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.
§ 53
The best parental environment, the one that gives the erotic its due,
is that in which the child is allowed to remain a child until he is
required to develop certain phases of the egoistic-social environment.
The best home environment is that in which the parents are themselves,
and particularly the father, emotionally, i.e. erotically, adult and not,
as in so many homes, emotionally childish.
The emotionally childish status, in the erotic sphere of many parents, is
due at least partly to fear, which is purely an egoistic-social emotion.
Love has in its pure state no such emotion as fear but the fears that
are so commonly associated with the expression of love are all of
egoistic-social origin.
While love is properly identified with sex, there being no real
expression of love that is not fundamentally a sex expression, there is
every reason why love should be freed from acquired associations with
fear; and if the fear which has, through puritanical views, attached to
sex could be removed from sex and therefore from love, people today would
be able to live a much more fully expressed life; for the inhibitions
irrationally associated with sex have taken away from life an inestimable
amount of health, strength and beauty.
The inference from this is that the only possible time to prevent the
acquirement of inhibitions is early childhood, and the only possible
people to do it are the parents.
The perfect love pattern will never spontaneously originate with the man
of the world; but with his children it may if he will, if both parents
will, practically refrain from interference. The parents know well
enough, sometimes consciously but more often unconsciously, that their
love pattern is a poor one—poor in conception and poor in execution. It
is poor in joy and rich in misery. According to this perverted pattern
they have lived their own love, and if they but pause to think, they
will withhold their hands and their words from interfering with the
illumination which is slowly reaching the younger generation, but which
blinds the parents’ eyes to true life values.
§ 54
In order to be a wholesome one, the relation between the parent and
child must involve a wholesome relation between the two parents.[15] You
cannot prevent divorce and prostitution if you do not develop before the
children’s eyes a marital pattern which will put both of these family
evils out of commission. You cannot annihilate even an idea by repressing
it into the unconscious. In order to obviate in the next generation the
worst features of this, we must recognize them intellectually and react
to them emotionally; and to be specific, in order to remove as far as
possible the chances of divorce and prostitution in our own children,
we must show them an environment in our own families in which the
marital pattern is such that any deviation from it must be revolting
to the little boy and the little girl who are now getting their first
impressions of married life from their own parents.
§ 55
_Instinct in Humans Generally Inadequate or Misleading_
Instinctive reactions are adequate responses only in natural environments
before civilization has set in. The more complicated life of modern
civilization renders purely instinctive reactions more out of date than a
twenty-year-old model of an automobile.
Not only is mere instinct not a good guide in the egoistic-social
activities, but in the erotic life it is almost worse than useless.
This is so because modern life is so different from the prehistoric
environment that humans are today unable to follow erotic instinct, or
even, on account of traditional inhibitions, to get at it in its purity.
We live today in an environment so preponderantly egoistic-social that
the majority of motives for any act are egoistic-social ones, and only
a small fraction of them erotic. This makes it as difficult to follow
erotic instincts as for a compass to point north, when a magnet is lying
three inches to the east of it.
Instinct alone would naturally prompt a boy and a girl to dwell long over
the preliminaries to the love episode. If left together and alone, they
would take some time to reach an erotic acme, and would instinctively
find that out last of all, as is so beautifully described in Marlowe’s
_Hero and Leander_, and so delicately suggested in _Paul and Virginia_.
Not only has the social convention of the present day tended more and
more to inhibit the introduction, prelude, first and second acts of the
love drama but it has raised such a barrier against the third act as to
give it an entirely disproportionate value in comparison with the others.
§ 56
There are three separate fusions involved in any perfect heterosexual
union: (1) the bodily fusion of the man and the woman, (2) the fusion of
their souls each with the other and (3) the fusion of the soul and body
of each more closely together.
