§ 26
It is the object of the present volume to point out that the non-existence of the erotic acme in the wife is an inexcusable condition, that can be remedied, and that its substitution by the ability of the husband to insure the acme in the wife as often as she desires it is a condition of the true physical and spiritual progress which should mark the present century.
Nothing could seem further from the truly American ideal of a good “sport” than that there should be men who will take all and give nothing. No excuse is accepted of men who enter a game, and, as soon as they are in, become paralyzed and unable to do a single thing except shout about their membership on the team. But that is exactly what the average husband does in his marriage. He marries mostly to get something for nothing in sex life and he finds out later that the something turns out to be nothing. Who is to blame but himself?
He makes innumerable excuses for his failure, excuses sometimes handed out to him by physicians. He is a man and men are known to be hasty in the love episode. Civilized men always are and have been. There is no help for it. Their wives must make themselves content with the crumbs that fall from the husband’s table. It is injurious for men to change in any way or degree their instinctive reactions. Postponement or doing without their own erotic acme acts in such a way as to constitute a strain on the man’s nervous system. All these false statements have been made by different people at different times.
The necessary control on the man’s part is possible to attain, and once attained it is easy to maintain. But it depends upon a fundamental rearrangement of all values for the man such that the greatest value for him is not in the pleasurable sensations that he himself gets out of his relations with his wife but in the gratifications, totally different in sense quality, that come from the sense of triumph over resistances that is experienced by him when he has for the first time attained, or finally has secured, such control over himself that he can thereby control the emotional specifically erotic reactions of his wife.
If a man’s deepest unconscious satisfactions came from being emotionally controlled by a woman he would never learn to control hers. The unconscious satisfactions invariably are felt when control over the woman’s erotic responses is held by the man.
Nevertheless there is a level of unconscious reaction causing feelings of gratification that even in men come from being controlled. More will be said about this later. Instinctively in many boys this control is thrown off. They rebel against paternal authority. They scorn being managed by girls. They prefer to be themselves and act their own acts and derive satisfaction from the effects of those acts upon the persons or things of the external world.
Yet the fact that all individuals of both sexes, when infants and children, are dependent, and can gain satisfaction and relaxations of tensions of desire never by means of their own acts but only by means of the acts of others, makes it quite evident that there will be a tendency, stronger in some than in others, to get in post-pubertal life their satisfactions via the old route—the satisfactions that come from having things done to them and not from doing things for other people and observing the results.
There are two sources of satisfaction in every human, the infantile one which may be called passive and the adult male which may be called the active source or the source of satisfaction from the effects of one’s own action.
§ 27
It is not to be overlooked that the satisfaction derived from the effect of one’s own action may be due to an unconscious magnifying of these effects. Those who have a slight degree of discriminative ability will think that their acts and the results of their acts are fine, whether they are or not, and may remain in the same illusion throughout their lives. They may never become disillusioned. I may continue to believe that the effects produced on my readers are deep and far-reaching whether they are or not. But if I were content to read books and listen to lectures and felt no desire to write and to influence others or to persuade them to see things as I see them I should derive all my satisfactions via the route of passive experiences.
There is a fundamental difference, then, between the essentially masculine and the essentially feminine type of character, according as the individual gets his satisfactions—the relaxations of his tensions of desire—via the route of feelings caused in him by the action of others or via the route of feelings caused in him by the true and illusionless perception that he has produced effects in other persons or in other things.
The rearrangement of values is the transition from a frame of mind in which the satisfactions are via the “passive” route to those via the active route. This rearrangement need never, for any biological reason, take place in a woman who is properly mated. If she be married but not mated by a male individual who has not made the above-mentioned transition, she will herself tend toward getting her satisfaction via the “active” or “male” route. In other words, rather than have nothing, she deludes herself into thinking she has something by getting a cheapened substitute, by becoming husband to her husband, who in turn becomes wife.
No man can be said to be successful as a husband who has not made this transition. No man is exempt from the necessity of the transition from this type of physical autoerotism to allerotism, simply because he was once an infant, and until he makes this transition he is, no matter what his age in years, still an infant. It has been undeniably proved by psychoanalysis and experienced by people in innumerable forms that no woman can be dominated by an infantile man.
Therefore every man is either the one or the other; either an adult man or an infantile man. He can by taking thought, and after reading books like the present, learn to which class he belongs. If he belongs in the infantile class he has been dominated by the “mother imago” or “angel imago,”[14] and if this be a fixation it will require a deep analysis by an expert before he can come to a realization of his true status; but it is unlikely that nine out of ten who read this book will require more than the advice offered in the following chapters. Or it will require a good orientation and suggestive treatment from a well equipped erotologist.
No wife can be a thoroughly happy one whose husband is in the infantile class, and who thus needs her “playmate.” (See § 12.) Such women are truly in a tragic situation. The infantile (autoerotic) behaviour of such a man in the fragmentary (never complete) love episodes leaves the woman nervous, “on edge,” with an unconscious conflict in her psyche that tends to undermine her health, and to make her an insuperable mystery to her husband, who himself suffers through his own ignorance. He knows, if he knows anything, only that something is amiss, but blinded by his own egotism can never believe that the cause lies solely in him, no matter how blameless he may be, from one point of view, on account of his ignorance.
§ 28
To return then to the proposition with which we started: If the man believes that the woman can by her action evoke his erotic acme, she can. He should know and believe that she cannot; unless he knows she is going to arrive at her erotic acme at the same time he does. But no man can ever be absolutely sure of that, particularly if his egoistic-social impulses are inordinately active and she has few if any such activities, comparatively, and more leisure to follow erotic impulses.
The autoerotic condition in a man is the cause of his haste in the love episode, as his attention is so primarily centered on his own sensations that he excludes the possibility of his observation of his wife’s reactions in the most intimate of marital relations. If the husband is hasty, he is ipso facto mentally autoerotic. His haste is caused by his mental autoerotism. In blunt language he loves himself more than his wife. He may love the results she produces in his feelings. What he needs is to learn how to love more, to be more passionate, to go deeper into the nature of erotism, into the study of the woman, his wife, and her individuality, particularly her unconscious reactions to him.
