The art of seduction 17: effect a regression
People who have experienced a certain kind of pleasure in the past will try to repeat or relive it. The deepest-rooted and most pleasurable memories are usually those from earliest childhood, and are often unconsciously associated with a parental figure. Bring your targets back to that point by placing yourself in the oedipal triangle and positioning them as the needy child. Unaware of the cause of their emotional response, they will fall in love with you. Alternatively, you too can regress, letting them play the role of the protecting, nursing parent. In either case you are offering the ultimate fantasy: the chance to have an intimate relationship with mommy or daddy, son or daughter.
[…]“The most attractive women,” it informs us, “are women full of maternal love. Women without maternal love are the types men never want to marry. . . . One has to look at men through the eyes of a mother.”
—IAN BURUMA, BEHIND THE MASK: ON SEXUAL DEMONS, SACRED MOTHERS, TRANSVESTITES, GANGSTERS, DRIFTERS AND OTHER JAPANESE CULTURAL HEROES
I have stressed the fact that the beloved person is a substitute for the ideal ego. Two people who love each other are interchanging their ego-ideals. That they love each other means they love the ideal of themselves in the other one. There would be no love on earth if this phantom were not there. We fall in love because we cannot attain the image that is our better self and the best of our self. From this concept it is obvious that love itself is only possible on a certain cultural level or after a certain phase in the development of the personality has been reached. The creation of an ego-ideal itself marks human progress. When people are entirely satisfied with their actual selves, love is impassible. · The transfer of the ego-ideal to a person is the most characteristic trait of love.
—THEODOR REIK, OF LOVE AND LUST
The transference effect was so potent, though, that Freud was often unable to move his patients past their infatuation. In fact transference is a powerful way of creating an emotional attachment—the goal of any seduction. The method has infinite applications outside psychoanalysis. To practice it in real life, you need to play the therapist, encouraging people to talk about their childhood. Most of us are only too happy to oblige; and our memories are so vivid and emotional that a part of us regresses just in talking about our early years. Also, in the course of talking, little secrets slip out: we reveal all kinds of valuable information about our weaknesses and our mental makeup, information you must attend to and remember. Do not take your targets’ words at face value; they will often sugarcoat or over-dramatize events in childhood. But pay attention to their tone of voice, to any nervous tics as they talk, and particularly to anything they do not want to talk about, anything they deny or that makes them emotional. Many statements actually mean their opposite: should they say they hated their father, for instance, you can be sure that they are hiding a lot of disappointment—that they actually loved their father only too much, and perhaps never quite got what they wanted from him. Listen closely for recurring themes and stories. Most important, learn to analyze emotional responses and see what lies behind them.
While they talk, maintain the therapist’s pose—attentive but quiet, making occasional, nonjudgmental comments. Be caring yet distant—somewhat blank, in fact—and they will begin to transfer emotions and project fantasies onto you. With the information you have gathered about their childhood, and the trusting bond you have forged, you can now begin to effect the regression. Perhaps you have uncovered a powerful attachment to a parent, a sibling, a teacher, or any early infatuation, a person who casts a shadow over their present lives. Knowing what it was about this person that affected them so powerfully, you can now take over that role. Or perhaps you have learned of an immense gap in their childhood—a neglectful father, for instance. You act like that parent now, but you replace the original neglect with the attention and affection that the real parent never supplied. Everyone has unfinished business from childhood—disappointments, lacks, painful memories. Finish what is unfinished. Discover what your target never got and you have the ingredients for a deep-rooted seduction.
The key is not just to talk about memories—that is weak. What you want is to get people to act out in their present old issues from their past, without their being aware of what is happening. The regressions you can effect fall into four main types.
The Infantile Regression.
The first bond—the bond between a mother and her infant—is the most powerful one. Unlike other animals, human babies have a long period of helplessness during which they are dependent on their mother, creating an attachment that influences the rest of their lives. The key to effecting this regression is to reproduce the sense of unconditional love a mother has for her child. Never judge your targets—let them do whatever they want, including behaving badly; at the same time surround them with loving attention, smother them with comfort. A part of them will regress to those earliest years when their mother took care of everything and rarely left them alone. This works on almost everyone, for unconditional love is the rarest and most treasured form. You do not even have to tailor your behavior to anything specific in their childhood; most of us have experienced this kind of attention. Meanwhile, create atmospheres that reinforce the feeling you are generating—warm environments, playful activities, bright, happy colors.
After the bond between mother and child comes the oedipal triangle of mother, father, and child. This triangle forms during the period of the child’s earliest erotic fantasies. A boy wants his mother to himself, a girl does the same with her father, but they never quite have it that way, for a parent will always have competing connections to a spouse or to other adults. Unconditional love has gone; now, inevitably, the parent must sometimes deny what the child desires. Transport your victims back to this period. Play a parental role, be loving, but also sometimes scold and instill some discipline. Children actually love a little discipline—it makes them feel that the adult cares about them. And adult children too will be thrilled if you mix your tenderness with a little toughness and punishment. Unlike infantile regression, oedipal regression must be tailored to your target. It depends on the information you have gathered. Without knowing enough, you might treat a person like a child, scolding them now and then, only to discover that you are stirring up ugly memories—they had too much discipline as child. Or you might stir up memories of a parent they loathed, and they will transfer those feelings to you. Do not go ahead with the regression until you have learned everything you can about their childhood— what they had too much of, what they lacked, and so on. If the target was strongly attached to a parent, but that attachment was partially negative, the oedipal regression strategy can still be quite effective. We always feel ambivalent toward a parent; even as we love them, we resent having had to depend on them. Don’t worry about stirring up these ambivalences, which don’t keep us from being tied to our parents. Remember to include an erotic component in your parental behavior. Now your targets are not only getting their mother or father all to themselves, they are getting something more, something previously forbidden but now allowed.
