Is sex necessary?

There is an erroneous impression current nowadays that sex is everything. It is similar to the psychological delusion common during the war years that the war would never end. Man is inclined to exaggerate the immensity of his chief preoccupation. Thus when the World War was in progress, men convinced themselves that there would never be anything else but war. Then the war ended, and Man was left, as it were, stranded. Used to a tremendous preoccupation, he had to have another. He turned to sex, out of sheer momentum, and overestimated its importance as he had magnified the immensity of war.

Sex is by no means everything. It varies, as a matter of fact, from only as high as 78 per cent of everything to as low as 3.10 per cent. The norm, in a sane, healthy person, should be between 18 and 24 per cent. In these hectic days, however, it is not unusual to hear even intelligent persons say, or imply, that sex is everything. This, of course, leads to the mistaken idea that a couple who are, so to speak, emotionally compatible, are going to be compatible in every other way. “Take care of sex, and the details will look after themselves,” is the rule, in a manner of speaking. Nothing could be more stupid. A man and woman may be very, very happy emotionally and not get anywhere at all. There are many reasons for this, but none is more important than the inability of many a husband, otherwise normal, to become adjusted to a lack of freedom. Freedom is as essential and as primary an urge with a man as the loss of it is with a woman. A man grows up with the desire to be free and unfettered. The boy of six wants to play outside the house all the time. He doesn’t even want to come into the house for his meals. On the other hand, little girls like to be in the house as much as they can. When dusk falls, the little boys are restless under the urge to be several blocks away, playing Go, Sheepy, Go, but the little girls want to be home putting their dolls to bed. Usually at least one of the dolls is ill and needs constant attention. Often it is necessary to force little girls to go outside and get some air and exercise, just as it is frequently necessary to use force to get little boys into the house. And even when girls do go outdoors, they have to be watched like a hawk or they will be playing house in the dog box or under the cellar door.

And yet, in spite of all this, women marry men without giving the serious chasm between their essential natures a thought. They think that a man wants a home. Well, he does, in a vague sort of way. Not so much a home, however, as a house. He likes to be able to say where he lives when he goes to vote, and things like that. But he doesn’t want a home in the sense that a woman does, to potter around in. He has neither the same urge nor the same talent for hanging pictures and rearranging furniture. A woman, no matter how opposed she may become to housework, still gets a small thrill out of shifting things. It never wears off. She may be too tired to cook and insist on going out to dinner, but before she goes she would be willing, nay, glad, to put the Victrola where the davenport is and move the davenport over in front of the fireplace. One simple move like that is enough to alarm a man sufficiently to serve as the onset of a serious psychological or mental disturbance. Men don’t stop to reason about individual moves. As soon as a woman calls on her husband to help her change the position of a couple of pieces of furniture, he instantly thinks the house is going to be torn up, as it was last spring, with carpets rolled up in the hall, and stepladders and buckets everywhere. This gives him a strange “boxed-in” feeling. If that feeling recurs too often, the husband may get claustrophobia. Claustrophobia is “a dread of being in an enclosed space, of living under conditions which would interfere with a speedy escape into the open.”

Every young wife should know the first symptoms of claustrophobia, because, if taken in time, it can be cured, but if allowed to run on, deterioration sets in and may result in anything from benign stupor to complete paranoia. Once a husband gets into the outer rim of the paranoid and paranoic psychoses, he may easily run through all of them, and in the end simply be no good at all. The first symptoms are usually innocuous enough, and may consist of nothing more than a mere Amplification of Personality Without Signs of Conflict. (The symptoms listed herein are largely selected from Claudé’s table.) But from there it is an easy step up to and including Logical Development of Delusions upon False Premises, Fragmentation of Personality, Dissimulation of Egocentricity, Looseness of Systematization, Exaggerated Feelings of Prejudice, Polymorphic Delusions, Ingenious Methods of Defense, Reticence, Recourse to Legal Measures, Apathy, Writing Letters to the Newspapers, and, finally, Diminution, or Total Loss, of Neuro-Vegetative Reflexes. There is nothing sadder than the spectacle of a once strong, firm-minded man no longer master of his neuro-vegetative reflexes, to say nothing of a hitherto well-integrated fellow in the throes of Fragmentation.