The thought, “I can control the most elusive thing in the universe—a woman’s erotism,” is the most triumphant thought that can occur to a man, except possibly the thought, “And I know how to continue to control it.” It is almost equivalent and is analogous in many respects to an ability to overcome gravitation and propel oneself at will through the air at any desired speed.
§ 29
In this connection it must be emphasized that control of the erotic situation by the husband is absolutely and unequivocally mental.
In order also to give due weight to the reply to an objection that might be made here, two new terms will be proposed. The objection is that the distinction between mental and physical is purely arbitrary, so it is futile to say that the control is exclusively mental, because the exclusively mental does not exist. Mind, apart from body, is non-existent.
The answer: All phenomena into which a so-called mental element enters can be graded into what would be called without objection on the part of anyone, more mental or less mental, meaning, of course, consciously mental. Thus digestion is less mental than phantasying or day-dreaming, and some emotions might be called less mental than others.
But because we are required by everything that we know about the mind-body combination, to suppose that no so-called purely mental state is without its physical substratum without which it would not exist, and because no physiological process is totally outside of all causal connection with the mind, we are justified in saying that mind is more highly organized body, and body less highly organized mind.
Regarding then any human phenomenon as conditioned by both mental and physical causes we can remove the difficulty, and at the same time the objection that is being answered here, by adopting three Greek words and coining two new English words from them.
Soma is the Greek for body; hyper for upper, or above; and hypo for under or below. So we may call the ordinary physiological movements and processes hyposomatic or a lower form of action of the mind-body combination. Similarly we may use the name hypersomatic for the various degrees of mentality. From the point of view of this book all human action is somatic. Some of it such as digestion, glandular secretion, is hyposomatic or at one end of a series of degrees of complexity. Some human action is hypersomatic, such as remembering. Some of the human phenomena, like emotions, partake of both ends of the series in apparently more or less equal proportions.
§ 30
To return, then, after this digression, to the statement that control is entirely mental: By this, of course, is meant control according to a hypersomatic pattern. There is no control without a pattern. One never is said to control one’s actions unless he has an idea according to which he is going to act. Otherwise his actions are automatic—not controlled.
The immediate connection of this with our present argument is this then (an argument that runs right along with the ideas of autosuggestion): any man can do what any man has done, if he has the same hypersomatic pattern according to which his actions are carried out.
An obvious objection will at once be made, but it is only an apparent one. Many men will say they know they are physically weak, or weak-willed, are lacking in control. They know it because they have never controlled their love emotions, and have little control over any of their emotions.
To that excuse, the answer is: just because you have not is no proof that you cannot. If that were the case no progress would ever have been made by humanity.
That you have not controlled yourself is proof only that you have not yet vividly imagined a pattern according to which your actions might be carried out. The only hypersomatic pattern existing in your personality is that according to which you are now acting.
Countless biographies of men, great and less great, demonstrate that there have been revolutionary, cataclysmic changes in their actions resulting from alterations in the patterns, i.e., changes in the hypersomatic end of their personality.
The man who says he cannot change his actions is simply saying he cannot change his ideas. That would be somewhat analogous to saying he cannot learn a foreign language. But we know that everyone going to a foreign country and being environed month after month by a foreign language will learn to speak it, whether he tries or not. How easily and quickly he does is a matter only of his hypersomatic elasticity. Some are more elastic than others, but almost anyone who can walk can learn to change his hypersomatic patterns, can in other words become conscious of a new hypersomatic pattern, see its superiority to an old one, and regulate and control his actions accordingly.
§ 31
Psychoanalysis has among other striking paradoxes this one most applicable here. The person who says he cannot do a thing is consciously saying, “I cannot,” but unconsciously saying, “I do not wish to.”
Any reply that can be made by any man who says he cannot learn to control his own erotic emotions and therefore is unable to control his wife’s is excusing himself, on the ground that he will not be censured by others if he is really unable. He may be laughed at, or commiserated for his incapacities, but he cannot, so he thinks, be held responsible for them.
But if there is one important and valuable advance made by modern psychology it is that the unconscious, which says, “I do not wish to,” causing the conscious man to say, “I cannot”—this unconscious can be trained, reëducated, reshaped, repatterned. It may take more than a month. The final emergence of action, based on the re-patterned unconscious, may be sudden. But it can be done.
Those who say, “I cannot do it” are in their ignorance simply saying, “I do not wish to do it.”
They would wish to do it if they had in their minds—in the hypersomatic portion of their personalities—an adequately vivid picture of exactly what it is desired to do.
It would be impossible to put into a book a detailed pattern of marital behaviour on the part of husbands, particularly hyposomatic details. But it is hoped that the book will give as clear an exposition of the hypersomatic lineaments of the marital pattern as will be required to make any man that reads it at least willing to change his own love pattern for one that has in it infinitely more satisfaction and triumph, containing as it does the only means whereby a single demi-human atom may completely unite with another and form an entirely new whole.
§ 32
As far as records are available there is no reason to suppose that the champion shot-putter, prize-fighter, or longshoreman is any more able to evoke in his wife the climax of erotic ecstasy than is the rather flat-chested, spectacled college professor, the department store head, the banker, or any other member of the so-called sedentary professions.
The latter class of people have unduly and illogically overvalued the hyposomatic end of the scale. Woman can be courted and married (and thereafter won!) by men whose strength is hypersomatic just as well as by those whose strength is hyposomatic. But so far as the physical or hyposomatic side of the marital relation is concerned, there may be a difference between the pugilist and the college professor in the amount of egoistic-social development in comparison with the amount of erotic development in his past history.
After reading this chapter many people may feel disappointed and say: “You have not told me how I can insure my erotic self-control (or my husband’s).”
