CONTROL
§ 128
Evolution has produced in man a being in whom the erotic has now a
greater significance than the egoistic-social impulse. In the development
of plant and animal forms, science recognizes certain new productions
that differ from the norm of the species in which they appear, in such a
way that they were at first called freaks or mutations. But as they breed
true to their form, they are necessarily regarded not as freaks (_lusus
naturæ_), but as well established varieties.
The establishment of the erotic as a norm in humans has the further
implication that here we have a phenomenon existent nowhere else in life,
namely the non-procreative or social love episode.
Indeed it may be that love itself, as distinguished from sensual desire,
is a mutation on the psychical level, a form not recognized in any
description of natural phenomena until late in man’s evolution—the love
that comprises both physical and spiritual reaction for the man, and both
physical and spiritual counter-reaction from the woman. Without this
interaction man cannot be said truly to love.
For the man of today, who has succeeded in placing the erotic above the
egoistic-social impulse, has achieved a height that few, if any, have
attained before him, has gained a joy and fullness of living compared
with which the so-called happiness of successful marriage according to
former standards is but foredawn to noon-day.
The existence of this higher type of erotic control leading to the
establishment of the non-procreative or social love episode, brings into
clearest relief the distinction between control as repression and control
as expression.
Control as expression is analogous to driving a horse and getting
somewhere, control as repression is like unharnessing him and letting
him run away. Control of the erotic instinct by repressing is not like
shooting the horse, because repression never annihilates an impulse but
only removes it from conscious control.
Keeping in mind this difference between control by repression, which is
only apparent, not real, annihilation, only removal from consciousness
and not destruction of the impulse, we shall more easily note the
necessary connection between self-control and individuality, i.e.,
personality.
His individuality is just what he makes up his mind, and exercises
his utmost imagination, to _do_. His work is his own, only in so far
as he controls his actions in doing it, so that they are better than
the external demand. If he is an office boy and told to put stamps on
envelopes, he can do it and only it, or he can put them on so quickly or
so straight that the quickness or straightness is immediately seen as his
particular part of the performance.
He can control the actions of his work and his play; but, except
indirectly, he cannot control his digestion, respiration, blood pressure
or circulation. He has to eat more digestible food, or to take more
exercise, or to cultivate pressure-raising emotions, or those that lower
the blood pressure.
He has been taught to believe that his physical constitution and his
instincts are tendencies inherited from his ancestors and that he cannot
control them. If his instincts or inherited disposition make him lose his
temper so that he is not himself, he is supposed not to be responsible
for all he does.
But is he freed from responsibility because he is temporarily governed
by his instincts, or is he steered by his instincts only when and
because he throws away responsibility? Is it impulsive, instinctive
action that excuses him, or is it excuses that are wanted by him, which
makes him call his action, or the part of it he wants to be excused for,
instinctive?
Is not his only reason for calling some actions instinctive or impulsive
the fact that he does not want to be held responsible for them? What he
cannot control is not his fault. Therefore, what he does not want to
be blamed for he says is not under his control. Any thing, person or
mysterious power can be made the scapegoat for his misdeed. Much more
likely is he to blame other things, persons or powers for what he does
contrary to what he thinks people want him to do, than to account for
some praiseworthy action by saying it was the result of some power other
than himself.
If his marriage has turned out unhappily he consoles himself by saying
all marriage is a lottery. If it turns out well he pats himself on the
back and says, in actions though not in so many words: “See what a fine
match I have made!” But why should he take only praise and put blame on
some mysterious power—luck, or providence or what not?
§ 129
His sexual instinct is most likely to be assigned to some mysterious
power. But it is no more mysterious than his heartbeat and no more
miraculous than the growth of his beard or finger nail. In spite of the
fact that he has not given them much thought, his sex instincts are as
much a part of him as any tissue of his body.
The same principle applies to the praise or blame attached by others
to the acts which his sexual instincts prompt him to do. If he kiss
a strange girl in an environment where strange girls are kissed by
everyone, his act is not blamed. So it is his own act and not inspired
by some unholy power (unless indeed he has to explain to someone how he
happened to be in that environment, or he would have to blame that on his
instinct).
If his amativeness shows itself in any place where that form of
self-expression is frowned upon, he will be mentally preparing excuses,
even if he does not have to use them, and he will simply say he was
forced by his irresistible impulse to do that very thing.
If his environment consisted at the time of one woman whose unconscious
passion was already directed toward him, she might call upon him for an
explanation which of course she wouldn’t really care about, but any sort
of explanation logical or not would suffice, because the demand was only
conventional.
He takes the praise for what is conventionally praised in his actions. He
shifts the blame to anything not himself. Also he takes the praise, if
any is accorded, to anything that has cost him much effort. He leaves,
or dodges, the blame. So the two ideas according to which he reacts to
praise or blame are the idea of whether the actions praised or blamed are
his, the result of his conscious effort, and the idea of whether or not
the actions or their results are pleasant.
§ 130
On this principle he does always the next best thing to what he thinks is
expected of him provided he cannot or fancies he cannot do exactly what
people look to him to do.
This praise and blame, coming from other people and this looking to him,
to do this or that, are both examples of the control society is exerting
on him from childhood up. The clothes he wears, the books he reads, the
plays he sees, everything he does is at least partly dictated to him by
the people with whom and among whom he lives. If he knows people expect
him to wear a linen collar and silk tie he puts them on if he has them.
If he has only a collar he puts that on. If he has no linen collar he
possibly puts on a paper or celluloid one.
At any rate he gives them the next best thing in any and every line
coming up as far as possible to their demands.
In sexual instincts there is only one conventional demand; namely,
that, except in marriage, he repress them entirely. The next best
thing, the celluloid collar, in this case, is any and everything
society calls non-sexual. He may waste his time playing cards and his
money on the races or the stock market, and if he succeeds in getting
excitement enough out of them to prevent his thoughts turning to sex
topics he will have the comparative approval of society. If he leaves
women alone entirely he will be called a clean man. Anything short of
actual criminality serves as the next best thing to sex in the eyes of
conventional society.