As children, we often form an ideal figure out of our dreams and ambitions. First, that ideal figure is the person we want to be. We imagine ourselves as brave adventurers, romantic figures. Then, in our adolescence, we turn our attention to others, often projecting our ideals onto them. The first boy or girl we fall in love with may seem to have the ideal qualities we wanted for ourselves, or else may make us feel that we can play that ideal role in relation to them. Most of us carry these ideals around with us, buried just below the surface. We are secretly disappointed in how much we have had to compromise, how far below the ideal we have fallen as we have gotten older. Make your targets feel they are living out this youthful ideal, and coming closer to being the person they wanted to be, and you will effect a different kind of regression, creating a feeling reminiscent of adolescence. The relationship between you and the seduced is in this instance more equal than in the previous kinds of regressions—more like the affection between siblings. In fact the ideal is often modeled on a brother or sister. To create this effect, strive to reproduce the intense, innocent mood of a youthful infatuation.
The Reverse Parental Regression.
Here you are the one to regress: you deliberately play the role of the cute, adorable, yet also sexually charged child. Older people always find younger people incredibly seductive. In the presence of youth, they feel a little of their own youth return; but they are in fact older, and mixed into the invigoration they feel in young people’s company is the pleasure of playing the mother or father to them. If a child has erotic feelings toward a parent, feelings that are quickly repressed, the parent must deal with the same problem in reverse. Assume the role of the child in relation to your targets, however, and they get to act out some of those repressed erotic sentiments. The strategy may seem to call for a difference in age, but this is actually not critical. Marilyn Monroe’s exaggerated little-girl qualities worked just fine on men her age. Emphasizing a weakness or vulnerability on your part will give the target a chance to play the protector
Unconditional love is rare and hard to find, yet it is what we all crave, since we either experienced it once or wish we had. You do not have to go as far as Juliette Drouet; the mere hint of devoted attention, of accepting your lovers for who they are, of meeting their needs, will place them in an infantile position. A sense of dependency may frighten them a little, and they may feel an undercurrent of ambivalence, a need to assert themselves periodically, as Hugo did through his affairs. But their ties to you will be strong and they will keep coming back for more, bound by the illusion that they are recapturing the mother-love they had seemingly lost forever, or never had.
The key to this kind of regression is to see and treat your targets as children. Nothing about them intimidates you, no matter how much authority or social standing they have. Your manner makes it clear that you feel you are the stronger party. To accomplish this it may be helpful to imagine or visualize them as the children they once were; suddenly, powerful people do not seem so powerful and threatening when you regress them in your imagination. Keep in mind that certain types are more vulnerable to an oedipal regression. Look for those who, like Professor Mut, seem outwardly the most adult—straitlaced, serious, a little full of themselves. They are struggling to repress their regressive tendencies, overcompensating for their weaknesses. Often those who seem the most in command of themselves are the ripest for regression. In fact they are secretly longing for it, because their power, position, and responsibilities are more a burden than a pleasure.
Interpretation. All of us carry within us an image of an ideal type of person whom we yearn to meet and love. Most often the type is a composite made up of bits and pieces of different people from our youth, and even of characters in books and movies. People who influenced us inordinately—a teacher for instance—may also figure. The traits have nothing to do with superficial interests. Rather, they are unconscious, hard to verbalize. […]
It is nearly impossible to embody someone’s ideal completely. But if you come close enough, if you evoke some of that ideal spirit, you can lead that person into a deep seduction. To effect this regression you must play the role of the therapist. Get your targets to open up about their past, particularly their former loves and most particularly their first love. Pay attention to any expressions of disappointment, how this or that person did not give them what they wanted. Take them to places that evoke their youth. In this regression you are creating not so much a relationship of dependency and immaturity but rather the adolescent spirit of a first love. There is a touch of innocence to the relationship. So much of adult life involves compromise, conniving, and a certain toughness. Create the ideal atmosphere by keeping such things out, drawing the other person into a kind of mutual weakness, conjuring a second virginity. There should be a dreamlike quality to the affair, as if the target were reliving that first love but could not quite believe it. Let all of this unfold slowly, each encounter revealing more ideal qualities. The sense of reliving a past pleasure is simply impossible to resist
Emphasize any weaknesses you might have, things you cannot control. Remember: most of us remember our early years fondly, but often, paradoxically, the people with the strongest attachment to those times are the ones who had the most difficult childhoods. Actually, circumstances kept them from getting to be children, so they never really grew up, and they long for the paradise they never got to experience. James I falls into this category. These types are ripe targets for a reverse regression.
Lying alone in bed, the child feels unprotected, afraid, and needy. In a nearby room, there is the parent’s bed. It is large and forbidding, site of things you are not supposed to know about. Give the seduced both feelings—helplessness and transgression —as you lay them into bed and put them to sleep.
To reverse the strategies of regression, the parties to a seduction would have to remain adults during the process. This is not only rare, it is not very pleasurable. Seduction means realizing certain fantasies. Being a mature and responsible adult is not a fantasy, it is a duty. Furthermore, a person who remains an adult in relation to you is harder to seduce. In all kinds of seduction—political, media, personal—the target must regress. The only danger is that the child, wearying of dependence, turns against the parent and rebels. You must be prepared for this, and unlike a parent, never take it personally.
--Robert Greene en "the art of seduction"
