Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power (A method for getting what you want by getting off on what you don't)

by Carolyn Elliott

My deep dive into psychology taught me that we human beings have a major habit of taking unconscious pleasure in the “bad stuff” in our lives. This was well-known to the founding giants of psychology like Freud, Jung, and Lacan. Freud called it “psychic masochism,” Jung recognized it as “the Shadow,” and Lacan called it jouissance—pleasure that's so intense we repress it. All of these psychologists recognized that a major component of helping people involved getting them to acknowledge and “own” this kind of weird underlying desire for and pleasure in stuff that they ostensibly hate and feel very frustrated by. It's strange, but it's true. Jung said—and I'll repeat it a few times throughout this book—“Until you make the unconscious, conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it Fate.”