AVOIDING THIS SAD STATE

There are various simple ways to avoid this sad state of affairs. Of course, where a husband and wife have plenty of money to begin with, and servants take care of all the details of household management, there is very little danger of claustrophobia. (There is always danger, even with money and servants, of dual personality, melancholia, and automatic writing, but not of claustrophobia.) In wealthy marriages, which are usually made for either financial or social reasons, the husband and wife see little, if anything, of each other, and the husband need have no fear of being boxed in at all. He is free to come and go at any time. But I am dealing with the typical American marriage, in which the wife runs her own home—builds it up around her husband—either because she has to, or because she wants to. A woman’s desire to potter about her own home goes back a long way, so far back that the urge often remains when economic necessity no longer exists. Women like to do their own work. They even build up ingenious excuses for doing it, such as claiming that the maid or the handy man didn’t do it right. This desire may not last for longer than the first three or four weeks of marriage, but that is ample time for the onset of claustrophobia. During that period a wife will concentrate on buying kitchen ware, painting chairs, selecting silver patterns, building bookshelves, etc., to the complete exclusion of everything else in life. The young husband, hearing all this tinkling and rattling and shoving going on around him, smelling paint, listening to hammering, etc., will begin at once to have a fear of being trapped or “caught.” He will strive to get out of the house, and his wife should allow him to go. What she almost invariably does, however, is to stop him and ask him to hold a piece of chintz or toile de jouy up over the mantel so that she can see whether she likes it there. She won’t like it there, and he then has to hold it, first high, then low, then in between, over a table in another part of the room. When this point is settled, he will likely be asked to hang a few pictures. Now a curious thing happens to many sensitive husbands when they are hanging pictures or holding things against walls. They get the impression that the walls are being made thicker, for the purpose of making it harder for them to get out—interfering with a speedy escape into the open. This is usually the beginning of the most dangerous of all hallucinations in claustrophobia cases—the Persecution Complex. The husband feels that he is not only being boxed in, but persecuted. If deterioration is allowed to set in, the delusion of persecution may attain astounding proportions, such as that the Masons or the Pianomakers are against him, or that former Vice President Charles G. Dawes is trying to “get” him. A case history will show how this happens.

Case No. 22. Personal History. Normal birth and development. Born June 14, 1894. Had the usual childhood diseases with no sequelæ. No serious accidents or operations. Patient began school at the age of six, got along very well, graduating from high school at 18. Graduated from college at 22, and became an architect. He always held good positions with good salaries. Considered capable and efficient. Habits normal. Everything normal. Case married when he was 29.

General Make-up. Always considered keen, intelligent, amiable, and trusting. Liked outdoor activities, something of an athlete, with a strong urge to “get away by himself.” Began to be suspicious shortly after his marriage. He frequently showed this suspicion in his work by complaining to his associates that his ability was not recognized, and intimating that he thought the elevators in the building had purposely quit stopping for him, so that he could not get out. Nervous. Jumpy.

Mental Examination. Patient was very keen, alert, but suspicious when brought under observation. His demeanor was self-assertive, but he was inclined to be anxious and restless. He demanded his immediate freedom of the physicians who were examining him, and was greatly frightened. “Let’s get out of here!” he kept repeating to the doctors. He was allowed to depart, commitment to an institution not being thought necessary on the occasion of this first examination. Later the patient became violent. Would jump up from dinner table and cry, “Let’s get out of this!”

