundamentally excludes neurosis; the correct structuring of the IMP guarantees the attainment of the metapsychic purpose of sexuality; the extrasensory faculties develop spontaneously; the individual has available daily access to the supra-sensitive dimension; he benefits from both the energy and the guidance necessary to his spiritual evolution; his intuition permits him to better resolve problems of a material nature; the archetypes confer on the events which mark his destiny their transcendent meaning. Not to mention the happiness of a successful love life without internal conflicts or suffering… You are quite the idealist! But now tell us in concrete terms what you mean by responding to the Oedipal drives of the child… Go and see how it is in societies not contaminated by Western morality! Or how it was in our own two centuries ago. You need only open ethnology books, or histories of sexuality to get an initial idea of natural behavior.These questions would not be asked if adults lived out their sexuality on the IMP level. They would let themselves be guided by the magic of love, by the extrasensory, and would know intuitively how to react. In fact, they would have to do nothing else but avoid anything that prevents the child from expressing his own drives.Two situations are traumatic for the child: to feel pressured by the drives of an adult, or to see his own drives rejected by the adult. You are completely forgetting the taboo of incest, it’s the foundation of any civilization worthy of the name! If there are two independent sexual functions, the IMP and IRP, we must also distinguish two different types of incest: a metasexual incest and a reproductive incest.We cannot reasonably speak of incest when a baby sucks from its mother, for example: yet it is the first sexual contact. The mouth of an infant plays an erogenous role entirely comparable to that of the sex organs several years later. The sucking also engages the mother’s eroticism. Eroticization certainly presides over a transmission of energy. And nature would not have provided for this mutual eroticization if the energy thus transmitted were not useful to the child.Polymorphous contacts, which he may seek later on, once he is no longer at the breast, have a priori the same function. The fact that they have a more sexual character, from the phallic stage, shocks us today, but Puritan morality did not exist at the time the genetic code was put into place. The child does not originally feel any disgust, any guilt, for his own sexuality. If we describe it as incestuous, that is because we project upon it the image of our own adult sexuality.The hatred inspired by the child-adult relationship is composed of elements of suffering, which we owe to our own repression. What scandalizes us in sex is most often what reflects our traumas and our obsessions. The term sexuality exists for barely two centuries. Before that, the child-adult relationship was perfectly spontaneous, colored by natural modesty to the point where it was unthinkable to name it. It was necessary to avoid speaking of it, like all metasexual relationships, because it is situated on a subtle level, which the intellect would only debase.On the other hand, a sexual act imposed by a father on his nubile daughter has entirely other psychic and physiological implications. The desire of the father and the maturity of the daughter put into play the IRP drives. Penetration, like seduction and subjection, belong to the reproductive function. There is a quest for sexual satisfaction at the same time as a refusal to procreate, thus a detouring of the reproductive instinct from its natural goal. Functionally, this is a perversion. What’s more, acting it out implies the violation of the drives for avoiding incest, which certainly exist in humans as they do in higher primates. Not to mention all the feelings of guilt induced by the social order. The daughter will be the victim of a whole parade of internal conflicts and degrading images which will prejudice her future sexual life.There, the term incest applies, if only for its etymology: incest means not chaste. Chastity originally meant renouncing impure thoughts or acts. Not renouncing all sexuality. You can make up all the theories you like: if psychoanalysts have unanimously stated, for generations, that a relationship with an adult is traumatic for the child, it’s quite simply because it is traumatic. Don’t look for something that’s not there! Psychoanalysts speak in terms of pleasure. If pleasure were the only stakes for an child’s drives, it wouldn’t be so serious to repress them. If the stakes, however, are an essential energy, a nourishment needed for the development of metapsychic potential, one can’t go about reasoning in the same way.It is not serious to forbid a kid to chew gum, it only deprives him of an artificial pleasure which is not provided for in his genetic programming. While forbidding him the nourishment needed for his growth would be catastrophic.Once we know the nourishing purpose of the IMP, the repressive system of today seems to be saying: Little child, you will have the right to eat when you are grown! Your reasoning always appears logical. But don’t you see that there is something contemptible about the relationship between child and adult? Do you have personal experience with it? For my part, I’ve been able to experience this relationship for years, as a child, and I have luminous memories of it. Never for a moment did a feeling of shame or disgust cross my mind. Try to be objective. If this form of love seems to you contemptible, you have to ask yourself two questions: is it really contemptible, and if so for what reason? Or is it not, and then for what reason do you have this impression of it? It is difficult to state that the child-adult relationship is contemptible in itself, because it is perfectly innocent and spontaneous in other societies, for example in Africa and in Asia. The idea of cutting off heads seemed perfectly normal to the Jivaros. That’s no reason to import this custom to France! The child-adult relationship was common in Europe up until the 18th century. The people of the time did not find it contemptible, or it would have been the object of scandals and prohibitions.Today, the situation is different: the repression of the child’s drives for the adult is more drastic than ever, it has intensified even more in the last few years. And the repression is accompanied by elements of anxiety, of hate and of disgust, which are even more violent. Anything that evokes the child-adult relationship reactivates these contents, lying under pressure in the unconscious since early childhood. Freud already pointed out this mechanism. He used it to explain the phenomenal opposition which greeted the discovery of infantile sexuality. The denial of the Œdipus complex proves that it is the site of terrible unconscious suffering.My theory of the non-repressed Œdipus complex comes up against even more violent opposition, because it more directly reactivates the sufferings of childhood. So, you are the only one to be right in the face of a world full of psychoanalysts, psychiatrists and psychologists? I know more than one who support me. But what would happen to them if they shouted it from the rooftops?Things are unfortunately quite complicated: even if I am right on a theoretical level, the shrinks are right on the social level. In a society which has lost sight of the metapsychic dimension of sexuality, the child can find only traumatizing responses to his own impulses.That’s where the cause of the repression is located: the child feels that he risks being wounded if he allows his natural impulses to be expressed. He senses it from the adult’s first reaction, maybe even by supra-sensitive means. He immediately perceives the danger he would face in becoming the object of a desire anchored in a genital sexuality, which could only destroy his innocence and condemn him in turn to a metasexual failure. But you do recognize the usefulness of the law? I have never said anything to the contrary. In today’s conditions, it is necessary to protect minors against the shock of encountering adult sexuality.But at the same time this law keeps our society a prisoner of a vicious cycle: the repression of precocious drives insures that the future adult will precipitate the same repression in his own offspring, without being conscious of it. And things repeat themselves from generation to generation.The only way out of it is to first understand the phenomenon. Then to restore the metapsychic function of love to the level of the adults.It wouldn’t take much for that to happen. To know that there are two different sexual functions, and that the triangular constellation is a natural thing, would automatically lead people to rediscover the functioning at the origin of the love instinct… Ah! Here we are again… Tell us exactly how you speak of this triangular relationship in your courses. The question is to determine whether the opening to a third person is a natural thing or not. That’s a major point, in view of the effect it could have on the Oedipal theory. We can understand infantile sexuality only if we understand exactly the natural functioning of the triangular constellation. So you start off by proving that adultery is a normal thing?It exists from the beginning of time. It seems to respond to particularly intense drives. That’s one reason to think it is genetically programmed. The prohibition against adultery also goes back to the beginning of time. Why shouldn’t it be the natural attitude? Morality is only good for the trash heap?If Moses had to forbid it, it’s surely because it had previously existed, and was practiced without prohibition. The recourse to making it punishable by death shows that it is a particularly powerful drive. Theft also had to be prohibited. That doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing! You are right. We must examine in which case an opening to a third person would be positive, and in which it would be negative. The comparison with theft doesn’t hold water, because the person who is robbed suffers damage. He loses something that belongs to him… The person who is deceived also loses something that belongs to him. It is perfectly normal that it be protected with a prohibition. There’s the problem: in certain cases he loses, in others he gains…In my courses, I propose a general method, valid each time two opposing theories face off: to make up a chart with two columns, on one side the arguments for the non-natural character of the behavior in question; on the other, all the arguments in favor of the hypothesis of genetic programming. It is then sufficient to discuss one by one the opposing arguments, and to compare the pertinence of the justifications which can be given for one or the other side.We can then put in the first column everything that makes us think that the sexual instinct is programmed to be expressed in a closed couple. In the other, everything that justifies an impulsive opening to the outside. In this way, we have as complete as possible a basis for conducting the discussion.It is also the occasion for the participants to evoke points which caused them suffering in their amorous experiences. Because you think you can convince a court with these kinds of demonstrations? I’m being attacked on theory, I must then justify it. That must be a part of the right to a defense.It looks like we’ll need a third day of detention!I’ll stick to the essentials. Among the arguments in favor of closing the couple, we can cite: contemporary morality; biblical commandments; the stability necessary for the education of children; the pain felt by the injured partner; the shame and disgust inspired by the adulterous relationship; the social complications for an illegitimate child ; the guilt of the one who deceives his partner; the risk that the new relationship will destroy the previous one; the idea that faithfulness is a guarantee of happiness; the fact that there are certain animals such as penguins, geese, gibbons, etc.; I let the participants add what they like to this list. As arguments for genetic programming of the opening to a third person, we can note: the power of the impulses toward a third person; their appearance in practically all histories of couples; their presence in all cultures; the resistance of adultery to millennia of repression; the hypocrisy which is used to get around the prohibitions; the necessity of finding an external source of energy to feed the couple’s relationship; the intensity of love and sex experiences in the external relationship; the intensification of the first relationship when the new one is realized; the intense happiness felt in loving love; the development of extrasensory phenomena once the couple is opened up. The omnipresence of adultery in art, literature, the theater, myths. Not to mention the cinema, which is the best factory for modern myths… Then it is time to put the different arguments to the test, by critiquing as objectively as possible. In a difference from traditional ways of thinking, our postulate allows us to reason from the starting point of two sexual functions, with one responding to a metapsychic purpose. You have enough there to get everyone tangled up! You mean to say: enough to untangle the problem, even if it discomfits everyone…First point: what can we take from the contemporary morality?History shows that it changes over the course of time from one culture to the other; the nobility, before the Revolution, commonly practiced extramarital relationships; with Puritanism, adultery became a subject of shame; several generations later, it is no longer a crime. In ancient Chinese tradition, the wife welcomed into the family the objects of her husband’s affection; good wives personally stood watch to make sure things went well. In Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, unmarried mothers were still destined for public shaming; at the end of the century, single mothers are subsidized.So: the genetic data are in principle invariable; the versatility of morality shows mathematically that it is not in accord with genetics. We thus find nothing in today’s morality regarding the genetic or non-genetic character of a behavior.Second argument: the biblical commandments. We must distinguish between the Old and the New Testament.The Old Testament portrays the curses which result from the original sin denounced by Genesis. The measures taken by Moses are of a cruelty which has nothing moral in it, for example when he has a couple run through with a lance, under the pretext that the woman belongs to a tribe which worships another god. He condemns homosexuals to death, which is hard to see as a divine commandment.The New Testament condemns this suppressive attitude. To hold to the rigors of the Torah would be to forget Christian teaching.The idea of sacred sex is not mentioned in the Old Testament. It thus tells us nothing on the subject of a triangular drive belonging to the IMP, if not the existence of suppressive forces as they arose in the conditions of life of the Israelites. So you would be in favor of polygamy? Nothing has ever shown that monogamy is a criterion for civilization. The Koran limits the number of wives to four. Polygamy has many advantages: the sharing of tasks, the opening up of the clan, the alliance with other groups preventing wars… The ethnologists are amazed that women, in Africa in particular, hope for their husband’s polygamy: it is quite simply the triangular constellation hidden behind these customs.Personally, I don’t take sides; I try to understand the functioning of the love drives as they are genetically programmed. I think that it is by that that we must begin before opting for one or the other of the social structures.I now come to the third argument: the opening to a third person would compromise the stability of the couple which is necessary to the correct development of children.The closed couple is far from being stable, contrary to what morality proclaims. It is enough to look around us. Reich states, supported by statistics, that the only happy couples are adulterous couples.The increase in divorces, since moral pressure has been relaxed, should make us think: if one car in a hundred, of a particular model, have a motor which explodes after several thousand miles, we must conclude that it was a bad model. Any commercial which continued to extol the qualities of these same cars would take on the look of a swindle. Now, according to the latest statistics, forty couples out of a hundred explode after several years: the morality which presents to us the faithful couple as the formula for happiness is thus a swindle characterized… Now you’re going too far! Humor never killed anyone… except for policemen!Fourth argument: the pain felt by the injured partner. This pain is in direct relation to the loss of the love object, stemming from the repressed Œdipus complex, who is himself a consequence of repressive morality. It doesn’t belong to natural functioning, at least not with the same intensity.In the current system, the partner who has an adventure with a third feels himself obliged to leave his legitimate spouse; the spouse feels obligated to reject him because the morality teaches that every relationship must be exclusive. The pain comes in great part from a fear of being abandoned. It doesn’t have the same character in certain traditional societies, as Malinowski confirmed with the Trobriand Islanders, or Mallaurie with the Eskimos. Experience shows that it reverses itself to love of love when the metasexual function does not succumb to repression.Fifth argument: the adulterous relationship inspires shame and distrust.The cultural pressure which has existed for millennia, the idea of mortal sin, added to jealousy, have demonized adultery. A sexual relationship, whatever it is, has nothing contemptible for those who live in love. Why should those who portray it to themselves from outside feel disgust?The contents of the repressed Œdipus complex, fixed on the triangular constellation, are reactivated by the representation of the external relationship. They are added to the reaction of disgust aroused by the degraded sexual relationship which the injured partner projects onto the external relationship. The repugnance is amplified by a feeling of indignation when he finds himself deceived. But the need to lie, the idea that one can love only one person at a time and the image of degraded sexuality are the consequences of the reigning morality.We are once again begging the question: it is impossible to conclude.As to the complications posed by the birth of a child outside of marriage, they are directly attributable to the value system put in place following the disappearance of the metasexual function. Saying: He is not my blood is a way of condemning the intrusion of a rival into the bosom of the family. The exclusion of foreign DNA is not a natural reflex. There are societies which don’t concern themselves with knowing who is the child’s biological father. If we lived in tribes, rather than in cloistered families, the problem of child support would not be posed. There would always be enough godmothers and godfathers close enough to the family to take care of its needs, and the family itself would never be destitute, given the solidarity of the group.The affective and vital security of the child would be better in a system of enlarged family than in that of the closed couple. When one thinks of the damage done by institutional placement…Seventh argument: the guilt felt by the one who deceives his partner.First, why does he feel obligated to hide the external relationship from his spouse? So as not to make the spouse suffer uselessly. The suffering of the injured partner is not natural: as we’ve seen, it derives from the Œdipus complex, thus indirectly from morality.The lie also serves to preserve a reassuring image of the ideal couple, the perfect husband, the virtuous wife. These images also derive from the morality.What remains is the guilt in doing something against the social order. The prohibitions are crystallized in the unconscious in the course of education, the transgression releases feelings of guilt, independently of whether it is a lie or not. There, too, guilt comes from morality. Given the contingency of morality, we cannot draw any conclusion from the feelings of guilt which accompany adultery, as far as the innate or non-innate character of the drive toward a third person.Eighth point: the impossibility of constructing a stable new relationship without destroying the preceding one.This is true only in the context of the failure of the IMP. The metasexual relationship does not demand the same belonging nor the same stability as the conjugal relationship. It is not there to substitute for it, but to bring it a quantum of energy that is useful to the accomplishment of the IRP, contributing to the stability of the home. The two relationships are programmed in such a way as not to be in competition, they are made to complement each other. And what do you do with the fear of being excluded, abandoned? No exclusion is possible if the relationship unfolds on the metasexual level. The abandonment of the first partner would provoke a guilt which would condemn it to failure. The only fear which may exist is that there would be a derailment on the reproductive level.Ninth argument: faithfulness is a guarantee of happiness.We get this principle from the fact that infidelity most often leads to unhappiness. But, the opposite is not always true: the fact that infidelity brings certain suffering does not prevent fidelity from bringing other kinds.Tenth argument: certain animals remain faithful until death, like penguins, geese, gibbons…We are not exactly geese, nor penguins. And if we need a comparison with primates, it would be better to do it with bonobos, genetically much closer to us than gibbons. We know today that bonobos show, even in the wild state, an astonishingly human sexual polymorphism, enough to make the most indulgent zookeepers blush. The faithfulness to the group by far outweighs the faithfulness to the individual. Only the mother-child relationship stands every test of fidelity. Where does the importance given to fidelity ? The model of the closed couple reproduces the dual relationship of child to mother… According to you, the wife’s faithfulness would be a form of infantilism? The possession of the wife: a regression to the oral state, why not. Under the sign of the obsession with the breast, characteristic of heterosexuality…The first relationship, between the mother and the infant, remains in the unconscious as the symbol of the IMP. It is the only stage which is not destined to failure, thanks to the physical contact of nursing. While the stages that follow exclude erotic contact and mark the definitive loss of any source of metasexual energy. The first triangular constellation, at the time of the Œdipus complex, is registered as a symbol of frustration and guilt, the opening to the third person from then on seen as a threat. We understand that the unconscious seeks to rediscover the binary relationship…At the end of the day, we see that none of the arguments advanced to support the closure of the couple stands up to critique. I could accept that fidelity is not genetically programmed. Why shouldn’t it be Man’s destiny to add to his condition certain values contrary to his genes? If you are in favor of genetically modified love… In the era of genetic engineering, we have to envision everything. Without taboos, there is no culture! It remains to observe reality to know if a taboo results in real progress or in useless suffering.If love is experienced on the model of the IRP, every relationship outside the couple is harmful, it provokes dramas and traumas of all kinds without bringing anything positive on the energy level. In fact, Moses was right to prohibit adultery in the post-Genesis context. With the disappearance of the IMP, it had in effect become a cause of suffering, indeed social instability. If you keep at it, you’ll be putting love in a bottle… It took us a good many years, spent observing a great number of couples, for my wife and me to convince ourselves that closing off by twos is incapable of bringing happiness. The closing brings an illusion of security, marriage guarantees a certain social position, a serious façade, but the whole edifice is undermined by a fundamental frustration, the repercussion of which can be found in all the recesses of our society. Happiness is not possible when one is missing such an important stage as the access to the extrasensory and its spiritual outcomes.This is not to say that adultery, as it is lived in the context of the IRP, is a good thing. Have you read Madame Bovary ? Flaubert paints a superb caricature of the Puritan impasse: neither marriage nor adultery escape despair, and grand romantic illusions end in arsenic… You are contradicting yourself: if adultery ends in despair, then fidelity is still better! The closed couple cannot be truly faithful. Even if each partner rejects all outside attraction, the impulses which gnaw at them on the inside already constitute an infidelity: He who covets his neighbor’s wife commits adultery in his heart… He feels guilty for his own fantasies and this guilt dooms the IMP to failure in advance, frustration induces obsession, the interior conflicts undermine the familial ambiance.Faithful means: not missing one’s engagements; whose feelings do not change; who does not betray. I don’t see in what way an amorous relationship with a third person would constitute treason, if the happiness is shared and if it brings a plus to the existing relationship. This presupposes that love be experienced on the metasexual level… And if the fickle spouse packs up to go experience his new love elsewhere? That’s what it leads to, your version of faithfulness ! Ask yourself why the partner who is in love feels obliged to leave.We are faced with an alternative: either the adulterous partner is wrong to fall in love with a third person and to act out this love; or the injured partner is wrong in not tolerating the outside relationship. What do you mean by is wrong? Going against natural laws: either it is not natural that one of the partners feels love for a third person; or it is not natural that the injured partner feels himself injured. Or, that nature is poorly made and suffering inevitable…That in fact is the object of my second column: what are the arguments which lead us to think that the opening to a third person is a natural movement?On the first line we have the intensity of the impulse for the third person. We must first assure ourselves that these impulses are not an effect of neurosis. They can derive from drives that have been rejected in the course of the precocious period, remaining latent in the unconscious. One discovers that they are particularly active in societies which do not repress infantile sexuality, as in the Phillipines, in Thailand and among the Trobriand Islanders.Their intensity argues for their natural character, and conveys at the same time their importance.Their omnipresence in different cultures in all the love stories likewise leads us to think that they are inscribed in the human genome.Similarly, the failure to which all measures of suppression put into place over the course of history are destined. Thousands of years of repression have done nothing but develop a phenomenal hypocrisy. An acquired behavior would have ceded more easily to being prohibited.The proliferation of infidelity in mythological or artistic production, from the disputes between Zeus and Hera to the modern cinema, including the theater of Corneille and the cuckold stories of Sacha Guitry, show once again the irreducibility, thus the innate character, of the opening to a third person.It remains then to define how this drive should be realized in order not to demean natural laws, and how it should be integrated into the reproductive function. All this to justify a threesome… Orgies are nothing but a caricature of what the triangular constellation should be. A pathetic way of compensating for frustration, people searching in any way at all for the energy they lack. Although the pornographic way does perhaps less damage than the Puritan one…As for me, I propose to resolve the problem mathematically: let us suppose that an authentic amorous relationship exists between A and B. We regularly see that this relationship loses intensity after a certain time, and that one of the partners, for example B, falls in love with a third person, C. What are then the various possible outcomes?First possibility: B abandons A to live out his relationship with C. Most often, A feels violent suffering which can reach the level of trauma. B and C cannot ignore it, and feel guilty.The relationship between B and C would then be tinged with feelings of guilt which would compromise the functioning of the IMP. These guilt feelings would oblige the two protagonists to justify themselves by speaking ill of A, asserting their rights, locking themselves into a closed system in such a way as to reject natural compassion, etc. This position of justification will crystallize in their psyches under the effect of sexual pleasure (repeated pleasure fixes the behavior and the internal state). Thus, the tendency to justification is a component of the ego. Adultery acted out in defiance of the spouse thus leads to the strengthening of the ego, which we know stands in the way of both extrasensory faculties and spiritual evolution. Such a relationship will miss its goal, both the metapsychic goal of the IMP and the reproductive goal of the IRP, in view of the breakup of the family. Adultery consummated under these conditions is thus a double perversion. I’m happy to hear you say that… Second possibility: B renounces his love for C in order to remain faithful to A. Appearances are saved, the rules of morality respected and everything seems for the best in this best of all possible worlds.But in the unconscious, it is another story: if B’s impulse for C is important, B will suffer from renouncing it. A will feel himself guilty, knowing unconsciously that he is depriving his partner of an indispensable nourishment. B will feel a prisoner, torn between the good conscience of remaining faithful to and the resentment at having to renounce a source of energy which his unconscious tells him is vitally important – not to mention the guilt of feeling adulterous impulses.Guilt and resentment will invoke a need for justification in A and B, and they will find themselves in almost the same situation as before. The A-B relationship will be set up on the IRP level and will reinforce the partners’ ego. The extrasensory faculties will not be invited, the energetic deficit will bring on depression and aggressiveness. The children will be the scapegoats of the parental malaise. That is the model of the nuclear family, of which the pathogenic virtues are well known.Between the two possibilities, Moses chose the second. It was a way of preserving the functioning of the IRP (be fruitful and multiply), while at the same time avoiding outbursts of jealousy. A way of guaranteeing a certain stability based on the continuity of the couple. The method, alas, did not guarantee the people’s happiness. Not surprising that they sought compensation in the joys of the golden calf… You speak of the reinforcement of the ego as something negative. Because your ego is not strong enough to stifle certain perverse tendencies? Psychoanalysis confuses the ego and the self. We must on the contrary be very careful to distinguish between them.One feels that ego, in the current sense (and not that of Kant) has something negative about it, while the self is the natural seat of judgement, of will, of self control. To define the ego, we would have to understand its origin, know how to describe the mechanisms which lead to an egotistical structuring of the self.In our culture, the two most fundamental instincts, pillars of physical survival and spiritual accomplishment, succumb to repression and conflictualizing . The dietary instinct is manhandled from the youngest age, by parents who do not know its natural functioning and who force their children to constantly go against it, demanding that they absorb a certain food while depriving them of another, modifying the natural flavors. The sexual instinct comes up against incomprehension and suppression. The child is invaded by sentiments of anxiety and guilt which go far beyond the threshold foreseen by nature and which he is not capable of managing. The self has almost no other defense but to adopt a position of justification to combat the guilt, and an attitude of reassurance to compensate for the anxiety.The justification and reassurance are in themselves two normal functions of the self, the problem is in their excess. If they go beyond the acceptable level for too long a time, an imbalance is created in the psychic structures: an exaggerated tendency to auto-protection and auto-justification, which takes shape as a sort of overgrowth of the self.The same phenomenon happens with aggressive drives: their over-investment in the long term, a consequence of the repression of the IMP, crystallizes an exaggerated tendency to aggressiveness. When the aggressiveness goes beyond a certain threshold, foreseen by nature, it mutates into destructiveness, a predisposition which is also characteristic of the ego.To which is then added the poor structuring of the self under the effects of poor learning of gustatory alliesthesia, in the culinary context: prepared foods have predictable flavors (while foods consumed raw change their flavor as needed). The child thus learns that he can systematically preview the pleasure: the strawberry candy he craves always has the taste of strawberry, just as he imagines it (while a natural strawberry would surprise him by its acrid taste each time the organism has no need for it). The too-systematic possibility of previewing the pleasure induces a paranoid type of confusion between desire and reality, which takes hold in the self from the first dietary experiences after weaning, and which one can also place in the ego.I propose to define the ego as being the part of the self formed by these four components, especially when they are hypertrophied: justification, reassurance, aggressiveness, paranoia. The ego is structured as a defense of the self against the repressed anxieties and guilt, that is to say it takes root in the unconscious. Whence the difficulty in uprooting it…A little bit of ego is necessary, it is a sort of figurehead, or spearhead which the self can use for defense against external