Society to date makes only this negative demand on him. It as much as
admits that it has nothing to do with sex and still less with love. That
simply means that society is so blind it has not yet seen that it can get
anything out of sex, or of love either. Society has no eyes, no arms, no
lips. Why should society be interested in the employment of these parts
of men in amatory ways? They need not expect it to. They have no need to
look to it for such things.
Society on the other hand wants the individual’s time and energy devoted
entirely to professional, commercial and artistic ends, and grudges him
every moment he spends in doing and thinking along lines of pleasure
and advantage to himself. Society plans the rôle of the gods in the old
Platonic fable before mentioned (§ 46) but has taken the half-humans and
halved them again.
Society, unlike the fabled gods, however, wishes each of these to devote
full time to making, manufacturing, buying, selling, even fighting, which
always makes more work, but never to loving, which it considers a mere
waste of time. Children it wants, but they can be begotten without love;
and the less love the greater numbers.
Society therefore completely ignores the individual. It tells him to make
chairs and tables but never to make love.
§ 131
One has to reflect thus, so as to disentangle the motives that rule
one’s actions. The most individual and intimately personal motive is
love. One’s strongest individuality, if one can discount society and be
oneself, is seen in the ability to make love.
What a man most controls is most himself. Those actions that are
most controlled by forces _outside_ of himself are least his own. In
his thinking he has to learn inseparably to link individuality and
self-control.
He has been taught from infancy to give up doing what he wanted to
do himself and do what other people want. All other people want him
to do almost the opposite of what he wants to do himself until, with
punishments, retaliations, and all sorts of rebuffs, their wants
have snowed under his instinctive desires with such an avalanche of
prohibitions that his actions are about ninety-nine per cent controlled
by the kind of selfishness that consists of selfishly trying to please
other people for a release from this snow pressure, which release is
called approbation or praise.
The impulses which come from the avalanche are the egoistic-social
motives, social because they come down upon him from everyone with whom
he comes in contact, egoistic because he is really protecting and
pleasing himself by following these motives.
But one can see for himself how much of the control of his ordinary
every-day actions is his, how much is the control of the avalanche.
Really then the only thing left to the individual is his love impulse.
Society is not interested in it, or does not see that it is. Society
would be a very different thing if it had eyes. It might have some
sympathy. The individual’s love impulse is the one bit of leaven in the
human mass today. It is the one thing he can call his own, the one thing
whose expression he can control. But society has taught by implication
that that is the one thing he cannot control except by annihilation.
So it appears society has shown quite Machiavellian abilities in
checkmating the erotic impulse which is the individual impulse par
excellence. Society is confronted with an apparently antisocial influence
and reacts to it on the low intellectual plane of trying to destroy it.
§ 132
But control is not annihilation nor is annihilation control in any sense
whatever. If you cannot train a horse by shooting him dead, you cannot
drive him by poisoning him. If you do you haven’t got him.
If you kill your love impulse you haven’t got it. You cannot kill it, but
you can knock it in the head so that it is unconscious. Ascetics have
done it. Society would as lief you did it yourself.
Your love impulse, not the Sunday school variety but the full red-blooded
variety of woman-loving (or man-loving) impulse is not only the most
individual thing about you because it is capable of the most complex
development in your case but it is the most valuable dynamo you have
generating endless power whose source is the sun itself.
Control of the love impulse therefore, and not annihilation of it, is the
individual’s most personal advantage.
§ 133
An essential difference obtains between the average man’s control and the
average woman’s chiefly in that the woman’s is a control by repression,
virtually, of course, no control at all; while the man’s control wherever
it exists is a control through expression.
It accords with the nature of masculinity and femininity that the control
of the woman’s erotism, if it be a control through expression, is the
control exercised over it by the man. Any control she may obtain over it
cannot but be the control by repression. In other words no woman has any
control over her own erotism except the ability to refuse to express it,
and even that she may lose if she meets the right man. And no control
is exercised over her erotism except by her true mate, if she is thus
developed by him.
The man’s control over his own erotism is a real control only after he
has succeeded in freeing his psyche from the mental autoerotism in which
he has been born, and has achieved a real allerotism. No consideration
need be given to the objection possibly raised here by some; namely,
that the double standard of sexual morality that obtains so widely may
have given the man a taste of allerotism, and may thus have given him
a control through expression. But it must be clearly understood that no
clandestine liaison of any sort whatever, except where there is a true
love of one woman, to the social recognition of which there is some
insuperable barrier, has any real value as an erotic control through
expression.
Finally in the differentiation between masculine and feminine erotic
control it may be said that the woman needs and can, by the nature of the
circumstances, have no control through expression herself. She needs no
release from her own natural autoerotism. Her love problem is _toto cælo_
different from man’s.
§ 134
The question—Are not all healthy men prone to relax their erotic tensions
more rapidly than women?—may be answered. Possibly they are, but they
need not be. If a man is sick he is more likely to feel like crying,
yet he does not always do so. If a man receives any great blow, he is
proportionately more likely to regress to the stage of infantility.
Healthy men, on the contrary, need not be short-winded in the love
episode any more than in playing a baseball game, painting a picture,
singing a song or writing a book. It may be that no art can be taught.
Even if this is true, we shall always attempt to teach arts of all kinds.
It may be that the art of love requires a certain amount of innate taste
in a man, for him to make any great progress.
History has shown a few great geniuses and a few great lovers. Few great
lovers figure in history because the average human adult married lover
has no penchant for advertising himself. The average childish married
man can, however, learn to take steps in the direction of adulthood in
married relations, even if he never becomes truly great as a lover.
This is indeed the most important point of all. Divorces in large numbers
and unhappy marriages in still larger numbers occur simply because the
husband will not have, or has not had the opportunity to learn the main
lessons of the married life, the greatest of which is that it is his
privilege to insure his wife’s attainment of the erotic acme, preferably
before his own, but at least simultaneously, and every time his own
occurs.
They are not truly mated unless this plan of simultaneity or succession
is followed whole-heartedly. If it is not now followed, it must be begun
at once, and the only method is through the appropriate action of the
husband.
A baby takes its mother’s milk and gives nothing in return except smiles
and gurgles and sleep. A man taking his wife’s body and giving her no
adult emotional return for the emotional catharsis he gets himself,
except the infantile smile and sleep, is himself no less a baby.
