The Devils Inside Us
How sexual archetypes reveal our unconscious psyche
“I want you to rape me!” she said.
I played it cool as best I could. But in that moment my internal narrative split, responding with equal parts “Fuck yes!” and “Oh no, I would never do that; You see, what you’re saying is an oxymoron and we’re already having consensual sex.”
The woman I was in bed with wasn’t pathological. Outside of the bedroom she is a rational, successful woman. But in the altered consciousness of heightened arousal, something other than her rational faculties took over; something primal and ancestral. She was taken by a normally unconscious set of characteristics that Jungian psychology would call an “archetype”.
The part of me that was able to respond with “Fuck yes” was my complementary ‘masculine’ archetype. The part of me spewing a bunch of rational jumble was my controlling ego — that which kept me ‘in my head’ and held me back from full authentic expression.
Actually, the parts of us that were playing out this dark fantasy didn’t even belong to her and me individually. They were a part of the collective unconscious acting through us. They were characters in an eternal psychodrama playing out their missions.
