The Sexual Instinct

What Is the Sexual Instinct?

The Sexual Instinct is the drive for attraction, chemistry, and transformative self-renewal. It is the striving of life to reconstitute itself into ever more diverse and creative forms. This instinct is not merely about sexual lust or genital arousal; its fundamental aim is to cultivate fascination and attraction to elicit the attention and choice of a potential mate, thereby ensuring one's genetic merit and psychological vitality.

This drive discerns who or what we’re attracted to and provides the motivation to pursue it, to enhance and display characteristics that make us more enticing. It is how we signal our sexuality. From an evolutionary point of view, the human mind itself is as much a sexual ornamentation as a problem-solver. The Sexual Instinct motivates us to invest energy in ourselves: our passions, interests, and self-expression, to create a unique “flavor” that distinguishes us from sexual competition.

This drive seeks more than procreation. It has a parallel psychological function: pursuing people and influences that have the potential to revise our sense of self, to upend stagnation physically and psychologically. It is the part in everyone that is willing to risk losing everything in pursuit of what's vitalizing and life-affirming.

The 3 Core Needs of the Sexual Instinct

This instinct motivates behavior to fulfill three specific biological and emotional needs:

1. Sex

• The need to elicit the sexual choice of potential mates and the need for sexual contact and release. This is the fundamental biological component, seeking partners for sexual union and the physical discharge of energy.

2. Chemistry

• The need to seek and find complementary energies, including a need to feel “chosen.”Chemistry is the means by which we sense a creative possibility and enlivening influences. It is a distinct sensation that denotes natural excitation, an energetic syntony between people that suggests, through the body, corresponding polarities with a creative or enlivening potential.

3. “Loss of Self”

• The need to get beyond ourselves and our usual psychological boundaries, a temporary dissolution of the habitual experiences of selfhood as a kind of self-renewal. It is the impulse to surrender, to lose oneself, and to drop one’s boundaries and defenses all at once. This need is mirrored psychologically as a drive to temporarily relinquish tightly-held psychological boundaries to counter psychological stagnancy.

Healthy Expression: The Awake Sexual Instinct

When we are present and connected to this drive, it manifests as a source of creativity, magnetism, and authentic transformation. The integrated Sexual Instinct helps us uncover what expands our felt sense of aliveness.

• Individuation & Self-Expression: It helps us to individuate, develop, and express ourselves. It motivates us to invest energy into creative activities, talents, and other expressions of virtuosity that unconsciously function as “courtship displays,” indicators of our unique vitality. We make ourselves dynamic and enticing by developing and expressing our unique “flavor.”

• Following Aliveness: We are really going for what enlivens and arouses us. It’s how we “shed our skin” and allow ourselves to be renewed, reinvented, and to keep moving toward a deeper source in ourselves with a willingness to let go of what no longer serves us.

• Navigating Chemistry: We become attuned to patterns of excitation and arousal, using chemistry as a tool to discern creative potential. We can experience different kinds of chemistry without compulsive action, recognizing it as a means of sensing possibility.

• Creative Polarities: The instinct understands that some degree of separation is desirable to have something to push against, which generates excitement. It acts as a counter to stability-seeking, aiming to be undone by our experience and providing the thrust to overcome obstacles between ourselves and the object of desire.

Ego Pattern: When the Instinct is Unconscious

When we are not present, the energy of the Sexual Instinct is co-opted by the fear of being undesirable and sexually overlooked. The body's innate sensitivity to what is enlivening is superseded by unresolved emotional constellations, and the drive becomes one for Objectificationand depletion.

• Objectification of Self & Others: We reduce ourselves and others to parts and functions. Considering ourselves valuable only if we are attractive, we make ourselves an object. Objectification of others can lead to a severe violation of boundaries and feelings of entitlement to sexual attention.

• Destructive Attraction: Under the guise of something new and creative, we are drawn to partners and dynamics that reinforce our toxic self-image and negative self-concepts in destructive partnerships. Attraction functions to simply reinforce our egoic identity.

• Compulsive Patterns: This can manifest as a compulsive seeking to expel or spend our life force recklessly. It can lead to consuming obsession, an impulse to self-annihilate, or a pattern of trying to "force" attraction with unworthy objects to prove desirability. We may become slavishly devoted to toxic dynamics or act out sexually from a place of insecurity rather than discernment.

• Destabilization: Because of its compulsory and polarizing quality, without the grounding of self-preservation and the contextual awareness of the Social Instinct, it can render us completely unconcerned with consequences and be destabilizing.

Sexual as a Dominant Instinct

If the Sexual Instinct is your dominant instinct, your personality is primarily organized around the need to elicit the sexual choice of potential mates. Much of your identity is structured around ensuring you can win out over sexual competition and cultivate fascination.

• Central Motivation & Focus: You are identified with your “courtship display,” the means by which you foster attraction and elicit intense engagement and chemistry. You are especially attuned to what “turns you on,” and pursuing attraction becomes a guiding principle. You have a high tolerance for being “locked on” to a specific person or interest, often with intense urgency and single-mindedness.

• Strengths & Traits: You often have a captivating personality, well-developed "attraction hooks," and a magnetic self-presentation. You are willing to be experimental, to make drastic changes in pursuit of desire, and to push beyond familiar boundaries for renewal. You possess a tenacious, transformative energy.

• Potential Pitfalls: You can become overly identified with your sexual viability, leading to insecurity if attraction is not reciprocated. Your energy can be mercurial, contracting when uninterested. You may undermine practical foundations or social support in pursuit of a "target." There can be a compulsive need to escalate dynamics or create push-pull tension to avoid stagnation.

• Core Fear Realized: The ego's strategy is an attempt to avoid the fear that expressing the other instincts (Self-Preservation or Social) will make you unattractive and cause you to be sexually overlooked.

Sexual as a Blindspot

If the Sexual Instinct is your blindspot, you neglect or ignore its needs. You are deeply handicapped in your ability to “see” its operation and the cost of this negligence.

• The Blindspot Stance: You may perceive Sexual energy as dangerous, narcissistic, destabilizing, or sleazy. There is a resistance to "letting yourself go" or being "swept up" in something, and a strong obligation to self-contain to protect your foundations or social standing.

• Common Manifestations: You struggle to register impressions about what turns you on and to trust chemistry. You may base attraction on ideas, social affinity, or reason rather than the body's direct response. You likely avoid developing or expressing your unique personal "flavor" for fear of being off-putting, leading to feelings of being unremarkable or unchosen. Passionate pursuits often require excessive mental rationalization to fit into your life structure.

• Impact: This neglect limits avenues of self-expansion, creativity, and deep immersion in interests. It can lead to a blunt approach to sex, missed experiences, and a repression of vitality. You may feel alienated from the sensation of your own life force, particularly in the pelvic area. Growth comes from inhabiting the sensations of the Sexual Drive, trusting its intelligence, and allowing for the creative risk of psychological boundary-crossing.

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