Fucking in Ritual Space

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In one way or another I've always suffered. I didn't know why exactly. But I do know that I'm not so scared of suffering now. I feel more than I've ever felt and I've found someone to feel with. To play with. To love in a way that feels right for me.

['Lee']
The Secretary


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Hillman: [In therapy] The sex addict needs to talk about pornography, about advertising, everything that is designed to turn you on.

Ventura: And everything designed to keep you repressed. The churches, Miss Manners -

Hillman: - and therapy's ideas of "relationship." In the sex addict, what kind of political awareness can you have about that? You wouldn't be for restrictions. My solution would be -

A long pause

Prostitution.

Ventura: Your credibility just took a very long walk on a very short pier. Prostitution so that -

Hillman: - so that the fantasy life would be freed.

Ventura: Heavy-duty bordellos. As in Genet's The Balcony, or in the Marquis de Sade. Yes. Yes!

Hillman: The classical bordellos that have been with us throughout history as part of high culture.

Ventura: I hear a chorus of, "Throughout the history of the patriarchy, you mean!" But prostitution appears to have started in the temples and rituals of what were still matriarchal religions. It was about fucking in ritual space -

Hillman: - as a sacred experience.

Ventura: And that's what a lot of so-called sex addiction is about - the search for fucking in ritual space. People will risk an enormous amount - their marriage, their jobs - to fuck in ritual space every now and again. Or you could put that a little harsher, as the puritan culture would, and say: people often take enormous risks to exercise their perversion.

Hillman: The only way you can understand some marriages, or why certain people stay together, is they've finally found someone they can share their perversion with.

Ventura: I like that. That's a reasonable reason to get married and a reasonable reason to stay married. Because what the society is calling a perversion you're feeling as a transcendent experience.

Hillman: That's where to go with dilmemmas of sex. Fucking in ritual space. It's not pictures of pussy or dick.

In the old-fashioned bordello the imagination of a person was cared for. Same for de Sade, which is a storybook of images. When the imagination of a person is not cared for we're left not only with what they now call sex addiction and sex therapy (which is a technology of sex and not the art of sex), but we're also left with the grandfather and the uncle who finger the little girls. Again, sex molestation and all that is partly a function of the repression of prostitution and of all sexuality not considered "normal."

[James Hillman]
with Michael Ventura
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy - And the World's Getting Worse, p.213, 214, 215


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Magic and Illusion

[In reference to religious rites and blessings] Everywhere and at all times there have been rites d'entreé et de sortie [rites that precede or proceed an event] whose magical efficacy is denied and which are impugned as magic and superstition by rationalists incapable of psychological insight.

But magic has above all a psychological effect whose importance should not be underestimated. The performance of a "magical" action gives the person concerned a feeling of security which is absolutely essential for carrying out a decision, because a decision is inevitably somewhat one-sided and is therefore felt to be a risk.

When the rationalist directs the main force of his attack against the magical effect of the rite as asserted by tradition, he has in reality completely missed the mark. The essential point, the psychological effect, is overlooked.

[C.G. Jung]
The Undiscovered Self, p.18, 19

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Magical practices are nothing but projections of psychic events, which then exert a counter-influence on the psyche and put a kind of spell upon the personality. Through the ritual action, attention and interest are led back to the inner, sacred precinct, which is the source and goal of the psyche and contains the unity of life and consciousness.

[C.G. Jung]
Psychology and the East, p.25

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By what criterion do we judge something to be an illusion? Does there exist for the psyche anything which we may call "illusion"? What we are pleased to call such may be for the psyche a most important factor of life - something as indispensable as oxygen for the organism - a psychic actuality of prime importance.

Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality, and it would therefore be the better part of wisdom for us to say: everything that acts is actual.

[C.G. Jung]
Modern Man In Search Of A Soul ('The Aims of Psychotherapy'), p.74

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For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

[William Wordsworth]
Passage from 'Daffodils'

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