§ 153
A man cannot feel what isn’t there without phantasying up to the point of hallucination. But what isn’t there is simply what he hasn’t put there in the way of response to appropriate action on his own part. He cannot put it there if he is mentally autoerotic. (§ 112).
He must know in advance what to expect, and what is the necessary expression of woman’s erotic feelings. If he does not, he is doomed to surprise of an unpleasant character; for he will either be disappointed when he finds that his wife’s reactions are not up to his narrowly limited pattern or he will be embarrassed by a too great gush of feeling on her part and an arousal of passion so tremendous that he does not know how to handle it.
This embarrassment is related to a certain type of mild disgust or aversion felt by men to whom some women make advances not considered truly feminine by the men. This does not refer to the brazen self-assertiveness of the prostitute which is by most men clearly recognized as egoistic-social. It refers to a truly erotic abandon sometimes seen in a woman who absolutely throws herself upon the man that has inspired her fancy. This attitude makes impossible for some men the satisfaction of victory or conquest.
This too great abandon on the woman’s part evokes in such a man the thought either that she is sexually more potent than he (an erotic reaction in no way connected with egoistic-social impulses); or that her own environment has been such as to bring out this expression in her. If she has been brought up in a family where love needs are frankly recognized, their wholesomeness will make her much more responsive, at once, to her husband’s love.
Naturally he will be neither embarrassed nor dismayed, if he has himself been trained to believe that his capacity for woman’s love is, if fully developed, as great as or greater than any woman’s could be. If he was thus well oriented, he would be pleased rather than otherwise to be relieved of the task of removing love’s inhibitions from his wife.
§ 154
Fate is inscrutable and mysterious. Dame Fortune is a mother-imago. The husband who does not understand his wife is a child who does not understand his mother. According to her fancy she may give or not give what he wants her to bestow upon him. Children comparatively early learn to manage their mothers, but the man who has failed to learn how to control his wife erotically has not advanced even as far as these children.
Such men are the ones who profess to revere the mystery in the feminine nature. They are simply a case of arrested emotional development. There should be no mystery in marriage. There is plenty of room for passion and romance without demanding that there shall be in it any mystery whatever. The inscrutability of the mysterious expression on the face of the Mona Lisa was the expression of Leonardo’s extreme infantility, the erotic childishness of a man who never really loved a woman as a man should.
Man’s projection of mystery upon woman is his infantile attitude toward her expressing his unconscious desire not to give but to receive.
What constitutes the husband’s complete erotic control is the removal of all mystery, his full perception of all the factors in the erotic situation. One of these is the actual fact as to whether or not his wife has in the love episode reached the erotic acme.
He frequently thinks, if he is one of the numerous men without insight, that she has; when as a fact she has not.
It is sublimely stupid for a doctor to tell the wife to pretend that she has reached the erotic acme in every love episode, and to say that no man can tell whether or not she has reached that degree of exaltation; so she might as well deceive him in order to keep the marital peace. Such men as follow this advice have not the remotest resemblance to human men, nor do they deserve to retain the love of their wives even if they have once gained it. One can tell whether a person is unconscious or not, or if she sleeps or not. A real husband can tell whether or not his wife has reached the erotic acme.
§ 155
The unconscious inference of a man’s reaching the erotic acme is that his wife has done the same in the erotic episode or surely will when he does. This feeling is so strong as to make almost everyone take the sign for the thing signified. The thing signified is the woman’s utter surrender. It is signified by the sign, which is the man’s losing or letting go his own control. Prior to the wife’s erotic acme there is no time during the love episode when the husband’s loss of control will not affect his wife’s unconscious adversely. She will surely though unconsciously resent his throwing down his burden of tension before he has torn hers from her, because his own tenseness is his only instrument wherewith to operate on hers. His desire lapses with his relaxation. Her relaxation cannot take place if he loses his tenseness before she does, even if it be only one second before.
Men would make happy marriage certain if they should universally grasp this idea; namely, that their letting themselves go entirely without the prior or simultaneous erotic acme on the part of their wives, is putting themselves on the same level as the animals without, however, being in the animal environment.
To that level the wives cannot sink; yet the husbands allow themselves to do so almost without exception. Because of centuries of repression their wives are not able to respond to the erotic situation as rapidly as they do themselves, and yet the husbands act as if they responded fully. This type of behaviour is practically equivalent to producing a hallucination in themselves.
To use a term from pathological psychology, every husband who does not secure his wife’s erotic acme before or with his own, actually hallucinates, for his own benefit, that reaction on her part. He is exactly like a man walking along a level sidewalk and making as if to step upstairs each step he takes and thinking he is climbing—in so far, just crazy, that is all.
It would be much better in some ways for a husband of this type to renounce love episodes forever, for such actions form no part of a real one; they are as productive as half a pair of scissors without the other half.
This solitary vice in a husband (masturbatio per vaginam) always comes from his hallucinating the effects he should produce instead of producing them. He is alone with his wife in his sexual (not love) episodes because she is practically not there. He may never have thought of the question as to where she may have been. She may have been mentally in the arms of another man. “With another person and yet alone!” is a terrible thought.
Yet when we think about what we see and hear among so-called humans we must realize how much alone all except the very fewest are, alone because they have not yet discovered the only method of not being alone—the supernal communion of one man and one woman. The few men who have learned how to love, and the exactly equal number of women whom they have taught, are the only persons in the world who are not absolutely and completely as alone as would be a solitary chemical atom in an illimitable universe of space.
§ 156
All the crowds and jams of people we see are merely, for the most part, huddling together, as an unconscious compensation for the sickening loneliness they feel in their heart of hearts. We see them in amusement parks, and in all places where hordes of people congregate; and undoubtedly a part of the impulse which moves them is their unconscious solitude for which they get only consciously perceptible consolation in the sight of each other and rubbing of elbows and treading on each other’s feet.
If one should ask if sex is the sole or major motive in all this the answer would be, by no means, if physical sex is all that is meant. The need is for companionship which many followers of crowds, not having the companionship furnished by the complete love of a man or a woman, fancy they get from the sight or elbow-touch of masses of people.
The deeply, profoundly, thoroughly married couples are the only ones who have no need to fear anything that comes from incompleteness. They neither crave nor are averse to other people, but the most fully mated never appreciate crowds very highly. Into their own mystic circle of binary personality they cannot take a third.
