Mental challenge

"During sex I fantasize that I'm someone else." (Richard Lewis)

Here is an excerpt by one of my most favorite writers/thinkers, Marie-Louise von Franz. This excerpt is from her book, 'Individuation in Fairy Tales.'

"...Sometimes, not only in those central moments, one has the feeling that the unconscious is now going to bring up something, and then one thinks inwardly, "All right, I will face everything, except I hope it is not this or that" - and then you can be pretty sure it will be just that. You have already a hunch as to what it will be and that it belongs to your personality, that thing of which you say, "I'll face anything except that"; it is just what belongs to you and your life. So very often the most important steps or episodes in one's life are surrounded by a cloud of resistance and fear. If one is quite honest with oneself, one does not even know if one desired or feared it most, for desire and fear are equal. The strange feeling of "that belongs but I won't have it" seems to belong typically to the areas of realization pushed toward one by the Self."

Not being a professional in the field of psychology allows me to comment freely. I like the quote simply because it points out that there is that rich area of everyone's life that seems to come up maybe in times of pain, maybe in times of joy, maybe periodically. It is an area that we don't particularly want, maybe we wish it would go away, maybe we fear it greatly. But according to Marie-Lousie it pushes you towards the Self.

Jungians capitalize the word self in this context, 'Self', because in their model, integration of Self or connecting with Self is a way of describing becoming completely human in the best sense. You become a highly realized person when this Self is understood.

So the idea here is that this thing that keeps reoccurring, and you may very well know what that is, is a type of sign or marker that may hold some very magical experience for you. Be kind to yourself.

Painting by Sol Lewitt