I will anticipate somewhat by saying that the affirmation “I know I can control,” if repeated enough times a day with sufficient conviction would undoubtedly help. If to this were added, “I know I love my wife better than I do myself,” it would also be a step in the right direction.
But for the material of the pattern on which is based the conviction of the truth of man’s ability to control himself, I shall have to refer the reader to the later chapters in the book.
At first all I can hope to do is to convince some of the men who read this book that they belong to the infant class of husbands. If the men whose wives are discontented or whose sweethearts are slow in promising, can read and realize that the whole situation is psychic or mental (hypersomatic) rather than physical or economic (hyposomatic), they will see that from one point of view their victory over themselves, and incidentally over others, is the easiest thing in the world, far easier than to lift a weight or change the colour of a leaf on a tree.
For the control recommended in this book no new muscles or nerves have to be supplied, nor do any actual muscles or ligaments or tendons have to be exercised or otherwise strengthened. It would be hard to go through a daily dozen or (gross) of calisthenic exercises and still harder, indeed impossible, to make hair grow (or not grow) where it did not (or did) before. But the procedure to be recommended in this book is more like opening one’s eyes, and seeing that a vehicle is bearing down upon one (or about to leave without one), than it is like walking in an ethical treadmill and satisfying a sense of duty by monotonous repetition of behaviour enforced from without.
For the control advocated here nothing is needed but a new picture of love, uncorrupted by the ignorance of traditional lore and superstition. What is needed is more creative imagination in married life, not spoiled by cynicism or emasculated by fatalism. Control can be secured!
CHAPTER III
EMOTIONS
§ 33
Emotions, including moods and many nameless feelings, are some of the innate organic sensations evoked in our bodies by sensations that are not organic. In other words, they form a part of the internal sensations, which so far as generally named are originally associated with external sensations.
Frink remarks that “the emotion, from the point of view of physiology, is these various preparatory changes in the content of the blood, in the innervation of the various muscles, endocrine glands and other viscera. The emotion, from the point of view of psychology, is the afferent, sensory report of these changes.” And William James’ classical statement is as follows: “Bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.... The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or fearful, as the case may be.”
While most emotions of the simple type, like surprise, admiration, joy and others are in infancy and childhood originally, though not innately associated with certain definite sensations from the outer world, they are frequently reassociated by experience through the influence of the environment, so that, in later life, one enjoys or detests quite the opposite of what caused instinctive attraction or repulsion in early life.
The complex emotions of love, jealousy and hate are not, in their greatest complexity, existent in humans before puberty, although the unsynthetized elements out of which they are finally composed are present in childhood, particularly hate. This, according to psychoanalysis, is a more archaic emotion than love and is not its direct opposite. It is likely that human emotions are progressing from a dominant hatred toward a reigning love.
Love in its fully synthetic and complicated form is not only impossible in children, but its higher types, spoken of in this book as erotic, occur at their best in those more intricately complicated personalities that are the peculiar product of modern civilization.
The expression of erotic emotion does not involve activity on the man’s part solely, and absolute passivity on the woman’s. Passion and passive are etymologically the same word, but the natural inferences from this are erroneous. It happened that emotions were called passions by some old Roman pseudo-philosopher who was translating Stoic doctrines and used “passions” to translate patheia, which, in Greek, means “sufferings.” The Stoics believed that emotions were sufferings inflicted on men by Fate. Their great discovery was that men could conquer them by training (askesis). Hence comes “asceticism”: the training by which a man might free himself from the suffering which was caused by feeling anything. Now we are beginning to realize that there are emotions that ought to be felt, and repeatedly—emotions that are as necessary to the growth of the soul as food is to the growth of the body. Asceticism (training), therefore, of the future will be a training in the emotions of love.
§ 34
Women are said to be more emotional than men. In the sense that their actions are guided by their emotions more than by the verbal processes of logical reasoning this may be true. For there is a type of mental process that may be called logical in which verbal consistency is sought and with little difficulty maintained. But as words are only counters, symbols or representatives of things and are used in only a part of all the thinking, conscious and unconscious, that goes on in the mind continuously day and night, a term is needed with which to describe the wordless thought-processes that are quite as important causes of action as are the verbal processes; and to these has been given the term psychological.
Emotions are for the most part indescribable, not to be adequately represented by words, and are therefore to be regarded as psychological processes tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal thought or reasoning.
Men are characterized more than women by a tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal control, while women utter many words in the vain attempt to give verbal expression to their feelings. In men on the average words have more weight in the determination of action; in women feelings or emotions.
§ 35
In the sense, however, that women perceive with greater clearness and intensity the internal organic sensations (or emotions) it is not true that women are more emotional than men. Unconsciously, “down deep in their hearts” the members of one sex are as emotional as those of the other. Men have as many and as powerful emotions as women, but have controlled some emotions more than women have, by annihilating or attempting to annihilate, them by means of repression. But women too have been forced to repress certain other emotions, notably the erotic.
§ 36
The most vital emotion is the erotic. I hope I shall not be misunderstood in my use of the term “erotic.” I place it above all the other emotions in dignity and complexity. It is sex plus love and more than that. “All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem.” All the dynamics of the ages in the force of one feeling. It is the physical plus the spiritual, the combination of bodily and psychical, the paradox that makes the individual’s greatest personal happiness consist in his feeling the happiness of another person of the opposite sex, the spiritual force that vitalizes and sublimates every physical thing it touches, the psychical that completely evaporates, if not supported by the most physical, an emotion that, unlike any other emotion, comes from the experience not of other things but of another’s emotions, the only emotion that responds pleasurably to every manifestation of bodily and spiritual activity of the member of the other sex. Erotism is the most nearly perfect type of conjugal love.
§ 37
“After she has had sexual experiences,” Kisch maintains, “a woman’s sexual emotions are just as powerful as man’s, though she has more motives than a man for controlling them.” (Ellis, Psychology of Sex, Vol. III, p. 202.)
Her motives for controlling them, which here means annihilating them or repressing them, are egoistic-social ones (see § 43) just as man’s; but in man-made society these motives are stronger in the woman than in the man, because man has placed more repression on her sex impulses than on his own.