For these thirds there is no hope but to find each his or her own complementary personality. The women wait; for there is nothing else to do. They cannot find by looking; they can only give themselves the gaunt consolation of distracting their own attention from love until they are found by the proper men.
For in spite of the great popularity which George Bernard Shaw gives to his ideas by putting them in epigrammatic and striking literary form, the truth is manifest to all who think straightforwardly and do not believe in a statement simply because it is paradoxical and therefore emphatic—the truth, namely, that women are not the choosers but if there is any choice they are the chosen, and are themselves utterly helpless and must remain inactive.
They can try to attract men but the more they try, the more will the erotically developed men unconsciously and unerringly infer that there is some weakness about them that necessitates this strenuous attempt to compensate for it. The harder they try to attract men, the more suspicious do the men become, particularly those having any deep acumen. As for the men being simply the helpless puppets of a sex of sirens—it is ridiculous.
The world is made up of the unmarried, the truly mated and those ill-assorted thirds whom ignorance has left unhappy and helpless until knowledge comes to the male partner.
§ 157
Many of these third persons are the wives of ignorant husbands who have hallucinated the fusion which they have never made. The husband fancies, perhaps, that the fusion can be effected by the wife; that all he needs to do is to submit himself to the wife as dispenser of delights and that by merely having him she will glow and burn with the heat necessary to fuse their two souls and make them a whole instead of fragments. Delusion! Hallucination!
The child says to a stick, “This is a horse.” The child husband says to himself, “This is my wife,” whether he knows it to be a fact or not. And curiously enough the child knows he is only fancying; but the man, in thousands of instances, does not know it.
This unconscious, and therefore almost irresistible, tendency on the part of men to believe the existence of what they wish is the main obstacle to man’s control of the erotic situation. Based on biological necessity, which in the merely instinctive acts of animals secures the sexual reaction on the part of the female, the unconscious phantasy still persists in the human animal, the phantasy that the erotic acme of the man causes that of the woman every time. But it is a phantasy in the majority of civilized marriages and tragically enough it may be the only flaw in some where congeniality and affection are flawless.
The bridegroom has this definite task before him to know his wife, for he can never know her before marriage. His knowing is a process of perception, the failure to perceive being a form of anesthesia in himself. Adam knew his wife—the only good he brought out of Paradise and fully compensating for the loss of Paradise.
When he knows his bride he will know exactly how much resistance he has to overcome in order to develop her. She cannot tell him anything in words, for no woman can know. Not even the most experienced woman sexually can put into words exactly what unconscious resistance she may have to even a virgin-pure man.
The bride’s resistance is just as real a force as is the gravity in a pile of stones. At the bottom of that pile of stones his bride’s soul waits and he has to remove them one by one; actions which take as concrete an amount of psychic energy as if they could be measured in foot-pounds or kilowatt hours.
§ 158
The groom not only has to see what resistance there is, but has to know that he must remove it all. The bride herself has no more power or control over these resistances than she would if she were literally buried under tons of rock. She depends entirely on his work to get at her soul. Will he ecstatically embrace one of these stones that cover her up? Like the child calling a stick a horse, will he say: “This stone is my wife. If I can believe hard enough, she may change, in my eyes, into my wife and I shall be spared the effort of releasing her from the weight which now oppresses her. How sweet and tender this stone is! How it throbs and palpitates as I squeeze it tightly in my arms! There, it has melted entirely. Dear wife!”
Insane? Yes. And the woman herself, alive and breathing under the load of stone which antiquity with more than bestial blindness, with infinitely more than granite heartlessness and marble stupidity has heaped upon her for centuries, is so deeply buried that she cannot herself even direct her own release. Dimly she hears her man apostrophizing with love the outermost stone. Will he ever get the sense to drop it, pick up one after the other of those overwhelming her, and actually penetrate to her and grasp her in his arms. Good heavens! How can intelligence be conveyed to that imbecile?
Or instead of hearing her husband hallucinating her release by means of rapturously caressing a stone that holds her down, she may have the still more poignant agony of hearing him make love to a woman already released from her bonds by some other man.
“Damnation inconceivable! Is he, my husband, willing to take the woman whom other hands have released, whom the work of other men has made practically theirs, and whom he virtually steals, or as a beggar accepts like a fruit skin from another’s feast?
“Or is it,” the poor soul may think to herself, “that really in my own true being, I am less attractive than the women whose weight of oppression so many men have cheerfully lifted? What have I done to make myself so unattractive? Must I curse my parents, who have, besides, perhaps, helped to entomb me alive under these stones?”
§ 159
The situation in many marriages is not less tragic than this. The husband in this case has either not been able to see the obstacles that lie between him and complete emotional fusion with his wife, or if he has seen them, he has not thought himself able to remove them. In either case he may be more ignorant than to blame; but not after he once gets the point of view of this book.
His accomplishment, the only virile accomplishment in the world, is plainly before him. He must acquaint himself with the exact amount of resistance and repression; and he must remove it piece by piece if it takes a half a century. He must realize fully that it is a piece of constructive work, and that no one else can do it for him.
§ 160
The anesthesia of the husband and the failure to come up to the constant test are both increased by man’s ignorance of the fundamental biological nature of the woman.
The only remedy for it, which will improve the conditions of marriage and reduce to the minimum infidelity of wives and of husbands as well, is the husband’s deeper knowledge of the feminine element. This knowledge, which should be an essential part of a man’s education, cannot be entirely given him by another, but must be the result of his own observation.
It is obvious that the intimate adaptations required of each marriage are absolutely individual. While all women and all men are actuated by similar unconscious motives, the specific working out of these motives results in an interplay of forces which is different in each individual marriage. There are over a thousand types of this intimate interplay of personalities within the marital state; also the types change in special cases from time to time. It is easy to see, therefore, that the minutiæ or marital living have endless combinations of possibilities, concerning which the husband would do well to become as well informed as possible.
