"How to tell sexual compulsion from desire: it's…" — Ernest Becker (#c689)

Card #c689IR // #c689Synthesis

How to tell sexual compulsion from desire: it's a flight from the body-as-mortality. 'Sex is of the body, and the body is of death... Eros and Thanatos are inseparable; death is the natural twin brother of sex.' The person who is compulsively sexual — or who flees into a depersonalized 'Playboy mystique' — is trying to escape the fact that the body that feels pleasure is the body that dies. When sex becomes a creed or a compulsion rather than a connection, look for the death-anxiety underneath.

— In our words · Source: The Denial of Death (Ernest Becker)

[Use when]

Use when sex is being treated as either a religion or a purely mechanical act — both are dodges of the body-as-death. Use when sexual behavior looks compulsive rather than connective.

[Why it matters]

Becker ties sex and death together as twins — both are about the body, and the body is the reminder of mortality. This explains the strange intensity around sex: it's never just physical, because the physical is exactly what we're trying to transcend. The 'Playboy mystique' is a failed solution, a despiritualization that runs straight back into death.

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