Early in his career, Sigmund Freud confronted a strange problem: many of his female patients were falling in love with him. He thought he knew what was happening: encouraged by Freud, the patient would delve into her childhood, which of course was the source of her illness or neurosis. She would talk about her relationship with her father, her earliest experiences of tenderness and love, and also of neglect and abandonment. The process would stir up powerful emotions and memories. In a way, she would be transported back into her childhood. Intensifying this effect was the fact that Freud himself said little and made himself a little cold and distant, although he seemed to be caring—in other words, quite like the traditional father figure. Meanwhile the patient was lying on a couch, in a helpless or passive position, so that the situation duplicated the roles of parent and child. Eventually she would begin to direct some of the confused emotions she was dealing with toward Freud himself. Unaware of what was happening, she would relate to him as to her father. She would regress and fall in love. Freud called this phenomenon “transference,” and it would become an active part of his therapy. By getting patients to transfer some of their repressed feelings onto the therapist, he would bring their problems into the open, where they could be dealt with on a conscious level.

The transference effect was so potent, though, that Freud was often unable to move his patients past their infatuation. In fact transference is a powerful way of creating an emotional attachment—the goal of any seduction. The method has infinite applications outside psychoanalysis. To practice it in real life, you need to play the therapist, encouraging people to talk about their childhood. Most of us are only too happy to oblige; and our memories are so vivid and emotional that a part of us regresses just in talking about our early years. Also, in the course of talking, little secrets slip out: we reveal all kinds of valuable information about our weaknesses and our mental makeup, information you must attend to and remember. Do not take your targets’ words at face value; they will often sugarcoat or over-dramatize events in childhood. But pay attention to their tone of voice, to any nervous tics as they talk, and particularly to anything they do not want to talk about, anything they deny or that makes them emotional. Many statements actually mean their opposite: should they say they hated their father, for instance, you can be sure that they are hiding a lot of disappointment—that they actually loved their father only too much, and perhaps never quite got what they wanted from him. Listen closely for recurring themes and stories. Most important, learn to analyze emotional responses and see what lies behind them.

While they talk, maintain the therapist’s pose—attentive but quiet, making occasional, nonjudgmental comments. Be caring yet distant—somewhat blank, in fact—and they will begin to transfer emotions and project fantasies onto you. With the information you have gathered about their childhood, and the trusting bond you have forged, you can now begin to effect the regression. Perhaps you have uncovered a powerful attachment to a parent, a sibling, a teacher, or any early infatuation, a person who casts a shadow over their present lives. Knowing what it was about this person that affected them so powerfully, you can now take over that role. Or perhaps you have learned of an immense gap in their childhood—a neglectful father, for instance. You act like that parent now, but you replace the original neglect with the attention and affection that the real parent never supplied. Everyone has unfinished business from childhood—disappointments, lacks, painful memories. Finish what is unfinished. Discover what your target never got and you have the ingredients for a deep-rooted seduction.

The key is not just to talk about memories—that is weak. What you want is to get people to act out in their present old issues from their past, without their being aware of what is happening. The regressions you can effect fall into four main types.

Unlike infantile regression, oedipal regression must be tailored to your target. It depends on the information you have gathered. Without knowing enough, you might treat a person like a child, scolding them now and then, only to discover that you are stirring up ugly memories—they had too much discipline as child. Or you might stir up memories of a parent they loathed, and they will transfer those feelings to you. Do not go ahead with the regression until you have learned everything you can about their childhood—what they had too much of, what they lacked, and so on. If the target was strongly attached to a parent, but that attachment was partially negative, the oedipal regression strategy can still be quite effective. We always feel ambivalent toward a parent; even as we love them, we resent having had to depend on them. Don’t worry about stirring up these ambivalences, which don’t keep us from being tied to our parents. Remember to include an erotic component in your parental behavior. Now your targets are not only getting their mother or father all to themselves, they are getting something more, something previously forbidden but now allowed.

The following year Hugo married his childhood sweetheart, Adèle, who physically resembled his mother. It was a happy marriage for a while, but soon Adèle came to resemble his mother in more ways than one: in 1832, he discovered that she was having an affair with the French literary critic Sainte-Beuve, who also happened to be Hugo’s best friend at the time. Hugo was a celebrated writer by now, but he was not the calculating type. He generally wore his heart on his sleeve. Yet he could not confide in anyone about Adèle’s affair; it was too humiliating. His only solution was to have affairs of his own, with actresses, courtesans, married women. Hugo had a prodigious appetite, sometimes visiting three different women in the same day.