§ 161
The hasty husband takes his own motions and his own erotic acme, which are but parts, for the whole. He takes the most physical aspect for the love episode. Naming the part for the whole is a sort of metonymy, which is a figure of speech and not literal truth. The hasty husband is in this sense unconsciously a liar. He cannot tell the truth because he cannot know it. If we say that this fragmentary performance of his is taken by him to be logically or intellectually like the whole, we must say that he rates low in discrimination. He ought to know that the fragment is no more like the whole thing than a hand is like the body.
Giving the physical side of the love episode too great a value is like connecting it too closely with the imagination, or with that part of the imagination that is bound up with the emotions. The factor in the sex life of most of the animal-like humans, that is, most closely connected with the strongest emotions, is the acme. In true human love, then, the strongest emotions are reassociated with other elements of the love episode than the acme. And the acme is the greatest desideratum only from the unconscious or instinctive point of view.
The imagination, the power of visualizing (and other forms of representations as well) then involves the power to affect, or to effect changes in the somatic reactions of the husband that render possible the prolongation of a sex act, and its transformation, into a love episode. The imagination of organic sensations in himself, in the normal husband, retards the progress of the love episode for the benefit of the wife. The hasty husband lacks just this imagination and the love episode is hurried through in the manner of an animal sex act.
The husband who reaches his acme of erotic relaxation even before actual contact with his love object has not in consciousness dwelt much upon the numerous preliminaries. Methods of retardation are methods of admitting into consciousness the different innate associations between emotions and the touch and movement sensations constituting the first stages.
§ 162
The use of the imagination as a transformer of unconscious energy is a comparatively modern technique and one made use of with great effect in autosuggestion.
As a transformer of unconscious psychic energy, or possibly, better, a re-shaper, it has sharply to be distinguished from phantasy.
Phantasy is the continuous mental activity that goes on night and day in the mind of every man, woman and child. It consists of visual images, auditory images, tactual, kinesthetic, thermal and a dozen other qualities all combining with each other in the patterns by no means fortuitous, but organized into groups, some of which have been called complexes. This organization is the unconscious wish. The patterns formed are unrelated to time, are unmoral and follow exclusively the pleasure-pain principle.
Phantasy, which is entirely spontaneous, or independent of any conscious volition on the part of the individual, is about ninety-nine per cent submerged in the unconscious. The one per cent more or less that emerges into the consciousness of the ordinary man of the world comes in as day-dreaming or as dreams of the night. In these two forms it appears in a shape least disguised, and is therefore the chief material of psychoanalysis, which is an inventory of the contents of the unconscious of the individual, an inventory that shows what possibilities he has of future better adaptation to his environment. It also shows why the people who are ill-adapted have failed to adapt themselves.
We are obliged to assume a causal connection between the phantasies of unconscious mind and the physiological process in the body on the one hand and on the other the broader life currents of the individual.
§ 163
Only by assuming this causal connection, which must also be a two-way connection, can we explain any influence of mind upon body. From innumerable instances, however, we are all absolutely sure that the mind influences the bodily functions and that the bodily functions influence the mind.
In no sphere of human activity is the influence of the mind on the body more clearly demonstrable than in the erotic sphere, both in its equatorial physical zones and in its polar intellectual zones.
This makes it absolutely incontrovertible not only that man can control his emotions, including the erotic; but that he should, if he wishes to be human and not merely animal.
In the causal connection between hypersomatic (mind) and hyposomatic (body) there is at least one link called the imagination. But the fact that imagination is so broad a term makes the understanding difficult as to how the various mental mechanisms, mostly unconscious, interact with each other.
The fact, however, is well known and admitted by all scientists that the mind does influence the body. It causes changes in the functions of the bodily organs. A purely mental state caused by external stimulation, for example, the hearing of some bad news or witnessing of some tragic occurrence, will alter the internal secretions of some of the endocrine glands, postpone digestion or upset it, accelerate circulation and respiration and cause other changes.
Sex phenomena are no exception to this principle that bodily processes are conditioned, that is, partially caused, by mental processes. Sex cannot be a part of love until love which is hypersomatic (mental) is in control.
It would be exceedingly satisfactory if one could devise a mental pattern for love that would apply to all individuals; but the fact that the various factors are over twenty in number, making over four hundred combinations of only two at a time, render it practically impossible to do more than make a generic verbal formula such as “better and better every day.”
It is impossible however, to get away from the fact that the sense type of imagination has not a little influence in the original rapport that springs up between two persons of opposite sex. Obviously a colour-blind man could not be much influenced by the iridescent beauty of some young women. There are people who are tone-deaf, and, to such, a monotonous voice might not have the deterrent effect it would for some. There are individual variations in the sensitivity to every one of the twenty-odd sense qualities that enter consciousness from time to time. Any of these variations may play a part in the first attraction exerted by young people on each other.
§ 164
Every one of these twenty-odd different qualities of sense impression may enter consciousness from time to time as a representation or reverberation of an original sensation. The commonest of these is sight. The appearance of some facial expression, for example, of an attractive woman, will, spontaneously recur to a young man for a long time. Motivated by pleasurable emotions experienced at the first sight, these visual memory images will recur again and again, each time accompanied by, if not caused by, the continuance or reëmergence of the pleasurable emotions.
But visual images are not the only ones that spontaneously recur. If the individual belongs to the auditory type, there will be numerous auditory “images.” He will hear in his mind’s ear the joyous timbre of a woman’s voice, also perhaps motivated by the same recurrent pleasurable emotion he experienced when listening to it the first time.
Visual and auditory “images” or representations may be supplemented by those of any of the other twenty-odd qualities of sense impression. The memory of a dance recalls a number of these, tactual, olfactory, kinesthetic, mostly, however, in the average person, not clearly conscious.
People have to be taught to see what is before their eyes. They also have to be taught to recognize timbres of musical instruments, intervals between tones, composition of various chords, etc.
Conscious attention must be used to enable some people to recognize the difference between various flavours, perfumes, odours, bouquets of wine, etc.
This sharpening of sense discrimination is accomplished by means of the conscious attention to the various images.
The sharpening of sense discrimination with the assistance of the mental standard supplied by the various representations of former sense impressions involves a change in the sense organ itself if we include in the organ, as we must, its nerve connections with the brain and with other organs.
§ 165
This is how we may conceive the effect of mind upon body. The imagination, composed of its various qualities of images visual, auditory and other, involves the change in the sense organ and in the brain and the other organs connected. We are thus being changed continually, both body and mind, by impressions coming from without and by the reverberations of these impressions that are known as mental images.
