TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Footnote anchors are denoted by [number], and the footnotes have been
placed at the end of the paragraph.
The new original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the
public domain.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
[Illustration: (Original Cover)]
IS SEX NECESSARY?
[Illustration: “NEW YORK BECAME THE CAPITAL OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION.”]
IS SEX NECESSARY?
OR
WHY YOU FEEL THE WAY YOU DO
BY
JAMES THURBER AND E. B. WHITE
[Illustration: (Sketch of woman seated on the floor)]
_Harper & Brothers Publishers_
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1929
IS SEX NECESSARY?
COPYRIGHT, 1929, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
FIRST EDITION
I-D
[Illustration: (Sketch of two guinea pigs touching nose to nose)]
TO DAISY AND JEANIE
[Illustration: (Sketch of man kneeling, looking back over his shoulder)]
CONTENTS
FOREWORD xi
PREFACE xvii
I THE NATURE OF THE AMERICAN MALE: A STUDY OF PEDESTALISM 1
II HOW TO TELL LOVE FROM PASSION 34
III A DISCUSSION OF FEMININE TYPES 55
IV THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: BEING A RATHER COMPLETE SURVEY OF
THE ENTIRE SEXUAL SCENE 73
V THE LILIES-AND-BLUEBIRD DELUSION 92
VI WHAT SHOULD CHILDREN TELL PARENTS? 112
VII CLAUSTROPHOBIA, OR WHAT EVERY YOUNG WIFE SHOULD KNOW 133
VIII FRIGIDITY IN MEN 160
ANSWERS TO HARD QUESTIONS 180
GLOSSARY 189
“_Things look pretty bad right now_”
—MAJ. GEN. BRIGGS, AT SHILOH
[Illustration: (Sketch of four men, with downcast posture, in a line.)]
Any reader who has
already begun to be
confused by the drawings
in this book should turn
to Page 195, where they
are explained.
FOREWORD
During the past year, two factors in our civilization have been greatly
overemphasized. One is aviation, the other is sex. Looked at calmly,
neither diversion is entitled to the space it has been accorded. Each
has been deliberately promoted.
In the case of aviation, persons interested in the sport saw that the
problem was to simplify it and make it seem safer. They introduced
stabilizers and emergency landing fields. Even so, the plain fact
remained that very few people were fitted for flying.
With sex, the opposite was true. Everybody was fitted for it, but
there was a lack of general interest. The problem in this case was to
make sex seem more complex and dangerous. This task was taken up by
sociologists, analysts, gynecologists, psychologists, and authors; they
approached it with a good deal of scientific knowledge and an immense
zeal. They joined forces and made the whole matter of sex complicated
beyond the wildest dreams of our fathers. The country became flooded
with books. Sex, which had hitherto been a physical expression,
became largely mental. The whole order of things changed. To prepare
for marriage, young girls no longer assembled a hope chest—they read
books on abnormal psychology. If they finally did marry, they found
themselves with a large number of sex books on hand, but almost no
pretty underwear. Most of them, luckily, never married at all—just
continued to read.
It was because we observed how things were going with marriage and
love that we set out, ourselves, to prepare a sex book of a different
kind. In this venture we were greatly encouraged by our many friends of
both sexes, most of whom never thought we could do it. Our method was
the opposite of that used by other writers on sex: we saw clearly in
what respect they failed, and we profited by their example. We saw,
chiefly, that these writers expended their entire emotional energy in
their writing and never had time for anything else. The great length of
their books (some of them ran into two volumes and came in a cardboard
box) testified to their absorption with the sheer business of writing.
_They clearly hadn’t been out much._ They had been home writing; and
meanwhile what was sex doing? Not standing still, you can better
believe. So we determined that our procedure would be to approach sex
bravely, and frequently. “Approach the subject in a lively spirit,” we
told ourselves, “and the writing will take care of itself.” (It is only
fair to say that the writing _didn’t_ take care of itself; the writing
was a lot of work and gave us the usual pain in the neck while we were
doing it.)
At any rate we gathered about us a host of congenial people of all
types, mostly girls. Gay, somber, petulant, all kinds. We also got
a lot of dogs, mostly Scotch terriers, a breed noted for stoicism,
bravery, and humor. Thus equipped, we set about the work with a good
spirit, and by dint of a rather unusual energy were able to prepare the
book for publication and see it through the press without giving up
any social engagements or isolating ourselves from the sexual world.
