Title: Dirty Words: Psychological Insights

Author: Ariel Arango

Year Published: 1989

Kind of Book: Psychology, Sexuality, Linguistics

How Strongly I Recommend It: 7/10

My Impressions: This book was recommended to me by Tony Robbins of all people. At the UPW event I went to he spoke about the power taboo language has over people when utilized correctly. When he mentioned this book as the place where he got that idea I added it my amazon cart right then. The author is a Freudian and many of his theories about taboo words are themselves taboo and uber-controversial. Among the questions he tries to answer here; What are dirty words dirty? Why do grown men enjoy sucking women's tits? Why don't we like smelling or eating poop? Why does sodomy so often have sadistic overtones? Hint: he's Freudian, so the answer probably has something to do with incest. Though a lot of these theories seemed bananas to me, they were certainly entertaining. If you haven't gathered by now. This book is not for the faint of heart.

Date Read: Feb 2021

What question is the author trying to answer?

  • Why are certain taboo words taboo? Why do they trigger visceral emotional reactions from so many people?

Practical Takeaways

  • (giving therapy) make sure the patient uses the taboo words in therapy not the scientific words A: A patient who relates his sexual life in the terminology characteristic of an anatomy or physiology book is not revealing his story but rather is delivering a summary, as scientific, cold, and impersonal as a medical book."-Sando Ferenczi

  • (giving therapy) use dirty words with your patients A: it allows them to genuinely release repressed affections-Sando Ferenczi

  • The words "fuck" and "cunt" must only be mentioned sparingly-Henry Miller

  • Accept and Don't repress your incestuous desires

  • Never allow fucking to become a habit A: the more tension the better

  • Give up the infantile illusion of the virgin mother, and accept that mom is a whore (Only when they admit that the beloved mother gets horny too, will they be able, in turn, to get horny themselves with the woman they love.)

  • Allow dirty words to have a place in your daily life

Big Ideas

  • Some words hit us on a deep emotional level

  • People were writing X rated notes to each other hundreds of years ago

  • When a patient in therapy uses the medical terms for genitals instead of the taboo ones they remove themselves from the situation and don't emotionally connect with what they're talking about and therefore don't make progress -

  • Dirty words (and dreams) are roads to the unconscious

  • If the words "fuck" and "cunt" were mentioned all the time the world would be shattered into pieces

  • Adult Men like breasts and sucking nipple because it reminds him of nursing his mother as a child

  • Adult Woman like sucking cock because it reminds her of nursing her mother as a child and she is unable to suck a tit

  • Women sucked cock in ancient times too

  • All dirty words are dirty because they trigger incestuous memories and therefore must be repressed

  • Humans feel ashamed of anything that reminds them of their animal nature

  • The lower-class (proletariat) is sexually freer than the bourgeois (upper class)

  • The reason the lower-class is more sexually liberal than the upper class is that there is a tension between culture and sexual instinct.

  • Kings, Celebrities, and popes hide the fact that they poop because that reminds us that they are animals and mortal

  • We only appear heroic to those who don't know us intimately

  • Our aversion to shit is not due to our nature, but rather caused by Civilization

  • Children love their own feces and other people's feces

  • Only people who are able to accept their incestuous desires are able to love fully

  • Every sexual organ arouses different instincts in us

  • The tits arouse tenderness in us

  • The ass arouses sadism in us (no one knows why)

  • Sodomy comes from a man's desire to punish, humiliate and dominate another man (both homosexual sodomy and heterosexual sodomy)

  • Preferring anal sex with a woman is a sign of homosexual impulses

  • The two ways men are emasculated the most are castration and sodomy (or whipping which is a displaced form of sodomy)

  • Whipping/caning are displaced forms of sodomy (sadistic)

  • Women are always consciously or unconsciously the motive for quarrels among men

  • Showing ones ass is a sign of submission amongst animals

  • Muslims offer their ass to Allah when then bow to him

  • Putting one's tail between their legs is a sign of fear and protection

  • Circumcision represents castration and is a form of instilling obedience

  • Every joke relies on surprise

  • We say humorously what we cannot say seriously.

