Sex divested of its biological function serves the purposes of the soul.[1] Anal intercourse, oral sex, and masturbation are central themes in male same-sex dreams, fantasies, and behaviors. Operating on the idea that spiritual meaning is born when images and behaviors are recognized as carriers and therefore symbols of patterns of energy at work within the individual, we can begin to explore the symbolic meaning and spiritual intent or unconscious purpose of such desires, fantasies, and attractions. Symbolism reveals aspects of reality that escape other modes of expression.[2]

Most human thought and behavior is symbolic rather than literal.[3] The symbol carries the unconscious projection,[4] and it is the symbol that moves the energy from one realm to another.[5] To understand the meanings of the symbols that carry this energy as it plays within the man who has same-sex attractions is to gain some insight into what it is that he actually seeks through these acts and fantasies. To give symbolic meaning is not intended to diminish the sexual aspect, nor is it to negate or deny the biological and environmental determiners of homosexuality and same-sex attraction. Rather, it is an attempt to bring meaning and understanding to these same-sex fantasies and behaviors, a meaning that might contribute to the actual realization and fulfillment of their unconscious purpose and spiritual intent. When the unconscious purpose of a behavior has been fulfilled, the energy moves to another level of development.[6]

            In the dreams and fantasies of men, unconscious masculine energy may express itself in the image of a homosexual.[7] As a phallic expression of the unconscious, he simultaneously represents the chthonic aspect of the masculine and ultimately the initiating spirit.[8] In certain expressions of homosexuality it seems that some part of the man is under the influence of this chthonic aspect of the masculine. This part seeks a sexual relationship with a man onto whom this unconscious masculinity is projected. Thus, same-sex attraction can be understood as the longing for the concrete manifestation of that potential that is contained in the Soul and corresponds to the quest for the soul’s realization. In homosexual love, the partner often becomes the carrier of the soul image and through the power of the relationship may unconsciously assist his lover, as the initiating spirit, in bringing that potential to birth in himself.[9]

            Psychiatrist, Carl Jung, asserts that it is the feminine image and urge for life in a man’s soul that initiates the development of the personality[10] and brings about not only feminine elements but also a dominant masculinity.[11] This soul image may initiate a same-sex relationship at times by falling in love with a man right through the ego in an attempt to establish a relationship between the man and this unconscious other living in his soul. The soul longs for the inner unity and wholeness of the personality and becomes the agent for this union.[12]As symbol, the sexual partner becomes the carrier of the unconscious image that longs for consciousness.

            I am operating on the assertions of quantum physics that everything is energy, both the physical plane of matter and the more abstract plane of the mind. I’m also operating on the idea that all behavior and thought are symbolic. Therefore, sexual fantasies and behaviors are symbolic expressions of energy at work in an individual but whose purposes are for the most part unconscious. 

            In discussing so-called perversions, the late noted Jungian psychoanalyst and homeopathic physician Edward Whitmont in his book Return of the Goddess says that same-sex oral and anal sexuality can be understood as meaningful patterns of energy as it plays at creation and development, expressing basic, unconscious, and unacknowledged urges for the purpose of balancing a one-sided position. As such, they are archetypal in that they express the call of a basic power that is essentially of a religious and numinous or spiritual character.[13]

            The focal point of the energy in male same-sex anal intercourse, fellatio, and masturbation is the penis. This yearning for contact with the male organ represents symbolically a deep need for connection with the soul, represented by the phallus, which I have shown elsewhere is a symbol for the Divine Masculine and the creative masculine spirit.[14] The symbol and the libido or psychic energy associated with it are unknown quantities, hard to recognize, never quite definable,[15] something little known or completely unknown.[16] Psychic energy is the common denominator of all symbols. Their common meaning lies in the fact that they are all analogies of the same thing.[17]

For example, phallic symbols are supposed to stand for the penis and nothing more. However, psychologically speaking, the penis is indeed itself but also a symbol of something more, the meaning of which is not necessarily easy to determine. Primitive people, like the ancients, would never confuse the phallus as a ritualistic symbol with the penis. For the primitive, “the phallus always means the creative mana, the power of healing and fertility, the ‘extraordinarily potent,’ . . . whose equivalents in mythology and in dreams are the bull [italics mine], the ass, the pomegranate, the yoni, and the he-goat, the lightening, the horse’s hoof, the dance, the magical cohabitation in the furrow, and the menstrual fluid, to mention only a few of the thousand other analogies. That which underlies all the analogies, and sexuality itself, is the archetypal image whose character is hard to define, but whose nearest psychological equivalent in perhaps the primitive mana-symbol.”[18]

The phallus is the source of life and libido, the creator and worker of miracles, the inseminator of the earth. It stands for the creative divinity working in darkness to create a living thing.[19] No matter how clearly a phallus symbol appears as such, it does not denote the sexual organ. It is always a symbol for the libido. A symbol points to something real or to a structure in the world. The phallus, the erect penis, is the symbol of archetypal masculine and points to archetypal masculinity as an originating psychic force.

Given that sexuality is “a fundamental expression of psychic energy”[20] and “in its symbolic dimension has a spiritual function,”[21] same-sex anal intercourse can be understood as the sexual manifestation of the spiritual desire of an aspect of the individual to surrender to the masculine spirit of the soul, which contains his unconscious masculine image that longs for relatedness and connection but gets projected onto the other man. The desire inherent in anal intercourse is to surrender to the soul’s longing for some unconscious and unrealized aspect represented by the phallus.

Excerpt from my book, The Other Man in Me, Erotic Longing, Lust and Love: The Soul Calling.

[1] Harding, Psychic Energy.

[2] Cooper, Illustrated Encyclopaedia, 7.

[3] Barnhouse, Homosexuality: Symbolic Confusion, 34.

[4] Jung, Collected Works 14, 476.

[5] Jacobi, Complex/Archetype/Symbol, 100.

[6] Jung, Collected Works 7, 107.

[7] Te Paske, Rape and Ritual, 113.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Sanford, Invisible Partners, 94–98.

[10] Ulanov, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology, 241.

[11] Ibid., 212.

[12] Von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, 214.

[13] Whitmont, Return of the Goddess, 250.

[14] Sanford, Invisible Partners, 96.

[15] Jung, Collected Works 16, par. 340.

[16] Jung, Collected Works 5, 222.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Jung, Collected Works 16, par. 340.

[19] Jung, Collected Works 5, 124, 97, 436.

[20] Whitmont, Return of the Goddess, 250.

[21] Ulanov, The Feminine in Jungian Psychology, 14.