And she will “mother” or “baby” him, first, and unconsciously hate him
later. Asking him if he has his rubbers, his umbrella, his overcoat and
the thousand and one things that more or less consciously irritate him,
show (but, in the average man, only to his unconscious) that what really
irritates him in these minor solicitudes is his manifestly infantile
situation.
§ 135
This complete lack, on the woman’s part, of any ability whatsoever to
secure erotic control over man leads her to try, unconsciously, of
course, to compensate, for her inability in this region, by securing
egoistic-social control over man. This she succeeds in doing every time
she meets a man who has not yet developed from a mental autoerotism, in
which he thinks that she has pleasures to bestow upon him and that he has
to get them from her, with or without payment of egoistic-social services.
It thus appears that woman not only has no exclusively erotic control,
which by the nature of things belongs entirely to man where he has
developed sufficiently to assume it, but also she invariably confuses the
two types of control, getting a vicarious satisfaction from different
forms of egoistic-social control, and missing, in a great number of
instances, the deep biological and organic satisfactions from the
exercise of control over her by the man.
A hazy notion that happiness is her prerogative at least in the first
months of her marriage leads many a woman to believe even to the extent
of a virtual hallucination that she _is_ happy, i.e., that she is
erotically controlled by her husband.
A love episode in which this control has not been secured by her husband,
or in which he may not even have tried to secure it leaves her in a state
of psychical conflict. She consciously knows she ought to be supremely
happy, unconsciously she feels blankly unhappy; and if, as so many women
are, she is without erotic insight, she fancies that her husband has
slighted her in some purely egoistic-social action.
Woman’s negative control in the erotic sphere results in the complete
depersonalization of her body.
§ 136
Unconsciously as well as consciously she _wishes_ to find all pleasure
in her honeymoon, and so strong is that wish that she is impelled to
believe that all the several experiences of it are pleasurable. They
_must_ be pleasurable or she must admit that at the start even, she is
_not_ happily married. This is the state of mind of those who enter the
married state with the most disingenuous sincerity. Those who marry with
any initial conflict, such as feelings of guilt for any previous illicit
sexual adventures, are more unfortunate.
Those whose wishes for happiness are so strong as to interpose a
rose-coloured glass between their eyes and their actual experiences are
deceiving only their conscious selves. One cannot deceive the unconscious.
Unconsciously they are disappointed in the lack of rapport between their
own emotional erotic situation and their husbands’. They are in the
position of a starving man looking through a plate-glass window, at a
restaurant full of merry feasters.
According to her bringing up she may repress all or a part, or none,
of her natural resentment at this situation; and the resentment is
going eventually to make her more exacting of her husband, if she is to
surrender to him even her impersonal body. For impersonal her body does
become even to her. She regards it as belonging by law to him and she
will not virtually inhabit it when he is with it. At his approach she
flees from it every time. And as this flight is an unconscious, though
a real flight, we cannot blame her if her husband will not, or cannot,
take enough care of it and its reactions to enable her to assimilate the
necessary food of love.
She will think: “He says he loves me, but I know only that he likes my
body. I begin to hate it because it does not give me the satisfaction
it does him. I can’t understand it a bit. It’s a strange world. But I
suppose it’s got to be as it is. I can’t do anything about it.”
And she cannot, if he will not or cannot. Is there any more powerful
deterrent than despair to prevent a young wife from being able to produce
in herself a relaxation of erotic tensions? Her usual course, when
she begins to despair thus is to deny to herself that she has any sex
feeling at all. Her husband then agrees with her and calls her frigid.
This crystallization of her feelings not merely retards but annihilates
whatever abilities she has to express her love in an erotic way. She
fortifies herself with the compensating thought that sex is, as she has
always heard, sinful, filthy, nauseating. Her face begins to become
hardened, to develop a wrinkle or two and she is in a fair way to become
an anti-something.
She begins to realize that he has not done this or that, such as
remembering to post a letter or make a purchase or keep an appointment
with her; or he has contradicted or opposed her in some judgment
concerning practical every-day occurrence. He has not done what he should
have done, to be sure; but not only does she not know what that thing is
but she has no means of knowing what it is. She therefore is forced to
express her dissatisfaction with him in terms of a sphere of impulse with
which she is acquainted; namely, the egoistic-social. She cannot talk to
him in a language of which she knows not a single word.
The relations between a new bride and her husband in their first love
episode are those of an examination or test. The bride tests the groom,
of course, in the majority of cases unconsciously. There is nothing else
for her to do. There is no test she has to meet. By the circumstances of
the case she is not required to do anything for the conscious performance
of which she is to be judged or tested by anyone. She has not to do but
merely to be, to exist—as if, asleep, to be awakened.
The unconscious situation is quite the reverse. The husband is the one
who is tested. If he fails in any detail of this test there remains in
the story of his actions a lacuna which she has no means of filling, but
which forms the nucleus of a doubt in her unconscious mind and the centre
toward which all subsequent failures on his part tend to congregate in
such numbers that she may become later completely skeptical. She will say
she knows he loves her. To be sure, he does a thousand little things for
her all of egoistic-social, none of truly erotic value.
If he even once takes these virtually friendly, unconscious examinings of
hers as real evidence of hostility or lack of interest, he is failing her
where she feels it most keenly, and is beginning to lose his control of
her erotically. If he continues to be switched off the main track by her
well-nigh inquisitorial attitude he as much as admits to her that he is
not longer able to come up to her standards—a humiliating admission for
any man to make to any woman.
Kittens are born blind. Women are born love-blind. No woman is other
than anesthetic, which means “not perceiving” until she has perceived
something. And there is nothing for her to perceive except what her
husband does.
Woman’s negative control, coming as it does from her anesthesia which
is innate in her and is removed only by the proper kind of marriage,
makes her “uncertain, coy and hard to please.” If not met and handled
erotically by a man who has abandoned autoerotism, it develops in her
a degree of opposition, antagonism, obstinacy and resistance that is
completely misunderstood by a man without erotic insight.
§ 137
Women confuse the control on the egoistic level with that on the erotic
level, because the latter prompts them to keep testing their men in
the unconscious attempt to assure themselves of their own security.