The last comes from the man on his side and the woman on hers, each
seeing the world more _sub specie Amoris_—as manifestation of erotic
passion; but it also comes from the fact that the admission into
consciousness of the innate erotic reactions, in spite of the opposition
of environment—the legitimate admission of these feelings—vitalizes not
only the physical body of man and woman, but also all the multitudinous
and diversified contacts of both man and woman with people and things.
Instinct alone, if it were possible to follow it unchecked, would lead to
those three fusions; but the sex instinct in men and women has been so
submerged by various forms of prohibition that even in the married state
most husbands and wives do not know of the joy of any of these three
fusions.
§ 57
One type of instinctive behaviour is the almost universal tendency to
reason by analogy which frequently turns out to be a reasoning by false
analogy and by association of the contiguity type.
It would be quite as reasonable for a woman to say that, because a
prostitute enjoys roast beef or lobster (or anything between), the pure
wife should feel it a sin to enjoy good food.
Of course there are people who think it is wrong to enjoy anything,
but while overgratification from food or drink has a certain essential
sensuality about it and gluttony was one of the “seven deadly sins,”
there is no psychological principle according to which intense enjoyment
is rightly prohibited, providing the consumption of food does not exceed
the necessity of the body for growth and restoration of tissue. Up to
that point the more one enjoys one’s food the better for himself and
incidentally for everyone else. If, however, the enjoyment has to come
from an increase in the amount consumed or the cost of it, then a quite
unjustifiable element of unsocial action surely enters.
One should enjoy food, and the more enjoyment the better, provided the
enjoyment does not depend on the increase in amount or expensiveness of
it.
Similarly there is every good reason why both women and men should enjoy
sex and regard it as quite as necessary as food.
Instinctively both women and men would do so if their sexual instincts
were accessible. Those men and women to whom their instincts are
accessible do gain their greatest comfort if not their greatest happiness
through the uninhibited expression of the sex instinct.
§ 58
If the greatest happiness in life be something other than the emotions
incident to the fusion of man’s and woman’s beings in the love drama,
then, whatever that greatest happiness may be said to be, it is surely
conditioned on a happy marriage. Those who think otherwise are not
happily married and they need to become so before their words can have
any authority. Those not happily married have, of course, no means
whatever of knowing at first hand what is, or should be, implied in that
term.
§ 59
Instinct has taught the woman to expect strength, physical or spiritual,
or both, of the man. Let it not be forgotten that mental and spiritual
strength is a perfect substitute for physical strength. It does not
mean that intellectual ability is the equivalent of spiritual strength
as the former may be coexistent with an emotional undevelopment which
is the same as spiritual weakness. A man may, even a child may, be an
intellectual prodigy as a chess player or mathematician without implying
any emotional development in the direction of normal erotism.
In this the sexes are different, for woman’s instinct here guides her
rightly. Biologically she is unconsciously forced, against her will, and
quite without her knowing it to test her man continuously for some kind
of strength. For some women indeed physical strength is all-satisfactory
but in the majority of cases of civilized woman physical strength,
without an accompanying spiritual strength, which will insure the
necessary erotic control of her by her husband, will always leave her
disappointed and discontented.
The qualities instinctively called for in the woman by the man are the
opposite in some respects. He unconsciously, if not consciously, expects
sweetness, docility, compliance, adoration in his wife, all qualities
that are a necessary background and basis for his childish and autoerotic
enjoyments. It is almost unheard of to find a man who takes pleasure in
the negativism which characterizes the child and also many women, and
in the opposition which alone, when deftly overcome, constitutes the
only proof that he is or has been purely masculine and creative in his
positive activities in effecting a change in that part of his environment.
It may be objected that this demand for compliance, softness and
accessibility in woman may not be purely instinctive; but, if it is not,
it is of such early origin as to be undistinguishable from true instinct.
It is the common experience of every infant to be treated with the utmost
tenderness by its mother.