Furthermore, all the time we were writing the book, we continued to
earn our living—in itself no easy matter.
We early resolved to keep alive our curiosity about things. Wherever
we went we asked questions. Aware of the tangled sexual thread
running through the pattern of people’s lives, we continually asked
the question: “Why is it that _you_ never got straightened out?” The
answers we got to this question helped us immeasurably.
Although most of our research was in life’s laboratory, so to speak, we
wish also to express our indebtedness to those authors whose writings
on the subject inspired us. How can we forget, in this connection, such
men as Will Durant, Samuel D. Schmalhausen, Dr. Joseph Collins, Joseph
Wood Krutch, and Gardner Murphy?
Most particularly are we desirous of acknowledging a debt to those two
remarkable men, who, more than any others, gave us the courage to go
on; two men without whose example we never could have found in sex a
daily inspiration; those two geniuses whom it is our pleasure to call
the “deans of American sex,”—Walter Tithridge and Karl Zaner.
[Illustration: (Sketch of man seated on bench, with downcast head)]
PREFACE
Men and women have always sought, by one means and another, to be
together rather than apart. At first they were together by the simple
expedient of being unicellular, and there was no conflict. Later the
cell separated, or began living apart, for reasons which are not clear
even today, although there is considerable talk. Almost immediately the
two halves of the original cell began experiencing a desire to unite
again—usually with a half of some other cell. This urge has survived
down to our time. Its commonest manifestations are marriage, divorce,
neuroses, and, a little less frequently, gun-fire.
When society decided it would have to set up laws to govern these
polymorphous manifestations of a once simple urge which had got out
of hand, it did so without a very clear notion of sex as we know it
today. It did not realize that direction of the Love Urge by outside
forces of law and order must be subversive of the complete flowering
of the individual—and is there anything in life more wonderful than a
completely flowered individual, man or woman?
Yet under all the weight of social regulation, the ancient desire to
unite and to separate and to unite again, usually with some one else,
has survived, for the simple reason that it is stronger than man-made
law and because cells, as now constituted, are more astute than the
police. They have to be. Thus we find men and women being consistently
together even against the rigorous dictates of a prescribed behaviorism
to whose institutional coldness the warmth of their emotional natures
is irrevocably opposed. And so on.
As far as I can make out, the authors of this remarkable book subscribe
to the modern ideal of freedom in sex, but do not believe that marriage
has yet been proved a failure in every case, nor that sex can
profitably be examined entirely apart from that old institution. In
this viewpoint the authors and myself are at one, which is probably the
reason I was asked to write an introduction.
Marriage, as an instrument, is a well-nigh perfect thing. The trouble
is that it cannot be successfully applied to the present-day emotional
relationships of men and women. It could much more easily be applied
to something else, possibly professional tennis. As they now stand,
marriage and sex militate against each other. If marriage is to be
retained it must be perfected to meet the new demands and intricacies
of sex. There is, doubtless, a discoverable plane on which marriage and
sex, the institutional and the emotional, could meet and, as who should
say, become friends. Not only marriage, however, but sex as well, would
have to make certain concessions. Tempered by this balanced viewpoint,
one must find it, then, logically impossible to pose only the question,
“What is wrong with marriage?” It becomes necessary also to pose the
question, “What is wrong with sex?” For if it is plausible to assume
that something may be so radically wrong with a well-nigh perfect
institutional device that it might be well for society to abandon it,
one must, in all fairness, entertain the suspicion that something may
be so wrong with a well-nigh perfect emotional relationship that it
might be well for society to abandon it, too.