  • The more sexually repressed a society (or person) the more sex jokes will make them laugh

  • People who laugh a lot are not happy

  • The more prohibited a word, the more power it has

  • The vagina/cunt is the most banned image (and therefore the dirtiest of the dirty words)

 

Theories why we ban images of the vagina in art/on tv

  • The presence of a woman's vagina causes us to act, not contemplate

  • A vulva is always the Mother's vulva

 

  • A man's mothers vulva is the most precious thing in the world to him

  • A man's mothers vulva becomes the unconscious model for all the vulvas he seeks later in life

  • The things we most desire become the things we most fear

  • We form a connection between a woman's face and her vulva

  • A man's personality/disposition is represented in his penis

  • Dirty words awake passion and emotion in people

  • The man most lose respect for the woman to be sexually free and happy in erotic life

  • We want to have sex with our Mothers

  • We want to go back to the Mother's womb

  • The goal of fucking for the man is to go back to his mother's womb

  • 'Mother Fucker' is such a bad insult because we unconsciously want to fuck our Mother's ie. Go back to the womb

  • The reason our parents having sex grosses us out is because we don't want to image anyone else having sex with our mother besides us

  • It is common for an adult man to uncover repressed memories of his parents having sex during psychoanalysis

  • Men with Madonna whore complex are impotent with women they respect and potent with those they do

  • Men with Madonna Whore complex desire women they don't love and love women they don't desire

  • Men with Madonna Whore complex will only be able to get horny with the women they love when they admit that their mother is not a virgin and gets horny too

  • When the unconscious is made conscious it no longer can rule you

  • During Psychoanalysis incestuous desires must be remember and experienced in order get better

  • When we talk about instincts we are able to control them

  • There is no biological reason to ban incest and make it taboo

 

Surprising Facts

  • There are words that are forbidden in every society

  • The Guajiros in Columbia would give the death penalty to people who said some taboo words

  • Freud was a monogamist and didn't let anyone know about any other sexual intimacies besides with his wife

  • Freud didn't let his wife socialize with a woman who had sex before marriage or his daughter read books with sexual content

  • The name for the "the milky way" comes from a Greek myth where Hera was nursing Hercules. He bit and hurt her tit and the milk went everywhere, forming the galaxy.

  • The word "cock" for penis comes from the erect comb on a rooster

  • In insane asylums the tendency of many patients to eat their own excrement is well known

  • The Roman Emperor Commodus often mixed human excrements with highly refined dishes

  • Farting was considered a good omen among the Greeks

  • In the 18th century homosexuals were burned at the stake

  • The root word of Islam is "al-silm" which means "submission" or "surrender." It is understood to mean "submission to Allah."

  • Turtles, penguins, elephants use rocks to masturbate

  • Female primates have been observed using plants and sticks as dildo //animal tools

  • The Egyptian pharaoh Ramses II marriage his daughters.

Azande people allow incestuous relationships

Incas in Peru allowed marriage between siblings

Hawaiian royal families incest was permitted

Ancient Egypt

Cleopatra married her brother when he was 10 and she was 18

 

Unknown Terms

Taboo: 1) an implicit prohibition on something based on a cultural sense that it is excessively repulsive or, perhaps, too sacred for ordinary people. 2) the words is Polynesian in origin. It has two contradictory meanings. It means sacred or consecrated; on the other, impure, prohibited, dangerous, and disturbing 3) anything that awakens a sacred fear in us

Obscene: 1) disgusting to the senses : repulsive 2) it is possibly a corruption or modification of the Latin word scena that literally means "out of scene".

Pornography: 1) Sexually explicit writing, images, video, or other material whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal.2) comes from the Greek pornographes, which literally means, "writing on harlots," that is, the description of the life of prostitutes.

Coprophagy: the consumption of feces. The word is derived from the Greek κόπρος copros, "feces" and φαγεῖν phagein, "to eat". It refers to many kinds of feces-eating, including eating feces of other species, of other individuals, or one's own – those once deposited or taken directly from the anus.

 

Symbols

Water=birth

Flowers=vagina

Water=vagina

Ear=vagina