Lust
Just as anger may be regarded the most hidden of passions, lust is probably the most visible, seeming an exception to a general rule that wherever there is passion, there is also
taboo or injunction in the psyche against it. I say “seemingly†because even though the lusty type is passionately in favor of his lust and of lust in general as a way of life, the very
passionateness with which he embraces this outlook betrays a defensiveness—as if he needed to prove to himself and the rest of the world that what everybody calls bad is not such. Some of the specific traits that convey lust, such as “intensity,†“gusto,†“contactfulness,†“love of eating,†and so on, are intimately bound to the constitutional stratum of personality. A sensory-motor disposition (the somatotonic background of lust) may be regarded as the natural soil in which lust proper is supported. Other traits, such as hedonism, the propensity to boredom when not succiently stimulated, the craving for excitement, impatience, and impulsiveness, are in domain of lust proper.
We must consider that lust is more than hedonism. There is in lust not only pleasure, but pleasure in asserting the satisfaction of impulses, pleasure in the forbidden and, particularly, pleasure in fighting for pleasure. In addition to pleasure proper there is here an admixture of some pain that has been transformed into pleasure: either the pain of others who are “preyed upon†for one’s satisfaction or the pain entailed by the effort to conquer the obstacles in the way to satisfaction. It is this that makes lust a passion for intensity and not for pleasure alone. The extra intensity, the extra excitement, the “spice,†comes not from instinctual satisfaction, but from a struggle and an implicit triumph.
