Chapter 20: Mix Pleasure with Pain Summary and Analysis

Here Robert Greene continues telling intriguing stories and relaying how the techniques of seduction really work. Here he attacks the love of kindness by urging seductresses and seducers to avoid being too nice. He teaches readers how to work the emotions of their 'targets' by inflaming them and then resuming kindness.

This time the seduction is not a sexual involvement, but a journalist's interview with the Shah of Iran. What it boils down to is how to get emotionally tightly controlled people who have been trained to control others by keeping their own feelings to themselves to open up. Interviews are about being personal and emotionally engaged. The journalist in the seduction is a woman. She led with certain questions, and then interspersed gentleness and understanding with policy criticism and relative harshness. This...