In placing more repression on hers than on his, he has not, however, given anywhere near a full expression to his own erotic instincts. Because of the dominance of egoistic-social impulses in modern civilization his erotism does not permit the expression of such fundamental strata of his unconscious as are stirred in woman, whose more flexible erotism is aroused to a pitch that he finds it difficult because of his egoistic-social interests to ascend.
As is maintained steadfastly in this book, he has repressed his own, but hers still more. In so doing he has lowered the moral, spiritual and psychical status of marriage, which should, if they two are to become one flesh, accept the entire body as well as the whole soul each of the other. In repressing what he has deemed the physical side of love man has put on himself a quite unnecessary burden. With the natural desire to control, which constitutes masculinity, he has, in his thinking, blunderingly made annihilation an equivalent of control.
This placing of more repression on her erotism than on his is due to the fact that his own is so quickly satisfied in comparison with hers. He acts en masse as if it would take so much of his time, now devoted to egoistic-social ends, to equal, in erotic expression, her greater capabilities.
§ 38
The most striking fact of most emotions, except those of love, is the facility with which they are reassociated with ideas different from those with which they first occurred.
The love emotions appear to be the least easily transferred, as indeed they are the least easily stirred to their depths. This is said advisedly on the well grounded observation that most people who say they love do not love fully, and deeply. The more deeply they love, the more their passion instills itself into every fibre of their being and the more slowly they are able to change their love object.
But ordinary emotions, other than the erotic, are readily and almost universally shifted from one object to another. Indeed, it may be asserted that there is no innate content of any of the emotions except love. Love innately requires an object of the opposite sex.
To illustrate the reassociability of the other emotions it is necessary only to recall what things one has liked or feared years ago and compare them with the present likes or fears.
And it would be enough to take fear itself as an illustration of the variability of its content. When fear becomes fixed in a phobia, it is extraordinary how irrational the association is, viewed from any logical standpoint. A woman fears mice or snakes, although she has never been injured by either, or beetles, although possibly she has never touched one. Or she fears to cross an open square, and nearly faints if she has to do so alone, although there is not a chance in ten thousand that any harm would come to her. An association of an emotion so profound as fear with some chance place or occurrence is ample proof that the emotions themselves have no essential connection with any external object. The absence of fear in some persons under circumstances where people generally would be afraid also demonstrates the ready dissociation of emotions from particular experiences. One can learn to like or to dislike almost anything.
To a certain extent this is true of love but far less so if we restrict the use of the term “love” to its more ideal phases. When we speak of “Off with the old love and on with the new,” it will be conceded that we speak not of true love but of a very shallow interest.
§ 39
A young woman, Miss F., married a man who made an ideal lover and to whom she responded passionately; but yet she was not happy with him. She had in reality fallen in love more or less unconsciously with a previous suitor. She frankly told her husband she could not love him fully, divorced him and subsequently married her first lover.
One might say that, if the reassociation of love emotions were as easy as that of most other emotions the young woman might have learned to love her husband. She evidently tried to do so, but she made the mistake, made by many uninstructed young women, of going against her better judgment in marrying the man she did. Her first lover was not in a financial condition to marry. She wanted to marry, and took the first available man. So, as in many cases, the fear of not getting married at all forced her to take a man whom she did not love enough. She must have been more or less conscious of this all the time. She made, however, a definite attempt to reassociate her love emotions. She was not able to do it. Her husband, although he is described as an ideal lover, was not able to arouse her full passion.
§ 40
Then there is the case of Mrs. G., who married the prominent Dr. G. practically on a wager. She did not love him, but in a spirit of bravado declared to a girl friend that she could make him marry her. Not himself being in absolute control of his own erotism, he succumbed to her charm. Not knowing also the part a husband is required to play in the marital life in order to make it a success, he did not make her love him, did not evoke in her the responses which make a woman the object of a man’s deepest passion. So, as in a great many marriages, he did not really love her, and she divorced him after a few years.
Both women were unfortunate in their choice of a man. The resultant divorces could have been obviated by the knowledge neither man had. But this is the history of most divorces where the couples have come to grief on obstacles considered to be erotic.
Neither of these women clearly distinguished between egoistic-social and erotic motives because neither of them had had erotic experiences, and in their marriages they failed also to get the highest type of erotic experience.
§ 41
But it is impossible for any woman to know what sort of erotic life will be hers with any man whom she consents to marry. At present every marriage is a trial marriage for a woman, and for the uninstructed man as well. Only the marriage composed of a woman and a fully prepared man can be said to have any reasonable assurance of being permanent.
The other emotions than love are readily transferred from one object to another. Love is not easily transferred as, primarily, it has only one object, the human of the opposite sex, and where the love in question is the elaborately developed love, that has its roots deep in the erotic soil of the unconscious of both partners, which it invariably has, if the husband knows how to control himself, the transfer is more like the transplanting of a huge tree.
It all depends on the unconscious depth of the love whether it can be transferred or not, or how long it may take. From this the corollary is that the so-called love that is fickle is not worthy of the name. Fickleness in a woman shows lack of skill in the man. Fickleness in the man shows him to be not a man but an autoerotically minded boy.
CHAPTER IV
INSTINCTS
§ 42
In a consideration of the essential factors in a happy marriage we are dealing primarily with the most fundamental of the instincts. For all practical purposes it is sufficient to distinguish broadly the two main groups of instincts that are associated with the ideas of love and of ego.
In popular language we are inclined to say that whatever one does without conscious forethought is instinctive, yet on further consideration it appears that unplanned, impulsive acts or groups of acts may, according to one’s bringing up, be habitual acts. These are acquired, not innate acts, and yet as soon as any mode of behaviour becomes habitual or automatic, the acts constituting it, occurring without forethought or conscious control, are as unpremeditated as is any instinctive act. One needs, then, to be careful not to consider as instinctive what is merely habitual.