[Illustration: _Early Woman._]
People never have been satisfied with marriage. If the contracting
parties are satisfied with it, some one else isn’t. How often one hears
the expression, “I don’t know what she sees in him.” As a matter of
fact, however, we hear that expression less frequently today than we
used to, because psychology has enabled us to know what she does see in
him. There is, however, still considerable doubt as to what he sees in
her. Some authorities claim that no man can see all there is to see in
a woman, because she is too complicated and mysterious for him. This
notion—that Woman is more incomprehensible than Man—has persisted for
centuries. It is of a piece with the legend that Woman is deserving
of a certain form of idolatrous worship, a legend that grew up in the
early ages of the world. When Man first came into being, he did not
think that the female was extraordinary. He did not think that anything
was extraordinary. The world was unattractive physically, and a little
dull. There was no vegetation, and without vegetation there can be no
fancy. Then trees came into existence. It was trees that first made
Man begin to brood. In pondering their leafy intricacies he got his
first crude concept of beauty. He used to tear great branches out of
trees and take them home to his cave woman. “Here,” he would say to
her, “lie on these.” The man then reclined in a corner of the cave and
watched the woman’s hair mingle with the leaves, and her eyes shine
through them, until he fell asleep. His dreams were troubled. Woman
came into his dreams as a tree, then a tree came into his dreams as a
woman. He also got her eyes, shining through the leaves, all mixed up
with the moon. Out of this curious and lamentable confusion grew the
tendency in Man’s mind to identify Woman with the phenomena of the
burgeoning earth and the mysteries of the illimitable heavens. As time
went on Man rather enjoyed cultivating this idea. It was something
to think about. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Thus was the
subconscious born, with all its strange mixture of fact and symbol.
As the vegetation of the earth grew more luxuriant Man grew more moody.
Each new plant represented something that he could not easily fit into
his practicable scheme of things (the tomato, for example, wasn’t
fitted in until late in the nineteenth century). For the first wild
iris, Man saw no conceivable use. However, he plucked it. It had, he
noticed, that curious color, or pigmentation, which he associated with
only two other things—the sky and Woman’s eyes. He brooded upon this
astounding coincidence overlong. Often he got wet through, standing in
a bog, contemplating a blue flag. Then he would take it home and give
it to his mate.
[Illustration: _Early Conference._]
All these things operated to bring about in Man’s mind an inclination
to identify the wonders of the earth and sky with the physical fact
of his mate’s existence. He decided they must have a great deal in
common, these wonders and this woman. What that was he determined to
find out. Too proud at first, too male, to take his mate into his
confidence in the matter of his uncertainties, he got to tramping
the bogs and woods at night, seeking the answer. He bayed questions
at the moon, he beseeched the trees to speak, he shouted at the wild
iris. There was no answer. It was then that it occurred to Man that,
since these things could not tell him the answer to the riddle of the
universe, the only possible source of that information must repose in
the living creature which he identified with them, the woman with skyey
eyes and leafy hair. Then came that important night when one of the
early men resolutely rose from his knees, under the moon, and started
back to his cave to demand from his mate an explanation of all these
mysteries. On the way a star fell. Those ages were notable for falling
meteors. This one frightened the man as it crashed sizzling through the
trees and buried itself with a moan in the ground. He ran the rest of
the way home, arriving breathless and white.
“Wha’ was ’at?” he croaked, pointing behind him. His mate saw nothing
but the waving of fern fronds in the wind, the form of some animal
slinking into the woods.
“It is nothing,” she said, and smiled, and ran her hand through his
hair.
Right then and there Man conceived the notion that Woman was so closely
associated, so inextricably entwined with the wonders and terrors of
the world, that she had no fear of them. She was in quiet league with
the forces of life. She was an integral part of the stars and the moon,
she was one with the trees and the iris in the bog. He fell down on his
knees, the pitiable idiot, and grasped her about the waist.
It is inconceivable that a myth as strong as this belief in the
ineffability of Woman, as deeply rooted in the soils of time, can
ever be completely eradicated. However fantastical, however untrue,
crotchet or whim, fancy or foible, there it is and there it has always
been. To destroy it would be to put the female properly in her place,
as a plain, unadorned unit in the senseless but unending pattern of
biological continuity. Romantic love would disappear. Life would be
simplified. Neuroses would vanish. But Man clings to his ancient and
silly value. What it has done to him is quite easy to see. It has
subordinated him to Woman, for one thing. The emotional nature of the
male has either been overlooked altogether or greatly disparaged.
“Isn’t that just like a man?” is an all-too-glib and common expression.
It implies that one can virtually ascribe to all men the simple
reactions which, in a number of men, inexpertly observed, have proved
_likely_ to take place. (The italic is mine.)