This testing is done on both levels. When it is done on the upper or
superficial level of egoistic-social acts it takes the form of all
varieties of fantastic and capricious behaviour. The most “temperamental”
woman is using her moods only to try the steadfastness of the man
concerned, although she is quite unaware of the unconscious motive.
She either cannot explain her actions or she assigns reasons that are
pure rationalizations. When the testing is done on the erotic level it
sometimes assumes the form of coldness or anesthesia.
Women will later come to see that their use of egoistic-social tests is
only an indirect manner (and never a reliable one) of assuring their
erotic security, but they will attain this insight only after they have
made the distinction between the two groups of motives and have given to
the erotic its true superior value.
If the young bride has had the good fortune to be enlightened on sexual
matters, and thus to be prepared for a descent upon her of an expression
of force which otherwise is easily too great a shock, she may even
welcome its impetuosity.
If on the other hand, as is almost universally the case, she is ignorant
of sex, her reaction to an uncontrolled husband will be one of utter
despair. The majority of educated women today have been brought up with
all the inhibitions which crass ignorance of sexual psychology produces.
As a precautionary measure many of them were instructed by their mothers
that boys and men are uncontrolled brutes and should not be allowed to
touch girls, who are destined to become married mothers.
Therefore the majority of women enter the married state with faces at
least slightly averted from sex, just as some religious sects train their
believers to wash in the dark and never under any circumstances to look
at their bodies undraped, much less any other persons’.
So the chance is that the husband will have as his first duty to
eradicate this sex inhibition, for which his wife is in no way to blame,
for as a child she started in the right direction, and was misdirected by
her parents, guardians or teachers.
If a man is constitutionally unable, or has trained himself to be
unable, to control his own emotional catharsis, and must see to his own
satisfaction, before (or even instead of) his wife’s, the prognosis of
happiness, if he gets a woman with the sex inhibition, is negative.
§ 138
That the soul as well as the body of the newly married, in their first
love episode, should be inexplicable and unreservedly “blended with the
only other soul and body in all the world for him” certainly requires
a mental ante-nuptial preparation that has rarely been attained in the
past. It implies the belief on the man’s part that the woman should have
_from the first_ exactly the same true physical and psychical ecstasy
that he expects himself. How many men think that?
It must be admitted, however, as has been indicated above, that the
woman’s erotic development progresses, and that in some cases it takes
months and even years for it to reach its full expansion. In the meantime
the hasty, anesthetic husband has lost his grip and, unconsciously
unwilling to grow up with his wife, remains at his selfish, animal level.
Incidentally, too, he holds his wife there; for it must be remembered
that the wife’s erotic development, on which depends not merely her
contentment, but the stark possibility of her becoming more than a
gynecoid female, is absolutely nil, if it be not developed by her
husband. This is unequivocally a one-way process. All the latent love and
beauty of being and action on the woman’s part are dependent solely on
the ability of her husband to unfold her.
§ 139
It may be argued that the woman’s erotic acme is conditioned by the
prior or simultaneous emergence of the man’s. But this argument is the
working out of a defence mechanism coming from the unconscious of the
man. He makes this statement not because it is true but because, from an
autoerotic phantasy, he wishes it were true.
The statement, too, may be sincerely made by the woman, but, if it is,
it is because she has heard him make it or correctly inferred from his
unconscious actions its tacit existence in his mind. It is shown in
another place that there is always in the man’s unconscious a phantasy
that his part in the love episode will produce his wife’s erotic acme at
once and without effort on his part. This phantasy amounts in some cases
to an hallucination.
§ 140
It was said above that you cannot control what you cannot see or touch or
otherwise perceive. To what you cannot see, you are blind; to what you
cannot hear, you are deaf; to what you cannot smell you are—but there is
no English word for that, so we have had to take a Greek word—_anosmic_.
Similarly if you could not taste, touch, feel, you would be insensible.
There are many more forms of insensibility than merely being knocked
out in a fight. The insensibility to the penultimate one of the various
phases of the love episode has been called in a woman anesthesia. In the
love episode of the hasty husband there are innumerable reactions of
his wife to which he is insensible, anesthetic; but which would be a
revelation of supreme joy to him if he could but see them; therefore it
is better that the love episodes should take place in the light rather
than in the dark.
Yet not alone the visually perceptible reactions. For there are reactions
of every variety. If you have ever used a blow pipe on a piece of copper,
and observed the iridescence which soon comes, you will realize the same
beauties in every sense preceding the complete annealing of your wife
by the heat of passion you engender in her. If you have ever watched
the iridescence of a spraying fountain in the sun, you will see the
same effect in the emotions of your wife when the relaxation of tension
has broken up her being into fine particles that float slowly down and
refract the light rays of your love. And the beauty and calm of the
rainbow after a summer storm is nothing to that of the mental state of a
woman after the downpour of her erotic passion.
All these are features to which the anesthetic man is insensible.
Although the similes used are visual, there is not a sense quality that
cannot be thrilled by the perception of the woman’s reactions. And
although the similes rather hint at the finale than at the preliminaries
they all refer to the effect produced on the woman by the activities of
the man. The kinesthetic sense of the husband must be developed. He is
much wiser if he will give these sensations some appreciative study.
It will help to give him control by taking his mind off the burden of
tension he has to carry himself, and enable him to acquire over his wife
that domination in the exclusively erotic sphere which is essential not
only to his wife’s happiness but to his own.
§ 141
Anesthesia is love-blindness. Love is pictured blind because he does not
see _defects_. The worst blindness of love is its not seeing beauties.
Most husbands’ love is blind. This is the anesthesia meant. When one is
given surgically an anesthetic it is to make one insensible to pain. Love
anesthesia is the insensibility to the love emotions which are stirred in
every man by every woman.
Can a man be aware of these appeals, made by every woman, and choose
to remain true to the woman he has married? What good would be done to
him if the anesthetic to which, by virtue of conventional repression,
we are all subject, should be suddenly removed? Would not such a man be
irresistibly impelled to make love to any and every woman he saw? Where
then would monogamy be? But if monogamy depended on anesthetics of this
type it would be on a very insecure basis. It would not endure a week.
Yet most men are love-blind, are anesthetic to woman’s deepest erotic
appeal. Furthermore the securest protection for monogamy is the removal
of that anesthesia.