Habits, because they are imposed upon the mind and body from without, and therefore are not innate and original, may be more easily changed than instincts. Yet it is quite evident that man has to control his instincts as well as to form habits. In spite of the greater difficulty of changing the acts which gratify the instinctive desires, this change can be made.
Asceticism and abstinence both prove that the sex instincts can be given a different expression, and that a permanent, if not always deep, mental satisfaction can come from the formation of ascetic habits. But the effect of these, however spectacular it may be in the accomplishment of egoistic or social ends, is always a bad one on the body.
Indeed, this bad effect on the body was even desired by the early religious ascetics who thought that by mortifying the flesh (making the body as dead as possible), they could immortalize the soul or mind; a view which modern science has shown to be erroneous, dependent as it is on merely verbal reasoning.
§ 43
The instincts whose gratifications are sought primarily in the physical satisfactions of food, clothing and shelter, and secondarily in all other forms of self-magnification, by means of which the individual may take precedence over other individuals, such as wealth and social position, or distinction of any kind, are called in this book egoistic-social instincts.
The egoistic-social impulses are measured by the so-called “intelligence tests.” They test that quality by which a person through shrewdness and acuteness of perception of external relations facilitates his passing ahead of others, always considered as his rivals. Persons with the highest intelligence are likely to subordinate their emotions to the intellect, and to reduce them to a gentle glow experienced while performing complicated and long sustained mental work. Such people look down on emotional people as being less intelligent than they.
§ 44
The direct expression of the egoistic-social impulse is the inevitable comparison made by himself between the individual and others. He compares himself unconsciously, if not consciously, with other men in health, strength, wealth, position, and in every other respect; and whether he voices these comparisons to himself or not, he unwittingly acts in accordance with them.
He compares himself with women too. It may safely be said that while there is no possibility of avoiding comparison with members of the same sex, a comparison of oneself with a member of the other sex is the one comparison that ought to be avoided, particularly when sex relations themselves are in question.
By this is meant that if a man compares his wealth with a woman’s he can say either that she has inherited the wealth of another man or, if she has made it herself, which is a comparatively rare instance, though growing less so each day, that she has done so simply by competing with men in egoistic-social activities. A man generally avoids this comparison if he thinks at all.
Children quarrel on egoistic lines regardless of sex. Comparisons thus begin at an age before the erotism in the complete and synthetized state is possible.
A woman, too, apparently makes a comparison between herself and different men, notably her husband. And women make the same comparisons between themselves and other women, but, it will be admitted, with greater emotional discomforts.
In all these comparisons so far mentioned the standard of comparison is an egoistic-social one. But in the erotic sphere not only are comparisons logically impossible, but, where attempts at them are made, there is a lamentable confusion of thought consisting of a rapid shift from one sphere to another. Thus if a man should say to himself, “Woman is more (or less) capable of love than men,” he would be using terms with no sense. For he would mean that woman is more fond of being controlled in her erotic impulses than man is. This is a comparison without sense; because woman, with every fibre of her being, craves to be erotically controlled, while man has no instinctive desire whatever to be controlled. Such a comparison would be as senseless as comparing infinity with zero.
If on the other hand a man should say to himself that woman is more (or less) capable of love than man, he would mean that woman is more desirous of being controlled in the erotic sphere than man is of controlling her. As the fact is that man, innately, is infinitely desirous of controlling and woman is endlessly desirous of being controlled, such a comparison would be as senseless as comparing one infinity with another.
This second useless comparison may be objected to by the people who accept a current opinion that men are more “passionate” than women. This, they believe, is the real cause of the double standard of sexual morality. But all women are potentially, and so are all men, absolutely under the dominance of the erotic motive, and the only difference between men and women is the degree of repression of its outward manifestation, a degree entirely dependent on the circumstances of their upbringing.
If we keep clearly in mind from the outset the inevitability of comparisons between individuals, men or women, in the egoistic-social sphere (a sphere consisting mainly of comparisons) and the utter absurdity of comparisons in the erotic sphere, we shall gain much clarity of thought and subsequently much peace of mind.
Does one woman want, more than another, to be controlled erotically? If she seems to, or says so in clearer words or actions than does another woman, she only happens to be more able to express herself in this way than other women are. Does one man more than another want to control a woman in the erotic sphere? If so, he only happens to have had such experiences that have given him greater erotic insight than the other.
The men who admit that they find money-getting and all that it implies more interesting than making love are only admitting that they have allowed the egoistic-social motives to grow stronger with them than the erotic motives. They are not stating any absolute truth about themselves. They are merely saying that they do not know the truth about themselves, and we listen to them without contradiction for we know that, when they talk about making love, they do not know what we mean by these words. They think that we mean wasting time or wasting substance in riotous living.
§ 45
The egoistic-social impulses are always developed in children by their environment earlier than their erotic impulses can manifest themselves, except in a fragmentary and unsynthetized manner.
This is somewhat analogous to the situation of the plants that “time the explosions” of pollen maturity so as to secure cross-fertilization.
The child has no opportunity to synthetize his erotic impulses which become unified under the leadership of the reproductive organs at the time of puberty.
This separation of egoistic-social and erotic impulse development may have been Nature’s way of securing an excessive egoistic-social development, just as she secures maximum growth of the individual body about the time of puberty. It is obvious that where the struggle against the forces of nature is a keen one, as was the case ages ago before man had begun to coöperate and really to form the basis of social living, any development of the erotic impulse above the bare needs of propagation would have been impossible.
So it may be supposed that a high degree of development of the egoistic-social impulse was evolved out of the adverse conditions of the physical environment of the prehistoric man.
But today the intensity of this struggle against the forces of nature which developed the egoistic-social instinct is far less than ever before. And the fact that it is now comparatively so slight makes it evident that the original need for this excessive egoistic-social development has passed.
In this development the free expression of the erotic impulse was necessarily checked. One can see this process of inhibition of the erotic going on in present-day savage tribes who are still on the way from an uncivilized to a civilized condition. The sex activity of the individual is even in them restricted more or less to comply with the demands of the social unit.
