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The Deep Psychology of BDSM and Kink
This fascinating volume investigates how the concept of soul is connected to BDSM and kink, exploring the world of alternative sexualities through the psychology of C. G. Jung and James Hillman as readers are guided on a provocative and lively journey through darker aspects of the sexual imagination. Contextualized both in sexual history and contemporary events, the book unveils surprising points of correspondence between the tortured fantasy-images of Jung’s The Red Book and the modern world of BDSM and describes from Hillman’s psychology a soul-centered perspective that affirms the psychological value of fantasy-images animating our human lives. The book also considers the collective archetypal sources of historical trauma which have provided inspiration to some of the more disquieting aspects of BDSM and details how the deep psychology of BDSM creates a space in the modern world to ethically engage these practices. Kinksters and BDSM practitioners will discover a psychological language that clarifies and affirms why these activities and relationships can be so intensely intimate, pleasurable, and transformative. Psychotherapists and enthusiasts of Jungian and archetypal psychology will find fresh insights here that support the practice of BDSM as a form of individuation and a path for bringing soul into the world.
294 pages, Paperback
Published September 20, 2023
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382 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
October 28, 2025
ok so idk how much I buy into deep psych, its giving spirituality, philosophy and esoteric knowledge from questionable white men 100+ yrs ago not really science and also not really the wild nature that I draw my spirituality from, none the less this was an interesting read in part because I knew so little about deep psych. A lot of this certainly went over my head but here are the notes on what I found interesting:
"We do not make our fantasies they make us."
If we normalize kink we may strip it of its power and pleasure which comes from its relationship to taboo.
Imagery in kink spaces pulls heavily from dungeons from medieval Europe, pre-enlightenment.
Leather culture aesthetic came from biker culture which came from military and fascism WW2.
Jung hypothesized the collective unconscious from which imagery can come forth to any/ all of us and isn't specific to us and our pasts so much as humanities at large.
During WW1 & 2 Jung felt that he and maybe Europe at large needed to reckon with the medieval in their psyches connected to darkness and capacity for cruelty driven by fear.
Feels connected to this podcast on fascism and kink, Susan Sontag's Fascinating Fascism, and how holocaust awareness ed in the 50s-60s was the 1st time most Western kids saw nude bodies and the rise of Nazi porn, among other things.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2HWo...
Kink play as embodied individuation and self realization.
Individualtion- how a person crafts their own understanding of themselves as a separate and unique entity, connected our agency and power and ethics, this has us separate from universal consciousness tho perhaps yearning for it and eventually bound to return to it. Jung saw this as our lives work and connected to our personal development.
Kink play as shadow work.
Shadow is connected to the Gothic obsession with pairs and duality (Jeckyl & Hyde, etc). Both kink and deep psyche are heavily informed by the Gothic period.
Syzgy- physiological integration of opposites, dialectical pairing, yin and yang: sub and domme, one cannot exist without the other, their connection as counterparts & their relationship itself is the 'engine for transformation.'
BDSM as a vessel to explore "the other" and find pleasure and attraction in it not fear and distancing. Every sub has an inner domme and every domme an inner sub and this empathy and inner relation to each other is part of how they know about what to offer each other and how far to push each other.
Conscious, consensual othering within a container as a vehicle for personal growth and perhaps as a way for society to work thru oppressive urges and fear of the other in a less destructive way?
Imagery is the language of the soul/ psyche, and fetish is rich with imagery and archetypes to be embodied, played with, and subverted.
Fetish- first etymologically used as a spiritual item then used for kink➡️ things that are more important than they seem on the surface, embued with spirituality, sensuality, etc.
Hilman saw the Reformation in Europe as connected to the dominant culture seeing the soul as singular and conflated with self and human/ the humane as an ethic, where as he saw 'soul' as multiplicitous, more like human nature and as an ocean within which we as individuals may swim through, with fantasy images being more pure and therefore real than the reality we engage with in the day to day because it will outlast us and our day to day work, and our primary work in life is to tend to our souls and inner landscapes through what we choose to feed it, analyze from it, and the time we spend with it is important and enriching.
Hilman proposed a dehumanized morality (different from the process of dehumanization) which rather than centering human care and good/ bad or healthy/ unhealthy, it centers the archetype and how true we can be to it.
Play as soul-making due to its creativity and metaphor, both therapeutic and part of human nature. Play is a space that can be both real & unreal, the actions actually happen but the context is not, a space where contradictions can exist peacefully, not seeking to resolve the paradox is key to its potential & potence.
Winicot - play as a healing agent, creation of "potential space," key to symbolic thinking, and sociopolitical optimism.
Gatimer- play as something that over takes players and is done to them. "The game of understanding absorbs the players and teaches them about the world thru their encounters with the other and the images of the soul."
Play and scene for kink come from the drama world.
Suffering is about the meaning making of pain, it is soul work.
Suffering is part of transformation in narrative arcs, and the loss of control, both suffering and loss of control are inevitable in our lives.