Near the end of 1832, production began on one of Hugo’s plays, and he was to supervise the casting. A twenty-six-year-old actress named Juliette Drouet auditioned for one of the smaller roles. Normally quite adroit with the ladies, Hugo found himself stuttering in Juliette’s presence. She was quite simply the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, and this and her composed manner intimidated him. Naturally, Juliette won the part. He found himself thinking about her all the time. She always seemed to be surrounded by a group of adoring men. Clearly she was not interested in him, or so he thought. One evening, though, after a performance of the play, he followed her home, to find that she was neither angry nor surprised—indeed she invited him up to her apartment. He spent the night, and soon he was spending almost every night there.

Hugo was happy again. To his delight, Juliette quit her career in the theater, dropped her former friends, and learned to cook. She had loved fancy clothes and social affairs; now she became Hugo’s secretary, rarely leaving the apartment in which he had established her and seeming to live only for his visits. After a while, however, Hugo returned to his old ways and started to have little affairs on the side. She did not complain—as long as she remained the one woman he kept returning to. And Hugo had in fact grown quite dependent on her.

In 1843, Hugo’s beloved daughter died in an accident and he sank into a depression. The only way he knew to get over his grief was to have an affair with someone new. And so, shortly thereafter, he fell in love with a young married aristocrat named Léonie d’Aunet. He began to see Juliette less and less. A few years later, Léonie, feeling certain she was the preferred one, gave him an ultimatum: stop seeing Juliette altogether, or it was over. Hugo refused. Instead he decided to stage a contest: he would continue to see both women, and in a few months his heart would tell him which one he preferred. Léonie was furious, but she had no choice. Her affair with Hugo had already ruined her marriage and her standing in society; she was dependent on him. Anyway, how could she lose—she was in the prime of life, whereas Juliette had gray hair by now. So she pretended to go along with this contest, but as time went on, she grew increasingly resentful about it, and complained. Juliette, on the other hand, behaved as if nothing had changed. Whenever he visited, she treated him as she always had, dropping everything to comfort and mother him.

The contest lasted several years. In 1851, Hugo was in trouble with Louis-Napoleon, the cousin of Napoleon Bonaparte and now the president of France. Hugo had attacked his dictatorial tendencies in the press, bitterly and perhaps recklessly, for Louis-Napoleon was a vengeful man. Fearing for the writer’s life, Juliette managed to hide him in a friend’s house and arranged for a false passport, a disguise, and safe passage to Brussels. Everything went according to plan; Juliette joined him a few days later, carrying his most valuable possessions. Clearly her heroic actions had won the contest for her.

And yet, after the novelty of Hugo’s new life wore off, his affairs resumed. Finally, fearing for his health, and worried that she could no longer compete with yet another twenty-year-old coquette, Juliette made a calm but stern demand: no more women or she was leaving him. Taken completely by surprise, yet certain that she meant every word, Hugo broke down and sobbed. An old man by now, he got down on his knees and swore, on the Bible and then on a copy of his famous novel Les Misérables, that he would stray no more. Until Juliette’s death, in 1883, her spell over him was complete.

Juliette never judged Hugo, or criticized him for his naughty ways. She lavished him with attention; visiting her was like returning to the womb. In her presence, in fact, he was more a little boy than ever. How could he refuse her a favor or ever leave her? And when she finally threatened to leave him, he was reduced to the state of a wailing infant crying for his mother. In the end she had total power over him.

Unconditional love is rare and hard to find, yet it is what we all crave, since we either experienced it once or wish we had. You do not have to go as far as Juliette Drouet; the mere hint of devoted attention, of accepting your lovers for who they are, of meeting their needs, will place them in an infantile position. A sense of dependency may frighten them a little, and they may feel an undercurrent of ambivalence, a need to assert themselves periodically, as Hugo did through his affairs. But their ties to you will be strong and they will keep coming back for more, bound by the illusion that they are recapturing the mother-love they had seemingly lost forever, or never had.

One day a student Mut loathed—a haughty, well-dressed young man named Lohmann—stood up in class and said, “I can’t go on working in this room, Professor. There is such a smell of mud.” Mud was the boys’ nickname for Professor Mut. The professor seized Lohmann by the arm, twisted it hard, then banished him from the room. He later noticed that Lohmann had left his exercise book behind, and thumbing through it he saw a paragraph about an actress named Rosa Fröhlich. A plot hatched in Mut’s mind: he would catch Lohmann cavorting with this actress, no doubt a woman of ill repute, and would get the boy kicked out of school.