Is it any wonder that the drama, and lately the moving picture, is recognized as one of the deepest transmuting influences in human life?
§ 166
Every sense impression is a suggestion. It is a psychological axiom that every idea tends to work itself out into an act on the part of the person that accepts the idea. This is the basis of hypnotism and any form of non-hypnotic suggestion.
It is evident then, that the sense impressions received every second of our waking life (together with the images or reverberations of these impressions that continue to live in the unconscious and appear only occasionally in consciousness) accumulate suggestive force. It is evident that every individual is subjected from birth to a continuous stream of suggestions, some of which he accepts (among them the most often repeated ones).
If these suggestions are formed of images (conscious or unconscious) of health, happiness and triumphant activity, they will be accepted and constitute a pattern for the entire life activity of this individual. And the same is true vice versa.
The impressions thus received constitute the content of the imagination and this content produces either well-being or ill-being (not to say illness) in the individual so influenced.
§ 167
The inference that a wholesome erotic pattern must be provided for young people, and adopted by older married persons, is therefore irresistible.
The only way actions of any kind can be made better is by introducing into the mind a pattern according to which these actions are to be carried out. The only means for introducing this pattern into the mind of a man, if he does not already possess it, is by way of the imagination. The various visual, auditory and other images must be created in the mind of the individual before it will be physically possible for him to follow this pattern.
Mere verbal reiteration of a clumsily worded command or prohibition never provides the imaginative factor which is the essential one. Prohibitions are discussed elsewhere (§ 197).
Thus it appears that the imagination is the vital factor in any action just because it constitutes the pattern of the action.
It is always much better psychologically to show or describe a person doing what one desires him to do than in abstract terms, to tell him to do it.
§ 168
Therefore a love pattern is needed. It is needed by the husband in order that he may control the erotic situation. It is not needed by the wife in order that she may control, for in the erotic sphere control is not hers nor does she want it; but it is needed by her in order to know whether or not she is being properly controlled erotically.
As no two individuals are alike, this makes it evident that the function of the husband necessary to create a happy marriage is to emphasize the mental (or hypersomatic) side of it, for the purpose of including every physical aspect in the most comprehensive way.
Again it must be reiterated that instinct alone can never guarantee a successful married life. The erotologist knows full well that the husband, relying on instinct alone, remains unutterably selfish, and therefore anesthetic, in thousands of cases; and that he can, if he has the confidence of knowledge, make of his wife a whole wife and not, as in the majority of cases a fragmentary wife.
A man should not let his wife remain fragmentary. He should not be content with either the domestic-servant fragment or the cook fragment, nor should he regard her solely as washwoman, stenographer or performer of any other essentially egoistic-social function. “Wife” should be restored to its original Anglo-Saxon concept of “the trembler,” i.e., the thrilled woman. Many men on the contrary speak of “the” wife, exactly as they would say “the” cook, or “the” chambermaid.
Instinct alone, which is purely selfish, in spite of its occasional marvellous faculty of providing for the future of others, can in almost none of the intimate marital relations insure a continuance of completely satisfactory love episodes. Continuance of these alone cements married love and furnishes the foundation for a truly artistic erotic superstructure—a love mansion, having a beauty far surpassing the lust hovels in which, after their tinsel and gingerbread honeymoon cottages, the average married pair spend the remainder of their lives.
§ 169
If, as assumed broadly above, the remedy for the ills which beset the married life which is guided by instinct alone are more excitement for the woman and less for the man, this only in one way suggests a balance which (as many wives consciously or unconsciously perceive) grows less and less as the years go on.
The man advances in his profession, makes more money, gains more or less gratifying triumphs in the world of affairs, joins a club or lodge, meets and has more or less stimulating contacts with more and more of his fellow-men. His wife the while remains mostly in the home, is restricted by the necessity of care of children, if any. If there are no children, she is generally steered by her husband into the least stimulating life possible, for he knows unconsciously that the interest of his wife in other people is mildly displeasing to him. He wishes to own her all—her actions, her thoughts. If he does not someone else will, and she will be, to that extent, not his. It will be difficult for him to reason that this type of ownership is merely the gratification of an egoistic-social instinct. If there is one thing a man should not, for his own erotic interests, want to do, that thing is the establishing of an ownership or possession. Ownership of wives dates back at least to the early Roman times when one had to own and control one’s wife’s whereabouts in order to satisfy oneself, and one’s neighbours, that one’s freeborn children were one’s own.
As a gratification of the egoistic-social instinct, ownership of the wife’s person, property, actions and thoughts is in direct antagonism with pure love instinct, which controls most satisfactorily and gratefully when there is no egoistic-social compulsion acting through husband on wife. Pure love instinct is gratified only when the control is perfected by eliminating all egoistic-social motives of husband or wife from the situation.
This is realized by some young women who marry but insist that they be not supported by their husbands.
CHAPTER VII
THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE
§ 170
Those who marry from merely physical sexual motives, who overemphasize or overweight the physical side of sex, are not able to gain from marriage what the rationally controlled love episode can give them. They naturally never admit that this is the case. They frequently do not know it themselves.
They think perhaps that they are putting the love instinct ahead of the egoistic-social, but their knowledge of men, women and things is defective.
They are to a certain degree anesthetic in the etymological sense, because they do not know how to live most fully. They are in a position similar to a child who should find a package of new thousand-dollar bills, and take them out into the street and play with them. They are infantile in appreciation of values, which, however, they may later learn.
To overweight the physical factor in the love between the sexes and to place the love motive ahead of the egoistic-social motive are not by any means the same thing. It has been already indicated that the overweighting of the physical factor proceeds from an egoistic motive, and is thereby vitiated as a truly human motive in the highest sense.
Both parties to such a marriage can, if they see and understand, change so as to raise the level of their own motive and give the true love motive its real place, as might be illustrated by the case of a young man who marries a woman author twenty years older than himself, motivated at first solely by the glamour of her reputation; but, finding in her a great heart and womanly qualities he had not before suspected, becomes her true mate in every sense; or the girl who, dazzled by the wealth of a suitor old enough to be her father but rich enough to “buy and sell” her father several times over, finally discovers in him a completeness and fullness of love that quite satisfies her when she realizes that, in spite of his egoistic instincts that have made him rich his love instinct is still richer. All that is necessary in a match “misgrafféd in respect of years” is the proper subordination by both partners of the egoistic-social to the love instinct.