§ 142
This doctrine of the supremity of masculine erotic control will be
objected to, and by the best of women. They will say that they get their
joy in perfect marriage from the knowledge that their husbands are made
happy. They will also say that it is only fair play if there is a give
and take on both sides, and that the denial of woman’s control relegates
them to an inferior position.
They misunderstand, however, the biological foundations of the marital
state if they consider woman’s position of receiver and not giver as
in any way implying inferiority. They confuse erotic control, which is
demonstrably a one-way control, with egoistic-social control, which is
quite as normally exercised by women as by men, by women over men, as by
men over women.
They fail to see also that the secure establishment of the one-way
masculine erotic control will so satisfy men that no dispute can arise as
to the rights of women in the egoistic-social sphere. They fail to see
also that the solid foundation of truly erotic control over them by their
husbands will release for egoistic-social activities an enormous fund
of energy which is now irrationally locked up in the erotic sphere. In
other words if they are fortunate enough to be married to a man who is in
perfect control erotically they will not need to worry about his approval
of whatever they may find interesting to do in egoistic-social spheres of
action.
§ 143
The excellent women who may on theoretical grounds, object to their
husbands’ supreme erotic control, are merely echoing the sentiments
of traditional convention, which are man-made sentiments, made by men
centuries ago, dictating what was right and proper for women to do
centuries ago.
Today there is nothing, even in the ordinary every-day service a man
receives from his wife that he would not rather have servants do for
him—cooking, house-tending, clothes-mending or the supervision of these.
If he were rich enough he would.
But the personality reaction in the most intimate psychical as well as
physical relations of married life he can secure from no other than a
true wife, and in no other sphere than the exclusively erotic and in no
other way than as she, like the vibrating string of a musical instrument,
responds to his technique.
§ 144
The main thesis of this book is that in the instincts and emotions of
love the self-control of the husband and, through this, his control of
the exclusively erotic emotions of his wife are essential to a successful
marriage.
A continuous interplay of control on the egoistic-social level between
husband and wife tends to exist in all marriages. There is an impulse in
women to control the actions of men at this level quite as much as men
attempt to control women. But the control of the egoistic-social impulses
of each by the other has nothing to do with real marriage, and the
impulses and emotions peculiar to it, which are erotic only and, at that,
subject to a one-way control.
In the sphere of the erotic emotions man should be supreme. Neither
husband nor wife is ever really happy unless he has this control, and is
indifferent to the other control on the egoistic-social level.
The facts that control is neither annihilation nor repression, that
control is of the very essence of personality and individuality, that
biologically man’s control of woman is the only control needed in the
erotic sphere, and that woman, not being able to control there (and
feeling, if she be not controlled, a need which she unconsciously
interprets as a need to control others)—all these are facts that are of
slight importance, however striking they may be, compared with the fact
that man, on the average, is brought up without knowledge of the erotic
control he needs to assume in order to make both himself and his wife
happy.
The unsatisfied woman experiences the fact that she has bestowed upon her
mate unutterable joy and bliss. A satisfied woman’s recognition of this
fact, however, cannot occur at the same time that her own erotic acme
takes place, for at that particular time she is as oblivious to anything
save her own sensations as if she were the only being existing in the
universe, and her sensations are as indefinite and infinite as though she
were taking chloroform. She must, in all the processes leading up to her
temporary psychic dissolution, realize that these processes are being
accomplished for her by the being and doing of her husband-lover. She may
not ever know exactly what he does do, but she is translated—and by her
husband.
§ 145
The man of the twentieth-century type gets his supreme gratification, not
from anything that is done to him, nor yet from any sensations which his
activities produce in him, which indeed he could get blindfolded from
any living woman of similar proportions and somatic reaction, but from
the knowledge his own visual and tactual sense gives him of the effect
of his acts on his partner, the physical and psychical effect which his
being and doing have not on himself directly (which is the ordinary
autoerotic procedure) but indirectly on him through the body and soul of
his mate.
The analogous statement cannot be made about the woman. To be sure, she
both is loved and loves, both is desired and desires, but she can herself
do nothing that gives the man other than autoerotic pleasure. His joy,
on the contrary, comes not from what she does to gratify him directly.
His appreciation and response to any artful action on her part is a
feminine reaction, and while excusable in egoistic spheres of action is
inexcusable in the erotic.
For he neither wants her, nor does she want, essentially and
biologically, to be the active, creative factor in the love episode, just
because this factor is the exclusively masculine factor. Her unconscious
reaction to this reversal of masculinity and femininity may amuse her
for a while, as a variation; but it cannot continue. Conscious purposive
action on her part gives neither her nor him a lasting gratification,
as it is a step in the direction of psychic autoerotism on his part to
receive such satisfactions.
Her reactions on the contrary should have such a degree of spontaneity
and unreflective artlessness as to give him assurance of their being true
unmeditated responses as sure and inevitable as the chemical action in
an opening flower, but as purely hypersomatic (spiritual) as they are
inevitable.
Otherwise, he will never be able to know her as she is. He will know
her as the traditional suggestion of her environment has taught her to
be. This pervasive influence of environment, which is well enough in
egoistic-social impulses, is wholly out of place in the erotic sphere.
The truly modern husband will wish more than any other thing to know his
wife as he himself alone can know her, and will more and more consciously
resent, as the century grows older, any egoistic-social conventionality
slipping into the purely erotic.
In order for him to gain his greatest joy from marriage with this
particular woman, she will have to be made _sui generis_. The only means
toward this end is her utterly unpremeditated, spontaneous response,
unclouded by the suggestions of tradition as to how she ought to respond.
A woman thus rendered _sui generis_ by her husband’s erotic control will
more than fulfil any requirements or specifications of a pattern of
romantic love. Such a woman, thus known by a fully percipient husband,
takes on for him a value, transcending far those of the ordinary
so-called loves of the every-day, mildly contented variety, and becomes
for him alone, incandescent with vitality.
The considerations offered in the preceding paragraphs point to the
conclusion that the average man’s lack of erotic control is due first of
all to his mental autoerotism.
Man’s lack of erotic control is due also partly to a certain anesthesia
on his part, taking the word in its etymological sense of a failure to
perceive.