Giving meaning to suffering allows us to be empowered and grow from difficult experiences- the premise of narrative therapy and also the key to much kink that reclaims and works through a traumatic experience.
Pain as a way of accessing altered states of consciousness, used across cultures and times spiritually.
Kink makes suffering relational, the meaning making of pain is an intentional part of the relationship, often connected to reclaiming pain.
Suffering and degrading are tied to accessing sub space, subterranean aspects of the soul and psyche.
Literalism- turning the archetype into something real, doing actual violence rather than playing with the symbolism to channel its compulsion consciously.
BDSM as shadow work, engaging with the archetype of evil so as to look it in the eye, work through it personally, and craft ones own moral code.
Chattle and capital have the same etymological route and shows how deep slavery and capitalism are entwined.
The interviews with Black folks in master / slave relationships in which one of the recurring phrases is "if you have a problem with this language you need to personally work through that" felt kind of weird... like the reason someone might be uncomfortable is due to systemic and ongoing harm in a huge way not a personal thing per se and there were only 4 interviews which made me wonder how cherry picked they were. They also made the point that saying only Black people could do M/S dynamics was fetishizing/ essentializing race but I can't help but feel white people playing master is a little too close to literalizing harm to be sexy to me.
Psychoid- relates to a deeply unconscious realm that is neither solely physiological nor psychological- makes me think of somatic embodiment but idk if thats what he was trying to get at
Numinous- arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring"; also "supernatural" or "appealing to the aesthetic sensibility.
Ecstacy- breaks us outside of our rigid ideas of ourselves, both physical and transcendent, paradoxical in nature.
The Satyrs- the 1st bdsm gay bike club, pulls from the Dionisian archetype
Zoe- natural animalistic erotic energy
Likely connected to animalistic play esp pet play
Compared to shamanism which invoked brushes with death sex change & queerness & a connection to an animal nature.
Death as an archetypal symbol and the underworld as the unconscious. Jung hypothesized the experience of death as a return to archetypal images perhaps the collective unconscious without ego.
Death and fertility as symbolically connected, burying the dead and planting seeds, Hades & Persephone.
"Accenting to life up until the point of death." -Bataille on eroticism
Death and dogs- early dogs/ wolves likely dug up corpses leading to mythology around Hell hounds in multiple cultures, also why dogs are sometimes seen as dirty symbolically.
The Catacombs- a gay club known for fisting which the author poetically uses to talk abt fisting and vulnerability and the subterranean and taboo and what the symbolism of hands and fists are.
2 drives- eros & reproduction, Todestrieb & returning to the earth and collective unconscious (death drive).
➡️ kink is likely so transformative for playing with both drives together.
"We do not make our fantasies they make us."
If we normalize kink we may strip it of its power and pleasure which comes from its relationship to taboo.
Imagery in kink spaces pulls heavily from dungeons from medieval Europe, pre-enlightenment.
Leather culture aesthetic came from biker culture which came from military and fascism WW2.
Jung hypothesized the collective unconscious from which imagery can come forth to any/ all of us and isn't specific to us and our pasts so much as humanities at large.
During WW1 & 2 Jung felt that he and maybe Europe at large needed to reckon with the medieval in their psyches connected to darkness and capacity for cruelty driven by fear.
Feels connected to this podcast on fascism and kink, Susan Sontag's Fascinating Fascism, and how holocaust awareness ed in the 50s-60s was the 1st time most Western kids saw nude bodies and the rise of Nazi porn, among other things.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2HWo...
Kink play as embodied individuation and self realization.
Individualtion- how a person crafts their own understanding of themselves as a separate and unique entity, connected our agency and power and ethics, this has us separate from universal consciousness tho perhaps yearning for it and eventually bound to return to it. Jung saw this as our lives work and connected to our personal development.
Kink play as shadow work.
Shadow is connected to the Gothic obsession with pairs and duality (Jeckyl & Hyde, etc). Both kink and deep psyche are heavily informed by the Gothic period.
Syzgy- physiological integration of opposites, dialectical pairing, yin and yang: sub and domme, one cannot exist without the other, their connection as counterparts & their relationship itself is the 'engine for transformation.'
BDSM as a vessel to explore "the other" and find pleasure and attraction in it not fear and distancing. Every sub has an inner domme and every domme an inner sub and this empathy and inner relation to each other is part of how they know about what to offer each other and how far to push each other.
Conscious, consensual othering within a container as a vehicle for personal growth and perhaps as a way for society to work thru oppressive urges and fear of the other in a less destructive way?
Imagery is the language of the soul/ psyche, and fetish is rich with imagery and archetypes to be embodied, played with, and subverted.
Fetish- first etymologically used as a spiritual item then used for kink➡️ things that are more important than they seem on the surface, embued with spirituality, sensuality, etc.
Hilman saw the Reformation in Europe as connected to the dominant culture seeing the soul as singular and conflated with self and human/ the humane as an ethic, where as he saw 'soul' as multiplicitous, more like human nature and as an ocean within which we as individuals may swim through, with fantasy images being more pure and therefore real than the reality we engage with in the day to day because it will outlast us and our day to day work, and our primary work in life is to tend to our souls and inner landscapes through what we choose to feed it, analyze from it, and the time we spend with it is important and enriching.
