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By Root 5647 0

to help them. Such is the central purpose of de Sade's story, to show virtue defeated and villainy rewarded: to enjoy the thrill which comes from seeing the anima degraded and humiliated, through that combination of sex and violence which are the supreme expressions of the human ego when it has broken free from any external restraint. Such are the two most extreme forms of egocentricity through which one human being can relate with another. The ultimate purpose of fantasy is to experience the mental sensation which derives from imagining the assertion of that egocentricity. And the key to understanding how this works is to see how its real driving force is the urge to defy the Self. The Self-defying ego finds its gratification precisely through creating imagery which shows the values of the Self being violated.

We see this clearly illustrated in the nature of those aspects of sexual behaviour from which fantasy derives its thrills. A crucial component in how stories portray the archetype of the Self is the way they resolve on the image of an ideal state of permanent loving union between hero and heroine. As the convention has it, `they got married and lived happily ever after'. This is why, when the ego sets out to violate the Self, it can only derive its thrills from fantasising about anything but the fulfilled married state. Just as the point about the `monster' in storytelling is that it can be portrayed as anything but a whole, ideal human being, the same applies when the ego sets out to fantasise about sexual relations. If we look at the imagery such stories feed on, we see how it can be centred on every conceivable aberration from the state of happily married love. It can derive its excitements from extra-marital sex, promiscuity, nymphomania, orgies, fetishism, prostitution, masturbation, homosexuality, lesbianism, sex with children, sex with animals, perversions of all kinds; and the more the sexually-driven ego strains after that sense of lasting resolution it cannot attain, the more likely it is to coalesce with the urge to violence, as it finds expression in sadism, masochism, rape, even murder. The one state from which impersonal fantasy cannot derive gratification is in imagining that state of humdrum `normality' in which the vast majority of the adult human race has always existed: a secure, unquestioned, lasting marriage.

It is indeed the essence of ego-based fantasies that they feed on images which are unresolved and incomplete. It is the very fact that its images cannot lead to resolution which gives them their power to tease and tantalise and to make them seem more significant than they are. This hugely important aspect of the way the human brain works was recognised by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night's Dream when he wrote how:

Because, in the darkness, the brain cannot get enough information to see the bush clearly, it is teased into exaggerating the significance of what it sees, building it up in imagination as a threatening monster. This is the phenomenon we may call a `nyktomorph, a 'night shape': an image which, because the brain cannot resolve it, becomes invested with far greater power than if it could be clearly seen and understood. And to understand how fantasy works, one must appreciate that it is precisely because it feeds on these nyktomorphic images which cannot reach resolution that it comes to exercise such an obsessive hold over the human mind.

Yet in storytelling the underlying archetypal structures are so constituted that they must always work towards that concluding image which shows us everything in a story being satisfactorily resolved. The mark of a well-constructed story is that every detail in it is contributing in some way towards that final resolution. And this can only come about if the story finally resolves in some image of the Self. Either a light hero and heroine are seen united in perfect love; or a dark hero is brought to destruction, so that light can re-emerge and wholeness be restored. By definition, therefore, where the purpose of the story is to defy the Self,