aggression. Depending on the circumstances, we have to know how to justify ourselves, defend ourselves, even fabricate for ourselves certain utopias, but this while remaining within the limits of reality.When the conditions in which the self is constructed in childhood go beyond certain norms, the figurehead becomes heavier than the boat, the ego takes on an exaggerated importance, the defensive attitudes end up by dominating the personality. A hypertrophied ego effectively consists of overestimating reality in confusing it with representations one makes of it, reacting too aggressively against external aggressions, often by illusory means (reassurance), being right at any price (justification).It is clear that an oversized ego does not facilitate the functioning of the triangular constellation, nor spiritual progress. Personally, I feel just fine with my ego, I don’t see any reason to question it! If you reasons that way, you will never get out of the vicious circle: the ego spoils the triangular constellation, which remains impossible so long as the partners are in a defensive position, incompatible with the opening to a third person; and the failed triangular constellation reinforces the ego.As the drive for a third person will arise sooner or later, we should be asking precisely why they pose an apparently insoluble problem. Why does our instinct lock us into a dilemma, with no way out but suffering? Is it a consequence of natural laws, or a consequence of the errors we make against nature? And what can we do to resolve the problem…When a natural drive leads to conflict and to suffering, it is probably because there is an error in the way it is being realized. This error might be in A, in B, in C, in the A-B relationship, in the B-C relationship, or in the C-A relationship. Or even in the total A-B-C relationship, for example following a poor unconscious image of the triangular constellation.Geometrically, there are seven possibilities to explore. You claim to be able to put love into an equation: but you said that love and intellect are incompatible… It’s not love I am putting into an equation, it’s the reasoning on the errors committed against natural laws. There, intellect has its place. Its principle function consists in unraveling the problems which spoil our existence.Different errors can be located in each of these seven places. It is enough to make an inventory of the suffering which stains amorous experiences when an impulse for a third person arises, and to try to rediscover its cause while using the decoding key of IMP + IRP.Sometimes we must go very far back. I usually tell my interns of a personal experience which revealed to me a fundamental error in internal attitude, of which I had previously been totally unconscious.It happened in 1974. After six months of a wonderful love story, all of a sudden my partner felt an extraordinary flash for a young man whom I knew. All at once I felt as if I was falling into an abyss. It had been planned that she accompany us, my family and me, on a vacation trip to the Côte d’Azur. After giving it considerable thought, I proposed to her that she give up the trip in order to experience what she needed to experience.Everything seemed to me infallibly logical: I should have been happy that the person I loved would receive a surplus of happiness thanks to another. If A loves B more than himself, he should rejoice that C is bringing her an additional supply of love…That was without taking my unconscious into account: the more the hours passed, the more I felt tormented by uncontrollable pains, to the point of having to let my wife do the driving. The worst was the night: impossible to find sleep. I was assailed by fantasies of violence, I saw myself armed with a club, beating down with all my might on the loving couple. Not having been able to close my eyes for an instant, feeling ashamed of my possessiveness, I finally decided to get up before dawn and watch the sunrise.We were camping in the rocky inlets, near Marseilles. The countryside was splendid, the water blue and limpid, glittering out of sight, with pink reflections where it met the sky like my lost happiness. When the first rays shot out over the horizon, I tried to make this light enter into me and calm my brain. I felt a terrible pain in the center of my chest, as if I had broken in two. All of a sudden, at the moment I was leaving my head to re-center myself in my chest, an incredible swing took place: all the suffering which had been tormenting me was as though reversed into an extraordinary wave of euphoria. A sort of ecstasy coming straight out of Paradise…It took me a moment to understand what had happened to me. I now felt as though carried away by the love that the others could experience, no more negative thoughts came to darken the scene. Returning to lie down in my tent I had, one after the other, for the first time since my childhood, several visions which told me what was happening between the two partners, six hundred kilometers away. These visions were later verified.I did not know at first what to think of this type of inspiration. Was it chance, the beauty of the countryside, the light of the rising sun? Something had happened in what I then took to calling my solar plexus. The suffering had totally disappeared at the precise moment when I left ordinary thought to re-center myself in my chest.The pain reappeared each time that I gave too much importance to thought and went away again each time I re-centered.I drew an initial conclusion, by simply applying my working hypothesis Pain = Error: I had to admit that the consciousness centered in the solar plexus was the natural position. While consciousness centered in the head, classical in our culture, had to be an error, since it was enough to provoke pain.This explained the importance that Oriental wise men gave to the techniques of meditation, meant to silence thought and re-center consciousness in the presumed chakras. Personally, I am afraid that the idea of multiple chakras endowed with specific functions might in themselves be interfering thoughts. I prefer to speak of the respiratory center, or of the solar plexus, without seeing in it more than a subjective perception: the impression of being centered in the solar plexus does not mean that something verifiable is happening on the physiological level, it is perhaps simply the signature of a certain state of consciousness. Of a state in which the ego moves into the background.The most striking thing was this sudden reversal of pain to pleasure, this unexpected possibility of being able to feel the love of others as a sort of benediction. As if all the energy that at first had fed the suffering had been miraculously transformed into bliss. All had been swept away - the jealousy, the fear of losing love, the idea of adultery, all the egotistical feelings that corrupt this type of situation. Very nice, your little story. You are an exceptional human being… But wouldn’t it be just a little bit to serve your theory? Later on, I was able to confirm that a good number of others felt exactly the same swing. Particularly people who practiced a natural diet and had less parasitic excitation of the nervous system than mine. It was an authentic phenomenon, which allowed me to see a fundamental solution to the problem of the couple, and to many other problems…What’s more, it was then that the swinging over into extrasensory faculties made their appearance more often.The process proved to be verifiable and reproducible, it could be considered as forming an integral part of the IMP, belonging to the same genetic programming. The startup of the extrasensory proved that it functioned as an important source of metapsychic energy. Which gave a raison d’être to this famous adulterous drive.By the way, we need to give it another name. What you call love of love? Or love squared. Or even love to the third power: Love³ in view of the number of partners…In this way a third path was defined, neither breakup nor rejection, which permits us to attribute to the triangular constellation a fundamental role in human sexuality: when two partners, A and B, have a longstanding relationship, the intensity of this relationship decreases after a certain time, the exchange of energy between two people becomes sterile for lack of renewal; nature then provides a drive pushing one of the partners to approach a third person, as a way of finding an external source of energy.To the extent that A is in a state of natural consciousness, that is to say centered in his solar plexus and not in his head, he does not feel any suffering. On the contrary, he perceives the love of the others as a renewal of his own relationship with B. If he is not too blocked, he will even end up by falling in love with the third partner. The three protagonists are thus led quite naturally to love each other… You’re playing the evangelist now? I read a pamphlet by a famous psychoanalyst who showed that Saint Paul was paranoid…One and the same thing: either I am dreaming, and all those who experienced this thing after me, too; or it is the natural functioning of love and we must ask ourselves objectively why it’s been lost in the mists of time.Psychoanalysis explains at least why this third way remains blocked: the child, at the time of the Œdipus complex, fixes a castrating image of the father or the mother, and from then on feels the third person as a threat. The representation of an external relationship reactivates the Oedipal suffering, the triangular constellation is instantly doomed to catastrophe.That’s the rule in a society constructed on Oedipal repression.In my psychomathematical jargon, I speak of a [2-1] structuring, with the minus sign meaning that the image of the third person is perceived a priori as negative. That’s a fine thing to say, the idea of feeling love for an individual who is screwing your wife is the sign of a pure mind! When you say an individual who is screwing you are already projecting on the external relationship the image of a disconnected sexuality.Your reaction is partly an essential reflect destined to denounce an error; whether it’s an error which you project, or an real error in the relationship. A possessive relationship of the IRP type would threaten to destroy your relationship as a couple, it would compromise for the three partners the chances to discover a more subtle level of love. It’s not surprising that your unconscious would protest.You would react differently if you knew from experience what was meant by a relationship of the IMP type. You would feel a priori a positive emotion, which would not go over to the negative unless the others committed an error. For example, if they slid into possessiveness.It’s been years since I lived love in that fashion. And I’m far from being the only one. That demands an inconceivable self-mastery. A theory that leads people to that kind of self-control has something manipulative… It is enough that the three partners respect a few natural rues: that the consciousness not be too far into the mental; not looking for either pleasure or possession of another; allowing oneself to be carried away by reciprocal drives, not doing anything to spoil the magic of love; not letting oneself be influenced by morality and preconceived ideas… And avoiding all excitation of the nervous system due to diet. These are nothing but natural conditions: we can then consider the positive experience of the triangular constellation as a natural potential, figuring in the genetic programming of human sexuality. Considering as a natural drive the fact of loving the love of those who are deceiving you… I have never seen that, even in the movies. But there are many films which pose the problem. Of which some have happy endings…The triangular constellation is an integral part of the IMP, it succumbs along with it to the Oedipal repression, with the result that one cannot observe it anywhere, even in oneself. At the most we can see some sublimation emerging, such as love of one’s neighbor, Christian charity, the priest who blesses the married couple, who confesses the unfaithful spouse, the hope of outside help, the state of grace… Or the deviations, such as the stories of cuckolds, the scorning of unmarried mothers, the fury directed at adultery, the wife-swapping…The fact that this possibility of opening remains systematically blocked does not prevent it from existing in our impulsive structures and being called upon to play a fundamental role in the amorous process. We must simply respect the conditions which permit it to manifest itself in a natural form. If the repression of the Œdipus complex is irreversible, I don’t see how that could be possible. You are completely right: nothing is more difficult than to correct poorly fitted psychic structures. Just look at what psychoanalysis costs, in terms of time and money!
Chapter VIII What is the real cause of neurosis? It is tied up with Oedipal suffering. And what is the quintessence of Oedipal suffering? The lack of metasexual energy.Logically, the state of the psyche should improve at the moment the missing energy again becomes available… Do like Reich: sell the orgone and you’ll be rich! Reich was condemned for fraud, the American judicial system claimed that this energy did not exist. Maybe it should one day be rehabilitated…Getting the extrasensory faculties to function again shows unambiguously that there exists a metapsychic energy related to sexuality. Metapsychoanalysis defines the conditions under which the love process can give access to this energy. To that extent that the lack of energy is the fundamental cause of the Oedipal trauma, it should have more efficacious results than classical psychoanalysis in the reestablishment of the psychic structures. What methods do you recommend, on a practical level? Love takes care of the procedure. Each time an impulse for a third person arises, the triangular situation reactivates the child-mother-father Oedipal constellation crystallized in the unconscious. The injured partner projects on the third person parental images, with their content of anxiety, of guilt, of suffering, of hatred. Everything evoked by the opening of the couple is accompanied by a parade of negative elements: fear of losing the love object, jealousy, reproaches, abandonment, dependence on the mother, fantasies of murdering the father, frustration, depression, suicidal thoughts. If I understand correctly, you are replacing the couch with the bed? The triangular situation is more efficacious than the prone position in making the old internal conflicts rise to the surface.It remains to make good use of all the cumbersome contents. It is there that the knowledge of the natural functioning of the love instinct is determining: when one knows, for example, that the swing of jealousy into love for love is possible, that it should even be spontaneous, one can no longer identify with classical reactions. Each one is led to question himself about the origin of the negative impulses which assail him, about the excessive violence. And so to go back to the sources of his Œdipus complex and perform his own analysis.We also see the reemergence of the first positive impulses which were victims of the Oedipal repression, since they are reconnected by the new triangular relationship. These first impulses, called incestuous are the fundamental drives of the metasexual function.Where it differs from psychoanalysis is in not rejecting them in the name of some taboo, but in rehabilitating them knowing how they would have been able to manifest themselves in a moral context conforming to nature. Instead of thinking: I had such and such a drive for my mother or for my father, repressed at the bottom of my unconscious, which I must now deliberately reject, as an adult conscious of the prohibition, we must on the contrary know that this drive was perfectly natural, that the prohibition was an error of society, and that the suffering associated with the repression measures the importance of the metapsychic energy which remained inaccessible.This process of rehabilitation immediately releases internal conflicts. It permits the clearing away of elements of guilt which have crystallized around the repressed drives, in reassigning the fault to aberrations of morality. The fact of knowing that the missing energy will soon be restored, as a nourishment too long refused, sweeps away the anxieties induced by frustration.All this takes place in a highly emotional context, induced by the various aspects of the triangular constellation, which reproduces, as the plot unfolds, all sorts of old situations. The different Oedipal contents are exorcised one after the other, in the sense that they find a logical explanation, going back to their true meaning. Little by little, the drives of the IMP, crushed since childhood under the weight of repression, find their natural means of expression. Which is verified by the return to function of the paranormal.In general, it doesn’t take long for the triangular constellation to bring about the first contributions of energy. The Oedipal suffering dissolves then in feelings of happiness and of the magic of love. The psychoanalytic problem deflates like a toy balloon… This all seems rather hazy! In that case, I will describe the process in mathematical form. Most often, things happen as follows:When B feels within him a love drive for C, he immediately speaks to A of it (honesty is imperative, the least secretiveness makes everything fail); A finds himself confronted with the framework which is the release mechanism for the triangular constellation, which reactivates Oedipal contents; the anxiety of a castrating third person and the fantasies of murder, inherent in its structures [2-1] (negative investment of the image of the third), assail him despite himself, taking often unexpected forms.He then has a choice: either position himself against the new relationship, identifying with Oedipal contents, or working on these contents in order to be free of them and to act for B’s happiness; if he chooses the second possibility, he will have to do some important soul-searching and question his [2-1] structures.Knowing, thanks to the theory, that the natural functioning would consist of feeling this new love as something positive (if I love B, I should be happy that C makes him/her happy), A will be led to make a first effort to accept the third person: one might say that he is functioning on a [2-1] + ε model, the term ε representing the small overture which he has been able to show.B can then approach C, within the limits authorized by A; the intensity of emotions put into play, and their triangular structure, activate the IMP drives, which immediately generates a certain quantity of energy.B brings this energy to A, who recognizes it by the increase in the level of intensity of his relationship to B; the magic of love reappears as though by magic, the sexual relationship itself feels it in a positive way. He then sees himself rewarded for his effort by a wave of happiness, for which he can credit none but C.Happiness, as well as pleasure, fix the ε correction in his unconscious memory (in his superego) and transform it into automatism; his method of functioning will benefit from that point from an initial improvement, which we can write 2-1 + ε, the term ε having moved inside the brackets, indicating that from that point on, he will have integrated a more positive reaction to the image of the third person.Because B will feel the need to be closer to C, a new effort will be demanded of A, who will learn to function on the [2-1 + 2⁢ε model. And so on with the ε corrections being added little by little, until A is rid of all his negative Oedipal contents.His psychic structures will end up functioning on the [2 + 1] model; from then on he will spontaneously feel a positive love emotion at a new spark of love in B for a third person.In other words, he will have rediscovered the love of love. The triangular relationships which he will be able to experience will enrich his energetic capital, he will quickly develop extrasensory perception; he will no longer know the torments of jealousy nor the fear of losing a love object; his psychic structures will have gone beyond the repressed Oedipal model to that of the non-repressed œdipus. Which I write mathematically:Œ⁻ = [2 – 1 ] → [2 – 1 + к⁢ε] → [2 + 1] = Œ⁺ So the psychoanalysts are right when they say that one can overcome his Œdipus complex? That transformation is much more profound than what is envisaged by classical psychoanalysis. It’s not about reshuffling the psychic structures by intellectual means, but about a reunion with the fundamental energy the lack of which had generated the Oedipal conflict. It’s a causal therapy.The Freudian position is a bit like that of the nutritionist who would say to his patient, a victim of malnutrition: You will be cured when you accept that your parents left you to die of hunger when you were little, that without telling him where he can find the nourishment he needs to reconstitute his health.The reactivation of the Oedipal triangular constellation permits us to relive that which was lacking in the precocious period and to find in the present the energy heretofore inaccessible. This energy erases the deep trauma and the frustration. The unconscious defenses relax of themselves because they are now without object. We see a progressive dis-investment in the parental images, a détente in the relationship to the real parents, the disappearance of possessiveness and of jealousy, a general normalization of neurotic tendencies. Not to mention the birth of extrasensory faculties, witness to the resumed functioning of the IMP and to the supply of quite real energy. So you have invented a new psychoanalysis which functions without a psychoanalyst… Then why do you give seminars? I haven’t invented anything. I try to clarify certain natural phenomena and to describe their mechanisms.The simple knowledge of the natural functioning of the love instinct forms a basis for a spontaneous Oedipal therapy, under the management of love itself. Each one becomes his own psychoanalyst, or that of his partners. It’s an entirely natural process, because it does not require the intervention of any element external to the innate drives.Metapsychoanalysis tries simply to define the genetic structures of the love instinct, in such a way as to know what are the prejudices, the taboos, the moral constraints which must be overcome in order to allow the natural process to take its course. Now that’s more interesting already: your theory has the goal of freeing your disciples from morality. They can then do what they please…or what you please! You imagine that it is enough to remove the limitations imposed from outside to be able to do anything at all. That is an optical illusion, which derives precisely from the suppression of the IMP.In reality, there is a whole system of negative drives, of prohibition and inhibition which form an integral part of this instinctive program and are victims of the same repression. In the triangular situation, the negative drives are reactivated at the same time as the positive ones. They impose limits much more efficaciously than does morality. You can play games with the external prohibitions, but it’s impossible to do so with the prohibitions which come from inside. The more you reject them, the more force they take on, and the more they induce guilt: since guilt blocks the IMP, the rejection of the natural prohibition becomes, paradoxically, a synonym for suffering. According to you, there are genetically programmed prohibitions? A behavior can only be coordinated by a constant play of motion and inhibitions.Think of the way in which the lion and the lioness handle their problems as a couple. The male is attracted by the pheromones which announce to him that the female is in heat; he courts her, attempts his approach maneuvers; she shies away, gives a few slaps of the paw, pretends to bite him if he insists; he then knows to slow down his pace, wait patiently, return to charge, without ever being excessively bothered; the whole thing can take several days, and it is at the moment of optimal fertility that the sperm is transmitted.A similar balance, albeit far more complex, exists between the positive impulses of the IMP and a whole series of negative impulses, destined to adapt behavior to the external circumstances and the energetic situation. Learning plays an important role, but we see that these opposing drives already exist innately. We see them even in very small children in situations they have never encountered. In adults, we see them reemerge most clearly in the triangular constellation.Let us admit for example that A functions according to [2 + 1] and is able to bear the love which unites B and C. If everything goes according to plan, he receives in return energy which reanimates his relationship with B, he himself opens up to C, and everyone is happy. That’s the ideal case.In reality, certain errors inevitably slip into the process. If C, for example, gives in internally to the desire to possess B and to exclude A, if he cultivates sexual desire or seduction, if he has the intention or the fear of conceiving a child, the subtle dimension of the relationship is threatened. The triangular constellation risks going down in a general explosion and definitively blocking the IMP in the three partners (when the suffering goes beyond a certain threshold, it happens that the partners remain confined in their mutual rejection).So, we see emerging at the beginning of this type of skid a whole series of negative drives, perfectly organized to reestablish the situation. Even without having consciously analyzed the error of C, A feels rise within him the force of reproach which pushes him to find the error and denounce it, with such an intensity that he cannot prevent himself from intervening. Simply say he is jealous! It’s perfectly normal, if his partner is deceiving him. Experience shows that it’s not about jealousy: these prohibitory drives appear in persons who have long since overcome the rivalry and the fear of losing the love object. We see them even in persons outside the triangular constellation, having no intimate relationship with the protagonists.Once the partner at fault has recognized his error, they disappear as if by magic, even if the exterior relationship continues and intensifies. They show up only when an error threatens the IMP, and know very will how to target their action in such a way as to throw light on the error. All that has nothing to do with a simply jealous attitude. If what you say is true, everyone would have negative impulses toward the lovers, because the IMP never works in normal people. So Prévert’s little lovers… Prévert’s little lovers have something moving, precisely because they carry, in their innocence, the hope of a restoration of the IMP. They are child-lovers, evoking nothing about slipping onto a lower level: neither desire, nor obscenity, nor calculation, nor possessiveness. It is the job of the poet to make us dream of a happiness to which we aspire without knowing it, by inscribing it in the framework of the possible, even though this framework excludes it in everyday reality. There is reassurance in seeing the image of a happy couple, all the more moving since the couple itself has deceived us for generations.When less abstract lovers smooch on a public bench, we feel a certain uneasiness. The children want to jeer at them. It happens sometimes that a couple is murdered savagely, with no one, not even the murderer able to explain why. It’s not by chance that one hangs a small bell under the bedstead of newlyweds. Some sort of negative impulse arises against the image of the couple, at odds with the hope of finding happiness in the imposed paradigms. If these prohibitory drives really existed, the psychoanalysts would have given them a name a long time ago. It is not easy to observe them in an ordinary context: they are always covered by the Oedipal contents, which are by far more violent.That was one of the most difficult stages in the development of metapsychoanalysis: to be able to distinguish in each aggressive reaction the immediate part, due in fact to the present situation, and the part traceable to the Oedipal trauma.An error in the triangular current constellation releases a completely justified prohibitory drive, but it at the same time reactivates the prohibitory drives which the same type of error had released in the Oedipal period. At the time, the child saw himself constrained by education to choke back his aggressive drives. They then remained repressed for years in the unconscious (forming by accumulation what Freud calls the fantasies of murdering the father). When an error situation analogous to that of childhood presents itself, they are reactivated and are engulfed by the negative drives released by the present error, with such a violence that one can no longer distinguish the old component from the new one.This situation severely complicates matters: in a triangular situation, when one partner cannot bear the behavior of the others, we must always ask whether his reaction comes from drives released by the present situation, or if it is due to old Oedipal contents taking advantage of a similar situation to explode. Should the reproach which is manifested in A be taken seriously, does it point out an error in the relationship between B and C, or does it come from the old contents embedded in A’s psychic structures?Psychoanalysts already have their work cut out for them with Oedipal contents. Since the purpose of the IMP was missing in their reasoning, nothing led them to distinguish aggressive drives charged with protecting the metasexual function, tangled up with the aggressive drives of the œdipus, which was the sole focal point of their interest.Freud nevertheless arrived at the conclusion that there existed a set of destructive drives, he thought that for each life impulse, there was an opposing death impulse. He called them Thanatos, which means death in Greek, as opposed to Eros. Since he did not know the principle purpose of human sexuality, the idea could not have occurred to him that these drives had the goal of denouncing the fact that this purpose had failed. In ordinary conditions of failure, the Excalibur impulses are so frequently activated that the destructiveness seems to be an integral part of the human psyche. One must still admire the insight he needed to recognize these drives behind the fantasies of murdering the father, and bring up that they are genetically determined.I have searched a long time to find a term for these prohibitory and inhibitory drives that evokes their guardian function, to denounce error. Finally, I followed Freud’s example: I went to rummage through mythology, which is a sort of psychodrama of our unconscious forces.By chance, I came across a film by Boorman: Excalibur. This film portrays one of the most beautiful myths handed down to us from the Middle Ages: the story of King Arthur, of Queen Guinevere, and of the knight Lancelot. Obviously, this is the problem of the triangular constellation. When the king discovers the queen and the knight asleep side by side, he plants his legendary sword, Excalibur, between the guilty couple.At first sight, one might think that there is nothing here but a banal adulterous affair. Certain details show that the problem is much more profound. The sacred sword, driven into the ground between Guinevere and Lancelot, doesn’t affect them as one might expect: it goes through the chest of Merlin, who is under the earth, in the lair of the dragon. As in ancient China, the dragon symbolizes transcendent energy. The enchanter Merlin, who accompanies successive kings without ever aging, represents unambiguously the metapsychic dimension. No sooner has he succumbed than distress and famine, symbols of existential void, spread out over the world. There is only the quest for the Grail to rediscover the lost paradise.The parallelism is clear. When two protagonists of a triangular constellation do not respect the rules of the IMP, the third feels a drive which pushes him to intervene. This intervention interrupts the love process in favor of an intellectual process which blocks the transcendent function of love. Normally, this is only a passage. When all is untangled, everything returns to order as soon as the error is discovered. Love blows even stronger afterwards, as if to reward the partners for the effort they have made.On the other hand, when one doesn’t manage to decode the error and overcome it, tensions are exacerbated, the intellect monopolizes consciousness, the prohibitory drives turn to compulsion, frustration sets in. Finally, the extrasensory faculties themselves break down: symbolized by Merlin’s death. The sword which was there to assure the reign of love and truth ends up by destroying the source of energy which it was supposed to preserve.I hope not to betray the myth by baptizing the negative drives associated with the IMP: Excalibur impulses. If it makes you happy… But there’s a contradiction: your Excalibur impulses are supposed to guarantee the development of extrasensory faculties, and it is they who end up destroying them! Because we are too far removed from primitive conditions.Our culture is woven through with commonplaces and precepts contrary to natural laws. For example, morality teaches us that the opening to the third person is a fault, while the fault is clearly in the closing of the couple. The one who should bring the love that the spouse feels for the third person sees his jealousy and possessiveness confirmed. Instead of listening to the drives which denounce the senselessness of the closing (thus the Excalibur impulses), he retrenches in his position. The heart hardens, the triangular constellation founders in the impasse and everyone comes out traumatized. What could have been the occasion for progress has done nothing but aggravate the failure of the IMP for the three partners.There is yet another difficulty: the unfurling of the Oedipal contents adds excessively to the suffering normally associated with the work of untangling. A situation which would be bearable in itself, for example the necessity of waiting a certain time before a partner comes to recognize his error, is accompanied by an avalanche of pain, which has as its source the repressed Oedipal suffering. One who suffers excessively is then tempted to accuse others of faults they have not committed. These latter cannot accept the accusation and retaliate in their turn. Tensions are exacerbated, the separation is prolonged, and suffering increases in the three protagonists.Now, what is the reaction when a pain