Observers have been too prone to hold that the male is negligible, and
to overemphasize the importance of the female. Thus we find such keen
analysts as Ira S. Wile and Mary Day Winn[1] asserting that “anyone
who wishes to understand modern marriage must center his attention on
woman and find out what she thinks of it and what she intends to do
about it.” This is the old Bridegroom Fallacy—the notion, to paraphrase
Miss Loos, that the bride is divine but that the bridegroom is just
nothing. Unless more stress is laid, and pretty quickly, too, upon the
complexity of the male, and the importance of what he is thinking about
and what he intends to do, or at least what he would like to do, we are
never going to arrive at a norm. How often do you hear it said that the
little whims and desires of a man should be cherished, or even listened
to? You don’t hear it said at all. What you do hear is that “the way to
a man’s heart is through his stomach.” A thing like that hardens a man.
He may eat his spinach and say nothing, but he is being hardened just
the same.
[1] _Marriage in the Modern Manner._
The American male, because of the remarkable stress laid upon women in
this country, has been understood least of all males. There has been
no completely successful attempt to state his case until the authors
of this extraordinary book came along. I do not know who they are. In
places they do not seem to be themselves. But they’ve got something. (A
lot of what they have they seem to have got from Zaner and Tithridge,
which is all right with me.) At any rate, they state the case for the
American man clearly and plausibly. At the same time they have by no
means neglected the female. It takes two to make a neurosis, and nobody
knows that any better than White and Thurber, unless it’s Zaner and
Tithridge.
Herein are examined, therefore, both men and women, male and female,
Man and Woman—not only in themselves, but in their curious reactions
to each other. The term “reaction” seems to be used in this book to
include not only those quick, unpremeditated reflexes which cause so
much trouble, but also those slowly formulated prejudices, doubts, and
suspicions which cause even more trouble. If this book does anything
at all toward straightening out the lamentable mess that things have
got into in America—and I certainly think it will—the authors will feel
amply repaid for their pains, which consisted in large part, they tell
me, of insults.
LT. COL. H. R. L. LE BOUTELLIER, C.I.E.
SCHLAUGENSCHLOSS HAUS,
KING’S BYWAY,
BOISSY-LE-DOUX SUR SEINE.
_July 15, 1929_
IS SEX NECESSARY?
CHAPTER I
THE NATURE OF THE AMERICAN MALE: A STUDY OF PEDESTALISM
In no other civilized nation are the biological aspects of love so
distorted and transcended by emphasis upon its sacredness as they
are in the United States of America. In China it’s all biology. In
France it’s a mixture of biology and humor. In America it’s half, or
two-thirds, _psyche_. The Frenchman’s idea, by and large, is to get the
woman interested in him as a male. The American idea is to point out,
first of all, the great and beautiful part which the stars, and the
infinite generally, play in Man’s relationship to women. The French,
Dutch, Brazilians, Danes, etc., can proceed in their amours on a basis
entirely divorced from the _psyche_. The Chinese give it no thought at
all, and never have given it any thought. The American would be lost
without the _psyche_, lost and a little scared.
As a result of all this there is more confusion about love in America
than in all the other countries put together. As soon as one gets
the psychical mixed up with the physical—a thing which is likely to
happen quite easily in a composing-room, but which should not happen
anywhere else at all—one is almost certain to get appetite mixed up
with worship. This is a whole lot like trying to play golf with a
basketball, and is bound to lead to maladjustments.
The phenomenon of the American male’s worship of the female, which is
not so pronounced now as it was, but is still pretty pronounced, is
of fairly recent origin. It developed, in fact, or reached its apex,
anyway, in the early years of the present century. There was nothing
like it in the preceding century. Throughout the nineteenth century
the American man’s amatory instincts had been essentially economic.
Marriage was basically a patriotic concern, the idea being to have
children for the sake of the commonwealth. This was bad enough, but
nevertheless it is far less dangerous to get the commonwealth mixed up
with love than to get the infinite mixed up with love.
There was not a single case of nervous breakdown, or neurosis, arising
from amatory troubles, in the whole cycle from 1800 to 1900, barring
a slight flare-up just before the Mexican and Civil wars. This was
because love and marriage and children stood for progress, and progress
is—or was—a calm, routine business. “Mrs. Hopkins,” a man would
say to the lady of his choice (she was a widow in this case)—“Mrs.