It would seem that the expression of the erotic impulse would be freer and freer as we approached the ultimate goal of civilization. In uncivilized man, love in the sense used in this book has no existence, but sporadic instances of it appear among civilized peoples.
But the ascendancy gained, in early human life on the earth, over the erotic, by the egoistic-social instincts is now so great, on account of the comparative modernness of the higher type of erotic impulses, that even yet the latter are as young seedlings of some exotic plant in a forest of enormous trees.
And specifically a conscious ideal is needed on every man’s part, to overcome the undue prevalence of mere competition and create anew a civilization based not solely as the present one is on the egoistic-social instinct but on the erotic instinct.
Lest this be misunderstood as advocating an unlimited number of offspring, it should be emphasized that the modern erotic impulse is one leading toward love expression entirely apart from the desire to procreate.
How animal-like (we may for example think in 1950) it was in the year 1923 for people to consider it wrong to go through a love episode—even married people—except when they wished a child to be conceived! Why should the erotic experiences in those days have been left to the roué and the prostitute? “What could have been meant by married love?” they will say.
Now that an increased sense of responsibility has been developed in women, placed on them thoughtfully and purposefully by men, all men are able to find by actual experiment the women whom they wish for mothers of their children, and women, too, are sure beforehand, both that they want their children and that they desire those particular men for the fathers of their children.
§ 46
The fundamental characteristic of the erotic instinct is its recognition of the necessity of heterosexual physical and mental companionship. This belongs to both sexes equally, although men’s clubs, women’s clubs and the other occasional separations of the sexes exist—caused by the overpowering influence of egoistic-social impulses.
If a man cannot see anything in a woman but a child or a fool, he has no rational excuse for seeking her company. He might as well have a dog’s. Those who see no more than that are themselves either children or fools. In such cases the real love instinct has been so overcast with prejudice or tradition that it cannot function as it should. Such a man is judging women by the egoistic-social standard and his statement means no more than that in his experience he has met more unintelligent than intelligent women. Or it means that he himself lacks that degree of intelligence which alone is able to evoke the intelligent reaction in another.
The proper functioning of the true love instinct is seen only in the ineluctable conviction that man and woman are complementary, and that the union of one man and one woman composes the real individual, the social unit. Man alone, or woman alone, is only demi-human.
Plato’s fable in the Symposium, much quoted recently, relates how humans were supposed to be duplex—two heads, two sets of arms and legs, a huge double-size body. Fearing the power of such humans, the gods cut them in two, one half of each binary human forming a man, the other half a woman. After that time the parts were so absorbed in trying to unite, that the gods were no longer worried.
Corresponding to the self-magnification of the separate demi-human which seeks the magnification of its own petty half of the real unit of existence, the true love instinct always includes in its strivings the gratification of the other complement of the true social unit.
The egoistic-social instinct then regards the world from a demi-human standpoint, looking for self-aggrandizement unconsciously, inevitably. The erotic instinct alone takes in the aspect of the world as affecting one other person too, and their children when they come along.
The love instinct seeks gratification through the gratifications of one member of the opposite sex; and fails to find the first except through the second.
It is impossible, from the viewpoint of this book, to love more than one member of the opposite sex at once. Men or women who think they do this are deceiving themselves. It is impossible to call that feeling love which has in it any reservations whatever. Every thought, every feeling, every act that could not be communicated to the mate, diminishes by so much the integrity of the personality in whom it originates and initiates an inceptive disintegration of personality.
By this denial that love at first sight is a fact is meant that either of two things is more likely than anything else to happen in the cases where men and women fall thus instantaneously in love with each other and the union is continued through life, which is indeed comparatively rare.
Either the pair are utterly ignorant of what true love really implies and maintain for years a passionless mariage de convenance; or one of the pair, realizing the emptiness of joy that marks their marital existence, is too proud to acknowledge failure. It is conceivable that the woman may realize how unerotic her husband is, and feeling unable, as most women are indeed, to change her husband’s ideas, to supply him with the ideal he should have had himself, naturally gives up what is essentially for her a hopeless struggle.
§ 47
It is also conceivable that the man, profoundly ignorant as many men are of the erotic needs of women, may utterly fail, in his behaviour towards his wife, to avail himself of the inestimable privilege he has of making himself complete man in the only way possible for a man to do. Through his entire married life he may suppose, in his ignorance, that his wife is by nature cold, unsympathetic and unresponsive. He is unlikely to find by accident the magic key to unlock the treasure of her passion, yet it exists, and he may, though he has fallen in love with her at first sight and she with him, be and remain the rest of his life blind to the possibilities quite within his reach.
In either of these cases love at first sight is as helpless as any other love. The term has no very deep meaning except in so far as all love is love at first sight.
In the majority of people true passionate love can never be experienced at first. Therefore no marriage is ever complete in the sense of ended, as far as possibilities of further development are concerned, until the death of one of the partners. If this is the case, then, it constitutes the unanswerable argument for indissoluble marriage, monogamy, not only with one partner but with that partner for life, providing, of course (an exceedingly rare combination), that it has not been actually demonstrated that there are real and insuperable incompatibilities. No marriage except a life marriage can be complete any more than a single demi-human existence can be complete until death has rendered any further development impossible.
Just as a man can never know till the end of his life all the possibilities his life held for him, and should endeavour in every way to develop to its fullest every potentiality of expression of his personality, so no pair can ever know until the end of their joint life all the potentialities of the different ages of married life; for each age has its own.
§ 48
Adult sexuality is not an egoistic-social expression in any essential sense. While the gratification of sexual desire is at first entirely selfish, starting as it does in every individual before puberty in autoerotic practices, it never becomes thoroughly adult until, in the case of the man, he has secured in his mate her perfect satisfaction on which his own depends. He can never marry in the deepest sense if he retains his autoerotic tendencies. A man’s satisfaction on attaining solely his own erotic acme without reference to that of his mate, is in every case an autoerotic satisfaction. The woman, in this instance, is merely an impersonal object or instrument by means of which he produces an effect on himself. In this respect his woman is no more personal than his food.