Hilman proposed a dehumanized morality (different from the process of dehumanization) which rather than centering human care and good/ bad or healthy/ unhealthy, it centers the archetype and how true we can be to it.
Play as soul-making due to its creativity and metaphor, both therapeutic and part of human nature. Play is a space that can be both real & unreal, the actions actually happen but the context is not, a space where contradictions can exist peacefully, not seeking to resolve the paradox is key to its potential & potence.
Winicot - play as a healing agent, creation of "potential space," key to symbolic thinking, and sociopolitical optimism.
Gatimer- play as something that over takes players and is done to them. "The game of understanding absorbs the players and teaches them about the world thru their encounters with the other and the images of the soul."
Play and scene for kink come from the drama world.
Suffering is about the meaning making of pain, it is soul work.
Suffering is part of transformation in narrative arcs, and the loss of control, both suffering and loss of control are inevitable in our lives.
Giving meaning to suffering allows us to be empowered and grow from difficult experiences- the premise of narrative therapy and also the key to much kink that reclaims and works through a traumatic experience.
Pain as a way of accessing altered states of consciousness, used across cultures and times spiritually.
Kink makes suffering relational, the meaning making of pain is an intentional part of the relationship, often connected to reclaiming pain.
Suffering and degrading are tied to accessing sub space, subterranean aspects of the soul and psyche.
Literalism- turning the archetype into something real, doing actual violence rather than playing with the symbolism to channel its compulsion consciously.
BDSM as shadow work, engaging with the archetype of evil so as to look it in the eye, work through it personally, and craft ones own moral code.
Chattle and capital have the same etymological route and shows how deep slavery and capitalism are entwined.
The interviews with Black folks in master / slave relationships in which one of the recurring phrases is "if you have a problem with this language you need to personally work through that" felt kind of weird... like the reason someone might be uncomfortable is due to systemic and ongoing harm in a huge way not a personal thing per se and there were only 4 interviews which made me wonder how cherry picked they were. They also made the point that saying only Black people could do M/S dynamics was fetishizing/ essentializing race but I can't help but feel white people playing master is a little too close to literalizing harm to be sexy to me.
Psychoid- relates to a deeply unconscious realm that is neither solely physiological nor psychological- makes me think of somatic embodiment but idk if thats what he was trying to get at
Numinous- arousing spiritual or religious emotion; mysterious or awe-inspiring"; also "supernatural" or "appealing to the aesthetic sensibility.
Ecstacy- breaks us outside of our rigid ideas of ourselves, both physical and transcendent, paradoxical in nature.
The Satyrs- the 1st bdsm gay bike club, pulls from the Dionisian archetype
Zoe- natural animalistic erotic energy
Likely connected to animalistic play esp pet play
Compared to shamanism which invoked brushes with death sex change & queerness & a connection to an animal nature.
Death as an archetypal symbol and the underworld as the unconscious. Jung hypothesized the experience of death as a return to archetypal images perhaps the collective unconscious without ego.
Death and fertility as symbolically connected, burying the dead and planting seeds, Hades & Persephone.
"Accenting to life up until the point of death." -Bataille on eroticism
Death and dogs- early dogs/ wolves likely dug up corpses leading to mythology around Hell hounds in multiple cultures, also why dogs are sometimes seen as dirty symbolically.
The Catacombs- a gay club known for fisting which the author poetically uses to talk abt fisting and vulnerability and the subterranean and taboo and what the symbolism of hands and fists are.
2 drives- eros & reproduction, Todestrieb & returning to the earth and collective unconscious (death drive).
➡️ kink is likely so transformative for playing with both drives together.
July 20, 2025
Dr. Thomas does a wonderful job here not only of presenting a cogent explication of kink and BDSM from a psychoanalytic perspective, but also of steeping that perspective in beauty and mythology. This book has bled into my clinical work as I have worked my way through it, including with my patients who do not consider themselves part of the BDSM community, bringing such richness and a newly enhanced appreciation for the ways in which pain can bring connection and meaning. This is especially true of the chapters on evil and ecstasy, both of which elucidate BDSM dynamics and the more universal experiences we humans are facing in the present day.
November 22, 2025
Death's symbolic presence is arguably the great psychic force that brings radical sexuality into intimate relationship with soul.
Sexuality is about more than genital pleasure, coital union, and orgasmic release. Sexuality is also about curiosity, desire, overwhelm, suffering, dread, and ambivalence.
Sexuality is about more than genital pleasure, coital union, and orgasmic release. Sexuality is also about curiosity, desire, overwhelm, suffering, dread, and ambivalence.
January 15, 2024
A fascinating discussion.
January 27, 2025
I love when people know what they are talking about.
March 26, 2025
Fascinating read but a little limited in terms of the kinds of relationships it covers.
December 2, 2025
This book far exceeded my expectations. The author finds the perfect balance point (at least for this reader) between academic and personal. Highly recommended.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews