The Art of Seduction (69 page)

because we cannot attain

effect fall into four main types.

the image that is our better

self and the best of our self

From this concept it is

obvious that love itself is

The Infantile Regression.
The first bond—the bond between a mother
only possible on a certain

and her infant—is the most powerful one. Unlike other animals, human ba
cultural level or after a
bies have a long period of helplessness during which they are dependent on
certain phase in the
their mother, creating an attachment that influences the rest of their lives.
development of the

personality has been

The key to effecting this regression is to reproduce the sense of uncondi
reached. The creation of an
tional love a mother has for her child. Never judge your targets—let them
ego-ideal itself marks

do whatever they want, including behaving badly; at the same time sur
human progress. When
people are entirely satisfied

round them with loving attention, smother them with comfort. A part of
Effect a Regression • 331

them will regress to those earliest years when their mother took care of
with their actual selves,
everything and rarely left them alone. This works on almost everyone, for
love is impossible.
•
The
transfer of the ego-ideal to

unconditional love is the rarest and most treasured form. You do not even
a person is the most
have to tailor your behavior to anything specific in their childhood; most of
characteristic trait of love.
us have experienced this kind of attention. Meanwhile, create atmospheres —THEODOR REIK,
OF LOVE

that reinforce the feeling you are generating—warm environments, playful
AND LUST

activities, bright, happy colors.

I gave
[S
ylphide
]
the eyes

The Oedipal Regression.
After the bond between mother and child
of one girl in the village,
the fresh complexion of

comes the oedipal triangle of mother, father, and child. This triangle forms
another. The portraits of
during the period of the child's earliest erotic fantasies. A boy wants his
great ladies of the time of
mother to himself, a girl does the same with her father, but they never
Francis I, Henry IV, and
Louis XIV, hanging in our

quite have it that way, for a parent will always have competing connections
drawing room, lent me
to a spouse or to other adults. Unconditional love has gone; now, inevita-
other features, and I even
bly, the parent must sometimes deny what the child desires. Transport your
borrowed beauties from the
victims back to this period. Play a parental role, be loving, but also some-
pictures of the Madonna in
the churches. This magic

times scold and instill some discipline. Children actually love a little
creature followed me
discipline—it makes them feel that the adult cares about them. And adult
invisibly everywhere, I

children too will be thrilled if you mix your tenderness with a little tough-
conversed with her as if
with a real person; she

ness and punishment.

changed her appearance

Unlike infantile regression, oedipal regression must be tailored to your
according to the degree of
target. It depends on the information you have gathered. Without knowing
my madness; Aphrodite
without a veil, Diana

enough, you might treat a person like a child, scolding them now and then,
shrouded in azure and
only to discover that you are stirring up ugly memories—they had too
rose, Thalia in a laughing
much discipline as child. Or you might stir up memories of a parent they
mask, Hebe with the goblet
of youth
—o
r she became a

loathed, and they will transfer those feelings to you. Do not go ahead
fairy, giving me dominion
with the regression until you have learned everything you can about their
over nature. . . . The
childhood—what they had too much of, what they lacked, and so on. If
delusion lasted two whole
the target was strongly attached to a parent, but that attachment was par-
years, in the course of
which my soul attained the

tially negative, the oedipal regression strategy can still be quite effective. We
highest peak of exaltation.
always feel ambivalent toward a parent; even as we love them, we resent —CHATEAUBRIAND,
MEMOIRS

having had to depend on them. Don't worry about stirring up these am-
FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE,
bivalences, which don't keep us from being tied to our parents. Remember QUOTED IN FRIEDRICH SIEBURG,
CHATEAUBRIAND,
TRANSLATED

to include an erotic component in your parental behavior. Now your tar-BY VIOLET M. MACDONALD

gets are not only getting their mother or father all to themselves, they are getting something more, something previously forbidden but now allowed.
The Ego Ideal Regression.
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
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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.

Some Examples

1.
The parents of Victor Hugo separated shortly after the novelist was born, in 1802. Hugo's mother, Sophie, had been carrying on an affair with her husband's superior officer, a general. She took the three Hugo boys away from their father and went off to Paris to raise them on her own. Now the boys led a tumultuous life, featuring bouts of poverty, frequent moves, and their mother's continued affair with the general. Of all the boys, Victor was the most attached to his mother, adopting all her ideas and pet peeves, particularly her hatred of his father. But with all the turmoil in his childhood he never felt he got enough love and attention from the mother he adored. When she died, in 1821, poor and debt-ridden, he was devastated.