It may be said that a man’s satisfaction is none the less selfish, even though it be conditioned on a woman’s. But the self-satisfaction which excludes that of the woman must be greater in selfishness and actually less human. In fact this reciprocal self-satisfaction is the distinguishing human trait without which the sex life of most marriages, like all prostitution, is not other than animal heat.
A man frequently thinks he has to make a conscious choice between courses of action that are predominantly egoistic-social or erotic. He thinks of the erotic life as taking time, and incidentally money in the time lost alone, to pay enough attention to a woman to develop her erotic possibilities, and many men acting under this false impression that erotism weakens practical accomplishment, have decided that the egoistic-social path was the more attractive. But even they can never free themselves from the promptings of the erotic impulse.
Such men, thinking erroneously that all sexual acts are erotic, making as they do no distinction between the two, believe that they have somehow fulfilled an erotic need by keeping a woman, either a wife or a mistress. This travesty of the truly erotic by a man who acts mainly from egoistic-social motives is self-deception. The two are not only not the same, but never can be made so.
§ 49
Many a young man making a success of his business, paying off his debts and beginning to pile up money, lets up a bit from the strain of business and begins to look about him for amusement keener than the ordinary recreations.
He meets an attractive young woman, puts her down mentally as not quite up to his social scale, but finding her responsive determines to go as far with her as she will let him. Of course this is starting wrongly, on the basis of not so much making her an integral part of his own personality as trying to find in her an objective and nearly impersonal means of procuring autoerotic pleasure for himself. Not how he pleases her is his ultimate thought but how she pleases him. It has possibly not occurred to him that he likes her because he likes the effects she produces in him and that no matter how much money he lavishes on her, it is barter for certain privileges she permits him to take with her. These privileges are not the highest and greatest he could avail himself of, with a woman he would make his wife, the chief privilege being that of developing himself through her and incidentally of developing her to the highest degree of which she is capable.
On the contrary he does not take a great deal of interest in any section of her personality except her body. He may think her cute and amusing or enigmatic if he is interested in solving puzzles; but he is not likely to find any of her mental characteristics engaging, although she probably has such, even if she allows him liberties he might consider impossible in some other women. He will probably not introduce her to his mother or sisters, as he holds them as a different class of women; and with the secretly followed woman he feels on a different social plane, no matter how personally neat and attractive she may be. If she engages with him in any erotic preliminary play, she ostracizes herself in his eyes from the class of women to which his mother and sisters belong, women who would not do that. This comes from his youthful propensity to bisect everything into absolutely good and absolutely bad. Women are thus divided into the mother class (which includes of course sisters and cousins) who are supposed by him to be non-erotic in a sense. Chief goddess in this class of erotically pure women is the mother-imago or angel-imago described in another section.
To the ideas, opinions, beliefs and other spiritual and intellectual characteristics of his clandestine “love” he pays little attention. Believing again, and again erroneously, in the utter bisection of human qualities, he does not know that supreme erotic attainments demand the highest intellectual abilities, or the utmost freedom from traditional superstitions about conventional morals. He does not know that his own greatest intellectual development is conditioned on his own fullest erotic development, which he can achieve only by the deepest and most searchingly passionate pursuit first of the soul and second of the body of his inamorata. His tendency toward gross bisection makes him accept the common shallow opinion that physical and spiritual are far as the poles asunder. He does not know that what he thinks the keenest physical pleasure is, as physical pleasure, far inferior to what it might become for him if he treated his evening love to the full illumination of his intellect and his reason. He also thinks and still erroneously that he can purge away all earthly love from the woman of the mother-imago class and find for his wife, whom he will later love spiritually after he has satisfied his physical passions, a woman absolutely pure of all human passion.
He makes the serious mistake of thinking he can love on a sort of departmental plan, a plan that may work well in his business or in any other egoistic-social sphere, but in the erotic is an utter failure.
He thinks, in other words, that he has passions that should be called base, and that he can gratify these desires with one type of woman. That their baseness is only a matter of the autoerotic mode in which he gratifies them has perhaps never occurred to him. Nor has he ever known that no passion can rightly be called base if gratified allerotically, which is the opposite of autoerotically. For allerotism is the passionate love not of self but of another. No one could be called in any sense unethical who gratified his own desires only through the gratified desires of another. But that is not the state of the well-to-do young man with a clandestine “love” affair.
The hardest thing for this young man to see is the fact, which is quite patent to the unconscious both of the young woman and of himself, the simple fact that his interest in her is merely autoerotic. Some indeed will say that they are fully aware that they are keeping up secret relations with women for purely selfish reasons. They see that, in their day life, business is business and one has to sell and buy; and they wrongly suppose that the selling and buying of women’s bodies is no worse than business. The woman gets well paid for her services. Indeed they may, if they have read him, quote Ellis, who contrasts the reward of the average wife and the average demimondaine, and says that the prostitute is much better paid than the wife, and does far less for the economic reward she gets.
But the young man who thinks for a moment that there is anything really erotic in the relations between himself and the young woman whom he disdains to make his wife, knows no more of erotism than a butterfly does of the depths of the ocean. His case is simply that of an undeveloped embryo. His autoerotic love is a wasted gonad that has never met the cell with which alone it could completely fuse and grow into an individual of its appropriate species.
Not all sexual acts are erotic. Many are no more truly erotic than smoking a pipe or chewing gum. The man who for egoistic-social reasons refuses to confine his love to a woman he has married or intends to marry, and thereby removes all chance of the vivifying effects of true erotism being caused in his extra-marital life by the depth of his marital love, is starting in the wrong direction every time. He has left undeveloped the truly erotic part of himself, which, thus banished into the unconscious, will nevertheless, through its indirect manifestations, completely warp his sex life. He will have no love life whatever. In spite of its frequent occurrence in men in general, sex life without love life is a monstrosity.