First he had to find out where she performed. He searched high and low, finally finding her name up outside a club called the Blue Angel. He went in. It was a smoke-filled place, full of the working-class types he looked down on. Rosa was onstage. She was singing a song; the way she looked everyone in the audience in the eye was rather brazen, but for some reason Mut found this disarming. He relaxed a little, had some wine. After her performance he made his way to her dressing room, determined to grill her about Lohmann. Once there he felt strangely uncomfortable, but he gathered up his courage, accused her of leading schoolboys astray, and threatened to get the police to close the place down. Rosa, however, was not intimidated. She turned all of Mut’s sentences around: perhaps he was the one leading boys astray. Her tone was cajoling and teasing. Yes, Lohmann had bought her flowers and champagne—so what? No one had ever talked to Mut this way before; his authoritative tone usually made people give way. He should have felt offended: she was low class and a woman, and he was a schoolmaster, but she was talking to him as if they were equals. Instead, however, he neither got angry nor left—something compelled him to stay.

Now she was silent. She picked up a stocking and started to darn it, ignoring him; his eyes followed her every move, particularly the way she rubbed her bare knee. Finally he brought up Lohmann again, and the police. “You’ve no idea what this life’s like,” she said. “Everyone who comes here thinks he’s the only pebble on the beach. If you don’t give them what they want they threaten you with the police!” “I certainly regret having hurt a lady’s feelings,” he replied sheepishly. As she got up from her chair, their knees rubbed, and he felt a shiver up his spine. Now she was nice to him again, and poured him some more wine. She invited him to come back, then left abruptly to perform another number.

The next day he kept thinking about her words, her looks. Thinking about her while he was teaching gave him a kind of naughty thrill. That night he went back to the club, still determined to catch Lohmann in the act, and once again found himself in Rosa’s dressing room, drinking wine and becoming strangely passive. She asked him to help her get dressed; that seemed quite an honor and he obliged her. Helping her with her corset and her makeup, he forgot about Lohmann. He felt he was being initiated into some new world. She pinched his cheeks and stroked his chin, and occasionally let him glimpse her bare leg as she rolled up a stocking.

Now Professor Mut showed up night after night, helping her dress, watching her perform, all with a strange kind of pride. He was there so often that Lohmann and his friends no longer showed up. He had taken their place—he was the one to bring her flowers, pay for her champagne, the one to serve her. Yes, an old man like himself had bested the youthful Lohmann, who thought himself so suave! He liked it when she stroked his chin, complimented him for doing things right, but he felt even more excited when she rebuked him, throwing a powder puff in his face or pushing him off a chair. It meant she liked him. And so, gradually, he began to pay for all her caprices. It cost him a pretty penny but kept her away from other men. Eventually he proposed to her. They married, and scandal ensued: he lost his job, and soon all his money; finally he landed in prison. To the very end, however, he could never get angry with Rosa. Instead he felt guilty: he had never done enough for her.

The key to this kind of regression is to see and treat your targets as children. Nothing about them intimidates you, no matter how much authority or social standing they have. Your manner makes it clear that you feel you are the stronger party. To accomplish this it may be helpful to imagine or visualize them as the children they once were; suddenly, powerful people do not seem so powerful and threatening when you regress them in your imagination. Keep in mind that certain types are more vulnerable to an oedipal regression. Look for those who, like Professor Mut, seem outwardly the most adult—straitlaced, serious, a little full of themselves. They are struggling to repress their regressive tendencies, overcompensating for their weaknesses. Often those who seem the most in command of themselves are the ripest for regression. In fact they are secretly longing for it, because their power, position, and responsibilities are more a burden than a pleasure.

The French public, weary after the terrors of the 1790s, greeted Chateaubriand’s first books enthusiastically, sensing a new spirit in them. His novels were full of windswept castles, brooding heroes, and passionate heroines. Romanticism was in the air. Chateaubriand himself resembled the characters in his novels, and despite his rather unattractive appearance, women went wild over him—with him, they could escape their boring marriages and live out the kind of turbulent romance he wrote about. Chateaubriand’s nickname was the Enchanter, and although he was married, and an ardent Catholic, the number of his affairs increased with the years. But he had a restless nature—he traveled to the Middle East, to the United States, all over Europe. He could not find what he was looking for anywhere, and not the right woman either: after the novelty of an affair wore off, he would leave. By 1807 he had had so many affairs, and still felt so unsatisfied, that he decided to retire to his country estate, called Vallée aux Loups. He filled the place with trees from all over the world, transforming the grounds into something out of one of his novels. There he began to write the memoirs that he envisioned would be his masterpiece.

