The oedipal regression strategy must be tailored to your target. If you know that were attached to their parent of the opposite sex but only partially negative, then the strategy may be effective. The strategy calls on you to remind them of their childhood, by acting out their parent’s role and getting them to live through their oedipal fantasy. But you must be careful, if you scold them regularly like a parent would to a child, you evoke ugly memories of a childhood that was filled too much with discipline. It’s important to include an erotic component to your parental behavior.
All of us have an ideal, but it is unconscious – hard to verbalize. We search for this ideal the hardest in our adolescence, we were more idealistic then. Our first loves will have more of these traits than the affairs that follow.
It’s impossible to completely embody someone’s ideal, but if you can come close enough, you can lead your target into a deep seduction. To do this, play the role of the therapist. Get your targets to share information about their past, their former loves and particularly their first. Pay attention to expressions of disappointed – how this person failed to give them what they wanted. Take them to places that remind them of their youth. In this regression you are creating the adolescent spirit of first love. There is some innocence here. Much of our adult lives involve conniving, compromise, and 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.
The Art of Seduction, Robert Greene
If you’re interested in exploring the darker parts of human psychology that most people ignore, consider reading this short book The Dichotomy of the Self.