Erotism, then, may be defined as the highest expression of sex, from which all autoerotic impulses have been removed, or in which they have been so much subordinated that they play an almost negligible part.
§ 50
In our competitive economic social structure of yesterday and today the egoistic-social factor has been stressed to the utmost, almost, indeed, to the breaking point for all civilized people, quite to the breaking point with many of them. This egoistic tendency has evidently changed if not perverted much of the pure love instinct. It has, for instance, caused woman to judge man by his success in economic competition and also to adopt for herself a competitive modus which has spread itself over so much of her activities as in many cases to make her his rival in the activities in which for the time he happens to be engaged.
No work that has to be done in the world is any more peculiarly or properly the work of one sex than that of the other. All work, implying as it does duty, is egoistic-social. No work is erotic; and nothing erotic should be work and so have in it the effort that is connected with duty. Anything looking like work that enters into the erotic sphere is just so much egoistic-social activity. Erotism is the play side of life. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” needs to be reworded into “all egoistic-social strivings and no erotic living makes Everyman (and Everywoman for that matter) an emotional moron.”
Ships are not ordinarily navigated by women, but women could probably navigate quite as well as men if they had equal experience. Some women evidently think they are magnifying their own ego if they take up any occupation simply because it is or has been generally known as man’s work. Yet no man presumably seeks to magnify his ego by becoming a chef or a maker of women’s clothing.
It is strange that we should continue to make financial success an aim for all young men, when innumerable experiences have taught us beyond a doubt that happiness comes not from material success, but rather material success from happiness.
No man can develop the egoistic sphere of his personality to the limit of its potentiality if his erotic sphere is rotten to the core. And it is rotten in many men. No man can feel right toward the outside world or any part of it if his love impulse, the very core of his being and prime mover of all his acts, is so overgrown with egoistic or social fears that he cannot give expression to the most essential part of himself.
§ 51
The egoistic instinct becomes social, even before the intelligence perceives that it may be made subservient to the erotic instinct, quite as soon, indeed, as rivalries, even in childhood, appear for possession and enjoyment. After the child reaches puberty and recognizes the egoistic-social impulse as a possible means of furthering the gratification of erotic desires, it becomes associated with these.
This extension of the egoistic-social interest under the dominance of the erotic is more and more, in modern times, beginning to take on a phase of spiritual growth in distinction to merely material aggrandizement. It is not the best, in any respect, for a man to acquire, for the sake of his wife and children, wealth and social or political or artistic distinction. Indeed, many children are overburdened with the illustrious traditions of their forebears and are even hindered thereby in their own self-development.
A man married and had three children, two daughters and then one son. By the time his son was old enough to desire luxuries the father was wealthy enough to provide them without stint. In doing so, however, he made it plain that the son was expected to follow in his footsteps in the business. The story is common enough where the son becomes simply a wastrel without positive character of any kind.
Not so, however, in this case. The father’s extremely positive and aggressive character produced a different reaction in the son, who had a positiveness of his own. Remaining absolutely unspoiled by the luxuries by which he was surrounded, he continued to disappoint his father by becoming what the elder man thought the most ignominious of all—a teacher, and soon reached the summit of his profession as head of a department in a great university.
To this career, however, the father’s great egoistic-social success in amassing money did not in the least contribute; rather it hindered it. The son’s progress would have been infinitely easier without the rigid egoistic-social atmosphere in which he was brought up. The ill-concealed sneers of the father prevented the son even in his youth from developing a genial open-hearted sociability with which he was by nature endowed, and made his contacts with men and women unnecessarily difficult.
§ 52
The parents’ happy married life, irrespective of wealth and distinction, is the best possible heritage for their children. The father just mentioned could not in any sense have been called happily married. He considered his wife an abject idiot and acted accordingly, domineering over her to the utter extinction of any personality she might have originally possessed and thereby deprived the son of even as fine a mother ideal as he might have had.
If to a happy married life showing itself to the children in every incident of the home and its management is added the best type of sex instruction, both physiological and psychological, the parents have done their duty, and have succeeded, as far as any parents could, in transmitting an environment in which the superiority of the erotic over the egoistic-social impulses is daily recognized.
An exceedingly common environment is the opposite one where any erotic impulses of the children are not only frowned upon but are practically declared by the parents to be either non-existent or impossible of any form of expression.
Psychoanalytic treatment of various neuroses strikes, unsuggested by the analyst, the sexual factor, as Frink says in his Morbid Fears and Compulsions (page 225), in the second or third interview. Most neurotics are brought up with no legitimate sex instruction. It needs a fair and open discussion between parents and children, in absolutely matter-of-fact terms, to prevent sex from becoming compressed, if I may be permitted to use the term in this way. Sex is forced into the focus of attention of many children by being the only topic about which they may not speak to their parents in confidence. The utter exclusion of the erotic from the child’s life is the final compressive factor which reduces it into the smallest possible compass, into dangerously explosive density. The exclusive emphasis on the egoistic-social in the bosom of the family drives out the erotic from the consciousness of children in the only situation, where it would be more ethical than in any other. Many children never see their parents in puris naturalibus, though there is no logical or psychological reason why they should not, and many psychological reasons why they should have experiences that would prevent them, boys as well as girls, from the shock of some later chance revelation.
Many children never see any endearments between their parents, partly because when the children are old enough consciously to notice these, they have ceased to take place. The marriage of the parents has run down. They are no longer lovers but purely egoistic-social business partners in the home.
But where should a tradition arise, and how be perpetuated, of a noble type of marital love, except in and by the children’s home? How should they learn anything or where should they best learn of married happiness except from their father and mother? If they see better marital relations evidenced in the homes of the companions they may visit, surely they will at least unconsciously realize that at home all is not well, and the unconscious principle of identification will make them think that as their parents lacked warmth of affection so they themselves must or will.
Homes in which the marriage of the parents has run down are not the best homes for children. The parents realize this and try to act out frequently a love which they no longer feel in their hearts. But all acting of this character is absolutely transparent to the unconscious of the child.