appears of which one does not understand the cause? If you feel something prick your foot, you right away ask yourself: Have I stepped on something pointed, is there a thorn in my shoe? You automatically concentrate on the incident, your consciousness is centered in your head. The psyche is made so that the intellect takes the lead over the other functions when pain is present.And as long as the intellect dominates, the IMP remains blocked… You feel that intelligence is a bad thing? Far from it! Intelligence is indispensable to understand the error.Only, nature seems to have foreseen that the errors that are committed will be decoded within a limited time. To remain several hours, even several days on the mental level to discuss mutual wrongs, is perfectly acceptable. But beyond a certain length of time, lowering the IMP to half-mast becomes intolerable and exacerbates the intellect even more. The reproaches, the wounds, the discouragement which appear in the triangular constellation require, in their turn, the time to be analyzed. That’s the vicious circle, and it generally ends badly. The protagonists remain locked in their intellect, their suffering gives way to a hardening, they can only with great difficulty rediscover the necessary subtle state of consciousness needed for the functioning of the IMP.The failure of a triangular constellation often leads to an irreversible situation, to a sort of linking of destinies where the individual paths separate. The blocking of the IMP and of the extrasensory lead the partners to make decisions solely on reason, they commit even greater errors: they decide to divorce, to leave with the third person, to take revenge, and the situation degenerates into the irreversible.If each one could already live out the IMP in his childhood, as nature intended, they would have accumulated a reserve of energy and of trust in love which would enable them to tolerate a prolonged separation. They would have the reflex of looking for the error and would know from experience that it is better to renounce it quickly to find happiness again.In a society which would have integrated natural laws of love, problems of this type would be resolved in a few moments. Good sense, morality, the example of others, would furnish adequate outlines of reasoning and models of behavior. The protagonists would themselves be structured on the non-repressed Oedipal mode, they would not have to ask themselves, for every negative impulse, whether it is authentic or should be seen as the avatar of childhood suffering. They would trust in the infinite wisdom of love, not fearing to let go of possessiveness and the other shortcomings of ego. Their reserve of energy would permit them to tolerate the cutting off of love for longer without suffering from frustration. And the main thing: the extrasensory faculties would help them to discover their errors quickly, in the time it takes to have a few visions…Things would then be very different. Love would soon regain its rights, a wave of beneficent energy would heal the wounds, re-found happiness would consolidate every effort at truth. The Excalibur impulses would leave behind them a net gain.At the end of the day, the trajectory completed around the error would constitute an enrichment of consciousness. If I understand correctly, error would be useful? With those principles, you can justify anything! The child who starts to walk hurts himself when he falls: that’s how he learns not to make errors in his movements. The phenomenon is general: error instructs, if one knows how to recognize it and move beyond it.Our psyche seems to be programmed in such a way as to allow us, through free will, the possibility of committing certain errors. Each error brings suffering, this suffering obliges us to question ourselves as to the nature of the error and to better discern illusion from reality. This is a way for the conscience to explore all the possible paths of reality, just as chromosomal accidents permit the genes to explore new biological paths.At the same time there exists another road: free will also gives us the possibility of renouncing the behavior which we sense is erroneous. The voluntary renunciation ends in a feeling of deep satisfaction, of detachment, of beatitude. The errors which we tend to commit are always accompanied by a pleasure which makes them attractive. The internal work needed to renounce temptation also represents an awareness. You speak of beatitude? Renouncing pleasure is a form of suffering! Yes, when one hasn’t seen that the thing one is renouncing is an error, therefore a source of suffering in the long term. Once that awareness is sufficiently profound, the renouncement becomes a source of internal joy, much more profound than the missed pleasure.I think that that is, schematically, the mechanism of the evolution of consciousness, indeed spiritual evolution, with which nature has endowed us. Each time we are tempted by a pleasure which goes against nature (by a sin in biblical language), we can choose between two roads: yield to it and discover by suffering that it was contrary to natural laws (thus to divine laws); or renounce it, while doing the internal work of detachment. The two roads are the occasion for an equivalent awareness. The first is what we call the way of evil, the second, the way of good.In everyday reality, the two ways are constantly alternating. So, when you distance yourself from morality, it is with the goal of committing an error which will permit you and your partners to evolve spiritually? The reigning morality is itself an error, in view of the fact that it ignores the transcendental function of love. To obey it blindly, is to choose straightaway the way of suffering: a way of becoming aware that our culture has strayed from natural laws. To renounce the errors of morality requires a work of understanding and detachment which represents an equivalent awareness.The situation is analogous in matters of cuisine: tradition says to eat french fries ; we all know more or less that they are a cause of cardiovascular disease. A first road consists of concealing the danger and giving oneself over to gluttony; the day when the heart attack comes is the occasion for an awareness, the patient learns in his flesh that the art of frying does not conform to the natural givens of the organism. The second road is that of asceticism: it requires renouncement and the work of research, which leads to an awareness of the illusion of artificial flavors, of the noxiousness of superheated oils, of the errors of our ancestor cooks, of the senselessness of gluttony. In both cases, a step forward will have been made in nutrition science and in understanding of natural laws… Just before I saw you throw yourself on a mango, with a pleasure that was all gluttony. So you give yourself over to daily gastronomic orgies. If that’s the case, why wouldn’t you do it on a sexual level? The pleasure one feels from eating a mango is a natural pleasure: it indicates that the mango is useful to the organism. That’s the case for all foods consumed in their natural form: the sense of taste is made so that the pleasure comes only when the food corresponds to the body’s needs. When a fruit is not useful to the organism, it seems disagreeable to the palate. It would be doubly stupid to eat it: once to feel displeasure and once to do harm…On the other hand, if I add sugar and whipped cream, or I make a tart of it, the fruit which I have no need for will appear delicious. The culinary artifice permits me to obtain pleasure independently of the usefulness of the food. We can thus give a clear and distinct definition of gluttony: the pursuit of dietary pleasure by artifice, to the detriment of the natural goal of the dietary instinct.There is no gluttony in the pejorative sense in nature. Pleasure necessarily guides to what is right. If not, animals would systematically eat what harmed them, which would contradict the laws of natural selection. The experiments I have made with natural foods have largely confirmed that: if one uses only wild products, without modifying their flavors with anything artificial, the agreeable odors and tastes assure that only what is useful to the organism is consumed. I understand everything: it’s enough to obey sexual pleasure, and one automatically does the right thing! Your philosophy is becoming clearer and clearer… I would ask the question the other way: how is it that sexual pleasure can lead to something false?If the mechanisms of pleasure are genetically programmed ; if the genes have been put into place in the course of millions of years; one might expect that pleasure, of whatever nature it might be, would lead to behaviors useful to the individual or the species, by virtue of the laws of evolution… Sexual pleasure drives the species to reproduce, that’s not bad… It drives it too well, because contraceptive methods are necessary to avoid a population explosion. One might ask whether there is something amiss here…The experience of natural diet shows that the natural functioning of sexual pleasure is not what one thinks: in the absence of excitation factors, sensual pleasure disappears when the relationship does not lead to a valid exchange of energy. There are even mechanisms of impotence, which interrupt the erection when the metasexual function is in failure.We understand immediately what happens in classical conditions: for the one part, the failure of the metasexual function provokes frustration, which pushes one to seek pleasure in the reproductive function. That would not be possible if the excitability were not disturbed. But the excitation-producing factors brought in by food allow the attainment of pleasure, including orgasm, by forcing mechanical excitation.Thus is born a paradoxical form of sexuality, which we take for normal functioning, with all sorts of inconveniences: accidental pregnancies, the necessary use of contraceptives; energetic deficit, depression, atrophy of the extrasensory faculties; protests by the unconscious, which tries by blows of the Excalibur impulses to signal the error.Under the effect of aggressive drives and feelings of guilt an exaggeratedly repressive morality is born, but bearing at the same time all sorts of behavioral outlines which lead us even more into error. These internal contradictions cause us to fall back on the intellect constantly to condemn certain behaviors, to support others, to enact taboos without regard to natural laws: that, I believe, is the origin of contingent morality, which differs from one society to another, and which does more harm than good. You really have it in for morality! Because today’s morality destroys love. It imposes all sorts of rules and recipes on us which reduce to failure the most precious thing in our existence.I don’t think there is a true morality outside of the Excalibur impulses. Again, it is necessary that these drives be observed in conditions that are sufficiently close to nature. You speak of a true morality and a false morality. I was always taught that morality depends on the society in which one lives. What is permitted among savages is not permitted by us, and vice versa. Ethnology and psychoanalysis have defended this concept of morality. Because neither the ethnologists nor the psychoanalysts knew the true cause of the sexual instinct.I believe we must differentiate very clearly between two forms of morality: a social, contingent morality, transmitted by tradition peculiar to a given society; and a natural, or structural, morality, determined by our genetic structures. The ideal would be if both coincided. Morality is something very complicated, how can you say that something of such complexity is genetically programmed? Instincts are much more complex than they appear.In birds, the techniques of flying and hunting, the capacity to distinguish useful food from poisonous food, the sexual instinct with the display, mating, the hatching, raising the young and grooming, the defense reflexes, the recognition of predators and the different release mechanisms, the ability to orient according to the position of the sun and the stars during migrations, all that is inscribed in a few grams of brain.There is enough space in the human brain for infinitely more complex instinctive programs. Learning plays a primordial role. Nothing says that the image of the sky is inscribed in instinct. The young may learn to recognize the correct direction by following their parents… Exactly. A large part of morality is transmitted by education. It is this part which can degenerate from generation to generation by instituting a moral order that is contrary to the natural order.The problem is to rediscover the original morality, if it exists, by clearing away the layers of sediment with which it has been covered by centuries of tradition. We can use several methods to this end. If the results agree, we have every chance of having touched on the goal.A first way consists of comparing the morality of different ethnic groups and looking for their common denominators. And also by going back in time. If there is a natural morality, and if different traditions have become distanced from it in different directions, we should be able to find in each of them aspects that are similar, coming from this common origin. It is a method that recalls structuralism, developed by Lévi-Strauss to try to explain the meaning of myths. It applies just as well to morality. You’re telling us that morality is a form of mythology? Myths took the place of morality, in primitive societies. We believe in our morality of good and evil as the ancients believed in their legends. The concepts are different, we have replaced gods and heroes with the seemingly more scientific notions of psychiatry. But our formulations are not necessarily closer to psychic and metapsychic reality than were the mythological characters…Second way: examining, for each of the precepts put forth by morality, whether it is responsible for suffering in love or not. In postulating that every suffering has a chance of being the consequence of an error committed against natural laws, we will be led to point to certain precepts contrary to nature and to question ourselves about their origin and their raison d’être.Third way: observing in the medium and long term whether the application of a moral rule leads to a blocking of the IMP or contributes to its proper functioning. Among the criteria of proper functioning we will count: ongoing happiness, fullness of energy, the absence of depression, the opening to the third person (the love of love), the stability of relationships, creativity. And above all the development of the extrasensory. This last criterion is the most certain, because it is the most objectively verifiable (one can declare himself to be happy when one is not, but it is impossible to simulate the vision from afar of an unpredictable event).Fourth way: using extrasensory faculties to put to the text various precepts of current morality. The reliability is increased if we work with a sufficiently large number of sensitives, so as to multiply the cross-checks and avoid errors in interpretation. Excuse me if I doubt that! Visionaries are inevitably influenced by what they have in their heads. Between two people placed under the same influence, of course there will be cross-checks… The extrasensory cannot be influenced. It uses material present in the brain, but it organizes it in such a way that the messages don’t give rise to confusion. When the visions are sufficiently numerous, they themselves point to errors of interpretation: we suddenly see an arrow at the side of the target, a parrot with its feathers ruffled, or some other symbol of error.We could also proceed on a double-blind system, by writing the question posed on a paper which we put into a sealed envelope, in such a way that the neither the sensitive nor the person who replaces the envelope knows what it contains. If we proceed in this manner with several sensitives who do not communicate, and several envelopes of identical appearance, containing different questions, the result is even more significant.There remains yet a fifth way: observing the Excalibur impulses, which by definition signal behaviors which do not conform to the IMP. The precondition is obviously to have available a sufficient number of people who have already overcome Oedipal repression, in order to avoid the unfurling of the repressed contents, which would complicate everything. This is easiest with young adults who have not yet crystallized their sexual habits on the IRP model, while at the same time already being capable of analyzing their own drive.With these five criteria, it is enough to examine each of these principles of ambient morality. We cannot conclude anything absolutely in such a delicate area, but this is a method which allows us to see a bit more clearly. If the five results converge, there is little chance of being wrong. And you have conducted this whole research program all by yourself? I’ve been working at it for thirty years, with a dozen or so people to help with the theoretical development, and a large number of actors engaged in all sorts of love stories.First we got going by observing our children, at an age when the Excalibur impulses are not yet repressed or conflicted. Even babies show vivid reactions when the love between adults leaves the paths of the IMP, without being able to know what is actually happening. This capacity for discernment is explained by what Freud calls the primal scene: an innate rape fantasy, present in the unconscious, which predisposes the child to recognize a behavior which goes against nature.With these five criteria clearly formulated, a whole series of factors, certain of which seem to us above suspicion, are revealed to be incompatible with the metasexual function: sexual desire seduction, the closing of the couple, possessiveness, dependency, repetitiveness, conjugal duty, the rejection of the third person, the rejection of polymorphism, etc. Good! And having got that far, what does that give you? A justification for your sexual freedom? No: the freedom of thought necessary to formulate a clear and distinct definition of morality. Everyone knows what is meant by morality, why do you want to redefine it? Open up the dictionary and you’ll see that it’s not so obvious. It tells you: set of rules of behavior considered proper: that’s a definition of social morality.Bergson distinguished two types of morality, in his famous work The two sources of morality and religion: one morality created by the intellect, and a morality inspired by intuition. It is clear that the intellect allows us to decree any precept at all, at the whim of the beliefs or the interests of the moment. A morality of a purely intellectual origin cannot be taken as a reference point.It is also not very easy to delineate an intuitive morality. How to discern authentic intuitions from intellectual intuitions, products of experience and of acquired knowledge? True intuition is in communication with the metapsychic dimension. Again we must pick up the messages under proper conditions, in sufficient number and interpret them without letting ourselves be influenced by the reigning morality.Reich, in fact, speaks abundantly of natural morality, but without specifying the terms. He simply states that it exists, and that it would avoid pathogenic repression.Starting off from our postulates, it seems to me possible to propose a basic definition of morality: the integration in the collective memory of Excalibur impulses arising from individual amorous experiences over the course of time.In more mathematical language: let capital M be morality; M would be equal to the complete set (that is to say to the sum of the memories of partial experiences) of the Excalibur impulses (Ex) which manifested themselves in different situations experienced over the course of time (dt): M = 󰿈Ex⋅ⅆ⁢ Here you go again with your math… Is it to impress your students? A formula just condenses the reasoning. It gives a clearer picture of the magnitude it expresses, of which one can then more easily deduce the properties.Here, we see immediately that there is a morality of genetic origin: the Excalibur impulses are genetically programmed; so the sum of the experiences which register as a group in the course of its history lead to a result which is, it too, genetically determined. The idea of natural morality takes on a more fundamental dimension.We also understand why morality, whose goal is spiritual, addresses itself mainly to sexuality, which is in itself paradoxical: the Excalibur impulses are made to preserve the metasexual function, which has the goal of providing the energy necessary to metapsychic and spiritual development; the value systems established by the placing into memory of the Excalibur impulses then necessarily unites the sexual and the spiritual.Another corollary flows directly from this definition. When the sexual drives do not attain their metapsychic goal, the Excalibur impulses are activated; if the failure is maintained for too long, they become compulsive; so in a society constructed on the failure of the IMP, morality must take on a repressive form. I thought it was the repressive morality which provoked the failure of the IMP.. It’s like the chicken and the egg. Repressive morality provokes the failure of the IMP, and the failure of the IMP gives rise to repressive morality. The two phenomena go together: every aggravation of the failure of the metasexual increases the repressive forces, every reinforcement of repression aggravates the failure of the IMP.This can be verified historically: a first prohibition against masturbation was put in place, for scientific reasons, by doctors and moralists in the middle of the 18th century; the aggravation of Oedipal repression provoked a more systematic failure of the IMP; the Excalibur impulses accompanying sexual life could only increase; and repressive morality invaded the whole of sexuality in a generation or two.In the 19th century, they started to throw the deviants in prison, sentence the homosexuals to hard labor, heap shame upon unmarried mothers, declare polymorphous behavior perverse, claim that orgasm could be fatal, pursue childhood masturbation by the most sordid means, even proposing clitorectomy and branding the glans with a red-hot iron. Never before had such an explosion of repression existed. It’s not because things drifted in the course of history… You speak of drift: the problem is to know why morality drifted at this point!My formula gives an immediate response: when the IMP is strongly repressed, the Excalibur impulses, which are a part of it, are also repressed. Their action is then nullified on the conscious level. Replace Ex by zero in the set, and you will find:M = 󰿈⋅ⅆ⁢t = 0there is no more natural morality. It is the reign of contingent morality, which can drift in any direction at all.Exactly what we see in our form of society: visceral forces invest all sorts of taboos. But these subterranean forces undergo deviations and miss their primitive goal, which would be to preserve the sacred dimension of sexuality. Lacking a point of reference, they attack any scapegoat: after hunting down concupiscence and hunting down sorcerers, there was the hunt for masturbation, which lasted two centuries, then a homophobia crisis, an anti-Semitism crisis (the impure race; Nazism was very Puritan), now it’s the pedophiles who are likened to child-killers. These aberrations will not stop until the day the IMP has come out of repression, the Excalibur impulses can again emerge and attain their natural targets. Honestly, do you think people will adopt your ideas? The problem is not that they adopt the ideas of one fine fellow or another. What will rather happen is that people will decide by themselves, as it happened to me, that another function of sexuality exists. Nature always ends up having the last word. I have the feeling that the time is not far off…We can explain many more things from the Excalibur impulses, for example the notion of guilt.Mainly, the [Excalibur impulses] emitted by a partner A is aimed at an error committed by another partner, B. The unconscious of each one obeys the same plan of functioning, so that in B there is a similar drive directed against himself, aimed at making him take notice of his own error. This drive is felt in the form of anxiety associated with bad behavior: what I am doing is not right, I am wrong to act this way, which is what one calls a feeling of guilt.To the extent that the Oedipal contents do not come to complicate the situation, we see a perfect convergence between the feelings of guilt felt by the one who commits the error, and the Excalibur impulses emitted by the third person. From which one may deduce that the feelings of guilt and the Excalibur impulses are derived from the same genetic programming.One can thus, without risk of introducing contradictions in the theory, define the feelings of guilt as the particular case in which the Excalibur impulses turn on the subject himself.Something is not quite clear in your demonstration: if morality is a product of Excalibur impulses, it must necessarily coincide with these drives, originally. So, social morality and natural morality were in perfect harmony. Why did the two moralities start to diverge?It is in fact a crucial question. Without prohibitions, there should not have been repression, and without repression, no deviation can explain in principle the eruption of repressive morality. Where did the first prohibitory forces come from to start off the vicious circle?I see a primary cause, quite simply dietary: there are in cereal grains, in dairy products, in tea, coffee, cocoa, certain stimulants which modify the level of excitability of the sexual drives. The excitation of the nervous system affects the organic drives of the IRP more than the more subtle ones of the IMP, which increases the probability of a failure of the metasexual function and multiplies the Excalibur impulses. These in turn are amplified by the same stimulant factors, which aggravate the failure of the IMP, and that’s the vicious circle.We thus see mathematically that the introduction of stimulants into a population’s diet determines the emergence of a repressive morality.This can be written mathematically: the number of Excalibur impulses Ex is multiplied by a factor E(a) representing the endogenous excitation of dietary origin. My set then has as a result a morality M(a), that much more repressive than E(a) at a higher value: M(a) = 󰿈Ex⋅E~(a)⋅ⅆ⁢t =M⋅[E(a)~] Are you joking ? I believe it is a general law.If sexual drives are exacerbated by the excitation of the nervous system, repression must then increase in order to maintain behavior within acceptable limits. That’s already the case in animals: if the lion who is trying to seduce the lioness seems too excited, the female must bring him back to order more energetically. There would be more tension in the air, more swats with the paw and more roaring. But they will end up mating, and the biological mechanism will reach its goals.In human beings, the problem is not as simple: the difficulty arises from the confusion between the two sexual functions. The excitation of the nervous system reinforces mainly the reproductive drives, which then necessitate more draconian prohibitions in order to assure an acceptable social balance. But the metasexual drives are affected by the same prohibitions, even more so as they are more subtle. The biological mechanism attains its goal anyway (with the sole inconvenience of an excess of births and the need for contraceptives). While the other function succumbs to repression, with all the known pathogenic effects.The incest taboo, for example, is supposed to guarantee the normal functioning of the reproductive instinct, by avoiding consanguinity and providing a foundation for social life. The sexual pressure is such that it calls for violent repressive measures (while it is spontaneous in higher primates). The same taboo, charged with the same violence, is then applied to infantile sexuality, where it becomes a source of neurosis and metapsychic failure.We will see our way through this until we learn to distinguish the two functions which constitute human sexuality. The knowledge of the dietary factor leads us back to the scenario which was probably played out at the dawn of civilization: once our ancestors started eating cereal grains and dairy products, at the start of the Neolithic age, the level of general excitability increased; the sexual drives became more pressing, making the Excalibur impulses that much more violent; the amorous process became conflicted; what was previously lived spontaneously and in secret became the object of scandal, of lust and of guilt. The IMP, being unable to accomplish its function, the unsatisfied organic sexual needs provoked as compensation a general sliding onto the IRP plane; the situation could only get progressively worse over the course of millennia. And the story of Adam and Eve, in all that? I think that Genesis gives us in a nutshell what happened between man and woman at the origin of our civilization. Desire, symbolized by the serpent, made its appearance, calculation and seduction blocked the transcendent function of love. Soon, a whole parade of troubles descended on humanity: the new relationship with the divinity, made of anxiety and guilt; the false modesty, under the sign of the fig leaf; the loss of spiritual joys, the expulsion from Paradise; a new relationship to childbirth, in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; a new relationship to occupation, thou shalt earn thy bread by the sweat thy brow; the loss of the extrasensory, the darkness and the power of the prophets; the advent of religion, with the altar and sacrifices; the jealousy and the fantasies of murder, Cain kills Abel; the insatiable quest for happiness, the land of Canaan; the repressive morality, the prohibitions of Moses; the killing of Christ, come to restore love… Nothing shows that there was a change in diet. I forgot a very important word: Thou shalt eat the herb of the field… Since the Israelites did not go grazing in the pastures, it can only be cereal grains.So, the message is complete: cereal grains, especially wheat, were certainly the first and the most important source of stimulants, from the moment the hunter-gatherers preferred the slavery of the farmer to the freedom of the nomad.The role of diet is even more explicit in Greek mythology, in the myth of Tantalus and Prometheus. Tantalus cooks his son Pelops to offer him as a sacrifice; Demeter, goddess of wheat, devours a shoulder; and it is at the court of Pelops that the curse of œdipus is pronounced… How do you explain that the situation remained relatively stable until the Middle Ages, then was aggravated starting with the Age of Enlightenment? There was a new change in diet, with the introduction of colonial products: cocoa, coffee, even sugar significantly heightened the level of excitation, either by their own effects or by leading one to consume other stimulants. In favoring for example the consumption of cereal grains in the form of pastry.It is just after the onset of this new gastronomy that we see an explosion of repressive morality. Coincidence, or causal relationship… And what would you say if we went for a little coffee… That we are hardened criminals? Just bring me a bottle of mineral water…