§ 171
Unconsciously, of course, such people know from the first that they should get from each other the sweetness par excellence of human life, but while they know this unconsciously and it makes some of them uncomfortable and eccentric, even unhuman, they fancy so many inhibitions and barriers to it (particularly in the case of narrowly brought up women) that they do not gain from marriage that unspeakable and indescribable sense of identity each with the other that would successfully obviate any tendency whatever to infidelity.
This feeling of identity is not only thus physical in the husband and wife at the climax of erotism, but is given tangible, visible, and in all ways perceptible, manifestation in their children. It is given ideal existence in the community of interests it engenders in connection with the family life, interests which are here the expression of the ego-instinct, but here, as they should be, interests arising from the subordination of the ego-instinct to the now brightly revealed love instincts, which are not accessible to consciousness until after enlightenment in the technique of the love drama.
Those people also are unable to give fullest expression to themselves in the love episode who consciously or unconsciously, frankly or otherwise, place the egoistic-social motive above the love motive, who marry “for a meal ticket” or for any other egoistic-social motive such as wealth or position.
Both of these may be taught, if they can be made to see their false positions. Those who overweight the physical motive can, unless their intelligence is of too low an order, be made to see eventually, that they are contenting themselves, or trying to make themselves content, with much less happiness than they are capable of. Those who overemphasize the egoistic-social end of their relation to their spouses, can be instructed in love, so that they can raise their union to the higher order, unless, of course, there is the comparatively rare absolute incompatibility of temperament.
Marriage need not in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred be dissolved. Within reasonable limits; that is, excluding the widest possible divergence of taste and interests, almost any man can learn to control the erotism of almost any woman, if he wishes to take the trouble to learn how to do it.
§ 172
Most emphatically this does not mean that the control here referred to is all there is to a perfect marriage. It has been reiterated that the erotic control is only the foundation, but important as all foundations are. The erotic control leads not only to the maximum egoistic-social freedom, but to the greatest possible development of each of the partners’ distinctive personality.
The love confidence gained by the establishment of the one-way control in the erotic sphere only opens the windows of the house of love to the invigorating air of the outdoor world.
The unhappily married are unhappy because each is watching the other continually, devoting to this conscious and unconscious surveillance so much energy that either they have none left for the development of the properly subordinated egoistic-social interests or they lose so much energy in the unconscious conflict that they tend to become neurotic.
The unhappy married ones’ lack of love confidence is the most deeply gnawing care known to human misery. No egoistic-social interest of either but is regarded by the other as drawing him or her away.
§ 173
The marriage of two young people need not be postponed over a month or two after they have learned enough of each other to be sure that they are placing each motive, the love motive and the egoistic-social motive, in the proper relations to the other; namely, that the egoistic motive is recognized as being of less value toward their happiness. No fears should be allowed to enter their minds about the happiness of their marriage. Birth control should prevent any fear from the egoistic-economic point of view.
§ 174
If it should seem to some that the potentialities of the marriage that has been called a lottery are usually those of misery, and that the ordinary marriage only brings out the miseries of existence to which some shut their eyes, and from which others run away, it need only be suggested that almost nothing runs itself in the world as we know it, but everything needs constant upkeep, and it would be unreasonable to expect that when the nuptial knot is tied all activities in the direction of keeping it tied could be given up.
If the world about us is in constant change, to which we are obliged to make constantly changing adaptation, it is even more strikingly a fact that the world within us is constantly changing; and that we need to control this change ourselves and could not, if we tried, find a more fascinating occupation than learning how to make our inner adaptations in the best manner.
Marriages that run down before death has ended them are those where the man has lost his psychic potence, due to initial or gradually developing anesthesia on his part.
In the courtship he has taken a man’s part, presumably; but has stopped his wooing after marriage, because he has confused egoistic-social impulses with erotic. He has thought marriage was a civil contract by which he came into possession of something. Love scorns contracts; as it evaporates in barter. Most unhappy marriages are of the “run-down” type. The thesis of this book is that the only distinctive man’s work in the world is to keep winding them up. The man that lets his marriage run down is probably a perpetual-motion crank at heart. He thinks that in marriage he has found a thing that will run by itself forever.
§ 175
A passionate desire for culmination represents well the attitude of the executive head, or man of affairs who advances business by delegating details to others. There is no detail of the behaviour of the truly mated that the husband can want to be delegated to underlings. Love is not a business and no part of it should be either left undone or delegated to another man; though there are many husbands who apparently think some of the preliminaries can be omitted. Possibly the hasty husbands have thought that only the “high spots” of love could be or should be touched by them, because their business or professional lives do not permit them to look into every detail, much less do it themselves. But the minutiæ of love are like the notes of a violin score; they all have to be played by the violinist and they are all given their due effect and proper shading by the true artist.
Possibly one may say that all men cannot be virtuosos in love, particularly as it is infinitely more complicated than even the musical art; but at any rate all can use their utmost endeavour in the performances of the duets, which constitute the most valuable works of art for the family and the nation.
§ 176
The unconscious polyandry of the average married woman is absolutely proved if she does not regard her husband as satisfying in every way. If there is the remotest doubt of this, if she has the slightest repulsion or disinclination or aversion to any feature, act, mannerism or personal quality of his, she is withholding from him, possibly blamelessly because unconsciously, a feeling which, as she cannot give it to him, she must and does unwittingly give to some other man either seen or dreamed of. Absolute surrender on her part to one man is essential for a strictly monogamous union, a complete union entirely excluding the appeal of every other man under the sun. Any reserve whatever on her part is a reserve that will be kept by the unconscious part of her solely for the use not of her husband but of some other man possibly not yet seen by her; later she may meet him.
How can a woman give herself, if she has keen sense discrimination, to a man who isn’t strong, isn’t clean, isn’t well-dressed, isn’t generous and loving? If she has this fine discrimination she will not run the risk of approaching a marriage with such a man. If a man of undeniable strength (mental, not physical) makes love to her, his sincerity and the strength of his desire will enable her to change other characteristics in him before marriage.