Causation. When examined for causation, the patient at first talked guardedly, and then incoherently. “Look out for the water!” he would say, and, again, “You can’t get out that way!” His physicians, unable to correlate his statements and his apprehensions, called in Dr. Damon Prill, the eminent New York psycho-analyst. “What have we here?” said Dr. Prill. “Patient,” explained one of the doctors. “Look out for the water!” cried the patient. “Where did the water come from?” asked Dr. Prill, quietly. “From the drip-pan under the refrigerator,” said the patient. “Ah yes,” said Dr. Prill. “You can’t get out that way!” cried the case. “Now, why is it that we can’t get out that way?” asked Dr. Prill. “Because we are painted in,” said the patient. “Painted in, eh?” asked Dr. Prill. “You heard me,” said the patient. “Painted in, hammered in, pictured in, davenported in”—here he made a strange twisting gesture with both hands, leaned forward, and ended, in a confidential whisper—“rolled up in a rug!”

The reiteration of these incoherencies was all that Prill could get out of the patient, but it was enough to persuade him to question the man’s wife. He made some interesting discoveries. It turned out that the wife, one day, had asked her husband to keep his eye on the pan under the refrigerator and see that the water did not overflow, while she went to a bridge tea. The husband was home, going over some important plans. He forgot the pan and the place was flooded. The ceiling in the apartment below fell. The woman in the apartment below went all to pieces. The patient’s wife, returning from her tea, went all to pieces. The patient went all to pieces. Thus the hallucination formulated in his mind that being married and living in a house necessitated going to pieces. As for being “rolled up in a rug,” that, it transpired, had actually happened to him also. One day, during a thorough cleaning of the house, which his wife was superintending, she ordered two burly men to roll up a rug, without noticing that her husband was on it at the time. He was accordingly rolled up in it and had considerable difficulty getting out. As for being “painted in,” Prill established that the husband was also actually painted in on one occasion. He was in the bathroom shaving, and his wife did not know it. Thus she had a man paint the floors outside the bathroom, and when the husband opened the door to emerge, he couldn’t get out without stepping on the paint. He was about to step on the paint, anyway, when his wife saw him. “Here, here!” she said, “you can’t get out that way!” There was no other way out. “You’ll simply have to stay in there till the paint dries,” his wife told him, and he did.

Prill explained to the wife what these inhibitions had done to her husband and that his condition was precarious. He stressed the importance of allowing her husband his freedom at all times, paint or no paint. The husband was then brought back into the home and was allowed to live a free, unfettered existence, coming and going as he pleased—always, however, under the discreet surveillance of Dr. Prill. With that perspicacity of psycho-mental cases, however, that almost second sight, the patient became aware that some one was snooping around, watching him, and one night he leaped out of bed, pulled open the door of a little-used closet, and there was Dr. Prill watching. The patient, who otherwise might have been cured, went instantly into the last stages of the Persecution Complex.⁠[18]

The husband-patient began with the idea that he was being persecuted by the Detective Bureau of the Police Department and gradually enlarged his Apprehension Field until he believed he was also being persecuted by the Navy, the towns of Indianapolis and St. Louis, and the Box Manufacturers’ Association. He whispered to doctors that a bearded man,⁠[19] representing the Box Manufacturers, was following him around with a box and trying to catch him. Partly to avoid this imaginary menace, and also partly to stay off imaginary paint, the patient no longer walked on the floor, but on table tops, mantels, and so on, leaping around the room like an oriole. Unless watched, he would jump for the window-sills, and try to get out. He wrote to the Department of Justice at Washington, and finally to the President of the United States, protesting against the activities of the Order of the Eastern Star, the Railway Y. M. C. A., a Rev. W——, and the New York Times. The case was decreed hopeless in 1926. Later, the wife got a divorce and the husband seemed to improve. He was permitted to go to a ranch in Dakota, where he had a horse, a dog, and a pipe and was allowed to come and go as he liked. The last time I saw the patient, he was completely cured.