He fails to perceive that his function in married life is giving and not
receiving. He also fails to perceive the difference between woman’s
spontaneous reactions and those suggested to her by her environment. He
fails to perceive that woman’s resistance has a deep biological cause and
that she is unconsciously forced to test him hourly. He fails to perceive
that she inevitably confuses erotic and egoistic-social instincts.
§ 146
The man to whom the love episode is only an animal sex act, a swift and
dizzy whirl, is one who, so to speak does not in advance plot out the
trajectory of this flight, does not let the component factors enter his
consciousness for long enough to observe them and devote some conscious
love to them. These innate associations are there in his unconscious;
but his training has repressed them. Such a man to whom the love episode
is like a swift gulping of strong liquor has no time to reflect upon its
various bouquets and glints in natural and artificial light.
The ideal enactment of the love episode, if permitted to enter
consciousness in the proper manner, enables one to prolong it, because
this admittance of new factors into consciousness, that were all along in
the unconscious, gives a reason for stopping and taking account of the
phases of it as they occur. The most important phases are those where the
husband takes note of the effects of his being and doing upon his wife.
The hasty husband is the one who has no regard for any other’s feelings
save his own. If his own were the only ones that existed, he would of
course have no reason to retard his own erotic acme. With an insensate
spouse he might go through the love episode as often and as rapidly as he
wished.
It must be kept in mind always that there is a definite biological cause
for the slow progress of woman through the phases of the love episode—the
inescapable necessity that she shall assure herself continuously and
beyond the slightest doubt of the erotic strength of her partner.
It is probable that the women who are not slow in this progress are in a
sense degenerate, if that term have any real meaning. They would be the
ones who would not, unconsciously, of course, express that biological
need for impregnation by the strongest male, which is expressed by the
average woman in her slowness. They would tend to reproduce what might
be called a lower order of humans in which the erotic in itself, the
hypersomatically or spiritually erotic plays a much smaller part, an
order of humans that were nearer the animals than those humans who have
amplified the erotic factor.
The hasty husband, as will later be shown (§ 158), unconsciously reasons
that his own speed demonstrates his quick and masterful control over his
wife’s erotic emotions. This unconscious fallacy is made worse if the
wife has followed the doctor’s advice to simulate an erotic acme in order
to preserve the marital peace.
If the effect on her of his mere presence were so overwhelming, and if,
as soon as he embraced her, she soared into the empyrean of ecstatic
bliss, his mere embrace might have the effect at once of producing, in
her, her own erotic acme. This would, however, imply either that she
was herself weak, judged by the standard just given, or that she had
assumed, without testing, his superior strength in the erotic sphere.
This assumption is an exceedingly rare one, depending on an inference
from mere physical muscular strength, or from the fact of a great
egoistic-social reputation. In other words such a woman might think that
because her husband was or is an athlete his physical strength implies
erotic strength, or that because he was a famous man he would be a great
lover.
§ 147
The husband’s lack of erotic control based on his own lack of perception
renders him too precipitant in the love episode.
It is believed, on the authority of physicians and such others as have
studied the subject, that the love episode, in about seventy per cent of
civilized marriages, is but a one-sided affair from the first. This is
due almost exclusively to the impetuosity of the husband during the first
weeks of marriage. Sometimes under the inspiration of the purity of his
bride-to-be, or from an increased cautiousness against the chances of
contracting venereal disease, he abstains from resorting to prostitutes.
If this practice of his has come from a belief on his part that he
was obliged, as he believes all men are, to relax his sexual tension
periodically, he will generally believe that his temporary pre-marital
continence is piling up tension in him, and he will approach his bride
for the first time with an idea probably that his tension is greater
than it has ever been in his life.
A very important distinction must here be kept in mind; namely, that
between the perfect erotic love episode, free from conflict, and
involving both hyper- and hyposomatic levels of the personality, and the
imperfect, illicit sex act. It has been pointed out[24] that the physical
sex act does not relax a true love tension, that the instinct itself may
not be satisfied even with numerous hyposomatic sex activities.
If, therefore, the young husband be of the type that believes that an
illicit sex act invariably produces the desired relaxation of erotic
tension, he will be the more likely to give way to an impulse that has
a large proportion of the purely hyposomatic (or physical) factor in
it. This abandon on his part will exclude all possibility of mutuality.
He will thus lose at the start the possibility of that control which he
might have gained over his wife’s erotic reactions, had he been able to
control his own. And he would have been able to control his own but for
the erroneous belief that the tensions he relaxed clandestinely with the
_demimondaine_ were the main tensions, which undoubtedly they are not.
It is obvious that the annihilation of his bride’s natural responsive
actions that results from his faulty procedure is fatal to married
happiness.
§ 148
This hastiness marks the love episode on the part of the average man.
What he wants is a reaction that is to take place in himself, for which
his bride is merely the external complementary mechanism. The purely
mechanical side of this he could either purchase from a courtesan or
seize against her will from an innocent “honest” girl, but he fears
venereal disease in the former and trouble of accidental paternity or
discovery or both in the case of the latter. Eventually he regards both
types of women with equal impersonality. Either is merely food for his
sexual (not erotic in the highest sense) hunger, and it is his own sex
hunger that he is bent on appeasing, with absolutely no idea of the
difference in erotic value between the two types of women, in the way he
acts. There is none, for neither is more appropriate to his spiritual
need than hay would be for his stomach.
The man who desires a wife either for the purely sexual or for the
purely domestic motive has no conception of marriage whatever. If he is
influenced either consciously, or unconsciously by such a motive he might
as far as his own sole advantage is concerned, confine himself to sexual
affairs with prostitutes. He is unaware of the new light that has been
thrown on love by the recently acquired knowledge of the work of the
ductless glands. He has never heard of them, of course, and could not be
expected to know how intimately they are connected with each other and
with his entire mental and physical welfare.
What he later finds out, and that with no help whatever from science,
but from tough experience, is that the two things that he craves—namely,
sexual satisfaction and all the good things of domestic life—are in some
way inevitably and more and more sundered. His wife either is and remains
“cold” or acquires suddenly or gradually a coolness which increases to
actual pseudo-frigidity. He notices a change in her. He knows he has not
himself changed.
