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THOMAS MOORE
Thomas Moore is the author of the number one New York Times bestseller Care of the Soul. He has written twenty-four other books about bringing soul to personal life and culture, deepening spirituality, humanizing medicine, finding meaningful work, imagining sexuality with soul and doing religion in a fresh way. In his youth he was a Catholic monk and studied music composition. He has a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Syracuse University and was a university professor for a number of years. He is also a psychotherapist influenced mainly by C. G. Jung and James Hillman. In his work he brings together spirituality, mythology, depth psychology and the arts, emphasizing the importance of images and imagination. He often travels and lectures, hoping to help create a more soulful society. He also writes fiction, arranges music and plays golf in New Hampshire, where he has lived for twenty years.
Cover for DARK EROS
DARK EROS
Curing the Sadomasochism in Everyday Life
Third, revised edition, 178 pages, $22
ISBN: 978-0-88214-979-0
Kindle/Apple Books, $9.99
ISBN: 978-0-88214-985-1
In this eye-opening book Thomas Moore turns to the dark side of love: its cruelties, perversions, and appalling tortures. Bravely and with brilliant insights, Moore re-imagines the repulsive fictions of the Marquis de Sade to learn what they can teach about the horrors hidden deep inside the human soul, revealing unsuspected poetic and imaginative powers within violence and sexual victimization. The book also shows the sadomasochism that lies unseen in many aspects of everyday life.
With a foreword by Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig and a new afterword by the author.
 
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The Marquis de Sade wrote obscene and disgusting books— I don’t call them novels—that are dismissed and condemned when read literally. But if you can treat everything he writes as metaphor, as an image speaking about a more subtle level of experience, you may find that Sade is a psychoanalyst far ahead of his time. It’s as though he writes in code, asking you not to read him simplistically, but to explore the largely hidden human desires we all have for things like revenge, secrecy, control, and manipulation. Just because we think them doesn’t mean that we act on them. But the dark thoughts and feelings are significant and require our acceptance. We may think that psychology helps us get free of such negative emotions, but Sade tricks us into seeing them not only as necessary but, in a deeply felt way, desirable.
—THOMAS MOORE, from the 2022 Afterword