Keeping inmind to what astonishingextent S/M and BF activities maychange the 'standard' functioning of the psyches of the participants, it comes as no surprise, that sexual and masturbatory practices certainlycan facilitate altered states of consciousness/perceptions whichstates are even pursued asconscious goals by devotees of these practices. Curiously enough, those include 'BDSM Christians', who believe that "transcendence can be experienced at the end of a bullwhip.
Getting tied up, or zipped into
a mummificationsuit, canbe a cathartic experience."
This quoteis from an interviewtaken by Margaret Wapler, in
which a devotee's explanations are presented: "The flogger, with eachlash of the whip, has one
message: now, now, now, now..." "So sooner or later, like it or not, you're goingtobe
inthat moment, and you're going to come face to facewithall that stuff you haven't beenlookingat, and there's
goingto bethis big cathartic experience. Andthat's wheretheDivine exists."
Transcendental experiences apart, the
sociopolitical mix of BDSM with the Bible can producea weird postmodern equivalent of the
Abrahamic law: "It does differ from secular BDSM in that the relationship is (or should be) confined
toa husbandand wife in maledominant/female submissive roles. The Master andsubmissive/slave
worship, prayand growtogether as Christians. TheMaster is headof thewife. She submits to
Him." Depending onthe BDSM and BF emphasisof the ritual, various layersof the psyche which
belong to the background in everydaylife, come to the forefront, dominating the perceptions
and sensations of the participants.
The mental phenomena which can be summoned by intense
BDSM and BF practices, is different inscope from the effects of masturbationthrough
watchingrepresentation of same. While the viewer of porn relives
his/her childhood erotic anxieties through their symbolic representation, the participants in anintense intimate
reenactment, not being influenced only by audiovisual significance but by all other factors of
a realtime spontaneous activity, canunleash experiences similar to mystic/LSD such, which
can be called 'archetypal' or 'transpersonal'. Archetypal experiences concern material from
not the individual's, but from the collective unconsciousness, a concept introducedbyCarl
Gustav Jung - another wayward disciple of Freud who, because of thisconcept, is perhaps
even more controversial thenReich.
He developed the idea of a collective unconsciousness,
after noticingthe strikingoverlap betweenmanyfantasies/dreams/experiences of his patients,
and ancient mythologicalmotifs, of which these patients had no idea, had no contact with, and
could not have possibly been influenced by. In 1906 Jung was invited by a paranoid
schizophrenic patient to share with him the joys of staring into the sun and seeing the sun's
penis cause the wind39. Jung wrotedown the curious delusion, but five years later
he came across a freshly translated manuscript of ancient Greek rituals connected
to the worship of Mithras, in which a prolonged tube hanging form the sun, which causes wind, is described.
As time went and Jung collected more and more mythological, mystical and alchemic data, the
overlap between individual outbursts of unconscious material of a let's say Bavarian 30
year old hairdresser, and ancient Hindureligious material, became quite conspicuous - hence
the concept of a collective layer of unconscious material, beyond the
individual layer. It is not to be perceived as a sort of 'informationpool' full
ofimages and scenarios, which an individual may accidentally or consciously access - rather
the images and scenarios are the individual's
ways of encoding that which influences his or her psyche.