§ 177
There is, as Krafft-Ebing argues, a natural “sexual subjection” of woman (i.e., “women are naturally masochistic”). Saying that the essence of femininity is to be erotically led, does not mean that women are naturally masochistic. In no sense does being led, in the purely erotic or love impulse aspect of the marital relation, imply masochism. Only, however, when the ego impulse is so strong as to need much sacrifice in the love episode can really masochistic feelings occur in the wife; and in the husband only when he uses the love episode as an egoistic act, by which he is to compete with other men in the favour of his wife.
If that jealous stage occur, it is a condition where the full expression of the love instinct itself is diminished in favour of the other. The even momentary thought that his wife could be given a more thorough relaxation in the purely erotic sphere by another than himself, a more perfect consummation than perfection itself, which he has induced in her, is a thought that is in itself masochistic and least likely to occur to either of a thoroughly married pair.
The idea of masochism as an element in marriage is worthy of consideration only because it is the ruling motive of the wife in those unions where the husband has not assumed control of the emotional situation and the wife has been so well trained in the Christian duty of self-sacrifice as to believe that she must suffer—truly a humiliating thought for the husband if he happens to be a man. He thus vicariously suffers from his own ignorance.
Masochism, the tendency to gain pleasure from the pain another inflicts on oneself, is a natural phenomenon at a certain stage of pre-synthetic childish erotic development; and, in all normally developed persons, is outgrown. Indeed, a woman,—and a fortiori, a man, who retains any great masochistic element in his love life—is, in that respect alone, a child and not an adult, and incapable of adult love until that tendency is removed.
But it persists more frequently in women, and constitutes a part of the sexual inhibition already referred to. It is a tendency about which all young husbands should be warned in advance. They are not to allow their wives for an instant to have any reason to infer that the wife’s marital “duty” is to sacrifice herself or any part of herself to the physical or mental pleasure of her husband. The eradication of this idea can be begun by the man long before engagement, in spheres of activity quite far from the sexual, and should be steadily and consistently carried on. He should never ask her to do anything “for him,” especially not anything to which she may have expressed any unwillingness, not to say repugnance, herself. He should see to it that he gets his pleasure from the knowledge that what he does is most likely to be gratifying to her. This is, of course, the attitude of the real man.
A girl should be instructed enough not to be impressed by the mental autoerotism of “lounge lizards” who are feeding their own erotic phantasies by sight and touch of her. They are more than likely to become mentally autoerotic husbands.
While on the topic of masochism it is necessary to warn all young women that in no sense is self-sacrifice the object of a healthy marriage. The self-sacrifice which is so lauded in theologies is a sacrifice of egoistic impulse gratification. In the face of a great erotic exaltation there can be no such thing as a thought of sacrifice. No woman really in love can perceive anything but gain in really erotic action, for if she knows herself she realizes that her strongest impulses are those of Eros.
§ 178
Any conflict in her psyche is between the erotic and the egoistic-social impulses. The only inhibitions against the erotic impulses, as everywhere, appear to be the egoistic-social ones, though it has been pointed out that even the erotic instinct itself contains an innate antithesis that might cause a conflict even were the egoistic-social influences minimized or even removed.
One suspects that in the woman these unconscious doubts must come primarily from not having been completely controlled, so completely in the erotic sphere that no egoistic-social impulses are for the time perceptible. A woman of a highly refined nature whose husband’s erotic control is not forceful enough thus to expunge totally all egoistic-social impulses for the time being, will have a certain number of them not disposed of.
It thus happens that such a married woman, when loved by another than her husband and yielding to him, will in so doing obliterate even this residue of egoistic-social inhibitions. This explains why an illicit love is to them so powerful a stimulus. They observe a sudden separation of the two spheres of impulse in themselves, and they realize the illimitable enhancement of the erotic motive over the egoistic-social, the latter naturally appearing as dross against the gold of the erotic. If in the clandestine love they have swept away all egoistic-social conventions, they have practically rendered themselves subject to erotic impulses alone. Thus the very fact of this love being illicit appears to render it purely erotic, absolute, all-comprehensive, the conflict settled beforehand.
§ 179
Freud in his paper on the love life already referred to[26] makes the observation that there is a type of “love” in a certain class of men in which the man seems to prefer as his loved one a woman who is at least nominally possessed by another man. His attentions to her are carried on as if he were rescuing her from some oppressor. In extreme instances he often professes to be solicitous for her virtue, which consists in his eyes only in not being used by the other man. Freud continues that the other man from whom this type of lover wishes to rescue the woman represents this lover’s own father, the woman his mother, and he himself is the little boy in the original family triangle where the son, according to Freud, is always jealous of the father and continually trying to get his mother away from the father. The “love” type here described is another instance of the compulsion to repeat, referred to in his book Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
It should be the privilege of the husband to sweep away all egoistic-social inhibitions. He should see to it that his actions throughout his married life are such that his wife makes to him the total surrender here implied. If he does not, he has not taken all the steps he might, to render his marriage absolutely happy.
§ 180
It is likely that the woman who responds thus erotically to the illicit love situation, because love is thus cleared of all egoistic-social inhibitions, may be the counterpart of the man just described. If he wishes to rescue her from a personality, apparently her husband, but in reality the father influence (from the point of view of the lover), so she may wish to be rescued, i.e., removed from all influence of authority—the father influence in her own personality. For in the unconscious the father factor represents the egoistic-social impulses. It is the father who requires compliance with egoistic-social demands. And whoever can sweep away all these influences symbolically rescues her from her own father. It should be, and in many cases indeed is, the husband that does this; and if he does it completely there is no motive for illicit love.
In no sense can the so-called sacrifice made by a woman of these egoistic-social demands be regarded as a masochistic self-sacrifice involving any erotic factor. The erotic is not sacrificed but magnified. The misfortune is only that in some cases the husband does not cause the sacrifice which then is left for some other man to bring about.
Without for a moment implying that this illicit love on the woman’s part has any more ethical value than the man’s attempted rescue, it is impossible not to believe that the periodical abolition by the husband of all egoistic-social inhibitions of his wife is a purification of the erotic factor. Taking place within the marital state and effected solely by the husband, this makes the light of love burn so much more brightly as to illumine every other life activity.