Chapter IX You have a funny concept of love: the metasexual function would be there to lift us up toward transcendence, and adult sexuality would be limited to a matter of reproduction, just like the animals. We wouldn’t even have the right to love each other to make a baby… On the contrary, the procreative function should be as magical and sacred as that which is directed toward spiritual evolution. Each child who comes into the world is called to a spiritual destiny. The two functions are certainly made to be very precisely combined. The problem is to know how. Don’t you think that you would have fewer troubles by accepting things as they are, rather than wanting to change everything… It’s not my troubles that worry me, but the troubles everyone suffers in the system as it is now. With the model of reasoning which I propose, we have another means to try to untie the Gordian knot. As we follow it down all the paths it leads to, we will see where its limits are.If we distinguish two instinctive programs, the IMP and the IRP, we immediately see that the global functioning of sexuality obeys two possibilities: a proper integration of these two programs, as nature foresaw; or a defective integration, resulting from certain gross errors induced by the culture. Thus we must examine how the different drives which belong to the two sexual functions can interact and be combined.Freud thought that the drives which appeared before maturity should be put into the service of the reproductive function. The potential for the excitation of different erogenous zones was supposed to converge toward normal coitus. That is why he considered polymorphous drives as simple preliminary pleasures, with the ultimate goal remaining penetration: in doing this, he applied the Cartesian equation: sexuality = reproduction. Freud recognized, though, that the two functions are far from coinciding totally.To my mind, this perspective needs to be revised taking into account the metapsychic purpose of the metasexual function. Infantile sexuality responds to a specific goal of vital importance and should for this reason preserve a certain autonomy over the course of its existence. In the absence of repression, it constitutes the base on which the reproductive function should be grafted, because it precedes it in time. One might imagine that the reproductive drives would be called upon to intervene only very occasionally, only when it is time to conceive a child. So infantile sexuality is primordial, and adult sexuality not of much interest? That sounds like an apology for pedophilia there… The misunderstanding arises from the fact that Freud gave the name infantile sexuality to the essential drives called on to play an equally important role in the adult as in the precocious stage, indeed even more important. The distortion has resulted from the enormous surprise of the rediscovery of sexuality in children, after centuries where one pretended to see it only in adults, as a purely reproductive instinct. Infantile sexuality is the first term which comes to mind to characterize precocious drives to which one could not attribute a precise function. It is certainly regrettable, because such terminology leads to underestimating these drives, as one neglects the importance of baby teeth, and to confer an exaggerated importance on reproductive drives.That’s why I propose the term metasexual function, which evokes both autonomy and the metapsychic purpose. What do you mean in practice when you say that the reproductive function must be grafted onto infantile sexuality? That the new drives which emerge at puberty, organized around the desire for penetration and impregnation, must be subordinated to the metasexual function. Being quite close to animalism, they are incapable of generating the metapsychic energy which is necessary to the normal functioning of the human psyche. They need to receive this energy generated by the metasexual drives, in order to themselves function correctly. Where do you get this preposterous idea? Why should the contact which is most important for procreation not be able to generate energy as well as the infantile drives? It’s experience, shared among a great number of people, that convinced me. I first had a tendency to think like you and like Freud that vaginal penetration was the center of gravity of sexuality. Things proved themselves to be much more complicated.I should first note that the reproductive function requires far fewer orgasms to attain its goal than does the metasexual function. In women, it requires none at all. In men, only a few ejaculations over the course of a lifetime are enough to assure the continuity of the species. If you add up the number of respective orgasms, you will find a ratio of one to a thousand, approximately. Which could mean that the metasexual function occupies a thousand times as much space in the psyche… But hold on, look at what goes on in the world: penetration is at the heart of sexuality in all cultures! And if all the cultures were a consequence of metasexual failure? A way of compensating by a system of intellectual knowledge for the Knowledge with a capital K which has become inaccessible?The West doesn’t have a monopoly on sexual error. It is possible that the loss of the IMP is at the origin of different forms of culture. Then, this loss leads to an overvaluing of the IRP and of normal coitus which is its principle expression. Nothing says that the supremacy of penetration is natural, it might be nothing but the reflection of the general failure of the IMPSecondly, we must distinguish between penetration and penetration. The same act, or almost, can have two different functions. Tantric penetration, for example, does not aim for organic gratification and avoids ejaculation, coming closer to the metasexual function. While coitus in the West, with the desire, the fascination for the shape of the body, the organic attraction to the opposite sex, the search for excitation, the pelvic movements, is closer to animal behavior and belongs to the reproductive function.Third, we must ask if it is normal that polymorphism occupies such a secondary place in our sexual culture. If it leaves the starring role to penetration, maybe it is as a result of its repression in the precocious stage, or the loss of its own function. We should then examine how the polymorphous drives and the two possible types of penetration should be integrated in the absence of Oedipal repression. Perhaps you have a little problem with normal penetration, so to speak? Nothing is easier than penetration.I have rather the impression that the show that’s added to it, in the name of virility, is an unconscious compensation for the energetic void which is often behind it. Post coitus animal triste est… the Romans stated before us. It is even more clear with female sexuality: the penetration desired by the man is most often felt by the woman as a gift she gives him, if not slavery.The way sexuality is now represented is quite probably against nature, in view of the fact that it is based on the repression of metasexual drives, which is most probably not a natural process. If we want to see it more clearly, we must examine in detail what happens with each of the drives which belong either to the metasexual function or to the reproductive function.A number of drives come into play, before and after the sexual relations themselves. You’re embarking on one of your grand theories again… How can we put the IMP + IRP model to the test without exploring all their repercussions? We can draw up an inventory of all the drives associated with the metasexual function and write next to them the closest drives which seem to belong to reproduction. Then try to see how the pairs thus formed can be harmonized.How do you intend to distinguish these two classes of drives? You risk falling into arbitrariness and falsifying the reasoning.It’s not so difficult: the metasexual type drives are by definition those that we can find in the precocious stage, whether by directly observing children left free to express them, or by a posteriori rediscovering their traces in the unconscious and their deviations due to repression. They must by definition engage, directly or indirectly, the metapsychic dimension. The knowledge of the different stages of development, as Freud defined them, can also help to clarify the situation. As to the reproductive drives: since they belong to an essentially biological function, we must look for them in animals, in particular in mammals. It is enough to pinpoint the behaviors of the maleand female in different species, to draw common denominators from them, then to verify if we find the same traits in the human being, and in what form. You want us to make two lists of drives instead of one. What else? The possibility of analyzing drive by drive the interactions between the two functions.There are in principle three types of interaction. Let us take the example of penetration. We can imagine: that penetration replaces polymorphism by generating metasexual energy in its place starting with puberty; that the repressed polymorphous drives are diverted into penetration, with the result that one seeks in the latter an energy which it is incapable of giving; we might then expect the emergence of Excalibur impulses indicating the error, conferring a destructive component on the sexual relationship; that there be a renouncement (at least partial) of sexual realization, in the unconscious hope of finding in a substitute behavior the fulfillment which would guarantee the failed IMP; we would then see the appearance of behaviors of sublimation, directed to spiritual types of goals and hiding the sexual reality (for example the cult of chastity). The frustration would only be deeper, it would induce a destructiveness which would cut across the substitute activities. You seem to presuppose that a sexual drive must be realized at any price to leave us in peace. Konrad Lorenz recounts an amusing experience he had with pairs of pigeons: a male introduced into a cage containing a female coos for an hour before mating; placed in a cage where a stuffed pigeon awaits him, he coos for two or three hours, then tries to mate; if you replace the stuffed female with two lumps of rags knotted around a stick, the cooing lasts even longer; if the rags are thrown in a lump on the bottom of the cage, the poor pigeon coos perhaps twenty-four hours, but still ends by mating.Lorenz deduces from this that the impulsive energy accumulates when the drive is not realized, and that the latter ends up reacting to release mechanisms which are farther and farther removed from the natural release. In applying this notion to the IMP and the IRP, we can immediately predict a confusion between the two instinctive programs. When the IMP is repressed, the different drives which lie in wait are subjected to an accumulation of impulsive energy. Now, there are certain similarities between the IMP and the IRP drives (sex, for example, is involved in both cases). The impulsive energy of the IMP will end up investing the IRP drives which most resemble it. There will just be a diversion of the IMP drives into the IRP drives. One might speak of confusion of drives between the two instinctive programs. With such theories, you can take people anywhere you want. I was undoubtedly wrong to present you with the theoretical reasoning before the facts. In reality, the facts preceded the theory. But they are so numerous, that it is better to start from the theory to explain them in the most organized fashion.I have been able to observe, for example, that people who have already restored the IMP to functioning (as verified by the beginnings of extrasensory faculties), and who are suddenly separated from their partners, are assailed after a certain time by IRP-type drives, without even noticing that they are following the wrong program. When the blocking of the IMP is prolonged, the sexual desire, the fantasy of the eternal couple, the possession, and the rivalry which are peculiar to the IRP become more and more pressing, and we see people embark on unfortunate relationships which end in suffering, extrasensory failure, an accidental pregnancy…At the same time, we witness a sort of slippage in values: the drives associated with reproduction, such as the desire for a home, the need for material security, the rejection of potential rivals, take over from the spiritual values. The phenomenon persists even if one can appease the sexual drives of the IRP. We even see them grow, as if the biological energy put into play in penetration fed these associated drives, destined to insure the material conditions favorable to reproduction.That is how we explain the exaggerated importance taken on by all sorts of biological and economic activities, such as the search for food, worries about money building a house, competitive sports, etc. Nevertheless, these are all perfectly respectable activities! The problem is that they should not preoccupy us to the point of hiding the essential values.Such a confusion of drives is not made gratuitously: it comes to exchange the spiritual perspectives of the IMP for those material ones of a biological function; the unconscious automatically protests by blows of the Excalibur impulses. When the substitute activities take up too much place without bringing the fulfillment unconsciously reckoned with, they release aggressive movements, even destructive ones if the situation drags on.The confusion of drive is generally coupled with sublimation. The psyche reacts against the failure of the IMP by seeking other paths of spiritual fulfillment which exclude sexuality, because the latter remain systematically deceiving. All sorts of desexualized activities develop around a deep need for realization which we no longer know how to tie to physical love: we will seek it in art, in religion, in superstition, in all sorts of cultural activities which we don’t find in the repressed IMP.But sublimation is not gratuitous either: Excalibur impulses signal to us the sterility of the channels of substitution. We feel, undermining our hopes, a piercing deception, indeed a need to destroy the system in which we find ourselves imprisoned.We can then explain, drive by drive, the malaise and the destructiveness that undermine the general picture of love in our society. Behind each zone of suffering or conflicts may lurk a mechanism of diversion-sublimation arising out of the Excalibur impulses.The sliding of the IMP energy into the IRP is by definition an neurotic process, as is any form of diversion. We can rediscover in the different confusions of drives, the origin of various types of neurosis defined by Freud, Jung, Reich, Adler, Marcuse, Lacan and even shed new light on them.To my mind, the confusion of drives between IMP and IRP brings the most fundamental explanation to the endemic neurosis peculiar to our Western culture. We found a chart in your lecture room. I was just going to ask you some questions… If you like, I will explain it to you line by line.On the left, I have noted the various functions of the IMP, in the usual order of their appearance in a metasexual relationship. In the second column, we find the homologous IRP drives. In the third, the result of the confusion of drives and, all the way on the right, examples of sublimation. Each diversion and each sublimation is clearly crossed by a certain number of Excalibur impulses. This is going to take a while… Live in the present and you won’t feel the passage of time. You will find that in all the esotericisms…On the first line, I first compare the respective purposes of the IMP and the IRP. The purpose of the first is of a metapsychic and spiritual order, the second, a biological one.A host of values slip downward in this cultural confusion. The whole of the discourse concerning love and sexuality is reduced to in biological contingencies. That is particularly clear in sex education in school: they explain to the children, with the aid of colored posters, that the erect penis penetrates into the vagina and releases sperm which will fertilize the egg; pleasure is barely mentioned. Whereas young people would like to have some enlightenment of their amorous expectations, which are in no way explained by the mechanisms of insemination; the young people somehow have the feeling of having been swindled, from which comes the unease, even the ruckus (the Excalibur impulses) in the classroom.We see the same slippage in the interpretation of archaeological, mythological and historical data. The representations of the female sex in the grottoes of the Easter Island are decoded in terms of fertility, no one notes the proximity of a birdman which evokes an obvious rapport with extrasensory phenomena.For the Greeks, Hermes was a representative of the erect sexual organ: the specialists concluded the existence of a cult of fertility, without seeing that a messenger linking men and gods incarnates paranormal faculties. Even the meaning of the myths which are at the basis of our culture escape us.In an opera like The Magic Flute, Mozart brings together two couples, one who ends up with impressive offspring, the other attaining the Grail, symbol of spiritual fulfillment, and we don’t realize that he is portraying two distinct functions of human sexuality. The exegetes recognize the sacred phallus in the flute, because it is made of oak (the tree whose fruit symbolizes the sexual organs), but don’t enlighten us at all as to the relationships which exist between physical love, the extrasensory and spiritual evolution. The poetic wit of a Rimbaud lifts us up, we forget that it evaporated after his breakup with Verlaine, even though his Illuminations give evidence of a quest for the supernatural. We see that Gide makes an apology for an immoralist love, but we don’t imagine that the energy drawn from these ambiguous relationships was able to fuel his literary genius. Our whole culture is marked by this fundamental gap and remains locked into a program of explanations in which the essential is lacking: the link between the body and the spirit, between sex and transcendence.The unconscious feels the seriousness of this state of things and reacts by sending out Excalibur impulses. These can be seen in the difficulty students have in concentrating at their desks, an unconscious protest against something off base in the material taught and in the way of teaching; in the animosity toward intellectuals, which denounces a culture of lies; in the violence of young people against institutions, rebelling against all repressive measures.This lurking dissatisfaction necessarily brings down a whole slew of sublimations. What we cannot manage to explain in a program lacking the extrasensory and its relationship with the sexual, we seek to explain by hiding sexuality. For this, we utilize two axes, isolated by a carefully placed cleavage: on one side, an intellectualization which takes away the paranormal and deals only with biological sexuality, justified by the survival of the species; on the other, a spirituality whose only relationship to the body is through the host and the wine of the Mass. We no longer worry about the sex of angels, they lost it a long time ago; even Christ is definitively castrated, the Inquisition burned all the paintings of the masters which showed how the Magi and the first saints honored in him the sacred phallus; then it was the turn of Mary, with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception in the middle of the 19th century… That dogma dates from the Middle Ages… If memory serves, Pius IX proclaimed it in 1854, at the height of Puritanism.Our culture is thus constantly torn between a materialistic decoding of biological reality and an intellectualization of things of the spirit, removing the sacred dimension of the body. Neither one nor the other of these extremes can bring us what we truly seek. We end up by losing faith in our cultural values and escaping into an ongoing flight into progress, in the hope of someday making up the for the lack… You are against religions, because they do not advocate sex? History shows us what happens when religions attach guilt to sex: holy war, the Crusades, struggles to the death between denominations, the ethnic cleansing which punctuates the history of Jews, Christians and Moslems. The carnage began with Moses, with the sexual prohibitions of Deuteronomy and the first death sentences.I think we must simply re-learn the respect of nature. The natural laws are by definition the divine laws, because God created nature. He also created us capable of inventing a religion. The only true religion, which can concretely link us to the divine, is the one which He Himself invented: Love. Since love can no longer accomplish its natural mission, our spiritual aspirations founder in intellectuality.The cult of an angelic love, deprived of its carnal temple condemns us to a biological sexuality, deprived of its spiritual temple… You claim to be reshaping culture all by yourself? Doesn’t every man have the right to ask himself about the culture he is handed?I think that humanity would be obliged to reshape a culture in the respect of nature. It would have no other choice. The technical means developed following hyper-intellectualization having attained a level like that of a neurotic individual, a bit clumsy, who can destroy a whole town by himself. Neurosis must then be one hundred percent eradicated: this will not be possible until the problem of psychic structuring is definitively resolved… OK! Now, the second line on your chart. The Oedipal is the sensitive period for the IMP; puberty, the sensitive period for the IRP. The confusion between repressed infantile drives and the drives of maturity allow us to better understand the problems of adolescence and why they have grown so much since the takeover of Cartesian morality.In the absence of repression, the IMP could structure itself over a good twelve years before puberty, without any risk of confusion with the IRP which is not yet functioning. The fundamental relationships between sex and the sacred, between sentiment and the magic of love, between thought and intuition, between the extrasensory and the spiritual would be profoundly integrated well before sexual maturity. Which, I might add, gives an entirely different dimension to the child-king of the primitives…The adolescent would discover in a later time the drives belonging to the IRP: the desire for the female, penetration, the exclusion of rivals, etc. He would give these elements the place they deserved as biological functions, subservient to the IMP drives, which are by far more important for a being with a spiritual vocation such as the human.In a repressive society, the process is reversed. The IMP is repressed from the Oedipal stage, the drives belonging to it remain compressed in the unconscious until puberty. At that moment, the IRP emerges with its reproductive type of drives. The impulsive energy of the IMP, accumulated over years, is invested in the various drives of the RIP, giving them an exaggerated importance and a configuration having little to do with their primary intention.As adolescence is s sensitive period, the IRP is definitively cemented in this form, at once hybrid and over-invested. The future adult will henceforth confuse the IMP with the IRP, projecting the need for transcendence peculiar to the former on the biological drives of the latter. He will invest his hopes for fulfillment in the conquest of the other sex, will seek mystical ecstasy in animal coupling, and supreme blessedness in the plans of conjugal life. His newly-minted genital drives will be inflated by the impulsive energy of polymorphism which has remained latent for years: he will fix an obsession with penetration and a dependence on the opposite sex which will accompany him until death.This process will not be without hitches: the Excalibur impulses will indicate to him that there is an error in the way the cards are dealt; they will direct themselves against his own amorous drives, will mix in in the form of guilt, inhibitions, disgust, sadism, masochism; their intensity will be proportionate to a danger of confusion for which the stakes are the meaning of existence itself. Added to this, the guilt and fantasies of murder from the Oedipal stage will throw themselves into the breach.All these negative drives will first target the older generation, bearer of the image of the father and felt as responsible for the impasse; whence the intergenerational conflict which can only get worse, faced with the inability of the people around him and of the whole culture to provide an explanation. They will also run through the representation of the opposite sex, scapegoat of the metasexual failure, whence the pejorative terms that flourish at adolescence: chick, bird, guy, gigolo, etc.At least they don’t take the road of suicide. Suicide is the ultimate reproach of the adolescent to those around him who cannot explain to him the real causes of his distress. Adolescence was always a difficult time. The adolescent is still a child and we expect him to be as responsible as an adult… Experience shows just the opposite: when the child has been able to live out his Oedipal complex, at least partially, no sign of unease appears when he reaches adulthood.The concept of adolescence, associated with the idea of a difficult passage, is only two centuries old. It was imposed once the prohibition on masturbation had aggravated Oedipal repression. Then the prohibition opposed to the relationship of the adolescent with an older person, which still played the role of an initiation, sealed the relegation of young people in a no man’s land cut off from real life. Before that, the notion of age groups didn’t have the significance it does today.The failure of the œdipus nevertheless calls for a sublimation: what does not function in the reality of being, we project onto a desexualized iconography. The myth of the pure and innocent child, denuded of sexuality, runs through the whole educational and the whole penal system; if the right to masturbation has ended up being more or less reestablished, any drive for adults has been that much more masked, qualified as incestuous or perverse.The archetype of the adolescent who refuses to grow up, like Peter Pan, able to fly above the rooftops, recalls to us that the loss of childhood structures brings with it the loss of the extrasensory and of transcendence.Let us not forget the sublimation that is dearest to Christians: the Holy Child, come into the world without passing through the torments of sin (Mary was born free of original sin), to save us from the darkness and the vicissitudes of the flesh…That which should have saved us, is the child within us. This child would know how to make us rediscover love in its divine dimension. Be as simple as the little children… Only infantile sexuality, in its purity and its innocence , could open the way for us to the supra-sensitive and to the spiritual.We prefer to compensate for our failure in projecting the fundamental link of the œdipus and the sacred on a Baby Jesus, chubby-cheeked and completely asexual, charged with teaching us love in the name of an omnipotent Father, who couldn’t manage to mold out of the clay two lovers able to bear the rigors of Eden… You should give catechism classes! You’d be quite successful… One who has experienced the incomparable magic of love of the Oedipal period without repression immediately sees that it is this we are seeking when we see a candlelit crèche, in the echo of the cathedral’s vaults, beyond the mystery of the Eucharist. Or when we offer children piles of presents under a fir tree symbolic of light: a sacrifice to a God of impossible love, on the altar of the family… You really do have something against the family. But it’s still at the basis of every society… It’s the family which has something against happiness. I speak of a Western type of family, one imposed by Puritan morality, and not what it might have been originally.We are, there too, victims of a confusion between IMP and IRP. We should feel the family nucleus as a source of satisfactions associated with procreation and not as the condition for our existential fulfillment.Procreation is a difficult task, which requires a consistent supply of external energy to unfold in true happiness. The closed couple is not the dispenser of transcendence that morality paints for us. The unconscious protests against this illusion. The nuclear family is inevitably the site of an energetic void accompanied by Excalibur impulses which poison the atmosphere. To these are then added the parents’ guilt feelings, as accomplices in the Oedipal trauma that society inflicts on the child.Since nothing allows us to deal with the situation, the reproaches become compulsive, destructiveness sets in and each one retires to his ivory tower: the father to his work, his sports or his bar, the mother to her household or the world of fashion, the children to their dream world or their budding delinquency. I know some families who are very close… Each one forces himself to conform to the model imposed by morality. The parents by remaining faithful, the children by being obedient. We must look behind the scenes, when the protagonists do not know they are being observed, to see what really happens. Or, better yet, see the conflicts gestating in the unconscious.Our society gives the illusion of a certain harmony, because each one feels obliged to present to others a semblance of perfection, in order to hold their esteem by displaying adherence to the common social model, or to assure himself that he possesses happiness. Whence the general illusion: everyone else is doing fine, it’s only with me that things aren’t going well and the ongoing conflict: it’s my wife’s fault, it’s my own fault…Sometimes, a corner of the veil is lifted on everyday reality, on the occasion of a domestic scene, a divorce, a televised confession. These moments are quickly forgotten, they are perceived as exceptions to the rule. Unemployment, alcohol, infidelity, poor character, incompatibility and other alibis are invoked. We would feel too directly threatened by a questioning of the familial model.For centuries, religion has taught us to compensate for deception with sublimation. The Holy Family is the refuge of our hopes of domestic happiness, the fantasy of transcendence which love should have guaranteed the protagonists engaged in the tasks of reproduction. We even find the extrasensory there: the Annunciation to Mary… As if by chance, it is a desexualized model. Do you ever go to church? Quite often! I love old stones… Let’s talk now about the sexual drives themselves which you list in your two instinctive programs. First there are those that push one to seek a partner and approach her. We can distinguish two different types of approaches.On one side, the love at first sight: this is a phenomenon which comes neither from conscious will nor from sexual need. We feel it at the level of the heart. More exactly: of the solar plexus. It is characterized by an intense sensation of the magic of love, which brings with it all the affective and intellectual motions.Love at first sight appears well before puberty. It is not necessarily a function of reproduction. We can then write it down in the IMP column.The corresponding IRP drive, on the other hand, should not be observed before puberty. Between thirteen and fifteen, youngsters change their behavior: they show a new type of attraction for youngsters of the opposite sex, they try to seduce, the blush at nothing, they fantasize the sexual act. This form of approach recalls what one observes in animals. When the female is in heat, the male undertakes a whole seduction operation to obtain her favors. The display is even very complex in certain species.By analogy, one might think that the characteristic behavior of the man who courts a woman is genetically programmed. It manifests itself with sexual maturity, independent of any magic of love; it brings the intervention of feelings of possession and rivalry; it always harbors a desire for penetration. It should logically be written in the IRP column.Love at first sight is a rare thing, which happens only once or twice in a lifetime. Can one consider it as an integral part of the instinctive program?It is rare because it belongs to the IMP and succumbs to the same repression.In natural conditions, the magic of love would be in permanent circulation, so to speak. Love at first sight would regularly illuminate existence. That is what opens the way to the extraordinary exchange of energy which should take place in the metasexual relationship. If it is felt as magical, it is because it marks the way toward the extrasensory and the spiritual. To live in this state of expansion of consciousness and opening to another even constitutes a need, just like the need to create or to communicate.In ordinary context, love at first sight comes only in short blasts, when the circumstances are particularly favorable. Each time it tries to break through, to get around the barriers of repression, it is immediately snuffed out by desire, possessiveness, Oedipal guilt, the intellectualization of choices demanded by morality. Our unconscious suffers from its absence, leading to a latent feeling of frustration, of the uselessness of existence, which we cannot explain.We then project our hope of longing for magic and transcendence on the homologous drive of the IRP: we attribute an exaggerated importance to seduction, as if it were in its power to open to us the doors of Paradise. We feel the deliberate conquering of the love object as a promise of supreme joy, instead of trusting the love-energy to govern the relationship.The Excalibur impulse reacts immediately to denounce the confusion. Seduction, the courting of the woman by the man, is always shot through with a certain uneasiness which is reflected even in the vocabulary: the word sweet-talk evokes at once a hope for love, for sexual realization, perceived by the unconscious as a promise of happiness, and a scorn, an anticipated deception, a latent force of reproach, which signals the error in communication.As to sublimation, we find it for example in the idea of illumination: a true copy of love at first sight, supposedly opening the door to transcendence, but excluding sexuality. To look for joy while hiding the spiritual function of the IMP is a transgression of natural laws, the Excalibur impulses come quickly to darken the scene: visionary in the old days meant a real mystic; the same word today is used pejoratively, as a synonym for a hothead, a dreamer. The term appeared for the first time in 1798… The mystics were religious, you can’t tell us they found their inspiration in sexuality! Saint Theresa of Avila was accused by the Inquisition of imagining erotic scenes with Christ to attain ecstasy…The image of a desexualized spirituality became generalized only after the Age of Enlightenment. It is also since then that the cult of Reason became widespread, to the point where we confuse the mental representation of a God with the direct perception of the divine which the mystics sought.The word mystic goes back to the 14th century and comes from the Greek μυστης, initiated, while the verb to mystify also dates from the second half of the 18th. The semantic slide is significant: it coincides with the loss of the last vestiges of the IMP, following the repression of infantile sexuality and the intensification of Oedipal repression. I see that you list tenderness in the IRP. Isn’t tenderness necessary to have your IMP succeed? Tenderness already exists in animals. For example in pigs.I once observed a boar going about seducing a sow: he started by gently rubbing his chops against those of his lady love, while grunting languorously in her ear: once these formalities had been completed, he delicately lifted the sixteen teats, one after the other, with his snout, which takes eight times as long as with a human…Then, when he sensed everything in order for the act, he jumped on her rump and, eyes gazing into space, lustily accomplished his male duty. Which is also rather long, because the pig has almost a liter of semen.A tender attitude is useful to the IRP, it can contribute to the success of the coupling. Associated with sexual relations, it fixes itself in the psyche of the future parents by the effect of pleasure, and can favor, in the long term, pregnancy, childbirth, raising children.At the IMP level, we find another form of tenderness, more ethereal in nature, charged with guaranteeing not the transmission of sperm, but the transmission of a metapsychic fluid: it is quite simply the magic of love, which opens up the solar plexus and renders it more receptive. The IMP demands great delicacy, but this is not tenderness on the order of sentiment. It is rather an internal attitude of respect for the other, of sensitivity, of being available. Of purity of thought and gesture, of humility in the face of the mystery of love…In this respect, ordinary tenderness is actually disturbing, it induces a certain complicity, an intellectualization which takes something away from the subtle character of the relationship. But it should not be excluded either, as a lack of tenderness would be just as harmful as its excess. Let us say that we must not put the cart before the horse: physical tenderness must be inspired by the magic of love, it must never precede or replace it.When there is a slippage of the IMP into the IRP, this relationship between the forces is reversed: we unconsciously hope to attain by words of love, by tender gestures, languorous looks, what we should be finding in the magic of love. From which we get an over-investment in the tender attitude; we are internally convinced that it will join us to our partner and open to us the paths of heaven. We use it to jump-start the weakening love at first sight. It eventually becomes an instrument of seduction.The Excalibur impulses are