Hopkins, I am thinking, now that George[2] has been dead a year,
you and I should get married and have offspring. They are about to
build the Union Pacific, you know, and they will need men.” Because
parents can’t always have men-children when they want them, this led
to almost as many women as men working on the Union Pacific, which in
turn led to the greater stature of women in the present Northwest
than in any other part of the nation. But that is somewhat beside the
point. The point is that men and women, husbands and wives, suitors
and sweethearts, in the last century lived without much sentiment and
without any psycho-physical confusion at all. They missed a certain
amount of fun, but they avoided an even greater amount of pother (see
Glossary). They did not worry each other with emotional didoes. There
was no hint of a Pleasure-Principle. Everything was empiric, almost
somatic.[3]
[2] The late George Hopkins.
[3] The word “somatic” has been left out of the glossary because of the
confusion which the dictionary itself seems to be in over the meaning
of the term. “Pertaining to the wall of the body” is as close as the
New International comes to what we have in mind here, but it goes right
on to use “parietal” as a synonym and parietal means “pertaining to
order within the buildings of a college.” Then again the word goes back
to the old Indian, or East Indian, root _Soma_ which means a god, a
liquor, and an asclepiadaceous climbing shrub (_Sarcostemma acidum_).
Furthermore, if your eyes stray even a fraction of an inch, in looking
up “somatic,” you are in “sölvsbergite” which includes the feldspars,
ægirite, grorudite, and tinguaite.
This direct evasion of the Love Urge on the part of Americans of the
last century was the nuclear complex of the psycho-neurosis as we know
it today, and the basis for that remarkable reaction against patriotic
sex which was to follow so soon after the Spanish-American war.
[Illustration: _Fig. 1._
_Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Baseball._]
At the turn of the century, the nation was on a sound economic basis
and men had the opportunity to direct their attention away from the
mechanics of life to the pleasures of living. No race can leap lightly,
however, from an economic value to an emotional value. There must be
a long period of _Übertragung_, long and tedious. Men were not aware
of this, thirty years ago, because the science of psychology was not
far advanced, but nature came to their aid by supplying a temporary
substitute for an emotional sex life, to tide them over during the
period of _Übertragung_. This substitute took the form of games.
Baseball assumed a new and enormous importance; prize-fighting reached
its heyday; horse-racing became an absorption, bicycling a craze.
Now women, naturally intraverts, could not easily identify themselves
with baseball or prize-fighting (they admired Christy Mathewson and
Terry McGovern, but that was about all); they took but slowly to
horse-racing; and they giggled and acted the fool when they first tried
to balance themselves on a bicycle. They drew away from men and from
men’s concerns, therefore—there was no more of the old Union Pacific
camaraderie—and began to surround the mere fact of their biological
destiny with a nimbus of ineffability. It got so that in speaking of
birth and other natural phenomena, women seemed often to be discussing
something else, such as the Sistine Madonna or the aurora borealis.
They became mysterious to themselves and to men; they became suddenly,
in their own eyes, as capable of miracle and as worthy of worship
as Juno and her sisters. This could not go on. The conflict was
ineluctable.
[Illustration: _Fig. 2._
_Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Bowling._]
When men, wearied of games, turned to women with that urgency so
notable in the American male for its simplicity and directness, they
found them unprepared for acceptance and surrender. The process of
adjustment in courtship and in marriage became more involved than it
had ever been before in the history of the country, if not in the
history of the world. The new outdoors type of American man, with
all his strength and impetuosity, was not easily to be put off. But
the female, equipped with a Defense far superior in polymorphous
ingenuities to the rather simple Attack of the male, was prepared. She
developed and perfected the Diversion Subterfuge. Its purpose was to
put Man in his place. Its first manifestation was fudge-making.
[Illustration: _FUDGE-MAKING_.
