This article examines the psychological experience of sexual longing. It offers a way to think about erotic experience as a state of consciousness that connects us with material registered in the body. The article addresses erotic longing and its relation to loss, and emphasizes 2 simultaneous levels of existence. It proposes that the enigmatic aspects and the pragmatic cocreated interaction with the (m)other always coexist and play a dual part in the otherness of lustful states of mind. The article addresses the dialectic tension between the pragmatic attachment to the object and the enigmatic existential aspects, and suggests that adult sexual states of consciousness contain both the enigmatic and the pragmatic mother. Questioning the nature of our sexual longings, I bring this inquiry into the analytic room.