§ 181
Jealousy is treated by Ellis in a vein apparently unaware of the contribution made to this subject by Freud, who shows that the man is jealous because he is either physically or psychically impotent. If the husband either knows or thinks that he is unable to lift his wife into the empyrean, the thought inevitably comes to him that there must be some other man who can do it. If this thought is an unconscious one it is manifested in every restrictive measure taken to prevent his wife from meeting other men, for which measures he assigns not the real cause, for he does not know it, but all sorts of reasons developing through the unconscious mechanism of rationalization, either that she is not attending to her duty, or neglecting him and his interests or spending too much money, or what not. This condition of jealousy is all the more likely to exist in the husbands who are so ignorant of love that they are unaware that there is any such thing as the woman’s acme of pleasure in the love episode. This form of jealousy, primarily due to the husband’s ignorance, is all the more painful to him because he does not understand, and all the more tragic in its irony.
It seems, too, quite probable that part of the jealousy of women is due to a corresponding situation of their own erotic life. A woman who fails to apperceive in consciousness the overwhelming somatic reactions which occur at the climax of the love episode is in a condition quite analogous to that of psychic impotence in man. If man’s jealousy, as has been shown by psychoanalysis, is really caused by his psychic impotence, i.e., his anesthesia, woman’s jealousy is evidently also caused by her anesthesia which is a form of psychic impotence.
§ 182
The case cited by Ellis (that of Mrs. Samuel Pepys, as recounted in the famous diary) contains only the man’s side. Possibly if the lady’s side were known it would be found that she was herself deficient in love and that she dreaded her husband’s possibly finding a woman who could react toward him in a more complete and satisfactory way than she could herself, this entirely apart from the question whether or not it should be the duty of the man to evoke such a response. She would feel unhappy and all the more conscious if she knew it was his duty and that he had fled from her to others where perhaps the task would be easier.
It is also insignificant that Pepys himself records: “I must here remark that I have lain with my moher (wife) as a husband more times since this falling out than in, I believe, twelve months before, and with more pleasure to her than in all the time of our marriage before.” This cannot be adduced as a proof that the jealousy aroused in the wife was the cause of any improvement in the marital relations of the Pepyses, but that his noting an increase in her pleasure simply indicates that because of his own lack of imagination he had not been playing the husband’s part for the preceding twelvemonth as he should have. His own imagination was probably stirred by “Deb’s” propinquity; as it would not have been had his erotic life with his wife been on the high passional level it should. This is the only reason why a little jealousy is supposed to whet the edge of love. If Pepys had been grounded in true love instead of a small-minded man, flinging notes to his wife’s maid, advising her to help him out in the lie he told his wife, he would not have failed so to control his wife’s erotic emotions that she would have outshone any other woman in attractiveness.
§ 183
Furthermore Ellis admits, and quotes his authorities to show, that jealousy is “an emotion which is at its maximum among animals, among savages, among children, in the senile, in the degenerate, and very specially in chronic alcoholics.” He notes that the supreme artists and masters of the human heart, who have most consummately represented the tragedy of jealousy, clearly recognized that it is either atavistic or pathological. Shakespeare made his Othello a barbarian, and Tolstoy made the Pozdnischeff of his Kreutzer Sonata a lunatic. But the jealous person is above all (at least psychically) impotent and projects, on the most likely object, his own desires, which he cannot fulfill for himself.
Let every jealous husband ponder this. If he cannot utterly satisfy his wife erotically, he is jealous of other men simply because consciously or unconsciously he thinks some other man can. Also if he cannot, his inability probably proceeds either from ignorance of the art of love or from a foolish disbelief in his physical powers, a most common delusion in the ordinary man who is brought up in the tradition that sex activity involves a loss of vitality, instead of constituting, as it does, an exercise of the interstitial glands, whose functioning is necessary to the most robust health and success, both of which are inimical to or destructive of the emotion of jealousy.
§ 184
One of the factors that make marriage a lottery for those who cannot or do not know about the unconscious element in the marital situation is the unconscious homosexuality characterizing so many men and women.
It is quite probable that the only impossible women, psychically, are those who have this unsuspected homosexual trend. It is an absolutely proven fact that the men who have it strongly developed are themselves impossible, unless they are cured of it.
The subject of homosexuality is one of the most serious, most complicated and most difficult ones of all the subjects connected with the marital question.
Let it not be understood that the homosexuals are all manifestly woman-hating men or man-hating women. Their homosexuality is not as evident as that. Sometimes its only visible sign is being what is called a man’s man or a woman’s woman.
The man who enjoys men’s company almost exclusively, the club man, the man who never misses an opportunity to meet men, who invariably rides in the smoker but who does not invariably smoke there, who is much more at ease with men than with women, is in all these reactions motivated not solely by the conscious motive of carrying on so-called male activities, but partly by an unconscious homosexual tendency which, though it may never express itself in overt acts, is still an influence dominating the majority of his actions, and, to that extent, is an influence working against his completely hologamous status. It is, in some if not all cases, undoubtedly the factor that is most powerful in preventing him from obtaining the erotic control over his wife necessary to a perfect hologamy.
Our man-made civilization has strongly homosexual tendencies, and has had them for centuries, expressed not only in men’s (and women’s) clubs, associations, fraternities and secret societies, but also in the compensatory woman-hunting and woman-worshipping done by some of the individual men, as a reaction from the unconsciously perceived homosexuality of their environment.
Psychoanalysis has shown, indeed, that some of the illicit sex relationships maintained by men are mostly for the purpose of demonstrating to the men themselves, bachelor club men, for example, that they are not really homosexually inclined.
Psychoanalysis also shows the close connection of this deficient masculinity with jealousy on the one hand, and with paranoia on the other. Also it has been shown that morbid jealousy in woman has sometimes the same cause. “The root of this jealousy is a non-conscious homosexuality. She is jealous of her woman friend, because she herself is in love with the friend. She puts herself in the rôle of the man.”[27]
From these considerations it will be evident that the man or woman with the unconscious homosexual trend cannot be a true mate until the trend is redirected. The obverse of this is also quite suggestive, although not necessarily operative in all instances; namely, that, if the passion for his wife cools, it may be because he has, or has developed, in himself a homosexual tendency of which he is unconscious.