“_The female, equipped with a Defense far superior in polymorphous
ingenuities to the rather simple Attack of the male, developed, and
perfected, the Diversion Subterfuge. The first manifestation of this
remarkable phenomenon was fudge-making._”]
The effectiveness of fudge-making in fending off the male and
impressing him with the female’s divine unapproachability cannot be
overestimated. Neither can its potentiality as a nuclear complex. The
flitting from table to stove, the constant necessity of stirring the
boiling confection, the running out-of-doors to see if the candy had
cooled and hardened, served to abort any objective demonstrations at
all on the part of the male. He met this situation with a strong
Masculine Protest. He began to bring a box of candy with him when he
called, so that there would not be any more fudge-making. These years
constituted the great Lowney’s era in this country. Brought back to
where she had started, face to face with the male’s simple desire to
sit down and hold her, the female, still intent upon avoidance of the
tactual, retaliated by suggesting Indoor Pastimes—one of the greatest
of all Delay Mechanisms. All manner of parlor games came into being
at this period, notably charades,[4] which called for the presence of
other persons in the room (Numerical Protection). The American male’s
repugnance to charades, which is equaled, perhaps, by his repugnance to
nothing else at all, goes back to those years. The Masculine Protest,
in this case, was a counter-suggestion of some games of his own, in
which there was a greater possibility of personal contact. His first
suggestions were quite primitive, such as that it would be fun to
count up to a hundred by kissing. The female’s response was the famous
one of Osculatory Justification. There must be, she decreed, more
elaborate reasons for kissing than a mere exhibition of purposeless
arithmetical virtuosity. Thus Post Office and Pillow were finally
devised, as a sort of compromise. Neither was satisfactory to either
sex. The situation became considerably strained and relationships
finally trailed off into the even less satisfactory expedient of
going for long rides on a tandem bicycle, which has had its serious
effects upon the nature of the American man. He liked, for one thing,
to do tricks on a bicycle. The contraption was new to him, and he
wanted to do tricks on it. One trick that he liked especially was
riding backwards. But there wasn’t one woman in ten thousand, riding
frontwards on the rear seat of a tandem wheel, who would permit her
consort to ride backwards on the front seat. The result of all this was
not adjustment, but irritability. Man became frustrated.
[4] See Glossary, definition No. (1).
[Illustration: “_There wasn’t one woman in ten thousand, riding
frontwards on the rear seat of a tandem wheel, who would permit her
consort to ride backwards on the front seat. The result of all this was
not adjustment, but irritability. Man became frustrated._”]
Frustration wrought its inevitable results. Men began to act
jumpy and strange. They were getting nowhere at all with women. The
female gradually assumed, in men’s eyes, as she had in her own, the
proportions of an unattainable deity, something too precious to be
touched. The seed of Pedestalism was sown. The male, in a sort of
divine discontent, began to draw apart by himself. This produced that
separation of the physical and the psychic which causes the adult to
remain in a state of suspended love, as if he were holding a bowl of
goldfish and had nowhere to put it. This condition nowadays would lead
directly to a neurosis, but in those days men were unable to develop
a neurosis because they didn’t know how. Men withdrew, therefore,
quietly and morosely, to their “dens.” It was the epoch of the den in
America. Some marvelous ones sprang into being. Their contents were
curiously significant. Deprived of possessing the female, the male
worked off his Possessive Complex by collecting all manner of bibelots
and bric-à-brac. The average den contained a paper-weight from Lookout
Mountain, a jagged shell from Chickamauga, a piece of wood from the
_Maine_, pictures of baseball-players with beards, pictures of bicycle
champions, a yellowing full-page photograph of Admiral Schley, a
letter-opener from Niagara Falls, a lithograph of Bob Fitzsimmons, a
musket-badge from the G. A. R. parade, a red tumbler from the state
fair, a photograph of Julia Marlowe, a monk’s head match-holder, a
Malay kriss, five pipe racks, a shark’s tooth, a starfish, a snapshot
of the owner’s father’s bowling team, colored pictures of Natural
Bridge and Balanced Rock, a leather table runner with an Indian chief
on it, and the spangled jacket of a masquerade costume, softly shedding
its sequins.
[Illustration: _Fig. 3._
_Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Craps._]
The den was the beginning of male sublimation in this country, but
the fruits of that sublimation were slow in ripening. At the start,
in fact, they were in a state of absolute suspension. Man began to
preoccupy himself with anything, no matter how trivial, which might
help him to “forget,” as the lay expression has it. He thought up
childish diversions, at which one person can amuse himself, and to
justify his absorption in these futile pastimes he exaggerated their
importance, as we shall see. These diversions included the diabolo, the
jig-saw puzzle, linked nails and linked keys, which men took apart and
put back together again, and most important of all, pigs-in-clover.
