Every sexual crime has a 'pretend' duplicate including strangling, beating, cutting with knife - the levels of anxiety and tensionheighten the arousal of the criminal when he is assaulting the victim, and ofboth participants, when a consensual ritual isbeing carried out. The viewing of the photographic or cinematic representationof such rituals also bring about rocketing anxiety+tension=arousal effects within viewers.
When anyspecific porn scene
iscapable of arousing the viewer, this indicates
that the portrayed act influences the psyche on the
level of significance, and its value therefore is baseduponthe emotional
reactions of the viewer, whichin turn arebased on his
individual mental history. While some consumers todayactuallyget pathologicallyaddicted
toporn material or horror films, we can onlyimagine
the intensity of the addictionfor voyeurism of real suffering and blood, within the
peasant watching a dog fight or the Roman citizenstraining to see
the gory details onthe sand below.
The mental climate of this civilization appears tobe subordinate to
a 'hysterical excitement - acutedepression' duality, inother words '
manic depression'. The mostpopular legal and
illegal emotion influencing substances: sugar, chocolate, coffee, alcohol, cocaine,
amphetamines, 'poppers' - are so called 'uppers'theycreate to alesser or bigger extent a
buzz of excitement, anenthusiasm for most aspects of the current social reality, sometimes
also a 'falling away of inhibitions' In a way a counterpart to
those are the prescription 'happy pills', usedbyhumansto combat excitement, to inhibit anydeep emotional impulse, when the
accompanying anxietycan no longer be handled by Ego effortsalone.
Thisis a social dimension of the individual manicdepressive mechanism perceived by Karl Abraham before
the collapse of the Victorianworld, and described in 'Notes on the Psychoanalytical
Investigation and Treatment of Manicdepressive Insanity and Allied Conditions' (1911): 'In
the depressive state he allows himself to weighed down
byhis complex, andsees no other way out of his misery but death. in the
manic statehe treat the complexwith indifference.
...Whereas the melancholic exhibits a state ofgeneral inhibition, inthe manic patient even
normal inhibitions of the instincts are partlyor
whollyabolished.
...The removal ofinhibitions renders accessibleonce
more the old sources of pleasure which had been suppressed. and this shows how
deeplythe mania is rooted in
the infantile.
...The patients often havean
excessive feeling of power
...Fairlyfrequently there appear grandiose ideas which are
verysimilar tochildren's boasts about their knowledge and power."
The addiction to a heightened state of tension connected
to feelings of invincibility and freedom - an 'adrenaline trip'-
is evident throughout the information currentsof the free world. Here in Bulgaria, since
the fall of the Berlin Wall (will this event ever mean as much
toourdescendants?), the term 'maniacal' is intenselyused in a positive meaning, 'this chap
is a maniac' means 'this chap is cool', a 'maniac' clubor film is 'groovy', 'cool', 'hot' such,
etc. In the English speaking world, the term 'maniac' has had a negative meaning long before
the 'manic' moodbecame 'cool' andmarketable, but the meaning of the Bulgarian 'manic' is
provided in English by the concepts 'extreme', and 'adrenaline'.
Extreme and adrenaline are verycool, withcorrespondingextreme sports, extreme music, extreme sex, combat sports,
sports in general, 'thrillers'. Horrors, blockbusters,
TV shows 'cops, cops and more cops', jumpingwitha parachute, jumping
into the pool from the highest plank, riding a vehicle at dangerous speed,
'kicking ass', 'fucking', 'sucking', 'going down on someone'.