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The Human Depths
Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.
– Haruki Marukami
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My interest in Sade became serious shortly after I began practicing psychotherapy. Well-intentioned, upright, high-minded people would present dreams and fantasies filled with exquisite torture, murder, sexual perversion, and graphic scatology. They were disturbed by these dreams and assumed that they hinted at horrible repressed wishes or character disorders. But I had been prepared by my studies in archetypal psychology to understand the pathology in images as a genre of expression. So, I thought, if I do not moralize these dreams, then I need help approaching their imagery on its own terms. I need a guide who is consonant with their strange mystery rather than one who is moralistic and insensitive to their necessity. I sought out a specialist of this particular kind of imagination, and I was surprised to find the detail, the consistency, and the honesty of Sade’s fiction. If C. G. Jung resorts to imagery of the Old Testament to “amplify” a religious dream, then I could turn to Sade to intensify my appreciation of images from the outskirts of sexuality and the dregs of human behavior.
— Thomas Moore
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Maturity is knowing when to say no…