[Illustration: _Fig. 4._
_Sex Substitutes (Übertragung Period): Six-day Bicycle Racing._]
During this period almost no achievements of value, in art, science,
or engineering, were forthcoming in the nation. Art, indeed,
consisted chiefly of putting strange devices on boxes with the aid
of a wood-burning set. The commonest device was the swastika, whose
curiously distorted conformation bears no discernible relationship to
any known phallic symbolism. Those years were blank, idle, lost years.
Outside affairs of all kinds were neglected. Men retired to their dens
and were not seen for days. The panic of 1907 was a direct result.
It might be interesting to examine into a typical case history of the
period.
CASE HISTORY
George Smith, aged 32, real estate operator. Unmarried, lived with
mother. No precocious mother fixation. Had freed his libido without
difficulty from familial objects, and was eager to marry. Had formed
an attachment in 1899, at the age of 29, with a young virgin. Her
Protective Reactions had been immediate and lasted over a period of
three years, during which he had never even held her hand. Defense
Devices: usually euchre (four-handed), or pedro. Definite and frequent
fudge-making subterfuge. Post Office and Pillow, both with low degree
of success.
Smith’s separation between the physical and the psychic occurred in
1902, the direct stimuli presenting themselves on June 6th of that
year, examination (by Dr. Matthiessen) showed. On that day Smith ran,
frightened, from a barber-shop in Indianapolis, where he lived. Inside
the shop, on the floor, a middle-aged man named Herschel Queeper had
thrown a fit. Queeper had been trying for two days to get three little
balls, under a glass in a tiny round box, to roll into an opening made
for them (common pigs-in-clover puzzle). But no sooner would he get the
third one in than one, or perhaps both, of the others would roll out.
Mrs. Queeper was beginning to wonder where he was.
[Illustration: _UNCONSCIOUS DRAWING: PLATE I._
_Unconscious drawings, as they are called in psychoanalytical
terminology, are made by people when their minds are a blank. This
drawing was made by Floyd Neumann, of South Norwalk. It represents the
Male Ego being importuned by, but refusing to yield to, Connecticut
Beautiful._]
Smith withdrew to his den and pondered and fiddled around and made
Unconscious Drawings (Cf. Plates I, II, III and IV). He turned his
attention from the object of his amorous affections to a consideration
of the problems of pigs-in-clover. The usual Justification of
Occupation occurred. It took the form of exaggerating the importance of
finding out whether the puzzle could possibly be solved, and of working
out a methodology of solving it more readily, if it could be solved at
all. The case procured one of the little boxes and began to roll the
balls toward the opening. At first he set about it quite calmly.
There were no immediate signs of mental deterioration, either malignant
or benign. But although the case got all the balls into the opening,
thus proving that it could be done, he never got them all in at the
same time. In the second month he threw a brief fit. This, today, would
ordinarily prove the first step toward a complete physico-psychic
breakdown, but in those days neuroses were staved off longer, owing to
the general ignorance of psychology, and Smith not only calmly examined
the effect of the fit upon himself, without calling in any scientists,
but determined to go on and examine the effects of fits upon others.
He decided, however, that it would be difficult to examine the effects
of puzzle-fits upon men, because men brooked no examination when they
were intent upon puzzles, and so he hit on the idea of having his dog,
an animal named Dewey, play with the little round box until it threw a
fit. But when he called in his dog he found, after several experiments,
that the dog could not hold the box in either its right or left
paw.[5] Furthermore, the animal was profoundly incurious about the
puzzle.[6]
[5] This presented a difficulty that has not been overcome to this day.
[6] This disinterest held good up until the day of the dog’s death.
[Illustration: “_Furthermore, the animal was profoundly incurious about
the puzzle._”]
Undismayed, Smith decided that somewhere in Indianapolis there must be
a dog adroit enough to handle the box and sagacious enough to grasp
the idea behind it, and with a view to finding such an animal, he
determined to get all the dogs in town, and all the pigs-in-clover
puzzles in town, into one room and see what would happen. (Apotheosis
Complex, with Plurality Fallacy.)