§ 60
When the average unreflective man meets opposition, in any degree of
strength, from his wife he tends to reënact the mother-infant situation
in his own married life. This results in the husband’s reproducing more
or less exactly the original infantile tantrum. Naturally he tends toward
an explosive use of force when he does not find in his wife the qualities
he has sensed in his mother. However much he may conceal or transform the
outward manifestation of this infantile trend, the trend exists and is
a positive factor in the situation which contains the wife’s opposition.
From this it follows that instinct is a better guide for women than for
men.
Woman is in every way justified in her demand for strength in her mate.
Man is wholly unjustified in expecting sweetness, adoration and the other
qualities except perhaps the docility implied in the susceptibility to
male control in the erotic sphere which is undoubtedly innate in every
woman. It does not occur to him that the negativistic opposition of woman
is her means of testing his own strength, and that he has in it the best
possibility of proving his essential masculinity. That he should totally
ignore the opposition by the sole means of suggestive replacement of
her antagonistic ideas by the ideas which he knows are the best ones in
the situation, and that he should convince and persuade her through his
perfectly confident attitude that this type of action on his part is
exactly what she is instinctively trying to evoke in him by her apparent
perversity, are too infrequently even glimpsed by the man who relies on
_his_ instinct.
§ 61
From the erotic viewpoint it makes no difference whether a woman is well
dressed or not or even tidy, provided her ill-dressed condition does not
interfere with her physical health. A woman in rags wielding a hoe or a
rake or even a spade may be just as radiant and have just as fine and
attractive physique as a lady in silks. It is a fallacy to suppose that
erotic attractiveness consists only in the cosmetic art. This motive to
keep herself in the pink of visual perfection appeals only to sight, and
is at bottom more egoistic-social than erotic, however much the woman may
think she is making an erotic impression by her appearance. The conscious
appeal to sight is frequently only an overcompensation for her erotically
unsatisfied condition.
As sight is only distant or vicarious _touch_, it is evident that the
visual appeal is only a substitute touch appeal. That a woman with
a homely face may be erotically attractive then is no paradox. The
beautiful face is only the symbol of the “skin you love to touch.” The
visible symbol may be absent and yet the kinesthetic quality be present.
Furthermore all lovers who take pleasure from the sight of beautiful
lines of the human form are only vicariating for kinesthetic sensations.
The original sculptor is the caressing hand.
§ 62
In modern human civilized life instincts in general, even irrespective of
the sex of the person in whom they are manifested, are the worst possible
guides. The love instinct is also among the worst, simply because its
present-day vestiges are so overlaid with restrictions and conventions
that it cannot be seen clearly. It has been so inhibited that it needs an
apologist.
When looking at the two broad divisions of egoistic-social and love
instincts, one has to have demonstrated the essential superiority of the
love instinct and its far greater ability to cause happiness, health,
and, in the deepest sense, success.
Over two thousand years ago Aristotle saw, and said, that the greatest
satisfaction comes from fullest use of all one’s powers. Today we are
beginning to realize, after the study of the ductless glands, that
there is a kind of reaction in the body not mediated by nerves, as
are muscular reactions, and that we have, in the hormones, a mode of
interaction between the parts of the body that has been as yet unnoted by
physiologist and psychologist alike, an interaction that places marriage
in the forefront as a necessity not only for health but for the fullest
development of our latent powers.
§ 63
For among the dozen or so ductless glands, which Berman[16] has
called an “interlocking directorate” of all the human activities, is
the interstitial gland which places in circulation in the blood a
hormone that vitalizes all the secretions of all the other glands,
and which requires for its own perfect working the concomitant and
synchronous perfect working of the homologous gland in the mate, in the
other demi-human of the complete social unit. In other words perfect
physiological health is secured in no better way than by marrying
provided marriage is complete marriage and not merely a “Platonic” or
business relation.
From these considerations it is evident that as motives for action that
leads to happiness, the erotic instincts (if we can succeed in extracting
their ore from the mine of our unconscious and refining it from the
dross of egoistic-social accretions) are infinitely superior to the
egoistic-social.