The change should have been in him and then there would have been in
her a change which would have gratified him instead of disappointing
him. But, never having been taught how to behave in the most intimate
relations of marriage, he is feeling the results of his ignorance just
as would a landlubber feel eventually the resulting shipwreck if he
undertook, or were forced against his will, to pilot a big ship. The
husband should be the matrimonial pilot, but he has received no course of
instruction in that form of navigation.
§ 149
Haste in the husband comes primarily from fear. Fear makes the thief
hurry through his thieving. The pickpocket must be so deft and swift
that the victim’s consciousness is not aroused to the theft. But a true
husband-lover is not, in the love episode, stealing anything from his
wife, no matter how much his actions may resemble those of a thief. His
aim should be not to avoid arousing her consciousness, but to awaken it
to the gift he is offering her.
Fear makes anyone telescope, curtail, syncopate and abbreviate any
act, selecting out of all the portions of the act some element of it,
considered perhaps the cream of it, and cutting out all the rest of it.
Fear alone—the fear felt by the thief—is unconscious motive enough for
haste on the husband’s part. If he did not fear her erotic acme, or her
reactions that occur prior to it, he would not repress them, or allow her
to repress them. Why should he fear to give his wife the same erotic acme
in every love episode that he uniformly gives himself?
He fears—unconsciously, to be sure, for the most part—that, if his wife
develops so strong an erotic reaction, she may have an irresistible
craving to satisfy herself when he is not present, thus giving herself to
another.
Haste in the husband is therefore due to a fear that he may lose his
wife’s passion, if it be aroused. He does not realize that the modern
educated civilized woman is unable to give herself to any but the one man
who has first aroused her deepest passion; and that the more educated and
cultivated she is, the more surely she is centred upon the one man about
whose being the entire erotic sphere rotates as on an axis.
Man’s fear that his wife may be or become “oversexed” is at least a
part of the cause for his haste in the love episode. Unconsciously, of
course, he does not want her to have the same ecstatic pleasure as he
has himself. Not only because, in his squinting regard, this puts her
in the prostitute class, but also because he fears her becoming too
passionate for one man and therefore requiring two or more. This is based
on an undercurrent of opinion among men that a woman’s sexuality is
fundamentally stronger than a man’s; and that her comparative leisure
in view of his own, will tend to foster in her the desire for sexual
gratification.
Added to this is the other erroneous supposition, common among ignorant
men, that excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the love episode has
a weakening effect on the man. Viewed as excretions, as the seminal
products have been until today, it would seem quite illogical to fear
an evacuation of these at least once a day. But although they have been
regarded as excreta, there has always been an unconscious belief in men
that their retention somehow strengthened the brain. Still a way has been
pointed out (see § 100) for the love episodes to be continued without
this fear.
A consideration favouring the erroneous belief that the seminal products
should not be ejaculated too freely is the phenomenon of a certain
lassitude and inactivity following the love (?) episode as it has been
hastily put through by many men. On the contrary the perfectly balanced
love episode cannot have this unpleasant result. It ensues only when the
episode has been imperfect either through too great haste or through the
lack of suitable response on the wife’s part. If both share equally,
i.e., if the husband reserves his own acme, the result is perfect. It
cannot be perfect in any other way than that perfectly shared in flawless
mutuality. The evocation of the suitable response on the wife’s part
lies wholly in the husband’s self-control. Whether the effect is caused
principally by psychical or by physical causes, it is he that in all
cases is responsible. Without his proper conducting of the love episode,
she is impotent and anesthetic. She cannot feel what he does not do.
She cannot see what he does not show her. Who can blame her if her
unconscious passion, over which she has never had, has not now and never
will have any control, is magnetized by the really superior conduct of
another man?
In brief, divorce is in the power of the husband to render imperative or
impossible. The wife has essentially nothing to say in the matter except
that she has found in her husband a rover among women, a beast that
treats her brutally or an ignoramus who is not competent to be either a
good husband or a good father.
§ 150
Some men are always delighting the conscious life of women by the
intensity and frequency and rapidity of their emotional relaxations.
Such men seem so generous in their spending of the small change of
emotion. But they are always maddening the unconscious of their women,
whether these women be wives or mistresses, for they are repeatedly,
almost universally, taking in the woman’s presence, and through the
instrumentality of her presence, what she cannot herself get, and what
she has biologically an expectancy, if not a right, to have. Such men
are practically annihilating the chances of their own and their wives’
happiness.
The woman that is governed by the egoistic-social instinct unwittingly
plans for the man’s hasty emotional relaxation, the while completely
holding her own emotional reactions in check, under perfect repressive
control. In the average civilized woman brought up under sex inhibitions
this control by annihilation is the only control she has. The ability
thus to annihilate the finest possibilities of erotic reaction in herself
is the result of the only training many women get. It is the fine art
of the prostitute, but not all of hers, however. The rest of it is
to simulate a loss of control on her own part in order to effect the
aggrandizement and unconscious sense of superiority on the part of her
patrons.
This conscious retaining of erotic control is, to be sure, based on
the biological necessity of man testing. The best of women cannot of
themselves let go their own erotic control. It has to be taken from them
by men who are emotionally their superiors in strength.
In so far as it (woman’s tendency to lie) is “almost physiological”[25]
and based on radical feminine characteristics, such as modesty,
affectability and sympathy, which have an organic basis in the feminine
constitution, and can therefore never altogether be changed, feminine
dissimulation seems scarcely likely to disappear.
Woman’s tendency to dissemble is dependent on her unconscious reaction of
testing the male. But she must test her male for the deeply biological
purpose of finding out whether he is strong enough for her. He needs to
be, for her purposes, only stronger than she is, to be strong enough;
although, when this motive is sometimes transferred to consciousness,
she may become a fortune hunter or vampire, and throw away any man for
the next egoistic-socially stronger she finds available. This does not
of course refer to physical muscular strength but to psycho-sexual
strength. If physical strength were enough there would be almost no
divorces and no marital unhappiness.