§ 185
A careful distinction needs here to be made between the sex activity that is really erotic—that of two perfectly mated lovers—and that which does not rise above the hyposomatic (physical) level. This latter invariably, except in the most unintelligent and spiritually undeveloped of humans, contains a conflict which may or may not enter consciousness. There is in people highly civilized according to puritanical ideals always a conscious conflict between the physical expression of love and their traditional ideas that the body is base and ignoble and the soul is a thing separate from the body and superior to it.
Psychoanalytic research into the unconscious shows that there in the levels below, and inaccessible to consciousness, the conflicts that like a perpetual tug of war are uselessly consuming large amounts of psychic energy are also, in that shunting of energy from its natural destination to other termini which may be practically any of the organs of the body, causing a derangement that if long continued easily becomes a functional disease.
The conflict that is conscious also produces a physiological derangement that may become a disorder. So in either case, whether the conflict be conscious or unconscious, the physiological processes are more or less disturbed.
If, as sometimes happens, a man’s inhibitions are too great, he is absolutely unable even to begin to have a love episode. If they are less great, he may be able to begin it but not to continue it. If there is any inhibition at all his part in the love episode is affected by just that amount of psychic energy that represents the force of his inhibition.
The conflict that is expressed in physical derangement, disorder, malaise or any other unpleasant result is almost always a mental conflict that can be resolved by mental means better than by physical.
In sex activity that is truly erotic there is no conflict in the man and none in the woman. It may be said that sex activity never becomes truly erotic until these conflicts have subsided.
But in the unhappy marriage a part of the conflict on the husband’s part comes from his unconscious realization that he has not assumed the truly masculine rôle.
§ 186
A brief résumé will be now given of conclusions so far reached. Man’s control, while difficult for him to gain and particularly in the love episode, is yet essential to his perfect union with his mate, unless there is proved to be, which has not yet been done, a congenitally uncontrollable type of men. Such men could never satisfy any except women who are erotically the most highly developed, in the sense that anything or nothing would send them into transports—a comparatively rare type of woman.
Haste on the man’s part in the love episode, his acknowledged precipitateness, his hurry to relax sexual tension, is due directly to his own anesthesia, his insensibility to the preliminary reactions of his mate, and in some cases a total ignorance of the existence of her final reaction. He does not know what effect in his mate he should really strive to get.
A knowledge of that effect involves a recognition of the fact that all women are unconsciously trying continually to test the man’s psychical strength. Many actions of women cannot be accounted for except by assuming this unconscious motive, for which, of course, there is a biological cause in the attempt of nature to mate the woman with the strongest man. The congenitally uncontrollable (if any exists) man will go down under this test, uniformly.
This biological cause produces in the woman the tendency to dissemble. This tendency makes the woman coy, bashful, modest, reserved, retiring. As animal she is always facing away from the male in the sexual act and as Ellis has noted, only the human female has in the human love episode turned so as to face the man. But this subhuman characteristic is always present in the woman, manifesting itself in some of her actions if not in all, and constitutes an obstacle to the man’s self-control; for, unless he has insight enough into the feminine character to discount her dramatic prevarications, he will infer that it is useless and hopeless for him to try to produce any effect whatever in her, so he might as well produce what effect he can—namely, in himself. He does not know that the most satisfactory result in his own feelings is produced by the reactions which he effects in her, through the reservation of his own supreme reaction until she is past knowing it herself, until, therefore, he has convinced her that his control is greater than hers, that his strength is greater.
As it is evident that in animal copulation whatever acme is reached is reached simultaneously by both sexes, because of the briefness of the act, it is reasonable to suppose that the man’s unconscious situation contains the implication that his own erotic acme necessarily involves the woman’s. In other words every man has an unconscious phantasy that when he has completely satisfied himself his mate is completely satisfied. Only after years of married life do some husbands begin to suspect that something is missing from the marital relation.
If the male subhuman animal is excused from any concern as to the proper reaction of the female, that does not excuse any man and yet in so far as he is animal he has no cause to act otherwise than take his satisfaction without delay. The female animal is accessible only in the rutting season. Human woman is at all times accessible to the love expressed in true mating. Human sexuality has not only made a fundamental distinction between procreative and erotic love episodes but also has almost obliterated the periodicity in the sexual accessibility of the woman. Therefore human love is toto cælo different from animal copulation.
Considerations of the matter of control lead to the conclusion that it is possible only by means of the imagination, and because imagination is only the reawakening with possible recombination of images of past experiences, we are again confronted with the problem of explaining how the experience to be imaged in advance and looked for and waited for may be presented both to the men who have and to those who have not had sex experience.
As one cannot control anything except according to a pattern, the pattern of controlled action must be in the mind of any who intend to achieve control.
The method then, by which the husband is to achieve control of his own, and thus over his wife’s erotic reactions, is simply observation. He absolutely requires fully to note the effect that what he does has on his wife. If he succeeds in averting his gaze, figuratively, from himself to his partner, he will find that his own reactions take on a lessened value in his eyes. His own reaction, one of ecstatic pleasure is, in comparison with his wife’s, highly concentrated on one detail of the love episode. This is, of course, the most important one in animals and would be in humans, if humans were animals, but the fact that they are not and that erotic values have developed in humans that do not exist in animals, makes the man’s erotic acme take on a much smaller significance and value.
Most husbands go through the love episode as if they were animals, merely procreating progeny, while yet starting from no such purpose. The purpose is, of course, in so many men solely the purpose to gratify themselves and not anyone else, that, of course, any deliberate thought of ways and means of gratifying any other, does not occur to them.
Many men, indeed, are filled with embarrassment, if not dismay, in perceiving a deeper and more extended reaction in their women than they perceive in themselves. With such a power which they observe developing in their wives they do not know how to compete. The situation of a husband who finds himself developing in his wife a much richer and fuller erotism than he thinks he has himself, contains the unconscious factor of unflattering comparison. Unconsciously he does not wish to find her richer than himself because that gives him a sense of unconscious inferiority and injures his feeling of control. So the marital situation contains the unconscious wish on the husband’s part not to find in his wife an erotism greater than his own, entirely apart from any conscious idea he may have that he should not have an “oversexed” woman as a wife.