By 1817, however, Chateaubriand’s life had fallen apart. Money problems had forced him to sell Vallée aux Loups. Almost fifty, he suddenly felt old, his inspiration dried up. That year he visited the writer Madame de Staël, who had been ill and was now close to death. He spent several days at her bedside, along with her closest friend, Juliette Récamier. Madame Récamier’s affairs were infamous. She was married to a much older man, but they had not lived together for some time; she had broken the hearts of the most illustrious men in Europe, including Prince Metternich, the Duke of Wellington, and the writer Benjamin Constant. It had also been rumored that despite all her flirtations she was still a virgin. She was now almost forty, but she was the type of woman who seems youthful at any age. Drawn together by their grief over de Staël’s death, she and Chateaubriand became friends. She listened so attentively to him, adopting his moods and echoing his sentiments, that he felt that he had at last met a woman who understood him. There was also something rather ethereal about Madame Récamier. Her walk, her voice, her eyes—more than one man had compared her to some unearthly angel. Chateaubriand soon burned with the desire to possess her physically.

The year after their friendship began, she had a surprise for him: she had convinced a friend to purchase Vallée aux Loups. The friend was away for a few weeks, and she invited Chateaubriand to spend some time with her at his former estate. He happily accepted. He showed her around, explaining what each little patch of ground had meant to him, the memories the place conjured up. He felt youthful feelings welling up inside him, feelings he had forgotten about. He delved further into the past, describing events in his childhood. At moments, walking with Madame Récamier and looking into those kind eyes, he felt a shiver of recognition, but he could not quite identify it. All he knew was that he had to go back to the memoirs that he had laid aside. “I intend to employ the little time that is left to me in describing my youth,” he said, “so long as its essence remains palpable to me.”

It seemed that Madame Récamier returned Chateaubriand’s love, but as usual she struggled to keep it a spiritual affair. The Enchanter, however, deserved his nickname. His poetry, his air of melancholy, and his persistence finally won the day and she succumbed, perhaps for the first time in her life. Now, as lovers, they were inseparable. But as always with Chateaubriand, over time one woman was not enough. The restless spirit returned. He began to have affairs again. Soon he and Récamier stopped seeing each other.

In 1832, Chateaubriand was traveling through Switzerland. Once again his life had taken a downward turn; only this time he truly was old, in body and spirit. In the Alps, strange thoughts of his youth began to assail him, memories of the castle in Brittany Word reached him that Madame Récamier was in the area. He had not seen her in years, and he hurried to the inn where she was staying. She was as kind to him as ever; during the day they took walks together, and at night they stayed up late, talking.

One day, Chateaubriand told Récamier he had finally decided to finish his memoirs. And he had a confession to make: he told her the story of Sylphide, his imaginary lover when he was growing up. He had once hoped to meet a Sylphide in real life, but the women he had known had paled in comparison. Over the years he had forgotten about his imaginary lover, but now he was an old man, and he not only thought of her again, he could see her face and hear her voice. And with those memories he realized that he had in fact met Sylphide in real life—it was Madame Récamier. The face and voice were close. More important, there was the calm spirit, the innocent, virginal quality. Reading to her the prayer to Sylphide he had just written, he told her he wanted to be young again, and seeing her had brought his youth back to him. Reconciled with Madame Récamier, he began to work again on the memoirs, which were eventually published under the title Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. Most critics agreed that the book was his masterpiece. The memoirs were dedicated to Madame Récamier, to whom he remained devoted until his death, in 1848.

We searched hardest for this ideal type in our adolescence, when we were more idealistic. Often our first loves have more of these traits than our subsequent affairs. For Chateaubriand, living with his family in their secluded castle, his first love was his sister Lucile, whom he adored and idealized. But since love with her was impossible, he created a figure out of his imagination who had all her positive attributes—nobility of spirit, innocence, courage.

Madame Récamier could not have known about Chateaubriand’s ideal type, but she did know something about him, well before she ever met him. She had read all of his books, and his characters were highly autobiographical. She knew of his obsession with his lost youth; and everyone knew of his endless and unsatisfying affairs with women, his hyperrestless spirit. Madame Récamier knew how to mirror people, entering their spirit, and one of her first acts was to take Chateaubriand to Vallée aux Loups, where he felt he had left part of his youth. Alive with memories, he regressed further into his childhood, to the days in the castle. She actively encouraged this. Most important, she embodied a spirit that came naturally to her, but that matched his youthful ideal: innocent, noble, kind. (The fact that so many men fell in love with her suggests that many men had the same ideals.) Madame Récamier was Lucile/Sylphide. It took him years to realize it, but when he did, her spell over him was complete.