charged with denouncing this sort of tenderness, which compromises the metasexual connection in advance. They start by causing an unease: the partner feels the efforts at tenderness by the other as a form of obsequiousness, of clinging; then come the rejection drives, which can go all the way to a breakup.I still see my mother looking at the kitchen clock over my father’s shoulder while he kissed her tenderly… Thirty years later, on her deathbed, she told me that all cuddles were nothing more than lies: that she had not known any couple who did not play the same game.As to sublimation of the magic of love, we find it for example in art. In music, where the sonorous harmony and emotional discourse recall the internal harmony and the emotional unfolding peculiar tot he IMP. It is doubtless for that reason that the cult of music has taken on such importance in the last two centuries. Before that, one barely bothered to know who had composed this or that musical piece…There, too, the Excalibur impulses hurry to denounce the confusion: we recognize them in the ferocity of the music critics, who look for little things to criticize, not knowing how to denounce the true dissatisfaction; in the snobbism which caricatures the hopes for fulfillment which we project on the art and the artist and inscribe it, by their own ridicule, with its illusory character.The magic of love finds another sublimation in the atmosphere of churches, in which the crucifix, the altar and the candles (symbols of the sacred phallus?) evoke a promise of spiritual fulfillment free of servitude of the flesh. The Excalibur impulses were at first timidly manifested by the iconoclasts, then more energetically in the destruction of churches under the Revolution, then more recently by the Communist regimes’ professed hatred of religion. They are aimed, to my mind, not at denying the sacred as such. They denounce an illusory sacredness which does not respond to our profound aspirations: the solemn ambiance and the grandiose spaces of the cathedrals, the statues, the windows, give an impression of transcendence, but don’t constitute a source of energy. In your opinion, praying is useless? Prayer, like the meditation of Oriental schools, permits us to manage metapsychic energies. They are not its source.Prayer dates from an era when love still functioned well enough to bring everyone a minimum of this essential energy; contemplation permitted one to use every bit of it in the best internal conditions. In Oriental cultures, more permissive in matters of morality, the IMP is less violently repressed: meditation plays a role which is clearly more important than in Occidental culture. These techniques have a tendency to become rarer as Judeo-Christian morality gains ground…When the IMP no longer functions, prayer loses its quintessence, like the tree which cannot grow and thrust its branches toward the sky without receiving sap from its roots. It is transformed into a quest for help or consolation, in an intellectual verbosity more or less invested by the ego, which goes contrary to a spiritual act.The unconscious quickly recognizes the confusion. Prayer on a foundation of repressive morality is a form of sublimation: we expect it to be a communication with the divinity, the natural way of which would be love. It is automatically shot through with Excalibur impulses: that is at the origin of the doubt which insinuates into the hearts, of the priest as much as the faithful, and ends up by undermining the faith in a divinity which is thoroughly impenetrable.The ascension of Puritanism was accompanied by an unprecedented loss of trust in the Church{e=« orgName » ref=« https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9592 ») and in its promises of eternity. The rise to power of atheism dates from the end of the 19th century, just like that of materialism… How can you be both against religion and against materialism? I am for questioning what is authentic spirituality and a proper use of the material. Which goes back to questioning what might be a psychic structuring conforming to natural laws.Our modern era is marked by a displacement of the center of gravity of the conscience. The IMP should give us, from childhood, the possibility of centering ourselves in the solar plexus. We would feel as a loss of happiness any error in attitude which might lead us to leave this position.Each resort to the mental ends in a blocking of the IMP, thus by a deficit of energy, each return to the solar plexus brings a new wave of energy, so that a spontaneous conditioning is produced from the earliest age. The alternations between depression and fullness, in the manner of the carrot and the stick, would fix the reflexes necessary to maintain the proper internal balance.We would feel this center as the most comfortable position of consciousness and would require no effort to maintain ourselves in it. The most stressful situations would barely destabilize us, there would not be the same swings into the intellect, such that intuition and the extrasensory faculties would not weaken in the face of danger. We would not need to pray to re-center ourselves. Each moment of existence, each breath, each act of love would be a prayer. In fact, prayer would be the normal state… And we should be arresting people through prayer… Maybe there would be fewer errors of justice!When the IRP diverts the impulsive energy of the IMP for its own purposes, consciousness is divided up differently. It invests the three poles involved in our earthly tasks: the intellect, the affect and sex.This slippage becomes organized starting from the Oedipal period; the anguish induced by the energetic deficit sets the consciousness in the mental, from a very young age. Feelings learn to function in the guise of compensation, of a call to help, in the hope of escaping frustration. Most often, the child renounces his sexuality at the latency period, it having become devoid of sense following the cleavage between sex and magic. He compensates by what Freud called sexual curiosity, which forms the basis for the compulsive intellectualism peculiar to the West.When puberty appears, the metasexual drives remaining repressed since the Oedipal stage are engulfed by the new reproductive drives. The confusion of drives, while reactivating the aggressive contents which have lain in wait since the Oedipal stage, cause the Excalibur impulses to spring forth more energetically than ever (because this phase is even more decisive than the Oedipal period; it is the last chance for the restoration of the IMP).Under the effect of these tensions, the solar plexus, still awaiting opening in early childhood, closes definitively. Puberty being a sensitive period, this internal situation crystallizes in the psychosexual structures. The consciousness, having lost its original anchor, is irreversibly implanted in the three poles of intellect-affect-sex.With no control by the solar plexus, a paradoxical functioning will carry the thoughts, feelings and sexual drives, multiplying the Excalibur impulses in all their types. In this way a latent destructiveness sets in, the intellect becomes tinged with sadomasochism, the affect harbors depression and suicidal tendencies, desire is spiced with shame and disgust. This is what gives the impression of no longer seeing in the adolescent the little angel he was before puberty.The adolescent who is not a victim of Oedipal repression benefits from a different organization: the solar plexus remains the command center controlling thoughts, feelings and sexual drives, guaranteeing the unity among the three aspects. This type of functioning is immediately recognizable by the serenity, the patience, the shining quality and many other criteria which would make adolescence not a period of malaise, rebellion and instability, but a major step toward an authentic spiritual blossoming. You’re off again into your grand abstractions… The explanation is abstract, but the effects are very concrete.The short circuit between the IMP and the IRP has consequences for the whole of our culture: the impulsive energy which should feed creativity, intuition, the magic of love, the extrasensory faculties, is engulfed by the moorings of our biological instincts.This model of reasoning allows us, among other things, to better understand the mechanisms of desire. Under natural conditions, thought inevitably accompanies sexual relations, but it remains at a second level, subordinated to the subtle energies which are operating on the level of the solar plexus; it remains passive, contemplative, like a sort of spectator noting in his journal the fulfillment of a sacred rite, while being ready to intervene if difficulty arises.When consciousness goes back to the intellect and to sex, following the blocking of the solar plexus, a short circuit is produced between thought and gratification. No longer held in check by the subtle energies, thought seizes the memory of gratification and projects it onto the future; the sexual relationship becomes a kind of hunt for orgasm; the obedience to a metapsychic dimension is supplanted by a mental desire which takes over the operation, but remains incapable of leading the amorous process toward its transcendental goal. Desire is nevertheless the vital force which is at the basis of everything… Every vital function may undergo distortions.Desire, when the IMP fails, is further exacerbated by frustration. Less by sexual frustration, since release is always possible on the IRP level, than by the frustration in metapsychic energy.In principle, desire should intervene as a compensatory force, destined to reinforce a process which is not succeeding. The intellect has as its function to intervene in the case of difficulty, for example in the form of a momentary desire, in order to surmount an obstacle on which a sexual drive stumbles. When the frustration lasts too long, the desire turns into compulsion and ends up derailing the drive, just like Lorenz’s pigeon mating with a lump of rags.So, we might add two factors: the absence of control by the metapsychic dimension, when it has not been able to develop correctly, and the exacerbation of frustration. The impulsive excitation provoked by dietary stimulants amplifies the phenomenon even more. The desire we observe in these conditions, in oneself or in others, no longer has anything in common with what natural desire should be, centered in the solar plexus. It is simply one of the adolescent characteristics: all his physical activity is shot through with a disproportionate sexual desire, which he does not know how to manage and which is one of the main causes of his malaise. So we should do like the Buddhists, renounce all desire and escape into Nirvana? It would be better to start by distinguishing between a natural sexual drive, experienced in innocence, and availability, and the same drive experienced in desire, that is to say taken charge of by the intellect. Intellectualized desire puts the ego into play, which is incompatible with spiritual fulfillment. Sexual gratification should by nature fix good attitudes: the gift of oneself, the love of love, the abandonment to divine will, which are also elements favorable to internal evolution. To fix an egotistical attitude goes contrary to the goal of the IMP itself.That is why desire is inevitably accompanied by Excalibur impulses, which insidiously plant guilt in the partners and set up a blocking of the metasexual drives. If they want to pursue their relationship, they must intervene by blows of fantasy, the intellect must engage ever more in the search for pleasure. It’s the vicious circle: each addition of desire necessitates an excess of desire, the relationship is swamped by more and more insistent Excalibur impulses and generally ends up exploding.Psychoanalysis, when it studies desire and takes it as the foundation of its reasoning, is the victim of a distortion due to an error in the point of reference. For it, the taking charge of desire by the intellect is normal. It ignores the role of the solar plexus, so the generalized blocking is an aspect of the endemic neurosis. Freud should have started all over? Seek to improve your work twenty times over… I don’t know if he appreciated Boileau.Once the consciousness is fragmented among these three poles, another short circuit is produced between the intellect and the affect: thought takes charge of feeling. Thus is sentimentality born, which gives adolescence its romantic dimension, which we sense is somehow derailed.The solar plexus should control, starting from the metapsychic contents, thoughts as well as feelings, like a coachman who holds the reigns of two horses which make up the same team. If the coachman falls asleep, the horses will have their head and the team will end up in a ditch.Not to mention the short circuit between sex and the affect, that is between the libido and the feelings: something to think about concerning the nature of feelings of love.In natural conditions, feelings and sexual drives would remain under the control of metapsychic energies. When the solar plexus is blocked, the sexual drives directly feed the feelings. With frustration amplifying the phenomena even more, the amorous feelings will attain an intensity disproportionate to the real value of the relationship. Which explains many bursts of enthusiasm and heartaches of love: the flames and the grand deceptions characteristic of adolescence… But youth has to pass… It could pass better!In practice, the three short circuits are superimposed on each other: love becomes a mixture of desire, of calculated sentimentality and of eroticized emotions, shot through with guilt and destructiveness. In the end, we no longer know what the solar plexus is for, nor what is a real thought, a real feeling, a real sexual drive…The adolescent is the first to bear the brunt of it. And no one seems to even be able to explain to him the mechanisms of which he is victim. All that gets resolved with age! With age? All that is aggravated with age, but one gets used to it for lack of a better way.Adolescence is a sensitive period. All the shortcomings suffered by adolescents are found in adult society, in the form of constants which we no longer can control.Have you read Kafka? Consciousness stuck in a body that feels foreign to it… One can’t describe the catastrophe better. Things have improved since the Belle Epoque. True, we must be optimistic. Now we have PACS, X-rated films by satellite, legalized abortion, the pills in schools…If one day we want to manage our adult problems, we must start by managing those of adolescence. And if we want to manage the problems of adolescence, we must manage those of early childhood.That will not be possible without giving the child the right to experience love as nature prescribes…
Chapter X You are an intellectual, yet you don’t miss the chance to denigrate intellect. Is that a form of masochism? I don’t criticize intellect as such, no more than the fact of having a brain and a consciousness. I criticize the position that intellect occupies in our psychic structures.It is at once disconnected from the metapsychic dimension and over-invested with drives of anxiety due to the failure of love. Our culture is marked by an tendency to mentalize in all spheres, by a blind confidence in science, Cartesian thought, technology. The over-investment of the affect, for its part, results in a pervasive sentimentality; we allow ourselves to be carried away by emotions of all kinds, exaltation, fanaticism, hatred, patriotic fervor, with the consequences we know too well.Such a skid reawakens the Excalibur impulses which run right through all our cultural activities. Already at school, students constantly show opposition to the cerebral learning we claim to transmit to them; the terms highbrow brainwashing, pedantry say what they mean. The student unrest, the failure of reforms, the nervous wear and tear on teachers, the violence, are all consequences of it.The extermination of intellectuals by the Khmer Rouge, exotic avatars of our materialist philosophy, make for very sinister caricatures of it…We see another example of this neurotic intellectualization in the anonymity, in the omnipotence of administration. The regulations, the numbers, the paperwork of all kinds, the jungle of laws and jurisdictions, supplant human values. You cross a border without your papers, and you are nothing but a number. You violate the law while doing good, you spend years behind bars… Because, according to you, the laws are also products of neurosis? Good reason to violate them… Laws are necessary if one lives in a community.But the takeover of the law by intellect, outside of any real communication between individuals, leads to all kinds of aberrations. The maintenance of social order becomes the path of expression of sadism, of the secret pleasure of rebuffing, of getting revenge, of destroying that which we despise or which bothers us. There would be much to say on administration in general and on the justice system in particular… You still haven’t finished your chart. Why do you put seduction under the IRP drive? If I feel love at first sight for someone, I am certainly obliged to approach her…If this love at first sight is authentic, you will not have to have recourse to seduction,the approach will be made in spite of you. You will both have the same feelings, you will have the same thoughts, no kind of manipulation will be necessary. The relationship will develop spontaneously, without suffering any lags.One can also fall in love without it being at first sight, under the effect of a confusion of drives. The drives can even reach a great intensity at the emotional level (and not of the magic of love), under the effect of the impulsive energy of the repressed IMP which becomes engaged in the amorous feelings linked to reproductive sexuality. This false love at first sight is generally not symmetrical, since it is not governed by metapsychic energy. It can be recognized by the Excalibur impulses which surge forth on all sides, in particular in the person being courted. The latter feels a discomfort when the other courts her, she sees his faults, the feeling of beauty is not present. She cannot respond to his advances without suppressing a certain internal resistance.The lovers, finding no spontaneous echo of these impulses, see themselves constrained to resort to an excess of seduction. In him as well, Excalibur impulses come to denounce the error, he feels ill at ease, plagued by waves of doubt and guilt just as the relationship is getting started. He fights against his malaise by justifying himself internally, which engages the intellect even more and consolidates the failure of the IMP. Seduction constitutes a vicious circle, just like desire which is its engine. It is perfectly possible to experience love without recourse to seduction. The first condition is to maintain oneself in an attitude of obedience to the subtle energies, and not to undertake anything by force of willYou yourself said that this energy is elusive. To allow oneself to be guided by it could be the pretext for all sorts of straying…On the contrary, it alone can show us the right path.The ways of love are impenetrable, the intellect is incapable of predicting the detours, which are always surprising. To tell the truth, it has to be incapable of it, because it is the unpredictable which opens the way to subtle emotions. Without astonishment, there is no wonder. Calculation and suffocating repetition stifle the magic of love.The problem is easier to resolve when the extrasensory faculties function normally. Every risk of derailing is then signaled by visions or other methods indicating that one is off the natural paths. The symbolic mixes in with a dead hand: between the backbone of a fish representing sexuality without energy, the death’s head symbol of spiritual failure, the Alien monsters, the putrefying flesh, the train wrecks, the highway signals, the palette is vast enough to denounce all types of possible errors.In the absence of visions, authentic love drives are recognizable by their containing the magic of love. They have a very different flavor from drives fed only by affective or sexual need. With a little practice, we can easily distinguish the true from the false. They are also recognizable by their results. A switched on drive leads to an immediate and perfect understanding between the partners. The magic of love renews itself day by day, the relationship is not degraded by any Excalibur impulse. We see the appearance of ever more numerous extrasensory phenomena, proof that the energy is circulating correctly. If the relationship loses its raison d’être, it stops on its own, giving way to another, but without leaving behind suffering. It all happens in happiness and fullness. Seduction comes back to offering happiness to a partner. It’s the role of love to think of the other’s good…Altruism is often a transposed egocentrism. To want to bring enjoyment to a partner is a way of appropriating that enjoyment by the person interposed. It’s an emanation of the ego, and the ego is incompatible with the spiritual process, it immediately blocks the IMP.The correct attitude consists of obeying together the calls of a subtle energy which knows exactly how the love drives should be oriented and how far sexuality should go. The metapsychic energy assures the unity among intellect, affect and sex, for both partners. Thoughts, feelings, and sexual sensitivity then intervene appropriately, in perfect accord with the magic of love.It is at that level of subtlety that the child’s drives are located. Finally! To get to the act, you must make a proposal at a given moment… In the absence of the magic of love, a relationship can only be establish by means of these two operations: proposal and acceptance. Just like with animals: the lion who approaches the lioness in heat proposes his services; the female defends herself, up to the time when she signals her acceptance by adopting the sawhorse position, tail slightly to the side… It seems to me logical to write the proposal-acceptance pair in the IRP column. For the IMP, the process is much more subtle: it is the transcendent energy which proposes to the two partners to come closer. They direct both of them at once, so that their drives are automatically synchronized. To formulate a proposal would do nothing but disturb the process. They ego must hang back and give way to the subtle signals of the solar plexus. We can see a higher form of acceptance in obedience to metapsychic energy. In fact, the partners don’t have the impression of obeying; they feel a sort of immanent ecstasy, of giving of oneself, which finds its reward in the harmony with profound intuitions, exactly the opposite of the desire and possession peculiar to the IRP. There are scarcely words to describe this state, nor to describe the IMP, practically forgotten in our culture. I speak sometimes of syntonia. I’ve heard that word in psychology… A subject is said to be syntonic when his various tendencies are in harmony. We are speaking here of a harmony between two different people, assured by a transcendent energy which directs and synchronizes the mutual drives. In this state of snytonia, the proposal and acceptance have no more raison d’être. We don’t even remember how we got to be in the other’s arms, nor who initiated the relationship. The state of syntonia is felt as a form of higher pleasure, of bliss characteristic of the magic of love. Its prolonged absence engenders a feeling of frustration. We search for a compensation for it in over-valuing the proposal, in placing the hopes for transcendent fulfillment belonging to the IMP in an engagement ring, in a proposal of marriage, in a way of presenting ourselves, dressing and perfuming ourselves. Even the acceptance can be over-valued, especially by the woman, who will count on a passive attitude to attain happiness, and on submission to her husband to realize her own fulfillment. These diversions are inevitably shot through with Excalibur impulses. Example: the romantic declaration of love. When the bashful lover throws himself at the feet of his lady love, offers his bouquet of roses, recites his passionate verses, the poor thing doesn’t know how to hide her uneasiness; she is torn between the fear of offending him, of losing a suitor, and the desire to flee, to be rid of his disturbing presence. The young man feels equally ill at ease: something tells him that he’s in the wrong key and that he is in the process of debasing the love to which he aspires in his heart. We find the same ambivalence in the classic dialogue: Do you love me? – Yes, I love you, and you, do you love me?. A pernicious mixture of a hope of syntonia, a fear of losing the love object and of a contractual understanding characteristic of the IRP. The too-rare syntonia finds sublimation in the states of ecstasy which we seek through art, particularly in dance. So-called classical dance, born in Europe, portrays the heterosexual couple, in contrast to most of the traditional dances. It is a way of evoking the emotional and gestural harmony which the IMP should allow to reign in a love relationship, while portraying the model of the IRP whose aberration we sense. A way that uses the unconscious to compensate for the lack, while leading the conscious to ask itself about classical outlines. Why would dance be a sublimation? I see rather a celebration of the beauty of the couple and the love which unites two partners… The sex act is not present, though it evokes a feeling of perfection peculiar to the ideal love relationship: it is by definition a sublimation. One might see in it another sublimation: syntonia is not possible in the long term without an opening to a third person; to present it in the framework of the couple is a way of sublimating the socially unacceptable triangular constellation. Dance thus conceived is at the same time a false promise. It allows us to believe that the two-by-two relationship will bring us the joys of a transcendent understanding, characteristic of syntonia; while this understanding is not possible in the energetic deficit of the closed couple. The Excalibur impulses will not miss the chance to denounce the hoax. We see them in the sometimes destructive critics. Even in the way they praise an artist to the skies: the cult of the star serves to cover the need to denigrate, tacitly referring to the competitors whose inferiority is stigmatized by the star’s superiority… You obviously put the couple on the left, and the triangular constellation on the right. The couple is without doubt the relational basis for the IRP. Solid, unalterable lines between a man and a woman are useful for procreation. The young of man goes through a long period of learning, during which he is incapable of defending himself or feeding himself, so the ongoing presence of his parents increase his chances of survival. Nature had good reasons to provide an attachment drive associated with the IRP. A complete sexual relationship is often enough to fix the partners in an irreversible reciprocal dependency. As for the IMP, the problem is different: it is about guaranteeing a supply of metapsychic energy, the most enriching possible. Closing up in a couple is contrary to this demand. Each individual possesses a different energy. Knowing that metapsychic energy is the carrier of information, we understand that the contents of the consciousness brought by the energy of a sole individual are limited. They depend on his nature, his origins and his particular experience – his karma, the Buddhists would say. We can see that in effect the exchange between two partners, in particular the intensity of the sexual contact, diminishes after a certain time. It need not be that the sexual realization crystallizes an attitude of possessive attachment, that would be contrary to the principle itself of energy exchange. Effectively the IMP drives are organized in such a way as to reinforce the capacity for detachment: the Excalibur impulses interpose themselves once there is the slightest bit of dependency or complicity. Detachment does not exclude fidelity, on the contrary. In the absence of frustration, the triangular constellation guarantees its learning from the Oedipal period. Internal detachment is necessary to spiritual evolution, it is what allows us to escape the supervision of the ego. Instead of locking love into a two-by-two relationship, you lock it into a threesome. Your exchange of energies will also come up against a limit. Triangular constellation doesn’t mean a ménage à trois. I mean by it the set of drives which go into action when the impulse toward the third person arises. In this area, nothing is static, the elective affinities are always unpredictable. No triangle can claim to be perennial. To imprison love in a triangular relationship would be to again condemn it to metapsychic sterility, even if less gravely than in a closed couple. The natural law is the opening to the third person, and this opening automatically results in allowing love the freedom to blow here or there as it pleases. It knows better than we what to do, since it is in intrinsic rapport with the metapsychic… Speaking mathematically, the triangular constellation is the decisive element which allows us to pass from the binary relationship to a larger opening, according to the affinities and energetic needs of the various protagonists. It occupies a key position in the functioning of the IMP. But it has many other functions as well. It is at the moment the binary relationship opens to a third person that the most important emotions for personal evolutions are put into play. The fear of losing the love object, possessiveness, mentalized desire and other ingredients inherited from the Œdipus complex are just as much obstacles which oblige the partners to do some internal work. They have the choice between suffering or the effort to be made to rid themselves of repressed contents, each time that they come to block the IMP. Thus is born an awareness of the errors of morality, the false guilt, the bad tricks the ego can play, the reality of metapsychic phenomena. The love of love liberates a great quantity of metasexual energy. This has the primary effect of reviving the solar plexus, which has been asleep since adolescence. Once returned to functioning, it functions a bit like a compass: it closes whenever one commits an error, then opens up again when one renounces the errors. In this way we rediscover little by little the correct psychic layout and the natural mans of expression of the love instinct. All this explains that the triangular constellation is genetically programmed. It is indispensable to guarantee the passage from the binary relationship to a larger opening and giving access to metapsychic energy. But it was not necessary that genetics organize the programming of relationships among four partners or more. This is established spontaneously starting from a triangular base. The triangular constellation thus presents itself as the fundamental relational cell of the IMP. In practice: isn’t it favorable to your energy exchanges to organize orgies with five, ten partners? In certain works on Tantrism, you can see acrobatic relations, joining a large number of protagonists perched one on the other. I don’t know what this type of sexual acrobatics can offer… More importantly: the triangular constellation guarantees opening to a social relationship. If a love relationship exists between A and B, and if B falls in love with C, the relationship will inevitably move beyond the ABC triangle. It is rare that individuals are totally isolated, C probably has a partner D. A second triangular constellation among B, C and D is thus put into place from the instant that C feels an overture toward A. It doesn’t stop there: before establishing his relationship with C, D surely must have had a relationship with E, and so on. Knowing that each new liaison can be constructed without destroying the preceding ones, we see a large number of people joined together in this way. Not for a matter of economic interest, ideology, or totem fusing the cohesion of the clan, but as a result of the natural functioning of love. On this order of ideas, the triangular constellation seems to constitute the structural base of the human tribal instinct. The grand theories of incest taboo are no longer necessary to explain the opening and the founding exchanges of civilization. The natural drives spontaneously organize the opening of the family to the group, as well as the constitution of the group starting with the individual. … all from a group of people kissing each other! Who love each other! There is nothing obligatory about the sex. Previous relationships, for example that of D and E, are not necessarily active on the physical level. The former partners feel an amorous emotion for the new relationship, without having to participate in it sexually. In a group like that, love circulates among all the members, but physical contact is realized only where it is necessary to the exchange of energy. You must have noticed that a love relationship interrupted without conflicts or mutual hurt remains forever memory of happiness, like a sort of potential love, even if the relationship has nothing actually sexual. The notion of potential sexuality plays an essential role in the IMP. The emotion one can feel toward a given person is different depending on whether any sexual relationships is excluded a priori , or is on the contrary potentially realizable, even if it is not actually realized. The fact of knowing that a physical relationship is forbidden leads to the closing of the subtle channels, even releases Excalibur impulses which can tarnish a budding friendship. While a potential opening is enough to restore the solar plexus to functioning and to favor the exchange of energy even outside of any concrete realization. Imagine the chaos in a society where each one would be open to anyone at all, you wouldn’t know where the families are, whom the children belonged to, how to pass on inheritance… You misunderstand me: the IRP remains functional, it even functions much better when it is no longer a site of frustration. The two structures are superimposed, without completely mixing. Everything depends on whether the individuals know or don’t know how to distinguish the two functions of sexuality. You will understand nothing of the most exciting soccer match if you don’t know that there are two teams and two opposing goals. Once you know the different goals of the two classes of drives, the interactions between the IRP and the IMP can be decoded without difficulty, and the social organization which sets in seems clearly logical. I have been