Smith was able, however, to round up only about 85 per cent of the
dogs of the city, because there were many who were too busy to get
away at the time. Even so, 85 per cent of the dogs in Indianapolis
was more than had ever been got together in one room before. The case
attempted to explain the problem to the dogs in short, one-syllable
talks, but the bedlam was too loud and too prolonged for him to make
himself heard. Fifty or more St. Bernards and a few dozen Chesapeake
spaniels listened, half-heartedly, but the others made holiday.
Furthermore, eighty-four bulldogs would not permit themselves to be
muzzled, and this added to Smith’s difficulties. Thus, on the fifth day
of the singular experiment, Smith, hearing a remarkable hullaballoo
belowstairs (he worked in the attic), descended to the parlor, where he
discovered the bulldogs engaged in a sort of tug-of-war, using a body
Brussels carpet as a rope. (The case’s mother had several days before
retreated to French Lick, in a rundown condition.)
Smith grasped the carpet firmly, with some idea of wresting it away
from the dogs, whereupon all of them save three began to pull against
him.[7] The Exaggeration Complex under which the case was laboring
gave him strength enough to meet with some small success in his first
efforts to take the carpet away from the dogs. He pulled them as far
as the bay window in the parlor, largely because they had not settled
down seriously to winning. When they did, however, the total of three
hundred and twenty-four solidly implanted feet and the virtually
immeasurable tugging potentiality were too much for Smith. He was
slowly pulled out into the hall, through the front door, and into the
street. He stubbornly contested every inch of the way until a drug
store, three blocks away, was reached. Here some one had the presence
of mind to call out the fire department.
[7] These three had closed their eyes, to hang on, and did not see
Smith.
[Illustration: _UNCONSCIOUS DRAWING: PLATE II._
_This was drawn by Peter Zinsner, 564 DeKalb Avenue, Brooklyn, without
knowing it. We here see Sublimation in conflict with the Libido. Peter
has reached a point in life where women seem so divine he doesn’t dare
call them up on the phone. Yet_ they _still call_ him.]
Dr. Matthiessen, who took the case at about this period in its
development, attempted to reduce the Magnification of Objective,
first by Analytic Reasoning, and then by cold applications. Neither was
successful. Matthiessen could not divert the libido. Smith declined
to resume his interest in the feminine object of his affections, and
insisted that his experiment with puzzles was a glorious project for
the benefit of mankind.
It was sheer accident that saved the patient—not Dr. Matthiessen.
Smith finally refused Dr. Matthiessen admittance to his house, nor
would he go to the doctor’s office, claiming that he did not believe
in psychology, but one day he dropped one of the little pigs-in-clover
puzzles and broke the glass in it. He then found that he did not have
to roll the balls into the openings, _but could push them in with his
finger_. He got a hammer and broke the glass in all the thousands of
puzzles he had brought to his home for the dogs, and solved every one
of the puzzles by pushing, not rolling. This instantly released him
from his complex by the Gordian Knot principle of complex release. He
thus gained the necessary confidence and sense of power to feel worthy
of the woman with whom he was in love, and he finally married her. The
marriage was of average success.
[Illustration: _This drawing was made from an old 1901 lantern slide
often used by Dr. Karl Zaner in his illustrated lecture, “What Can
We Learn from Animals?” Dr. Zaner has always contended that we can
learn nothing of importance from animals beyond a few pointers on
the art of relaxation. “Their general activities are, as a rule, not
only meaningless to man, but frequently to themselves as well. This
particular cat, for example, probably had nothing special in mind at
all.”_]
Marriages, however, were frequently delayed much longer than in the
case of George Smith, and it was not, indeed, until 1909 that the usual
norm was restored. Meanwhile, in between the time of the first general
separation of the physical and the psychic in this country, and the
final culmination in marriages, a period of sublimation set in. This
followed directly on the heels of the remarkable and lamentable era
of preoccupation with trivial diversions and was characterized by an
extravert interest in truly important projects and activities. The
airplane was brought to a high stage of development, the telephone
transmitter was perfected, tungsten replaced carbon as a filament for
incandescent lamps, better books were written, art progressed, there
was a cultural advance generally and the birth of a new Æsthetic,
and people began to get at the real facts in the Thaw case.
Nevertheless, Pedestalism has left its serious effects. It is doubtful
if they will fully wear off for another fifty or seventy-five years.
[Illustration: (Sketch of dog running.)]