PREVENTION OF NUCLEAR FEARS

Prevention of the nuclear fears which lead to such cases of claustrophobia should be quite simple. A wife should strive at all times to give her husband at least the illusion that he is free to come and go. She should remember that it is the little things that count, that claustrophobia is brought on by an accumulation of small details, that it is, in fact, a tragedy of the trivial. If a husband uses a guest towel, he should be quietly reprimanded, but under no circumstances sent to his room. After pointing out, briefly, that the guest towels are not to be used, the wife might even give him a piece of bread and butter with sugar on it, or a kind word. Too many wives do not consider it important to explain the facts of the guest towel to their husbands. A wife expects her husband to pick up his knowledge in the gutter or from other husbands, who know as little about the actual truth as he does himself. If a husband uses a guest towel, he should be gently reproved and then told where guest towels come from, in clear, simple language. The wife should lead him to the drawer where she keeps the guest towels and show him wherein they differ from ordinary towels—the kind he may use. The average guest towel can be identified by curious markings, either elaborate initials or picturesque designs in one corner or running all the way around the border. The husband should also be told that the use of such towels is not pleasurable, because of the discomfort caused by the hemstitching, the rough embroidery, and the like. He should be made to understand that no man ever uses a guest towel, either in his own home or when he is a guest somewhere else, that they are hung up for lady guests to look at and are not to be disturbed. If he is told these simple truths in a calm, unexcited way, the chances are that he will never use a guest towel again and that he won’t worry unduly over the consequences of his having used one once or twice. But as soon as he is given the idea that he has done something terrible, that old feeling of being boxed in comes over him. He begins to think that he will never do anything right around the house, and that his home is merely a laboratory in which he has been trapped for the purpose of serving as the subject of strange experiments with towels and furniture.

The same rules should apply to husbands when they leave things lying around, or track in dirt, or forget to shut the refrigerator door. None of these faults is, after all, of very great importance, and they should be lightly dismissed. If they are presented as heinous crimes, the husband is going to be liable to the inception of a Persecution Complex and the slow deterioration of mind and spirit incident upon claustrophobia. A wife is forever taking it for granted that her husband should know as much about a household as she does. If she would only realize that things which are easy and uncomplicated to her are strange and mysterious to her husband, and explain the mysteries to him, adjustments could be arrived at very simply, and sex would then have a chance to mean something. As an instance of what I mean take what happens during the average unpacking. A couple has just moved from one house to another, say, and the husband has been asked to help put things away. (He should not, of course, be asked, for the danger of that boxed-in feeling, with all of its awful consequences, is inherent in such a request.) As the things are taken out of trunks, the wife knows instantly where they go, not only the things she is going to use and wants put where she can get at them, but the things for which she has no immediate use and wishes stored away for the winter or summer, as the case may be. A woman can tell instantly whether a given article belongs in the attic or in the basement. All objects fall into one or the other of these two categories. For example, while I myself am not an expert at it, I am aware that anything framed or having wire attached to it goes to the attic, and that most containers and the like, especially those made of metal, go to the basement. A woman comes naturally by this ability to discriminate. She knows most of it by intuition and the rest she has learned from her mother. But to suppose that a husband should know, offhand, whether a chest of drawers with woolens or dimity in it goes to the attic or the basement is ridiculous. You might as well expect him to understand, without long, careful instruction, why one tea towel is used for the china and another for the glassware. The thing for a wife to do, then, is not to upbraid or rebuff her husband when she finds him tired and worn in the attic, sitting among a lot of things that should have been taken to the basement, but simply to say nothing, or, better yet, compliment him on his strength and agility and then, next day, hire a handy man to shift the things to where they belong. Adherence to a few simple rules of solicitude and understanding would prevent nine husbands out of ten, no matter how passionately dedicated to liberty they may be, from falling victims to the dread claustrophobia which every year takes its heavy toll of male minds as the result of the carelessness or stupidity of wives.