able to experiment with it in several decades of group life. The situations seen from the inside give the impression of running themselves, while they are totally disorienting to an outside observer who arrives with classical models of reasoning. When the metasexual function is repressed, every amorous approach is perceived as belonging to the reproductive function. The community is riddled with misunderstanding and incessant conflicts which complicate every situation. One doesn’t understand why love is constantly poisoned by marital conflicts, by the fear of losing the partner, by depression, by divorce. There, there are problems of inheritance, of children torn from their families, of abandoned single mothers. One needs to forget the emptiness inside in smoke or drugs, to drown sorrow and reproach in alcohol… If we distinguish on one hand the IRP, with all its characteristics, the stability of the couple, tenderness, the home, the secure haven for the children, and on the other the IMP which obeys energetic affinities without encroaching on the necessities of biological life, the problem is virtually re solved. The respective functions are perfectly compatible. When we find the formula that resolves a system of equations, the calculations are simplified as if by magic… So you’ve reinvented the ideal society, where everyone loves each other, the one we dream of, a true Paradise on earth… I have to point out that you are not the first! Everyone dreams of a lost Paradise: it’s probably because the human being is genetically programmed to live in something that resembles Paradise… There exist societies more harmonious than ours- let’s say that they existed before the West contaminated them with its moral hypocrisy and its poisons of all kinds. From the theoretical point of view: if the triangular constellation is inscribed in our genetic patrimony, and if putting it into effect leads logically to a socialization based on the love of love, we would be right to think that an ideal society, where happiness and love of one’s fellow man predominate, is genetically foreseen. Which explains at the same time the visceral intolerance toward contemporary society, which does not respond to our fundamental aspirations, and the ongoing flight into the fantasy of Paradise lost. Don’t you think that this fantasy serves simply to enable us to escape the difficulties of everyday life? Experience has shown me that such a communal life is possible, even spontaneous, when there are not too many Oedipal problems. This doesn’t mean that every conflict disappears; life would be boring. But the different drive are organized in such a way that each problem can find a quick solution and contribute to the individual’s fulfillment. To return to the theory: we can ask ourselves what causes the confusion of drives between the triangular constellation and the binary relationship. When the IMP fails, the hopes of transcendence, of indestructible love, of happiness, which are unconsciously linked to the triangular constellation, are projected onto the image of the couple, the homologous relational cell belonging to the IRP. Whence the grand fantasy of the eternal couple, guarantor of happiness and spiritual fulfillment bequeathed by each generation to the next, even if their own experience demonstrates its impossibility. Simply put, we unconsciously expect of the couple what the triangular constellation should be bringing, and which the couple is incapable of giving. Like each time there is confusion between the two programs, the Excalibur impulses show up. Their action depends on the seriousness of the error committed. Despite all the efforts undertaken to celebrate the ideal couple, to fortify it by the sacrament of marriage, to perfume it with rosewater , everyday reality inescapably darkens into marital boredom, latent reproaches, the forces of rejection, of reciprocal hardening, divorce and many other forms of protest put to work by the unconscious. The aggressiveness and pain are the traits it sends us to rid us of our illusions. Sublimation is clearly not absent from the program. The triangular constellation, buried with the IMP of which it is principal element, finds itself transposed into the hope of love expected to circulate among members of the group, placed under the sign of the vanished triangle, but this time excluding all sexuality: we recognize there, on a background of the Holy Trinity, Christian charity, love of one’s fellow man, the recipe which has been bravely attempted for two thousand years… Unfortunately, the most beautiful sublimation does not escape the verdict of the Excalibur impulses. We attend Mass, we listen to the homily, we take good resolutions, we even slip a coin (or a button) in the alms box, and as soon as we are back with our friends, we speak ill of others. The need to denigrate is one of the constants of our good Christian society. It is a direct expression of the aggressive drives that the unconscious directs against the hypocrisy of a morality which claims to assure love, but kills it by crushing sex. Loving one’s fellow man will cease to be a utopia the day it stops being a synonym for sexual repression. So you’re saying that Christ had it wrong? Christ never recommended sexual repression. In his time, sexuality was not treated the way it is today. Adultery was punished violently, prostitutes were stoned… Let he who is without sin cast the first stone… The Gospels should have taught us not to condemn sexuality in others. At that time, and up to the modern era, polymorphism was not taken into accounts by these prohibitions, at least not in intimate life. No more by the Moslems or the first Christians than by the Israelites. Only coitus was considered actually sexual, so that the IMP enjoyed relative freedom. Pleasure a such was not the object of guilt until much later. Do you know the expression: go cook yourself an egg? In Islam, adultery was punishable by death, so criteria had to be defined. If a third person kissed the hand of a lawfully married wife, the verdict could not decently be applied. If the third person lay down next to her without performing the act, not either. From which threshold would penetration deserve capital punishment? The Islamic lawmaker, apparently having no clock available, fixed the fateful limit at the time necessary to cook an egg. One is always tempted to project the morality of today on the facts of the past. There remained, before the Inquisition and the takeover of Puritanism, enough possibilities to experience the IMP for the population as a whole to have at its disposal a minimal supply of energy. Each one could experience a certain number of amorous experiences or overtures to a third person, particularly under the aegis of sexual hospitality. A net of triangular constellations was woven through the social fabric, without anyone even thinking of it. The love of love, the transcendent emotion awakened by opening up love, was still sufficiently present to feed the love of a third person and to lay its foundation in childhood. After that, it was enough for a religious precept to consecrate the natural attitude of loving one’s fellow man for it to become established. The same thing happened with Mass. When it was instituted, the ritual sufficed to reactivate the transcendent energies accumulated in the course of amorous experience and to give access to the transcendent dimension. With Puritanism and the generalized energy deficit, the only thing left of the liturgy was its formal aspect: the texts, the chants, the colors, the credo. But the quintessence of the cult, beyond the emotion and the conviction, this true reaching for the divine which should have made transubstantiation concrete, was lost in the smell of incense, for lack of transcendent energy in the souls of the participants. The priest, who was preserved by his vow of celibacy from descending to animality, may have possessed the necessary reserves, reactivated by the presence of the children’s choir… As for the faithful, they no longer found the same inner satisfaction and deserted the churches. Repressive morality entered morals at the Enlightenment; with it the lights of religion were extinguished… What do you mean by the next line? The love of love and the Excalibur impulses constitute two poles. When an error arises, the love of love is blocked and the impulsive energy charged with animating it swings into the Excalibur impulses. Then, once the error is eliminated, everything swings again into a wave of love. We have here what I would call a swinging drive: Love ↔ Excalibur, which plays the role of a switchman, of an orchestra conductor at the center of the IMP drives, charged with optimizing the metapsychic energy-information exchanges. On the IRP side, we see something analogous: in animals, rivalry has the goal of eliminating genetic errors, by selecting the male who carries the best seed. Once mating is over, the rivalry gives way to tolerance, the dominant male shows not the slightest aggressiveness toward his competitors. There, too, is a swinging drive: Rivalry ↔ Tolerance, charged with optimizing the transmission of genetic information. If the IMP functioned well, tolerance and rivalry would play a secondary role in everyday life; the love of one’s fellow man and the desire for truth, which derive from love3 and the Excalibur impulses, would be constantly activated and would hold first place. Imagine a society functioning on this model: the love of another would dominate hearts, tolerance would be spontaneous, rivalry would give way to a general solidarity, the Excalibur impulses would indicate the rare errors, the extrasensory faculties would clarify decisions and announce dangers… When the IMP is repressed, the bipolar arrangement of Love3 ↔ Excalibur remains blocked, the mass of impulsive energy which should feed it flows into the homologous two poles of the IRP. Rivalry becomes the recipient of the Excalibur impulses generated by the failure of the IMP, It takes on an exaggerated importance each time a comparison with a third person intervenes. It becomes intolerable that a neighbor has a nicer car or nicer house, we suffer when a colleague is given a promotion, we rejoice when a ball is kicked through a wooden frame or thrown into a basket, and hurl insult it happens for the opposing team… The whole social relationship is based on a spirit of rivalry and competition that does nothing, at the end of the day, but make people unhappy. The cult of sports is a veritable collective neurosis, with the health of young stars as the price; we make music to become famous, instead of thinking of what we play; in classes at school we list students by rank, rewarding those who have more points than others as later we will reward those who have more dollars… The confusion between Excalibur impulses and rivalry is implanted mainly in puberty. Competition by nature plays a dominant role in the adolescent, it is useful at that age to stimulate development and determine one’s position in the social hierarchy. But later, it should give way to solidarity, to mutual trust, to respect for another, to the spirit of truth, to the sense of justice and to the other specifically human impulses which are derived from the Love3 ↔ Excalibur poles. When the IMP is repressed, this natural evolution is not possible. The new rivalry with the IRP, inflated by the Excalibur impulses waiting since the Oedipal period, is integrated into the psychic structures. From then on, the Other is perceived as a way of comparison, to the detriment of the true relationship which would be that of potential love. The mistrust poisons camaraderie, the feeling of inferiority paralyzes creativity, the anxiety feeds the will for power, friendship becomes calculating; the father can’t bear to be surpassed by his son, whites hate blacks and blacks detest whiles, Jews are accused of monopolizing the key jobs, etc. Puberty being a sensitive period, these attitudes crystallize and are maintained throughout one’s life. They eventually make up the founding normality of human relations. The neighborhood jealousies, the spirit of competition, rivalry in sports, nationalism, religious fanaticism and racism can be analyzed as so many regressions to adolescence… Sport is a regression to adolescence? We’ll think of you when we attend the next match! When you see the next hooligans… There too, the Excalibur impulses explain the phenomenon: this violence, while appearing senseless, tends unconsciously to denounce an obsession with competition that is the counterpart, and so signals the loss of the transcendent function of love. When archaeologists of the future uncover our football stadiums, covered with the ashes of the next atomic wars, they will conclude that the sole God of our civilization was a round ball, which united thousands of faithful in its adoration… They will also discover our churches! They are minuscule compared to the gigantic stadiums which abound throughout the world… Speaking of churches: the swinging drive Love3 ↔ Excalibur, like every repressed drive, seeks a path of sublimation, something that also offers a sublime love, while punishing evil, and which would be connected to spiritual access. It is obviously the image of the Judeo-Christian God the Father. A swinging God who at times saves souls, at others sends us to hell. A desexualized God, as any sublimation would have it, and become Father because he is the projection of the paternal image. We can see there a regression to the phallic stage: when the child sees that his mother is not in a position to give him the energy he aspires to through his incestuous drives, he turns toward his father (Freud speaks of a negative Œdipus complex); his frustration is that much more brutal when he does not find in him the same erotic contacts as in nursing and care of his body. He then sublimates the image of an inaccessible and omnipotent father in the image of the transcendent father, endowed with all the powers, able to give him, under the aegis of a castrating morality, the ineffable love he lacks, seated on a cloud because this love unconsciously promises him the path to heaven. The unconscious can only protest violently against a promise of salvation which carries in it its own failure. Even the followers of a religion secure their faith by daily work of identification, which we call faith. They can then only turn their Excalibur impulses against the gods of others. It is doubtless from this source that the holy wars draw their inexplicable cruelty, in contradiction with the principles which they themselves advocate. The reproach of the unconscious against spiritual failure would be too discomfiting if they turned against their own religion, it is transformed into hate for competing religions, which represent a threat: if the others have another God, mine might not be the supreme God?… Neurotic rivalry interferes even in what little spirituality we have left. Similarly, we make a great show of tolerance, the substitute for the love of a third person which has become impractical. We cultivate it to expunge the guilt induced by the omnipresent hatred and scorn. This false tolerance (the true one would flow from a feeling of fullness belonging to love3) is systematically denounced by the unconscious, the Excalibur impulses riddle it with a destructiveness ready to burst forth at the slightest snag. For you, all religion is therefore neurotic… Between us, isn’t your doctrine a form of religion? To define a natural functioning is neither religion nor doctrine. A doctrine is a set of notions and beliefs whose truth we affirm. I don’t claim to be right in what I affirm. I try to show which are the logical consequences of my starting postulates. I consider them viable only to the extent they are confirmed by observable facts. My developments are more a search for verification for a stand I have taken. So it’s better to speak of hypotheses and theory, and not of ideology and doctrine. The Asian religions are clearly more tolerant than those bequeathed to us by the descendents of Abraham. The Buddhists, for example, don’t have the slightest combativeness toward other religions. In Asia, morality was much more flexible than in the West, especially regarding childhood sexuality, with the result that the IMP was not repressed in as draconian a manner. In countries where the child-adult relationship is still accepted, for example in Thailand or in the Philippines (except in the cities where tourism has made it degenerate) once can sense the presence of a different love, which surprises and fascinates Westerners: the hospitality, the delicacy, the peoples’ smiles… On the next line, you have listed a second pair of swinging drives. I have often asked myself about the origin of modesty. Is this a natural drive, or the expression of an inner conflict? It doesn’t exist (at least in the form we know it), in a number of primitive peoples. It appears in Genesis after the fatal fig… You mean to say the fatal apple. In the original text, the apple was a fig! And the fig is known as being a testicular symbol, thus a symbol of the IRP… The grape leaves were fig leaves. Eve would have been proposing to Adam to seek transcendence in reproductive sexuality: the first confusion of drives between IMP and IRP… In short, modesty doesn’t seem to have been part of the original state. So we must look for an explanation for it. The IRP contains a drive for sexual excitation which reacts to the sight of the opposite sex’s body, which swings into rejection when fertilization is not desirable. The phenomenon is quite clear in mammals. I once saw a she-goat in heat, who had tried for several days to approach the buck, by bellowing with all its vocal cords. After mating, and the passing of several minutes needed for the hormonal balance to change, she rejected him with blows of her horns. We observe the same swing after normal coitus: the partners most often fall asleep turning their backs to one another. While it is exactly opposite after metasexual relations, where contact tends to be prolonged, as though to perfect the exchange. We can easily understand the usefulness of the excitation → rejection drive, because the male would only waste his sperm if he went at it again uselessly. Do we find a homologous drive in the IMP, which avoids the recourse to sex when relations would lead to a loss of energy? I was already able, from an early age, to see that the sight of the erect phallus can release an emotion at the level of the solar plexus, which favors the opening of the subtle channels of consciousness. An image perceived as repulsive in other circumstances can, in the context of the magic of love, evoke a sort of transcendent beauty, I think that this is what the ancients meant when they spoke of the sacred phallus. It’s a swinging drive, the impression of transcendence is maintained only for the time that sexual relations are useful. Transcendence then swings into disgust? You have a funny concept of the sacred… When the IMP is not repressed, sex never appears repugnant. It is the object of the blind spot reflex: we don’t see it, we are indifferent to it. The swinging drive would then be written: Transcendence → Indifference. So then where do you put modesty? It results from a confusion of drives. The rejection drive peculiar to the IRP is invested by Excalibur impulses due to the failure of the IMP, in view of the proximity between prohibition and rejection. This latter then takes on an exaggerated importance. Instead of remaining purely functional, it is charged with anxiety and guilt, it becomes uncontrollable, like any compulsion: these are in fact the characteristics of modesty and sexual disgust. We can thus understand why children feel no modesty before Oedipal repression: it is at the moment that they perceive the failure of the IMP in the people around them, that it appears under the effect of the Excalibur impulses. And the process intensifies with adolescence. So you are for immodesty? In immodesty, there is always a desire to shock. The natural attitude is innocence. In the absence of inner conflicts, we no longer see sex, except in the rare moments when it produces a magical feeling, when an exchange of metasexual energy is favorable. The rest of the time, it is as if it didn’t exist. That may be what the nudists are seeking. The other pole of the swinging drive is equally over-invested: the libidinous excitation which can be produced by the sight of the sexual organ results in a short circuit between the IRP and the IMP. The impulsive energy charged with managing the feeling of transcendence picks the wrong level and produces an abnormal excitability, which is exploited, for example, in X-rated films. A sort of hope that visual excitation will revive a less deceiving sexuality. The Excalibur impulses immediately point out the error, with the feelings of disgust or discomfort which degrade these types of situations. In this way we can explain the repulsion inspired by sexual relations experienced by others, either seen or imagined: since we cannot visualize the magic of love, the image we have of the sexual act is that of a baser level of excitation (Freud’s primal scene), which releases drives of rejection unrelated to the reality experienced by the partners. This confusion is at the origin of the general spitefulness awakened by the child-adult relationship. Okay. Are you all done with your confusion of drives? Not entirely. The IRP doesn’t stop at fertilization. We see afterward, in the majority of animals, a nesting instinct. The female, often aided by the male, prepares the nest where she will raise her young. This drive is also observed in humans: the pregnant woman, in the days preceding delivery, feels a pressing need to do housework, to prepare the layette, to find a favorable place for the birth. Normal coitus directly stimulates this nesting instinct, probably because the nerve endings in the vaginal zone are connected to the instinctive centers of the IRP. Sometimes, after a simple penetration, the woman is seized with a frenzy of cleaning and organizing, like just before childbirth. The phenomenon is not seen in the man, although one observes, under the effects of repeated coitus, an resurgence of interest in domestic tinkering (nesting), professional activity (the search for food), possession of the woman (elimination of the rival). Relations of the IMP type, for their part, stimulate patience, creativity, the search for truth, generosity. Something is built as well, but it isn’t a nest made of twigs or covered with roofing tiles. We might speak of edification, of the construction of a philosophy which tends to protect children more precious than biological children, as Plato wrote: the spiritual children who are the virtues and the access to the Essences. The rules of wisdom, the maxims, the intellectual understanding of subtle values are a bit like solid materials charged with protecting the transcendent Knowledge against the aggressions of the outside world. A permanent nest where the most fluid wisdom of the soul can grow.. And where do you see the slippage from one program to the other? Given the repression of the IMP, all the impulsive energy which should feed this edification, essential for the development of the being, is invested in the nesting instinct. What should be played out on the metapsychic level is played out on the level of the material, of organization, of self-defense. This explains the over-investment in material possessions, in the house, in food, in money, in intellectual learning, in fame and everything that engages the ego in one way or another. Instead of seeking fulfillment in the spiritual dimension, which gives our destiny its ultimate sense, we seek it in material realizations and in rational science. Unconsciously, we expect from a beautiful home, a nice car, a bank account, a college degree, some theoretical knowledge, a fulfillment which is available only from spiritual possessions. The accession of materialism and the bourgeoisie gave way to sexual repression which arose in the middle of the 18th century. This explains the sudden expansion of the industrial society (over-investment in the object) and the materialist philosophers (over-investment in reason) which characterized this end of the millennium. After religion, now it’s materialism that is neurotic? Materialism is a form of religion: a belief in the idea that man can find his fulfillment in the material, whose engine is the unconscious aspiration toward a spiritual fulfillment. Like any form of diversion, materialism calls up the Excalibur impulses. The omnipresent violence, the torched cars, the broken street lamps, the bus drivers attacked, the criminality, all this is drawn from somewhere. The young people are not bad in themselves: they feel trapped between a materialist philosophy and a religious apparatus that, both of them, condemn their deepest aspirations to failure. Their unconscious seeks by any means to denounce an error of which they cannot comprehend the workings. Or, they escape into an artificial paradise: the euphoria that they cannot find in the magic of love, they seek in drugs, in states of trance replacing those which should accompany the extrasensory opening, in the frenzies of dream-parties, in the omnipotence of decibels which erase everyday life… The problem of violence and drugs will evaporate as if by magic the day adults offer young people a way of life that conforms to the natural laws of love. Young people protest mainly against exclusion and against social injustice. Their unconscious is not mistaken: exclusion and injustice are consequences of jealousy and possessiveness, thus consequences of the over-investment in the IRP. Jealousy is a natural thing! Even my dogs, when I give a bone to one and not the other… They have a repressed Cerebrus complex. From seeing uniforms… You are right: there exists a natural jealousy, in both man and animal. But it would play a minor role in the human being, compared to the place that love of love would occupy. All is explained when one knows that the IMP is not functioning correctly. Without it, the relationship to the other cannot be correctly structured. Since the Œdipus complex, the anxiety toward the third takes on exaggerated proportions and is added to the natural jealousy. If the love of love were put into place at the time of the sensitive period, the pleasure of possessing would remain quite secondary. The original jealousy, that which you see in your dogs, would not completely disappear from the human soul, but it would have nothing destructive about it. It would rather have a stimulating function: it would attract the attention of the wealthiest to certain injustices; the comparison would push those who are better off to make a personal effort to equalize things, without inducing any negative thoughts. When the opening to the third person is fixed as a guarantee of happiness, we rejoice to see others receive all the love, all the money, and everything that can make them happy, without ever suffering from the differences. At the social level, natural jealousy would exercise a regulating function. It would push the poorest to attract the attention of the most well-off to their difficulties. It would be impossible for the affluent to accumulate possessions at the expense of others: the feelings of guilt awakened by the awareness of injustice would make them lose the possibility of living out the IMP, and that loss is infinitely more painful than that of being deprived of material possessions. The love instinct is thus made to guarantee the auto-regulation of riches. In the current system, the IMP remaining inaccessible in any way, injustice and the scorn for others are not discouraged by any important loss. To seize the riches of one’s fellow constitutes a gain, without negative counterpoint on the level of one’s inner life. Money owes the place it occupies in our unconscious to the fact that it serves as sublimation for the missing energy; material enrichment is a substitute for spiritual enrichment. Whence the Harpagon’s bliss before his coffer filled with gold coins, and his lamentations when he finds it empty (a reflection of his inner emptiness). Molière used avarice to denounce a more profound diversion… You are showing us that jealousy and the desire to possess should lead to equitable distribution of wealth. That’s the world turned upside down! The image our culture sends us of jealousy has nothing to do with what it would be if our psychic structures were less denatured. As we know it, it is the result of several components which are all derived from the failure of the IMP. At the head of the list is rivalry, stemming from the IRP, over-invested with Excalibur impulses which take it as an outlet. We can feel that rivalry is mixed with the feeling of jealousy, and that it is itself fed by an exaggerated aggressiveness with respect to real situations, arising from dissatisfaction in love. The worst, however, comes from elsewhere. The first Excalibur impulses of life are repressed from the Oedipal period and remain in wait in the unconscious. They group together the fantasies of murdering the father, as well as the old hurts linked to the rejection of infantile sexuality. These are extremely violent contents, painful, which invade the emotional space when the threatening image of the rival intervenes. These Oedipal contents explain at once the murdering violence of the feelings of jealousy and the intensity of the pain which accompanies them: If he puts a hand on my wife, I’ll blast his brains!, Better to die than to think she could be happy with him… The phenomenon is further aggravated by the frustration due to the prolonged blocking of the IMP. It is less a sexual frustration than a deficit in metapsychic energy. This deficit is felt in the form of lurking depression and anxiety, which add to the cocktail a suicidal component: If she’s cheating on me, my life has no meaning… It is the metasexual failure and the repression of the triangular drives which are at the origin of the fear of losing a love object. Impatience comes from the lack, and anxiety from the closing of the couple. And that’s not all: the way in which the third person conducts his relationship with the unfaithful partner is not in general located on the correct level. The skid into desire or possession releases Excalibur impulses which are added to the preceding factors. These drives appear even before any realization of the outside relationship, the simple representation of a disconnected sexuality is enough to release them: If I imagine him kissing her… We can thus define classical jealousy as being the sum of at least four components: the authentic Excalibur impulses, released by the errors of the external relationship (realized or virtual); the reactivated Oedipal contents which pour into the breach; the suffering due to the metapsychic frustration (or sexual misery); the fear of losing the love object; the drives of rivalry, inflated by the confusion of drives between the IMP and the IRP. All these components are directly or indirectly derived from the failure of the IMP. This failure not a natural situation, we see immediately that jealousy is not a natural drive. Or more exactly, that it is the result of natural drives which denounce an unnatural situation. Reciprocally, we can deduce that this form of jealousy should not exist in a society based on natural psychic structures, in which the love instinct functions in conformance with genetic data (which obviously necessitate the non-repression of infantile sexuality). Exactly what Malinowski observed in the Trobriand Islanders… But jealousy is nevertheless proof of love! The proof of a possessive love, thus a love experienced on the IRP level. Jealousy is incompatible with the functioning of the IMP. It destroys its subtle dimension, it suffocates it, poisons it day after day. It locks the relationship into obligation, or into mutual subjection. It even constitutes a vicious circle, because the metasexual failure adds to the frustration and intensifies the Excalibur impulses, which in their turn reinforce the jealousy. Jealousy does, however, have some use: like any pain, it should lead us to question ourselves about our errors. As for me, it’s leading me to question myself about the errors of the third person who might have designs on my wife…
