Je ne sais quoi

You can't play the guitar like I do, with a certain I-don't-know-what that enlivens the spirit and makes monkeys chatter like magpies.

Life at work is bad coffee and eye strain.

I can't reach out for the fruit, low-hanging or giraffe-height. Are my arms too short?

What is happening here, now?

A Logic of Sexual Fantasy

I'm reading a good book about the psychology of sexual fantasy. It's called Arousal, and it's written by a psychotherapist in San Francisco named Michael Bader. I got interested in it when I heard him speak at a colloquium in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. His basic premise is that sexual fantasies are engineered by the unconscious mind to make us feel safe enough to get excited and experience pleasure. He believes that we acquire certain (largely unconscious) pathogenic beliefs as a result of trying to adapt to less-than-ideal family environments growing up. Since kids tend to take an ego-centric view of the world, it's common (he argues) for them to assume that they're responsible for bad things that happen in their family--parental neglect, anxiety, divorce, parental depression, etc. So the sex fantasies are constucted to negate these unconsciously held pathogenic beliefs. Imagine a man who grew up with a passive, depressed mother who had a hard time enjoying much in her life. As a kid, he may have concluded that he was somehow to blame for his mother's depression. As an adult, he might construct a fantasy (or merely express a preference) around women who are strong and dominant. Bader contends that the man would feel a sense of unconscious safety being with a strong and sexually powerful woman, because it would be obvious that she was not likely to get hurt by him (particularly by his sexual desire for her). He goes on to analyze some of the most common fantasies, including dominance and submission, youth/virginity, fetishes--he even finds a way to explain golden and brown showers in terms of psychological safety. Personally, I can think of many things that would make me feel more safe and sexual than having someone crapping on my head, but to each his own.