It is nearly impossible to embody someone’s ideal completely. But if you come close enough, if you evoke some of that ideal spirit, you can lead that person into a deep seduction. To effect this regression you must play the role of the therapist. Get your targets to open up about their past, particularly their former loves and most particularly their first love. Pay attention to any expressions of disappointment, how this or that person did not give them what they wanted. Take them to places that evoke their youth. In this regression you are creating not so much a relationship of dependency and immaturity but rather the adolescent spirit of a first love. There is a touch of innocence to the relationship. So much of adult life involves compromise, conniving, and a certain toughness. Create the ideal atmosphere by keeping such things out, drawing the other person into a kind of mutual weakness, conjuring a second virginity. There should be a dreamlike quality to the affair, as if the target were reliving that first love but could not quite believe it. Let all of this unfold slowly, each encounter revealing more ideal qualities. The sense of reliving a past pleasure is simply impossible to resist.

A few weeks later the king was inspecting the royal stables when he caught sight of a young man who was new to the court: the twenty-two-year-old George Villiers, a member of the lower nobility. The courtiers who accompanied the king that day watched the king’s eyes following Villiers, and saw with what interest he asked about this young man. Indeed everyone had to agree that he was a most handsome youth, with the face of an angel and a charmingly childish manner. When news of the king’s interest in Villiers reached the conspirators, they instantly knew they had found what they had been looking for: a young man who could seduce the king and supplant the dreaded favorite. Left to nature, though, the seduction would never happen. They had to help it along. So, without telling Villiers of their plan, they befriended him.

King James was the son of Mary Queen of Scots. His childhood had been a nightmare: his father, his mother’s favorite, and his own regents had all been murdered; his mother had first been exiled, later executed. When James was young, to escape suspicion he played the part of a fool. He hated the sight of a sword and could not stand the slightest sign of argument. When his cousin Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, leaving no heir, he became king of England.

James surrounded himself with bright, happy young men, and seemed to prefer the company of boys. In 1612, his son, Prince Henry, died. The king was inconsolable. He needed distraction and good cheer, and his favorite, the Earl of Somerset, was no longer so young and attractive. The timing for a seduction was perfect. And so the conspirators went to work on Villiers, under the guise of trying to help him advance within the court. They supplied him with a magnificent wardrobe, jewels, a glittering carriage, the kind of things the king noticed. They worked on his riding, fencing, tennis, dancing, his skills with birds and dogs. He was instructed in the art of conversation—how to flatter, tell a joke, sigh at the right moment. Fortunately Villiers was easy to work with; he had a naturally buoyant manner and nothing seemed to bother him. That same year the conspirators managed to get him appointed the royal cup-bearer: every night he poured out the king’s wine, so that the king could see him up close. After a few weeks, the king was in love. The boy seemed to crave attention and tenderness, exactly what he yearned to offer. How wonderful it would be to mold and educate him. And what a perfect figure he had!

The conspirators convinced Villiers to break off his engagement to a young lady; the king was single-minded in his affections, and could not stand competition. Soon James wanted to be around Villiers all the time, for he had the qualities the king admired: innocence and a lighthearted spirit. The king appointed Villiers gentleman of the bedchamber, making it possible for them to be alone together. What particularly charmed James was that Villiers never asked for anything, which made it all the more delightful to spoil him.

By 1616, Villiers had completely supplanted the former favorite. He was now the Earl of Buckingham, and a member of the king’s privy council. To the conspirators’ dismay, however, he quickly accumulated even more privileges than the Earl of Somerset had done. The king would call him sweetheart in public, fix his doublets, comb his hair. James zealously protected his favorite, anxious to preserve the young man’s innocence. He tended to the youth’s every whim, in effect became his slave. In fact the king seemed to regress; whenever Steenie, his nickname for Villiers, entered the room, he started to act like a child. The two were inseparable until the king’s death, in 1625.

Most of this came naturally to Villiers, but you will probably have to use some calculation. Fortunately, all of us have strong childish tendencies within us that are easy to access and exaggerate. Make your gestures seem spontaneous and unplanned. Any sexual element of your behavior should seem innocent, unconscious. Like Villiers, don’t push for favors. Parents prefer to spoil children who don’t ask for things but invite them in their manner. Seeming nonjudgmental and uncritical of those around you will make everything you do seem more natural and naive. Have a happy, cheerful demeanor, but with a playful edge. Emphasize any weaknesses you might have, things you cannot control. Remember: most of us remember our early years fondly, but often, paradoxically, the people with the strongest attachment to those times are the ones who had the most difficult childhoods. Actually, circumstances kept them from getting to be children, so they never really grew up, and they long for the paradise they never got to experience. James I falls into this category. These types are ripe targets for a reverse regression.