Chapter XI We have let you speak very freely, you will not say the opposite. Now answer some more specific questions.You claim that there is a different form of love, designed to develop extrasensory faculties, and that these faculties play an irreplaceable role in spiritual development. For children to develop normally, it is therefore imperative to give them access to this form of love? We should be in a social context such that it is possible to give them access to this form of love. Don’t play with words. You tell anyone who will listen that the realization of this love is essential for the normal development of the child, and that the child must freely express his sexual impulses. The fact that children have sexual urges directed toward their parents or other adults has been known for a century. This is the basis of classical psychoanalysis. However, you affirm that these impulses must be realized physically to allow certain energy exchanges. Whereas psychoanalysis considers that they must be subject to a prohibition, in order to structure the child’s ego. Or be experienced at most in the imagination.Your theory is therefore an incitement to incest and the rape of minors by adults. You reverse the reasoning. These impulses are part of the natural data of the psyche: it is therefore nature which constitutes an incentive for the child-adult relationship. I’m just trying to understand nature.It is absurd to speak of aggression or rape when the child expresses his natural impulses in complete spontaneity, and the adult gives him the response he needs to be able to express them. The child does not have the necessary discernment to know what will do him good and what will harm him… It is by cutting the child off from his natural sexuality that we infantilize him. A child left free to experience his romantic impulses knows better than an adult what he needs for his development. It’s the adult world that no longer knows where it stands. Given ignorance of the primary purpose of human sexuality, morality is unable to determine what is right and what is wrong.The behavior of the child, who acts on his natural impulses, may seem aberrant to those who do not understand what he is looking for. These people will have the impression that the child lacks discernment, even though he knows better than all adults what is good for him. He knows it by instinct, and instinct is surer than all beliefs. The younger he is, the less likely he is to make mistakes, because he still escapes repressions which could alter his psychological functioning.In terms of discernment, it is the law that does not discern right from wrong: the relationship where the child expresses his natural impulses and is happy to have the adult’s response, and the one where the adult realizes his own impulses at the expense of the child, and traumatizes him. We have to put a limit somewhere, and the only limit that is not open to question is the age limit. On the contrary, it is this limit which is the most questionable. The child has sexual urges from the phallic stage, on what criterion can we then decide on one age rather than another?The limit that we currently apply is modeled on the notion of sexual maturity. But this notion arises from the reproductive function, whereas infantile sexuality has nothing to do with reproduction. Do not say that a child can achieve sexual pleasure before maturity. Even if he has unconscious romantic urges, you know that a boy cannot ejaculate when he is not yet pubescent. You are confusing two things: orgasm and ejaculation. Ejaculation requires orgasm, but orgasm does not require ejaculation. I experienced this personally for several years, between the ages of nine and thirteen. Many children discover orgasm very early and do not dare talk about it, out of natural modesty.Kinsey, in his famous report on American sexuality, devoted part of his investigation to a group of minors, aged from one year to twelve or thirteen years old. He concluded that these children were perfectly capable of reaching orgasm, and that the youngest reached it even more easily than the older ones. This is exactly what I observed about myself before puberty. And what good is an orgasm when there is no ejaculation? Ask a woman what she thinks. She has no ejaculation, and yet she needs a certain number of orgasms to maintain her balance. Why would it be any different for the minor? Are you going to tell us that orgasm is necessary for the child? You are descending into ridicule! Even if he is capable of it, he may not need it for his psychological balance. How can you say that, when it’s unclear what the function of orgasm is?If the child is capable of achieving it, this is on the contrary a reason to think that orgasm has the same function before puberty as in adults. Most children live without orgasms and do very well. Except that they do not develop their extrasensory faculties. And that they could be better off. We do not necessarily see from the outside the conflicts that arise within the being. There are enough pediatricians and psychiatrists who have dealt with the problem. If the children were in bad shape, we would have known it a long time ago. How do we know if they are in bad shape, since we don’t know what the normal state is?The only thing of which we are assured, thanks to psychoanalysis, is that the repression of infantile sexuality is the cause of trauma. Freud was the first to notice this when he delved into the unconscious, where he found the vestiges of the conflicts and sufferings of early childhood.But what psychiatrist could take the next step and observe what happens when a child is allowed to experience his or her impulses freely, with the adult of his or her choosing? None, because he would end up in jail! Or banned from the profession.Currently, the system is locked by morality and the law, no one can address this problem without risking the worst problems. It is a kind of black hole in the system of knowledge, which swallows up everyone who would like to look into it. A compulsory consensus, to which everyone must join if they do not want to be excommunicated.Perhaps the greatest gap in the human sciences, when we judge by the consequences that can result from it on the scale of humanity. Certainly, we will never be able to stop you… You already arrested me yesterday morning! I hope it doesn’t last too long… With theories like that, you won’t have it easy!Another thing about the child: before puberty, there are no sex hormones circulating yet. Why would you want sexuality to already be aroused? There, I’ll stop you: there is no direct relationship between testosterone or estrogen levels and sexual drives. Contrary to the beliefs that spread when these molecules were discovered.Kinsey was the first to demonstrate this. This point confirms that human sexuality is not a simple reproductive function. If it were just a matter of hormones, it would depend on the menstrual cycle. This is the case in mammals, but not in humans, nor in bonobos, our closest cousins.It is certain that the genetic data of sexuality have undergone significant changes in the last millions of years of evolution. Don’t pretend that bonobos practice pedophilia… You couldn’t be better. I have a videotape of a report broadcast recently on a German channel, I hope you caught it: you will see twice how a small bonobo establishes sexual contact with an adult male, and even gets angry because the latter allows himself to be distracted during filming. So pedophilia is a natural thing in humans? We cannot conclude from a simple analogy.In my third week of classes, I propose to examine all the arguments which argue for the natural character of the child-adult relationship, and all those which argue for the opposite. We can thus get rid of preconceived ideas that prevent us from reasoning objectively.Didn’t you find this table in my material? It would be easier… We’ve got you covered! You really have everything planned… In the first column, I have gathered all the arguments unfavorable to the child-adult relationship, put forward by the participants in my seminars. Immaturity. Trauma. The size of the organs. Morals. Modesty. Guilt. Uselessness. Lack of sexuality in children. The fact that sexuality must be experienced between people of the same age. That it should be lived in the imagination. That the child will feel different from others. That he is incapable of reaching orgasm. That he will have a tendency to continue sexual activity. That a child free to live his sexuality escapes the authority of his parents. The incest taboo. The ugliness of the adult sex. The clash between emerging impulses and adult sexuality. The absence of these relationships in other cultures. The drama that legal intervention can represent. Prostitution of minors. Child murders. In the right column, I have gathered the favorable arguments: The child by nature has so-called “incestuous” sexual impulses. Freud considers them “incommensurable”. Their precocity and universality suggest that they are genetically programmed. The repression of these impulses is the cause of neurosis. Child-adult relationships were common before the repression of masturbation. This repression was introduced following a medical error accusing masturbation of all ills. The inhibition of infantile onanism causes intellectual inhibition. There is often sadistic behavior between children. Unrepressed children seek to concretely realize their impulses. The child-adult relationship is not or was not repressed in other cultures. Our society is experiencing a particularly acute sexual problem. She suffers from an endemic neurosis which we know is linked to the repression of infantile sexuality. Extrasensory functions in less repressive cultures and almost not in ours. The child feels a feeling of abandonment by his parents, even if they show tenderness. He has difficulty supporting the idea of ​​a sexual life between adults, which reveals his own frustration. Pedophilic behavior is observed among the primates closest to humans. The prohibition is explained by the Oedipal contents reactivated by the image of a relationship whose lack was the cause of suffering. We have already discussed most of these points.If you draw the conclusion that the child must carry out his impulses, the law being what it is, you fall under the umbrella of apologizing for crime!I never come to say that these conclusions should be applied in the current context. You are the one making this extrapolation. Yet have you experienced it in Switzerland? About thirty years ago, my wife and I took this risk because we saw the major stakes that it represented. Not only for ourselves and our children, but for society as a whole.I do not believe that we are mistaken, the discovery of the fundamental link between the metasexual function and the extrasensory faculties can have incalculable consequences, in all kinds of areas which present currently insoluble problems. We would never have gotten there by starting solely from adult sexuality.But we were also able to see the dangers of such an experience and the catastrophic consequences of the intervention of the justice system: the interrogations, the public outing of the most intimate things, the impudence of the media, the gaze of others, all of this constitutes a trauma from which the child subsequently has difficulty recovering.We were able to become aware of the conflicts that threaten the child, even if he is perfectly happy at the moment when he can experience his love for the adult. He will retroactively be the victim of feelings of guilt which could alter his future sexuality and compromise his socialization.We had also underestimated the Oedipal problem. Under the effect of education, the sexual prohibition is inscribed in the child’s unconscious from the phallic stage, perhaps even earlier. Then allowing him to experience his impulses for the adult puts him in conflict with his own superego, which is a cause of additional neurosis.To which is added the conscious conflict he experiences in knowing that this love is forbidden by society, and that his partner should abandon him in case the slightest suspicion arises. The child knows well that the discovery of such a relationship would cause a scandal among those around him and would shock him even more if he declared himself the initiator. This is why he takes all possible precautions, often more than the adult, to prevent it from being discovered. What are you talking about? It’s always the adult who encourages the child to keep quiet! This happens when the child is not the initiator. A child forced to do what he does not want to do needs relief from his parents, his classmates, his school teacher. The adult has no other means than threats to silence him.But when the child is happy, when he has desired the relationship, he spontaneously does everything necessary to protect his happiness. For example, I saw a child slip like lightning under a quilt and stay there for an hour, suffocating, because a person who did not inspire him with confidence had entered the room, without anyone explaining the danger to him.A child who has stolen a piece of candy already knows at six years old that he must not say a word about it to anyone. When it comes to one’s own sexuality, they are even more careful. The impulse to protect love is one of the early impulses, just like the Excalibur impulses. In your opinion, the campaign undertaken to make minors speak would be a contradiction in terms? We must distinguish two types of laws of silence: the silence of shame and fear imposed by an aggressor, and the silence that the child maintains to preserve his happiness.The silence of horror, and the silence of modesty.This is also true for those around him: when a child is happy, those close to him who guess the reason for his happiness do not feel like intervening. They have the choice between respecting the law and the good of the child. They do not remain silent out of fear or indifference, but because they feel that they would destroy something essential. They have no other solution than to hide reality.The dilemma will be resolved the day the law preserves the good of the child rather than the principles of a morality contrary to nature. So you would agree with the accomplices of a sexual assault? If this sexual assault is a love relationship desired by the minor, it is the one who denounces it who does the evil, who becomes complicit in a society destructive of the noblest values. All this becomes clear when we know the true function of infantile drives.For the child, the dilemma is very heavy to bear: if he tells the truth, he exposes himself to losing his love, therefore to great suffering, and to the shame of seeing society intrude into his privacy; not to mention the guilt of throwing your partner in prison. If he continues to lie, to protect his love, he puts himself at odds with those around him, with his classmates, with his teachers, any confidence automatically being placed under the sign of hypocrisy.The adult who takes the risk of responding to the child’s love is also confronted with a dilemma: if he rejects or rejects him, he condemns him to repression and the trauma of a first heartache; if he responds, he puts himself in danger, and also exposes the child to serious conflict.I see only one solution to the problem: public awareness of the error that morality and the law are currently making in this area. Knowing that infantile drives are aimed at metapsychic development could help change things. Because you think your ideas will spread across the planet? With the media coverage to which I have already been entitled…But I’m certainly not the only one working on it. Already in 1977, a a petition was sent to the penal code review committee, signed by several hundred prominent personalities, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, even Françoise Dolto.The subject is terribly difficult to communicate, especially since the Dutroux affair has relaunched the witch hunt. What did this petition ask for? The repeal of article 331, and the restitution to minors of the right to maintain sexual relations with people of their choice.These are ideas that will inevitably surface eventually. Chase away the natural, it comes galloping back: every adult feels, deep down, that they are suffering from something that goes back to their childhood. That something essential is missing, which he finds neither in the marital relationship, nor in donjuanism, nor in pornography, nor in continence. For the moment, this suffering translates into a visceral hatred against the child-adult relationship. Once the nature and cause of the frustration is clearly formulated, things could change. You are in fact a dangerous character: with your theories, you will create pedophiles galore… On the contrary! The individual who discovered love in childhood has no later tendency to seek the childish form to satisfy a sexual need. You yourself say that you had relationships with adults in your youth. However, we know that children who have been sexually assaulted very often become pedophiles themselves. Doesn’t that give you pause? I’ve been thinking about all this for fifty years!You over and over again make the same confusion between two things that have absolutely nothing in common. We cannot put in the same basket the case of a raped child and the case of a child who received the hoped-for response to his romantic impulses.A raped child undergoes trauma which will seriously taint his or her future sexuality. Sexual fear, disgust, shame will mix with every facet of his love life and compromise his possibilities for happiness. His failure in love will have repercussions on the rest of his activities, so it is something extremely serious. The image of the rapist will remain fixed in his memory, mixed with the trauma, so that it will be difficult for him to feel a romantic feeling for an adult partner. He will tend to turn to the child form to satisfy his sexual needs. The raped child is a potential pedophile.Once in the presence of his victim, he will find himself in a terrible impasse: now occupying the position of the rapist, he will feel guilty for doing as much harm to this child as he had suffered himself; he will tend to brutalize him, in order to reduce this guilt. He will make him the scapegoat for his inner conflicts, unconsciously accusing him of reactivating them through his presence. He will even accuse him of being the one who reveals his perverse constitution to him by making him give in to impulses that he knows are bad and that he would prefer to forget.The rapist thus targets the child three times for his aggression: once as responsible for his present guilt, once as responsible for his past suffering, once as a revealer of his perverse tendencies. He unconsciously accuses the victim of being guilty of the crime that his inner conflicts push him to commit.What goes on in a sex offender’s head is not rational. It is a fight between forces over which he is not master and which he can only unload on the child. They will manifest themselves in the form of sadism, threats, abuse, even murder, without the rapist himself understanding what pushes him to act. So the sex criminal is a victim of society? You have some good ones… I believe that all offenders are victims of society before society is their victim. This does not mean that they should be excused. But that we should once and for all try to understand the unconscious mechanisms of delinquency, rather than reducing it to consciously decided actions. What do you think happens when a child is the initiator of the relationship, assuming the adult is only responding to the child’s advances? The picture is fundamentally different. I can tell you about this from personal experience.The child who was able to realize his impulses before puberty, and derive the happiness that true love gives, retains within him a positive image of the adult. A “magical” image of the Other, but at the same time that of an accessible being. He will easily accept himself when his body transforms, since the signs of his own maturity will remind him of the one who gave him happiness. He will later accept without difficulty the image of an adult partner.His first relationship will have partly resolved his Oedipal problem. The non-castrating image that he may have formed of the adult will counterbalance the parental images resulting from his œdipus. His fantasies of murder will be offset by trust in the one who responds to his impulses. Once an adult, he will have no difficulty experiencing his sexuality with partners of his own age and will feel no need to turn to the infantile form.However, if it happens that a child experiences a loving feeling for him, he will remember his past happiness, the new situation will bring back in the form of sensitivity and self-giving the recognition of having received this first love. He will remember the heartache caused by a possible separation, or a moment of indifference from his former partner. It will therefore be humanly difficult for him to reject the minor’s impulse. How can you deny a child the happiness that you yourself received as a child from an adult? The minor who has a relationship with a pedophile therefore becomes a pedophile in all cases, whether it involves rape or love? This is what you are demonstrating… You don’t have to have been raped to become a rapist.The pedophilic tendency may simply result from a poorly resolved œdipus. The child who has not received the love he unconsciously expected from his parents can use, once he becomes an adult, the pedophilic relationship to reconstruct the Oedipal situation. The unconscious is not except for one inversion: the victim could, for example, symbolize the parent who is supposed to give love, and society the castrating parent.As long as the pedophile sticks to fantasies, the illusion can persist. Things take a turn for the worse when he acts out: he notices that the child is not playing the fantasy role, that he is afraid and is thinking of seeking help from his parents. He immediately identifies him with the castrating parent and directs his old murder fantasies against him.There is yet another element, perhaps more important, in the unconscious of the rapist, which psychoanalysis does not take into account: the hope of finding in the child-adult relationship the content of transcendent energy that he did not receive as a child. This component is even more important than the previous ones, because metasexual failure involves the very meaning of existence. The fall is all the more brutal: the inevitable failure at the moment of taking action reactivates old frustrations, causing a despair which will also turn against the child in the form of sadistic impulses, even murderous impulses. What do you want to do against these kinds of monstrosities, if not prevent them by toughening up repression? Repression makes things even worse.On the one hand, at the heart of the act itself. The rapist who finds himself exposed to a heavy prison sentence, representing the destruction of his own life, is tempted – this time consciously – to put the life of his victim in the balance. The fear of denunciation adds to the other destructive components, of unconscious origin, and can be enough to push the rapist into the horror of murder.Those who make the laws would do well to think about this when they plan to prevent sex crimes by increasing the penalties. Fear of repression does not stop the rapist. The process that leads him to take action is an unconscious process, against which the reasoned fear of a sanction remains ineffective. Once the act is completed, the rapist is suddenly brought back to the conscious plane, because his unconscious tensions have been discharged. Only at this moment, the fear of punishment surges through his mind and makes him dangle the advantage that eliminating the victim would represent. Aren’t you a bit of a rapist yourself for having such an accurate view of things? Through prison, I was able to speak with quite a few rapists and child molesters. They confide more easily in a fellow prisoner than in their psychiatrist. The psychiatrist is required to transmit their confidences to the prosecutor, the investigating judge, or the sentence enforcement judge; sincerity would amount to throwing oneself into the den of the wolf. You know it as well as I: prison is a school of hypocrisy…The penal system is in fact twice responsible for child murders: initially because it creates the future rapist by condemning the child to the failure of his Oedipal impulses; upon arrival, by transforming sexual crimes into blood crimes through fear. Should the fight against pedophilia be abolished? This would suit you well… We do not make essential impulses disappear by imposing a taboo on them. The prohibition condemns them to repression, and repression condemns them to deviation.The choice is not: repress the child’s impulses, or let them express themselves; but let them express themselves in a constructive form, or in a destructive form.In the current climate of psychosis, we risk making serious mistakes. The additional repression intended to eradicate sexual crimes only risks multiplying and aggravating them. Blind repression, based on a systematic confusion between love and crime, can only make the situation worse.The fight against adultery has lasted millennia, it has only resulted in unnecessary deaths and tragedies. She damaged how many romantic and marital relationships, only to end up failing. Just like homophobia. We destroyed geniuses, poets like Oscar Wilde, in the name of a theory which made them monsters or sick people.Today, pedophobia has taken over.However, the situation is more serious, because it does not only involve adult victims. The real consequence of the current witch hunt is that it will soon condemn all the children of the world to an even more total repression of their sexuality, and to a vision of love tainted with fear and horror. The unknown adult is portrayed to them as a potential monster; distrust and denunciation are their only salvation. Every school trip, every summer camp, every priest or every educator is a cause of anxiety for them. What will be the results of this permanent haunting on their psychic structures?You cannot cure an illness without understanding its causes. As long as the plague bacillus had not been discovered, epidemics spread, amid general psychosis, without any concrete measure being possible. This is exactly what happens with child rapists. We will only overcome psychosis by understanding the real causes of their pathology. And by ceasing to confuse them with those who act, or would like to act, for the good of the child. And what do you suggest, on a practical level? The problem will not find a real solution until we understand the true purpose of human sexuality. As long as we think in terms of pleasure, we will not be able to put the problem into an equation. Exactly like in mathematics: when a parameter is missing, the solution remains impossible.In the current idea of ​​sex, repressing infantile impulses amounts to depriving children of a pleasure, just as we forbid them wine or cigarettes. The goal is to preserve their integrity and seems perfectly laudable. If we know that this repression prevents them from developing an essential part of their being, we are forced to reason differently. Rejecting their impulses amounts to condemning them to a disability from which they will suffer for the rest of their lives. Has a double disability: to neurosis, and to the inability to develop their extrasensory faculties. Faced with such an assessment, any somewhat responsible adult can only question current education methods.But this can only be done very slowly. In the current context, any sexual experience that a child would have with an adult would be a source of trauma and would compromise their psychosexual development.The legislation is perfectly adapted to the social situation. It is this social situation that is not adapted to the needs of the child. That’s not what you seemed to be saying when you accused the law of being the cause of repressed œdipus and neurosis… Current legislation is not the root cause of this situation. It maintains it, but it is rather its consequence. The ban has become necessary to protect the child against the degradation of adult sexuality.Our Western civilization has fallen into a gigantic vicious circle. The IMP began to deteriorate thousands of years ago, as evidenced by myths. with each generation, parents were less able to experience love on a level that allowed the child to realize his or her metasexual urges; the latter, having become an adult in his turn, was still in worse shape than his predecessors. The situation could only deteriorate further, leading to the general phobia of masturbation and orgasm, which marked the complete disappearance of IMP.The situation has remained almost stagnant for two or three centuries. The child, no longer finding the energy he is looking for anywhere, automatically represses his own impulses and seems to spontaneously embark on the path to neurosis. We have become accustomed to considering Oedipal trauma as a constant in human nature. We no longer know what normal sexuality should be. An inconsiderate change in legislation would only be dangerous: it would lead adults to believe that they are capable of responding to the child’s request. The shock with degraded sexuality would be a new cause of trauma. You still lock the problem into a dilemma: whatever we do, there is trauma. Don’t you have an idea in your head, for example that the shock with adult sexuality would be less serious than the trauma due to rejection? The question arises: is it better to completely reject the “incestuous” sexuality of the child, or to change the law and maintain, for example, only the prohibition of coercion and seduction?To answer this question objectively, one must first examine the extent to which the trauma theory is justified.On the occasion of my Swiss trial, a doctor friend brought together all the psychiatric work available at the time on victims of indecent assault: none of this work concluded that there was trauma due to the relationship itself. Except in cases where there has been violence, the trauma is always the result of family reactions, police interrogations, legal intervention, or abandonment by the adult. There, you contradict yourself: a moment ago, you yourself were talking about trauma… I was talking about the trauma due to the shock with adult sexuality, degraded by the effect of repression. According to this work, we must believe that this shock causes a less serious trauma than the general trauma due to the repressed œdipus, since it goes unnoticed. It is also better for parents to give their child bad food than no food at all.The theory of trauma, on which the legislation is based, dates back to the beliefs that inspired Charcot. Freud demonstrated the aberration over a hundred years ago. Today it has come back into fashion, perhaps as an outlet for aggressive impulses which can no longer be discharged as they did then against unmarried mothers and homosexuals. Generalized repression means that we need a scapegoat for sexual suffering. Today it is the child-adult relationship that bears the blame.The psychosis is such that professionals are forced to follow suit. They play on the confusion between the trauma supposedly resulting from the adult relationship, and the very real trauma due to the brutal separation and the guilt which mark all these affairs. Psychoanalysts who do not howl with the wolves will be blacklisted. People need to see evil somewhere, just as the devil was seen everywhere in the witchcraft trials. It’s a way of externalizing a frustration that we cannot express, that of the metapsychic dimension of love.From what I have experienced in my own experience as a « victim », the trauma is non-existent if the impulse comes from the child, provided that the adult is content to respond without ever resorting to seduction, nor of course to coercion. As much as the trauma is serious when it comes to assault or rape, it is just as legendary when the child can guide the relationship, without feeling obliged to do what he himself does not have the impulse to do. The improvement obtained in the repression of the œdipus largely compensates for the imperfections of the adult response, provided that the adult has a minimum of sensitivity.Without forgetting the trauma of young people who are pushed by general psychosis or the lure of compensation to make false accusations!To escape the vicious circle, I believe it would be enough to modify the law so as to prohibit all forms of seduction and aggression, while tolerating a relationship based on love. How would you like us to be able to distinguish between a relationship based on love and a relationship of seduction… It’s technically impossible. You are able to determine whether someone signed a contract under duress, or whether they did so freely. It is easier to discern whether a child is acting out of love or fear. As long as you don’t make him feel guilty when you question him. If we tell him that what he did was wrong, as is usual in this type of investigation, he is obliged to blame the adult. Everything is distorted in advance.Imagine if he came to say that he was happy to experience such love, he would be called perverted or unconscious. His family must play the same game: if they sided with him, he would immediately be placed in a home. Under these conditions, no child can say that he was happy in a relationship with an adult, and the snake bites its tail. The adult is also forced to lie, to pass himself off as crazy, in the hope of mollifying his judges. And everyone can comfort themselves with the idea that such a relationship is necessarily harmful and the pedophile necessarily psychopathic.I believe that mathematically there is only one solution, if we one day want to get out of the impasse: start by rehabilitating the subtle function of sexuality, by giving young adults and young parents the necessary theoretical elements. It would be enough to introduce these notions into sex education lessons at school. Would you like us to tell children that they can freely fuck whoever they want? And you are surprised that you are accused of corruption of minors… They are told that their body belongs to them! Yes, but in the sense that they don’t have to accept advances from anyone. Their body is not theirs if they are not allowed to experience the love they feel they need! This is a form of youth fraud.But you make me say what I don’t want to say. My idea is not to advise schoolchildren to have sexual relations, that would be to introduce the intellect where it has no place, and destroy in advance the possibility of access to the metapsychic function of love.On the other hand, I think that we could very well explain to young people that human sexuality is different from that of animals. That great philosophers have long seen that there are two sexual functions,one which serves to produce children, the other whose purpose is much more subtle. This would be an opportunity to reread Plato by understanding what he says. Without redacting the passages which are ultimately the most important of his teaching. These young people, once they become parents, risk transgressing the law if we put it in their heads that the impulses of their children need a response… It would of course be necessary to explain to them that the penal code must be respected. But laws always end up changing, depending on public awareness. Countries that sanctioned homosexuality when it was considered an illness no longer sanction it since it was recognized as a general phenomenon.There are actually more parents than you might think who have questions about their children’s sexuality. They intuitively feel that the rejection of infantile impulses is harmful. But they cannot talk about it publicly, because of the psychosis that reigns on this subject.I think many people are ready to understand that it is the duty of every parent to help the child express his natural impulses, even if they seem contrary to current morality. People are not that far from admitting that sexuality could have a spiritual function. The Kama Sutras are widely known, no one seems to be outraged anymore. Even moralists would benefit from the idea that pornography would lose all interest if we rediscovered the meaning of the sacred phallus…I would not be surprised if one day, sooner than we imagine, the law punishes parents who do not respond to the incestuous impulses of their children, since they condemn them to neurosis and extrasensory failure… Isn’t the law made to protect against harm? You can demonstrate to me everything you want, if a pedophile touches one of my kids, I will have to hold back so as not to blow his brains out! What if it’s your child who falls in love with an adult? Whose brains will you blow out?Rather, we must ask ourselves why most adults can’t stand the idea of ​​children being able to freely experience their romantic impulses. Of