The following year Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adèle,

who physically resembled his mother. It was a happy marriage for a while, but soon Adèle came to resemble his mother in more ways than one: in 1832, he discovered that she was having an affair with the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who also happened to be Hugo's best friend at the
Effect a Regression
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339

time. Hugo was a celebrated writer by now, but he was not the calculating type. He generally wore his heart on his sleeve. Yet he could not confide in anyone about Adèle's affair; it was too humiliating. His only solution was to have affairs of his own, with actresses, courtesans, married women. Hugo had a prodigious appetite, sometimes visiting three different women in the same day.

Near the end of 1832, production began on one of Hugo's plays, and

he was to supervise the casting. A twenty-six-year-old actress named Juliette Drouet auditioned for one of the smaller roles. Normally quite adroit with the ladies, Hugo found himself stuttering in Juliette's presence. She was quite simply the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and this and her composed manner intimidated him. Naturally, Juliette won the part. He found himself thinking about her all the time. She always seemed to be surrounded by a group of adoring men. Clearly she was not interested in him, or so he thought. One evening, though, after a performance of the play, he followed her home, to find that she was neither angry nor surprised—

indeed she invited him up to her apartment. He spent the night, and soon he was spending almost every night there.

Hugo was happy again. To his delight, Juliette quit her career in the theater, dropped her former friends, and learned to cook. She had loved fancy clothes and social affairs; now she became Hugo's secretary, rarely leaving the apartment in which he had established her and seeming to live only for his visits. After a while, however, Hugo returned to his old ways and started to have little affairs on the side. She did not complain—as long as she remained the one woman he kept returning to. And Hugo had in fact grown quite dependent on her.

In 1843, Hugo's beloved daughter died in an accident and he sank into a depression. The only way he knew to get over his grief was to have an affair with someone new. And so, shortly thereafter, he fell in love with a young married aristocrat named Léonie d'Aunet. He began to see Juliette less and less. A few years later, Léonie, feeling certain she was the preferred one, gave him an ultimatum: stop seeing Juliette altogether, or it was over. Hugo refused. Instead he decided to stage a contest: he would continue to see both women, and in a few months his heart would tell him which one he preferred. Léonie was furious, but she had no choice. Her affair with Hugo had already ruined her marriage and her standing in society; she was dependent on him. Anyway, how could she lose—she was in the prime of life, whereas Juliette had gray hair by now. So she pretended to go along with this contest, but as time went on, she grew increasingly resentful about it, and complained. Juliette, on the other hand, behaved as if nothing had changed. Whenever he visited, she treated him as she always had, dropping everything to comfort and mother him.

The contest lasted several years. In 1851, Hugo was in trouble with Louis-Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte and now the president of France. Hugo had attacked his dictatorial tendencies in the press, bitterly and perhaps recklessly, for Louis-Napoleon was a vengeful man. Fearing for
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the writer's life, Juliette managed to hide him in a friend's house and arranged for a false passport, a disguise, and safe passage to Brussels. Everything went according to plan; Juliette joined him a few days later, carrying his most valuable possessions. Clearly her heroic actions had won the contest for her. And yet, after the novelty of Hugo's new life wore off, his affairs resumed. Finally, fearing for his health, and worried that she could no longer compete with yet another twenty-year-old coquette, Juliette made a calm but stern demand: no more women or she was leaving him. Taken completely by surprise, yet certain that she meant every word, Hugo broke down and sobbed. An old man by now, he got down on his knees and

swore, on the Bible and then on a copy of his famous novel
Les Misérables,
that he would stray no more. Until Juliette's death, in 1883, her spell over him was complete.

Interpretation.
Hugo's love life was determined by his relationship with his mother. He never felt she had loved him enough. Almost all the women he had affairs with bore a physical resemblance to her; somehow he would make up for her lack of love for him by sheer volume. When Juliette met him, she could not have known all this, but she must have sensed two things: he was extremely disappointed in his wife, and he had never really grown up. His emotional outbursts and his need for attention made him more a little boy than a man. She would gain ascendancy over him for the rest of his life by supplying the one thing he had never had: complete, unconditional mother-love. Juliette never judged Hugo, or criticized him for his naughty ways. She lavished him with attention; visiting her was like returning to the womb. In her presence, in fact, he was more a little boy than ever. How could he refuse her a favor or ever leave her? And when she finally threatened to leave him, he was reduced to the state of a wailing infant crying for his mother. In the end she had total power over him.

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.