Even if you’re with someone else, fantasy has the power to increase excitement, passion and transport you to your own personal sexual utopia. Liberating! And particularly helpful if your partner is not as sexually adventurous as you are! If you’re sexually diffident, fantasy offers itself as practicing ground where you can give your imagination free reign and experiment with role-playing. And most importantly, for some people, fantasy is the only way to keep focused on sexual pleasure during coitus (a way to keep those interfering thoughts (unpaid bills, work stresses etc.) far, far away).

For many however, fantasy is also a dark space within which they struggle endlessly. Women have often confided about rape fantasies to me, heterosexual men of homosexual fantasies, violent fantasies (both men and women), pedophilic fantasies, gang rape fantasies, bondage fantasies, incest fantasies and so on. Yes! I’ve heard them all. It’s been part and parcel (a very complex one) of the healing work I do.

A general feeling of powerlessness over the fantasy makes it impossible for most to control them. The fantasy seems to repeat itself obsessively as if it is functioning from a space within the mind which the fantasizer has no control over. Many people talk of how they try to fight their ‘negative’ fantasies but they are either not able to climax or just find that they lose interest altogether in the sexual act. Many people struggle to try and replace them with ‘healthier fantasies’ but that usually results in stress and loss of sexual focus for them. Both women and men also often talk about how they would never live out their fantasies but admit that there is a fear that they may be attracted to similar situations if the opportunity arose in real life.

The question then is that are people like child molesters and Jack the Ripper just people who muster up the courage to live out their deviant sexual fantasies? The notion that deviant fantasies are an important part of sexual deviance was emphasized by Abel and Blanchard (1974), since then researchers have generally agreed that negative fantasies are an important indicator of a person’s sexual preference and orientation. Marshall, Barbaree and Eccles (1991) also found evidence (and this has been a consistent finding of many other researchers) that deviant sexual interest usually develops in childhood. It could be a result of child sexual abuse or just our sexual conditioning whilst growing up. In a subset of their sample of 129 child molesters 95% of these offenders reported fantasizing about children during masturbation, and 44% remembered recalling deviant fantasies before their first offense. Are those of us who live out sexual deviancy in our heads and those of us who live out our sexual deviancies in reality just separated by a thin line of restraint?

Interestingly enough research has also consistently discovered that deviant fantasies almost always arise from a negative state of mind i.e. depression, anger, powerlessness etc. This negates the argument that ‘deviant’ fantasies can also be liberating, empowering and therefore healthy for people to indulge in. We can safely conclude that anything, which arises from a negative emotional state, can hardly have a positive outcome.

I am not sharing the above data to further scare those who are already living in fear of their sexual fantasies. Instead it is meant to put negative fantasizing in its context and to realize that negative fantasizing has harmful effects not only for us but also potentially for those around us.

Since we can’t just wish our dark fantasies away, we end up struggling with them and they in turn become more compulsive and repetitive. An entire part of us continues to breathe in and act out (even if it is within the privacy of our own mind) this darkness. Trapped within this destructive dance of the senses, few of us find the courage and the insight required to step out and change our steps. Sexual fantasy can be healed, if we understand why and how fantasies get created in the first place. In Part 3 of this article I will be talking about sexual conditioning/imaging and its role in fantasy creation. I will also discuss the rather controversial topic of pornography.