Interview Babel Magazine - Excerpts Part 38 - How to Overcome a Mental Illness

Written by Sam Vaknin

Q: Do you have any wild sex stories that'd knock our socks off?

Sam: Many years (and kilograms) ago, I was into orgies and group sex.

There are three types of orgies.

There is the "we are so intimate" group sex. People are so drawn to each other intellectually and emotionally that they cannot contain the flow of empathy, compassion - love, really. So, they express their unity through sex. In such group sex, all boundaries are blurred. The participants flow into one another, they feel as extensions of a much larger organism, eruptions of protoplasmic desire to be within each other. It is absolute, unmitigated, uninhibited immersion and enmeshment.

Then there is the "we are such strangers". This is the most promiscuous, wild, ecstatic, insane type of orgy. A kaleidoscope of flesh and semen and pubic hair and sweat and feet and wild eyes and penises and orifices of all measure. Until it is all over in an orgiastic cry. Usually, following the initial frenzy of devouring each other, small groups (twosomes, threesomes) retire and proceed to make love. They get intoxicated by the smells and the fluids and the bizarreness of it all.

It slowly peters out in a benign sort of way.

Lastly, there is the "we couldn't help it" thing. Aided by alcohol or drugs, the right music or videos - the participants, mostly unwilling but fascinated - slip into sex. They tumble in fits and starts. They withdraw only to return forced to by a mighty curiosity. They make love hesitantly, shyly, fearfully, almost clandestinely (though in full view of all the others). This is the sweetest kind. It is depraved and perverted, it is painfully arousing, it heightens one's sensation of oneself. It is a trip.

Group sex is NOT an extrapolation of pair sex. It is not normal sex multiplied. It is like living in three dimensions after being confined to a bi-dimensional, flat existence. It is like finally seeing in colour. The number of physical, emotional, and psychosexual permutations is mind boggling and it does boggle the mind. It is addictive. It permeates one's consciousness and consumes one's memory and one's desires. Thereafter one finds it hard to engage in one-on-one sex. It looks so boring, so lacking, so partial, so asymptotically craving for perfection...

Sometimes (not always) there is a "moderator". His/her (usually his) function is to "arrange" the bodies in "compositions" (very much like old quadrille dances).

Q: Of all the famous women in popular culture (either living or deceased), who would you consider the most beautiful of all- time?

Sam: I can see her face, but I don't remember her name. She is a contemporary young actress. And the second one would be Elizabeth Taylor.

Q: Why are women so afraid of you?

Sam: Women have suffered subjugation and abuse at the hands of men for millennia. Their only weapons have been their charm, their beauty, their sexuality, their mystique, their submissiveness, their wisdom. They had been transformed by the male-dominated, patriarchal, culture into manipulators. Women take for granted their ability - by tantalizingly offering sex and emotional succor to them - to sway men, attract them, coerce them, or convince them to do their bidding.

With the exception of narcissistic supply (i.e., attention), I am totally resistant to anything another person - man or woman - has to offer. I am completely self-sufficient and self-contained. I am a-sexual, schizoid, paranoid, misogynist, and misanthropic. Women - no matter how sexy, how willing, how determined, or how skillful - have absolutely no effect on me. This sudden helplessness and acquired transparency frightens women. Fear is a normal reaction to the dawning realization that one's coping mechanisms and survival strategies are useless.

Q: In "The Narcissist," you write, "I always think of myself as a machine." Could you elaborate?

Sam: At the risk of sounding narcissistic, allow me to quote myself:

"I always think of myself as a machine. I say to myself things like "you have an amazing brain" or "you are not functioning today, your efficiency is low". I measure things, I constantly compare performance.

I am acutely aware of time and how it is utilized. There is a meter in my head, it ticks and tocks, a metronome of self-reproach and grandiose assertions. I talk to myself in third person singular. It lends objectivity to what I think, as though it comes from an external source, from someone else. That low is my self-esteem that, to be trusted, I have to disguise myself, to hide myself from myself. It is the pernicious and all-pervasive art of un-being.

I like to think about myself in terms of automata. There is something so aesthetically compelling in their precision, in their impartiality, in their harmonious embodiment of the abstract. Machines are so powerful and so emotionless, not prone to be hurting weaklings like me. Machines don't bleed. Often I find myself agonizing over the destruction of a laptop in a movie, as its owner is blown to smithereens as well.

Machines are my folk and kin. They are my family. They allow me the tranquil luxury of un-being.

And then there is data. My childhood dream of unlimited access to information has come true and I am the happiest for it. I have been blessed by the Internet. Information was power and not only figuratively.

Information was the dream, reality the nightmare. My knowledge was my flying info-carpet. It took me away from the slums of my childhood, from the atavistic social milieu of my adolescence, from the sweat and stench of the army - and into the perfumed existence of international finance and media exposure.

So, even in the darkness of my deepest valleys I was not afraid. I carried with me my metal constitution, my robot countenance, my superhuman knowledge, my inner timekeeper, my theory of morality and my very own divinity - myself."