Sitting in a tiny house in Iquitos, Peru, waiting for departure time on the boat going up the Amazon, the Acuyasco, and finally the dead-tree infested Aucayacu (Demon River) to camp deep in the jungle.  The guide handed me an autographed copy of Peter Gorman’s book, a regular visitor.  Paging through Gorman’s experiences with native shamans, it struck me that sex addicts and sex offenders have never had an orgasm of the soul.  Their lives pursue perfect images that magnify physio-emotional orgasm to the nth degree, but no orgasm of the soul – something big enough to engage them in a life reaching into every crevice, bringing a sense of meaning, pleasure, and passion, convulsing their starved psyches to a fever pitch commensurate with the cybersex orgasms they’ve been chasing into the wee hours of the night.

James Hillman’s thought soon followed: “one hundred years of psychotherapy and the world is getting worse.”  Hillman believes our extreme focus on feelings and self-satisfaction turn us away from the outer world and its needs; we neglect politics, the environment, the future – the world goes to hell while we try to feel better about ourselves. 

Modern research in sexual behavior issues strongly suggests that clients need both approach and avoidance goals.  Avoidance goals are easy to come by, but approach goals are harder to come up with.

Then I am reminded of research I did years ago into the Polygraph and PPG (Penile Plethysmograph), discovering its roots in Carl Jung’s work on electro-galvanic skin response, along with evidence Jung gave the first court testimony related to what we now call the “lie detector.”  Simply put, the conscious and unconscious minds can run on separate tracks, which is why sex addiction and sex offenses can often be categorized as egodystonic.  The illicit and destructive sex act tends to be out of character with the personality or person that faces the world and out of sync with the values the citizen or offender lives by and professes the majority of the time. 

Just for a moment, let’s re-vision (in Hillmans’ honor) the lie detector itself.  The word “poly” means “many” – thus the polygraph is a way to prove there is life other than that presented on the surface in the facadomy we often mistake for normal and healthy life.  The polygraph proves there is another largely hidden life demanding sacrifice and attention and until it gets its due, it will, like the labyrinth and its minotaur, demand sacrifice after sacrifice: perhaps a hundred maidens a night, perhaps a thousand, however many naked or contorted or tortured bodies or fucking bodies it requires to keep the dead facade alive, or resembling life.  Poly – more than one life being lived, more than one set of rules.

That is why, seconds after orgasm in that prostitute or mistresses’ or lovers’ arms, the deadness and emptiness come rushing back in; or, the moment the Kleenex has wiped away the detritus of hours of Cyber-oriented sex pursuit, the dark anxiety obscures the screen of the window to one’s soul.  The feeble attempt to hold back the truth belies its reality again and again, thus pushing one back into the “addiction” again and again and again and again.  As they say, insanity is doing the same thing over and over and believing the outcome will change.

Alan Watts, a mystic of sorts, wrote MAN, WOMAN & NATURE, in which he discusses sex as the lowest common denominator of life – when we are dead and constricted and without meaning in every other way, there is still orgasm – it’s the last holdout.  By extrapolation, the pursuit of the orgasm is the last hope of those whose soul is in danger of extinction.

We have forgot the old battles of good and evil, except on the micro-level where we accuse our impotent selves, our addicted selves, of being evil – powerless as we are, and needing to actually declare that power-less-ness to begin the journey of healing, according to the 12-steppers.  The real evil may be how the pursuit of feeling better, of self-improvement, turns us away from the soul of the world (anima mundi).

I was recently struck, via a staff training, by DBT’s obvious homage to Freudian Psychology, dressed up certainly with an Eastern gown, but still about ego and core and the importance of creating a working relationship – a partnership – between what is visible and invisible, what is conscious (logical) and unconscious (emotional).  Milton Erickson went further, stating essentially that the ego alone makes a poor agent for change as it is filtered, defended, biased and often damaged as well.  The core, according to Erickson, is more dependable, assuming you find a way to communicate with it.

I’ve long advocated core-level change as the sine qua non for sex offenders.  The smallest amount of change on that level tends to be longer-lasting.  The ego needs to be in tune with that core-level change, not opposing it, and CBT, DBT and Relapse Prevention can, when used appropriately, help prepare the ground for longer-lasting change, should it happen.  On the other hand, over-reliance on CBT-based techniques can inadvertently contribute to further alienation of the core by exacerbating an already antagonistic dynamic between it and the ego.

In my opinion, core-level change is not an ongoing police state and regime of vigilance, but a fundamental change in how business is done.  Jonathan Stedler’s recent article on “The Efficacy of Psychodynamic Psychotherapy” underscores this: positive treatment effect can increase over time if the right core-level work is done, creating more of what DBT might call “the wise mind.” 

Packaging and re-packaging aside, effective treatment appears to require a partnership between ego and core, conscious and unconscious, not an estrangement, dismissal or exclusion.  The more solid that linchpin of psychodynamic work is, the more likely the change or improvement will hold up over time and under duress, which is what matters most, not how well they behave while under the spotlight of treatment.