course the image of the pedophile who abuses a child’s innocence is intolerable. Nothing is more serious than altering the ability to experience love.But here it is: the fact of forbidding the child from experiencing the impulses that he feels for the adult has equally serious consequences: it is condemning him to repression, to neurosis, and to the failure of IMP. Logically, you should also blow the brains out of those who prevent your children from living their impulses…Freud explained it a long time ago: anything that evokes the Oedipal conflict is unbearable. Even if you do everything to imagine your child happy to receive the love of an adult, you are reactivating the suffering accumulated in your unconscious during the rejections you suffered in your own childhood. I don’t remember any such suffering… Of course: they were turned away. You can no longer comprehend them consciously.Do you know the primal scream technique? It is a method proposed by an American psychiatrist, Janov, inspired by the work of Reich. It consists of relaxing the patient using different techniques until he releases his unconscious contents. We then see people rolling around on the ground screaming in pain, uttering insults or death threats against their parents. This is what we have deep in the unconscious, the results of the good morality of enlightenment…The same contents are activated as soon as any scene or representation evokes the drama of the œdipus. Burning the brains of an individual who is simply sensitive enough to understand your child’s need for love allows you to avoid the resurgence of your old suffering. Current psychosis is fueled by the same unconscious pains. It is to keep them repressed that for two centuries, sexual aggression and the response to the child’s impulses have been conflated. To cry haro about incest and pedophilia is to say: I have not suffered from the rejection of my own infantile impulses, and my children do not suffer from the repression that I impose on them.An irrational attitude always hides unconscious conflicts. When you see Marc Dutroux, Heaulmes, how do you expect us to ask questions about pedophilia! The correct reaction would be to ask how our society can produce monsters capable of kidnapping and killing children. Even if we believe in karma, in the incarnation of a demon, we must wonder why the methods of education could not prevent the child that they themselves once were from reaching such extremes. It is not because some [men rape women that we should prohibit heterosexual relationships. It is not because monsters rape children that any response to the child’s impulses would be monstrosity.Or else, we would have to go back and blow the brains out of all our ancestors, for whom the child-adult relationship was a customary thing. To Rabelais, for example, who speaks of the « distractions » that nurses provided to their charges, obeying an ancient tradition…Heroard left us very precise descriptions of the way children were raised before Puritanism. He recorded in a chronicle of ten thousand pages every moment of the life of little Louis XIII, in particular everything which concerned sexuality: « the Marquise de Verneuil passed her hand under his coat », « she played with his guillery », « he slept naked with his parents », « he touched the penis of his governess and noticed that there was water in it »… You would have had pages of minutes. In the past, children’s rights were not respected. It was considered normal to make kids work more than fifteen hours a day in factories… This happened especially during the era of Puritanism. We began to exploit children, at the same time as we prohibited them from having love with adults. This is no coincidence. A boomerang effect of repression… If morality was able to impose itself, it is because it corresponded to a need. In medical need!There was great anxiety about the illness at the time. We were barely emerging from the great epidemics of the Middle Ages, there were no antibiotics, and we no longer believed enough in demons to explain the various pathologies by evil spirits. A scapegoat was needed. Something which appears abnormal on a conscious level, and which is the object of unconscious guilt in order to attract the support of crowds.This was the case with masturbation: we could find no justification for it based on the equation « sexuality = reproduction », something particularly embarrassing at a time when we claimed to explain everything by reason. Moreover, it took on an unusual importance after the introduction of new colonial products, most of them aphrodisiacs. The more frequent masturbation that parents observed in their children could only worry them and make them feel guilty because they themselves had increased sexual excitement. Doctors, eager to find a cause to which to attribute illnesses, followed by moralists, who used a scientific pretext to strengthen their power, did not fail to jump at the opportunity. They met with massive success with the public. In one or two generations, repressive morality spread throughout Europe and as far as America. What about the Church{e=« orgName » ref=« https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9592 »)? Everyone knows that she was the first to pursue impurity… Error: The Church{e=« orgName » ref=« https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q9592 ») did not follow suit until half a century later. If she had not followed suit, she would have left her customers there…The ban initially focused on “solitary vice”. We imagined that masturbation was highly harmful, we spoke of destruction of the genitals. The loss of sperm was a loss of vital energy, emptying the spinal cord of its substance all the way to the brain. We observed the insane in psychiatric clinics and found that they masturbated, so the vice was the cause of their dementia.A real psychosis has spread across the Western world: attributing all kinds of illnesses to a sexual cause for which nothing objectively proves the harmfulness is frankly madness. Masturbation may have served as an outlet for the guilt already induced by the Inquisition in previous centuries. But the phenomenon took off around 1750.Morality only prohibited the child-adult relationship at a later stage, with the aim of protecting the child against premature initiation and avoiding the catastrophic consequences of orgasm, the spasms of which could be fatal. The penal code criminalized indecent assault for the first time in 1832, four generations after the ban on masturbation. Self-satisfaction can still be harmful, by closing the child in on himself… You’re a generation or two behind. Statistics have shown that children who masturbate perform better in school and are better prepared for their future sex lives. This is not surprising, because the œdipus is less brutally repressed when the sexual impulses can be expressed at least through self-satisfaction.Many reasons suggest that the new morality was not really aimed at the good of the child: the methods used to combat infantile onanism had all the appearance of sadism and perversion.The boys were given a shell with spikes inside, so as to make any erection painful. Other shells were fitted with an electrical contact which set off a ringtone in the parents’ bedroom. The girls were infibulated, bringing the labia majora together. When we realized that it was ineffective against the sensitivity of the clitoris, we infibulated the labia minora. Some doctors suggested burning the clitoris or glans with a hot iron. There was talk of resorting to excision, boys were systematically threatened with castration. The Prussian government proposed a law which obliged young soldiers, with an income below a certain minimum, to undergo a sort of infibulation: a ring had to be placed in the foreskin to prevent any manipulation, a law was proposed to parliament in order to establish general inspections…We also used bandages which prevented children from lowering their hands below the belt during the night, we prescribed toxic drinks supposed to cool desire, we coated the glans with silver nitrate to make it suppurate. Read “The History of Sexual Repression” by van Ussel, published by Laffont, you will see that I am not exaggerating. Everything was harder than today in those times, think of the Terror, the cruelty of torture, the death penalty… I rather believe that the Terror and the guillotine are a consequence of the neurosis which set in under the effect of this sexual repression.The best-selling work denouncing the alleged harms of masturbation, written by a certain Dr. Tissot, dates from 1750. Childhood sexuality was then more severely repressed and blamed than ever before. So the œdipus is more seriously repressed and the father’s fantasies of murder are necessarily more violent. As luck would have it, forty years later, the French killed their father… You mean their king? The image of the king is the projection of the image of the father. Was the French Revolution a consequence of sexual repression? You will have made them all for us… A consequence of the sudden worsening of neurosis, why not? The other causes, economic and political, which historians teach, remain what they are. But we do not have the right to neglect the influence of a change occurring in the psychic structures of individuals. If this stood up, psychoanalysts would have seen it a long time ago… A rational approach is not necessarily safe from taboos. As proof, Freudianism…The political behavior of a nation depends on the psychological structures of individuals. We know today that the father’s fantasies of murder are directly related to the repression of childhood sexuality. Infantile sexuality suffered unprecedented repression under the influence of morality which took hold shortly before the Revolution. It goes without saying that we must ask ourselves to what extent the rejection of the monarchy is a consequence of transformations in sexual morality.The relationship of the people to the king was based on the love of the child for the father and on confidence in a spiritual dimension supposed to inspire the holders of power. The “monarchy of divine right” was not a linguistic artifice intended to impress the common people: this notion dates from before the aggravation of Oedipal repression, therefore from a time when the metapsychic functioned better. Royalty was a remnant of the « hierarchy » of the ancients, in the original sense of « command by the sacred »: the power entrusted to those who had extrasensory. I don’t know if we can say that Louis XVI commanded from the sacred. See Marie-Antoinette’s love for jewelry, the exploitation of the people, the flight to Varenne… You are preaching for my parish: it is because infantile sexuality has been repressed that extrasensory perception has been swept away from our culture and the sacred has become an empty word. Louis XVI received a very strict Catholic education, his sexual « initiation » had nothing to compare with that of Louis XIII{e=« persName ref= »https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q737533”}. His weakness of character, his interest in locksmithing, his hesitations, his lack of courage are indicative of a neurotic psychological structure. Just like the superficiality of Marie-Antoinette and her bad influence in the critical moments of the Revolution. Leaders have lost the subtle “connection” that gave power meaning. As for those being led, they no longer had the points of reference which would have allowed them, through their own experience of the metapsychic, to understand the meaning of a « connected » power.A revealing detail: Marie-Antoinette was criticized for making the dolphin sleep in her bed… Do you consider the Revolution a mistake? Crime is never the solution, even if it is committed in the name of the people, or in the name of an ideal. The horrors that followed, Doctor Guillotin, the years of Terror, the Vendée wars and all the rest, could have served as a lesson. It took the typical example of authority disconnected, with Bonaparte, the debacles and cruelties revealing a power based on the ego, compulsory conscription as a proof of love for young people, to initiate awareness. Alas, this awareness was buried in the Pantheon, the halo of glory masked the reality of history, and the number of deaths.A good century later, Hitler made us repeat the lesson… Because Nazism was a lesson… It may have been necessary to push the anti-Semitism, which reigned at the time, to such extremes that the whole world ended up asking: why this visceral hatred against the Jews? How come people can kill in the name of a race or religion?These murderous forces necessarily have their source in the unconscious, we must therefore ask ourselves what the image of the Jew symbolizes in the unconscious of a Christianized society. Some say that Christians blame the Israelites for the murder of Christ. I believe the real cause is deeper: in our culture, the people of Israel embody the error denounced in Genesis, the loss of the transcendent dimension of love.For the unconscious, nothing is worse than the loss of IMP and its spiritual outcomes. Anti-Semitism seems to me to be the result of Excalibur impulses which, failing to be able to denounce the true cause of this loss, find a scapegoat in a people who have become, despite themselves, a symbol of original sin. Originally, the verb to sin meant « to miss the mark »: the crux of the problem is that the IMP misses its mark. From time to time it takes a great catastrophe to curb the Excalibur impulses that are accumulating. Anti-Semitism did not really disappear after the war… Exactly: it will exist in the West as long as the transcendent dimension of love and sexuality has not been rediscovered. As long as we do not understand the mechanisms of the trap into which our civilization has fallen.The same goes for other holy wars. Only understanding the unconscious mechanisms that have maintained them for millennia could stop the process. It will undoubtedly take a memorable clash between Islam and Judeo-Christianity for us to realize that the two cultures are the heirs of the same initial error.For the sake of theory: the divergence between these religious streams can be traced back to a failed triangular constellation. Ishmael and Isaac are the children of Abraham, who did not know how to make love reign between his servant and his wife, their respective mothers. An articulation of history where love of love gave way to rivalry, the consequences of which we are still suffering now.After the last war, the unconscious forces tending to restore the reign of love reached a climax. May 68 was, so to speak, the moral of the fable: “Make love, not war”. The motto was not there to encourage people to have fun in sex rather than in bombs, as some may have believed. It is much more an emanation from the unconscious, supposed to remind us that the desire to wage war comes from a dysfunction of the sexual instinct: “Live love as it should be lived, you will no longer massacre your fellow human beings”…A way of saying that the precondition of love of neighbor is love itself. It hasn’t changed much, apart from a few hairy sixty-eighters and a little more libertinism! The first intuitions got stuck in an impasse.The liberation of sex could only lead to the sterility of pleasure. Just read the theorists of the time: their reasoning is always based on the right to pleasure. However, pleasure rhymes with desire, the rediscovery of the transcendent function of love was doomed in advance to failure.The discomfort that we hear in the term “sixty-eight” reflects the disappointment of the unconscious, it is in fact an Excalibur impulse of the entire population. Everyone feels that this freedom was not true freedom. The youth revolution has transformed into a gigantic orgy, seasoned with drugs of all kinds, which has not contributed much to spiritual life.Although… we still observe a bundle of forces which seem to be seeking new paths. “Channeling”, psychosomatic medicines, parapsychology, sects of all kinds… With all the excesses that this represents.The collective unconscious will continue its painful quest for the Grail until the day when love has recovered its sacred function…How to understand Love,if we do not understand the Child within us.And how to understand the Child,if we do not understand Love…
Afterword Justice claims to work for the manifestation of the truth. But what is truth? The representation of an act emptied of its content is no longer the truth. By emptying experience of its content, judicial discourse on sex creates the untruths it needs to exist.Sexuality without love is a perversion and inspires disgust. Presenting a sexual act outside of its romantic meaning belies reality. It is to reduce the innocent to the indecent, the noble to the ignoble, the sublime to the infamous.Representing love outside of its transcendent meaning is a second lie, which reduces the sacred to the sentimental, the timeless to the temporal, the divine to the human.To imagine the relationship between the child and the adult as a relationship of constraint, of fear, of slavery, when it comes to shared love, is one more lie which reduces, in the name of simplistic arithmetic, beauty to ugliness, of self-sacrifice to bestiality, happiness to shame.Thus, the judicial discourse offers to the judgment of jurors and magistrates a thrice-falsified reconstruction of reality.When, moreover, the accusations themselves are false, an increasingly frequent situation following the current witch-hunt situation, we are four times in miscarriage of justice.As much as the fight against rape and sexual assault is urgent, the systematic amalgamation of love with horror in the name of arbitrary figures leads to tragedies that will one day appear worthy of the excesses of the Inquisition. Everything is organized to affix to the forbidden relationship the diabolical iconography of the child devourer, today renamed pedophile, on which the collective unconscious feeds to obscure the omnipresence of sexual failure.The “victim” of a love affair deviating from the penal code is obliged to rework his memory of the experience. Telling the truth, that she was happy, or even the initiator of the relationship, would cause her to be accused of perversion. The child has no other solution, to redeem himself, than to rally to the consensus imposed on him by the adult world: hence an inner conflict which results in latent resentment either against this adult world, or against the adult he loved and whom he must forget.This process is not only the effect of a denunciation and its legal consequences. It occurs insidiously even when the law of silence reigns, due to the pressure of guilt induced by the fear of potential denunciation, by the weight of secrecy which is its corollary. The child knows that he would be considered corrupt if he surrendered his heart to popular vindictiveness. The fears of those around him, the suspicions he may fear, teach him not to be himself. The morality supposed to protect him puts him in contradiction with his most intimate emotions.As time passes, he slowly reworks the memory of this unspeakable happiness and gives it the only form that can free him from others. He blames his « aggressor » for having been able to discover a paradise world that the majority portrays to him as being the work of the devil. He finds himself guilty of having loved in innocence. For having had what is forbidden to others and which he cannot share with anyone.Thus a victimization takes place which, when it is consciously expressed in the form of accusation or testimony, allows the judge and the psychiatrist to comfort themselves in the idea that the relationship experienced was perverse and traumatic. No magistrate, no expert could venture to face reality: that the false morality in the name of which they are preparing to destroy lives has produced the evil they intend to condemn. Augmenting evil in a hated love is necessary for them to silence the hurt caused to them by the failure of their own childhood loves.All adults who had a loving relationship before the regulatory age limits find themselves in this situation. Only silence allows them to let the conflict dissolve in a slow process of forgetting. To preserve in them the precious memory of the subtle delights on which they can, better than others, combine love in the present. To protect their inner world against those who would hasten to wreak havoc there under the pretext of morality and concern.The campaign undertaken against the law of silence, highly useful when it comes to authentic acts of mistreatment, unfortunately has immeasurable perverse effects when it is carried out at the expense of false victims, forced to align themselves with the dominant hypocrisy and play the role that society imposes on them.I speak from experience. The only difference is that I was only able to take on this role for a limited time. In the euphoria of marriage, I first convinced myself that the loves I experienced in my childhood were unnatural and had traumatized me. The situation was comfortable, I thus found an alibi for each of my failings. If I had discomfort in the relationship, it was because my sexuality was still marked by an early awakening. If I felt fragile in the face of the aggressiveness of others, it was because my Self had been poorly structured, due to the lack of an intransgressible intergenerational barrier. If I was too moved by a child’s grief, it was because I had not learned in time to curb my own desires.It took me years to realize that this decoding of reality could be turned around like a glove. That marital unease was an indication of a fundamental error in the Judeo-Christian conception of sexuality. That the ambient aggressiveness stemmed from a general frustration and denounced the threat hidden in the sacrament of the normalized couple. That the child’s true sorrow, which underlies all the others, is that the adult denies him the essential response to his most inalienable need, the need for unconditional love and the unhindered development of his transcendent potentialities.Denying all this, or hiding it, would certainly have been easier: it would have allowed me to avoid the serious problems that marked my trajectory. To avoid rumors, hatred, career breakdowns, legal problems, prison, excommunication by the media. To settle into a professional situation which promised to be rewarding on all levels: family, social, financial, and which I had to give up to devote myself to an uncertain quest.But, on a deeper level, it would have been a betrayal. A betrayal of my own destiny: the negation of a part of my being which has known the beauty of this love of the child for the adult and of its natural realization. Worse still: from a part of my being which has known this ineffable relationship between love and the miracle of the extrasensory, with the presentiment of their irreplaceable function in an authentic spiritual destiny.A betrayal towards others, too: it would have been to refuse, to those who seek it because they suffer from a fundamental lack, an essential key that our culture has buried under a heap of hazardous traditions, and that the avatars of destiny have given me to rediscover.A betrayal, again, in the face of the scientific spirit which I am convinced will be able to help future generations to untangle the Gordian knot of which we are prisoners. Concealing a truth, the forgetting of which can have incalculable consequences on the future of our society and on the future of each person, is a guilt that I would not want to take beyond the grave. I prefer to die misunderstood, pursued, banished, condemned to anything, but to have done everything so that these discoveries will one day make their way. Having done my best to formulate them and integrate them into a deciphering grid that is accessible to everyone.Everything I have experienced, observed and experienced has convinced me that there will be no other solution for our society than to face reality. The reality of who we are, what our instincts are, starting with the instincts of our children. And to assume our responsibilities as adults, the first of which is to agree to question our taboos and our chimeras. We don’t build much solid things on foundations that contradict nature.There is nothing stronger in human nature than the power of love, whatever the age of the individual and whatever the morality of the moment. Defying this force inevitably leads to disaster, as repressed impulses eventually come out in one form or another. If some follow the hypothetical path of sublimation, others inevitably take paths of destruction, or self-destruction.This is perhaps the ultimate meaning of the witch hunt on which the West has embarked since the Middle Ages, until its latest avatar, the hunt for pedophiles. The Puritan illusion, under the pretext of ridding human beings of their animality, ended in the catastrophe of a planetary neurosis. And we are far from having emerged from this deleterious detour in our history.By now repressing infantile impulses more violently than ever, in all children who are taught from kindergarten that every adult is a potential pervert, we are preparing an even more worrying boomerang effect. In the haste to protect innocence against a constant threat of corruption, we condemn our offspring to experience their essential adult impulses as an unspeakable perversion. They have no other way to socialize than to nip in the bud the vital forces that would give them a chance to live their own truth. We only allow them to assert themselves by denying themselves.The wave of violence which is affecting ever younger sections of the population is none other than the natural reaction to this new wave of repression. Young people, incapable of explaining the conflict that is inscribed in their hearts under the pretext of normality, have as their only means of expression the rejection of a system whose aberration they sense. Violence or suicide are the means at their disposal to make the adult world reflect on the monumental error which taints the Cartesian conception of love and being.Protecting innocence presupposes respecting the child as nature intended. Putting it in conflict with its primordial aspirations constitutes real corruption. Denying him his fundamental right to love exacerbates his flight and destructiveness. When the children of this generation become adults, these same impulses will also have grown and will take forms that should make us reflect on the already worrying figures for young delinquency.We always come back to the same point: the incredible misunderstanding that marks our modern times is rooted in the ridiculous equation of the Enlightenment: “sex = reproduction”. And this equation itself arises from the age-old divide between body and mind. There will be, in my opinion, no other way than to return to the original monism: that which had not yet dissociated knowledge and enjoyment, love and sexuality, paranormal and divinity.We believe we have made significant progress through these differentiations. In fact, we have simply lost sight of the fundamental unity of a reality onto which our mind only knows how to project the divisions specific to its analytical forms. The avalanche of contradictions and conflicts that ensue is the inevitable consequence of the overinvestment of reason, supposed to replace the lost communication with a cosmos, half of which escapes us. Obsessed with our knowledge, we no longer see the fundamental unity which should harmonize the joys of the body and the joys of the spirit. Love is transcendence, and leads to transcendence. But transcendence escapes our rational analysis. The failure of love locks us in a vicious circle from which neither materialist philosophies nor religious beliefs can extract us.The only path that is not a dead end seems to me to be the return to nature. Not in the sense of renouncing technical and scientific progress. On the contrary, we will be able to use the tools that the Enlightenment has made available to us to better recognize natural laws and mark the rational path that leads to the irrational.Science will never provide us with the materials necessary to build our spiritual dimension. But a better knowledge of matters of matter and biology can help us decipher the errors that prevent us from moving forward on the path to true Knowledge.The good surprise that this return to the sources has in store for us is that it is enough to dissolve the taboos crystallized around the age-old suffering generated by the loss of the transcendent function of love. As soon as the obstacles melt away, the subtle progression towards what is the ultimate meaning of our earthly existences resumes spontaneously. Because this is how the mystery of the loving beings that we are and that we always will be dictates.Too bad Plato is not there: today he would have far more powerful instruments to explain this philosophical love whose merits he praised. And to give us back with him access to the food of the Gods…
It is not the adult who should be given the right to love the child. It is the child who must be given back the right to love the adult.
Cover text Building on Freud’s discovery of infantile sexuality, G. C. Burger developed his theory of metapsychoanalysis. While psychoanalysis is essentially a study of illness and is less interested in the situation of the healthy person, Burger focused his attention on the latter. He describes the human condition, notably its development in the context of instinctive nutrition, or alliesthesia, as he studied it with a group of people around him, and as it is described in his widely distributed work “Eating True”. His central discovery is that infantile sexuality serves the development of extrasensory faculties. If this development is disturbed, the result is not only neurosis with its alteration of libidinal energy, but also a loss of spiritual faculties as a source of energy, a growing feature of our Western society. He manages to bridge the fundamental difference between Freud and C.G. Jung, both victims of the prejudices of a culture that was both materialistic and puritanical, one rejecting the extrasensory and the other sexual morality, which led to the first split in psychoanalytic theory. The consequences he describes, drawn from his postulate for psychoanalytic theory, are surprising and far-reaching, while remaining faithful to rigorous scientific logic. They convincingly reorganize Freud’s theories on sexuality where they are obscure or insufficient. In short, a book which, through its radical questioning of our culture, has something of the same provocative force that the discoveries of Freud had for his time. This work, of great interest not only for psychoanalysts but for anyone interested in the human condition as a whole, deserves wide distribution. It could become the foundation of a new visionary guide in our materialist world, where man is still only an economic object. Dr. Angela Köhler-Weisker, M.D.Doctor of psychotherapyPediatric psychoanalyst.Member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA)
Biography

Guy-Claude Burger is one of those spirits who do not hesitate to rattle the foundations of a society. Born in 1934 in Lausanne, he began by being a brilliant student of the classics, then of science, in physics and mathematics. His professors found themselves up against a merciless critical sense which he turned against accepted ideas, but which did not prevent him from regularly taking prizes for the best general average, for Latin and for mathematics. He completed his university studies just as brilliantly, taught upper class descriptive geometry and physics, then replaced his physics professor at the University.

But rational science did not respond to his deeper aspirations. He hoped then to realize them in art, completed musical studies, obtained the first jury prize for virtuosity with distinction. A winner of the international competition in musical execution in Geneva, he traveled the world as a cello soloist, played with great soloists such as Yehudi Menuhin, Gaspard Cassado, Hephzibah Menuhin, and was enriched by their philosophies.

When his wife was expecting their first child, his career was brutally interrupted by a cancer which left him, at the age of twenty six, only a small chance for survival. Seeing the powerlessness of medicine to either explain or cure the disease, he decided to dedicate his remaining years to an unconditional research into the causes of cancer and of suffering in general. On the lookout for errors committed by civilization against natural laws, he formulated, in 1964 a hypothesis still hidden by medical science: is the human organism genetically adapted to the dietary conditions that have been instituted since the origins of culture? Is man programmed to eat cooked food or to eat raw food, is his metabolism prepared for the new molecules brought by cereal grains and animal milk, don’t the culinary artifices distort the sense of taste and don’t they explain the loss of the dietary instinct, common to other species of animals?

Burger soon found himself at the start of an experiment unique in the world: he was able to observe the effects of a Paleolithic diet, stripped of all culinary artifice, as well as the functioning of the dietary instinct, in thousands of people, over periods ranging up to thirty years. Following improvements he observed in health and in the psychic state of the participants, he enlarged his field of questioning: is the human psyche genetically adapted to the conditions of civilized life and to the taboos of morality, notably in sexual matters?

Followed there, too, by many people passionately devoted to his research, he formulated, in 1977, a postulate which puts into question the totality of psychoanalysis and of the humanities: that human sexuality, in particular infantile sexuality, has, besides reproduction, an essential function hidden by our rational culture: the development of extrasensory faculties.

A searcher of the soul, but profoundly Cartesian, Burger based this revolutionary postulate on meticulous observations of paranormal phenomena, which proved to be linked to a certain way of experiencing love, close to the Kama Sutras and to the teachings of antiquity. He today proposes a carefully constructed and verified thesis, metapsychoanalysis, explaining by novel and fundamental means the many difficulties peculiar to our Judeo-Christian society: marital problems, adultery, jealousy, education of children, problems in schools, depression, dissatisfaction, exclusion, homosexuality, repressive morality, sexual perversions.

With, at the center of this work, the problem of the Œdipus complex and of pedophilia.