§ 151
Her testing her male, therefore, whether it is in pre-marital
egoistic-social relations or after marriage erotically, is a resort to
the negativism (which is indeed a characteristic of infantility). This
negativism is seen in the critical attitude which is so intense in some
of the later incidents in married life. And in the first love episode any
coolness on the bride’s part is a tacit resistance which seems to say:
“I am not yet fully mastered. Any opposition I present to you is no more
than what as a man you should be able to overcome. You may be my superior
in physical strength but there are numerous kinds of strength. I did not
obviously marry you for your physical strength much as I appreciate,
value and need it. But the love episode,” she continues unconsciously, in
blushes, averted gaze, occasional paleness, interspersed with impulsive
advances, all of which are here set down in their equivalent words, “the
love episode consists in far more than physical violence. In fact for
many centuries physical violence has formed no essential part of it. It
has on the other hand a tendency to fluctuating, wavering, more or less
trembling behaviour, that to the uninitiated appears contradictory or
inanely silly. If you are upset or disconcerted audibly or visibly by
any of the obstructions I am placing in your way, you are really not
strong enough for me. By my instinctive need for being controlled, I
am impelled to see how much strain you can bear, how strong your mental
and spiritual nature is, for I need that control more than anything else
in the world. I hope you will not fail me at this juncture, for I want
above all things to find a firm base to which to attach the wavering,
vacillating, fluctuating algæ of my emotions.”
All this she says in her actions, while her words may be: “Oh, Rob, you
certainly are awkward. You don’t understand me a bit.”
How tragic if Rob should take her words as gospel truth and substantiate
them by showing any irritation whatever!
§ 152
Possibly this is the place to say that if the young husband shows
surprise or, worse, irritation at any of the, to him, seemingly bizarre
acts of his new wife, he is providing her with exactly the reaction which
her careful and thorough unconscious is looking for, finding which it
says to itself: “Well, if I find many of these defects, farewell! I’ll
attach myself to some other man.”
Whereas consciously she is triumphant in her power over him to make him
anything from miserable to blissful.
This unconscious tendency to test the husband, based on the biological
necessity of choosing a mate at least slightly stronger spiritually,
psychically, mentally than herself, determines much of the actions of a
maid with a man.
In married couples where the man is properly schooled in love, this
wrangling on a low level does not take place except at its minimum at
the outset. Frequently the woman immediately senses, unconsciously,
that the man whose attentions she is receiving is of the stronger type
necessary to compel her emotional submission.
This theory admits the possibility of perfect marriage between the lowest
and highest types of intellect (which is an egoistic-social expression,
not erotic) with proportionally happy results.
It also shows how every married couple can reinstate themselves in the
most satisfactory mutual relation, even if they have already started on
the wrong path.
If the husband realizes that he is only being tested, and by a
sympathetic examiner who really wants him to pass the test, and that it
requires only a little thinking on his own part to make him erotically a
fully followed husband instead of a led one, he will certainly give the
necessary time to visualizing the pattern his actions will have to take
thereafter in order to make him successful.
In married couples where the man does not know or cannot learn the erotic
principles, the surface wrangling based on the perpetual unconscious
test continues, involving more and more of the couple’s egoistic-social
activities, until finally it becomes so acute that nothing can prevent an
open rupture.
In other couples where the man’s reactions satisfactorily answer the
woman’s first tacit interrogation, the dramatic testing automatically
stops.
Woman’s tendency to dissemble thus includes not merely verbal lies
but also all forms of her behaviour toward her husband. Of course, if
her erotic nature is entirely engaged she will have (for example) no
possible motive to spend his money above what is needed for pleasing
him through her developing her own personality in every way, or in
acting in any capacity whatever that would in an egoistic-social sense
be to his detriment, for through the perfect love episode she so
strongly identifies herself with him that all his interests, even the
egoistic-social, are superlatively hers, quite in contrast with the wife
whose love impulses have been ungratified.
The wife with the ungratified love impulse reacting unconsciously, as
described above, with irritated but unsatisfied desires, unconsciously
reasons to herself on the talion plan because she has not risen from that
to total identification. The irritated but unsatisfied wife, still on the
“eye for eye” level of reaction, unconsciously says to herself: “If I
cannot get something out of him one way, I will another, to pay for all
he is getting out of me. If I cannot make him give me a real love episode
I will make him give me other things. I will buy what I want and send him
the bill. He shall give me money if he cannot give love. Love is what I
want but I must have something.” This is unspoken, but still it exists.
§ 153
A man cannot feel what isn’t there without phantasying up to the point of
hallucination. But what isn’t there is simply what he hasn’t put there in
the way of response to appropriate action on his own part. He cannot put
it there if he is mentally autoerotic. (§ 112).
He must know in advance what to expect, and what is the necessary
expression of woman’s erotic feelings. If he does not, he is doomed to
surprise of an unpleasant character; for he will either be disappointed
when he finds that his wife’s reactions are not up to his narrowly
limited pattern or he will be embarrassed by a too great gush of feeling
on her part and an arousal of passion so tremendous that he does not know
how to handle it.
This embarrassment is related to a certain type of mild disgust or
aversion felt by men to whom some women make advances not considered
truly feminine by the men. This does not refer to the brazen
self-assertiveness of the prostitute which is by most men clearly
recognized as egoistic-social. It refers to a truly erotic abandon
sometimes seen in a woman who absolutely throws herself upon the man that
has inspired her fancy. This attitude makes impossible for some men the
satisfaction of victory or conquest.
This too great abandon on the woman’s part evokes in such a man the
thought either that she is sexually more potent than he (an erotic
reaction in no way connected with egoistic-social impulses); or that
her own environment has been such as to bring out this expression in
her. If she has been brought up in a family where love needs are frankly
recognized, their wholesomeness will make her much more responsive, at
once, to her husband’s love.
Naturally he will be neither embarrassed nor dismayed, if he has himself
been trained to believe that his capacity for woman’s love is, if fully
developed, as great as or greater than any woman’s could be. If he was
thus well oriented, he would be pleased rather than otherwise to be
relieved of the task of removing love’s inhibitions from his wife.
§ 154
Fate is inscrutable and mysterious. Dame Fortune is a mother-imago.
The husband who does not understand his wife is a child who does not
understand his mother. According to her fancy she may give or not give
what he wants her to bestow upon him. Children comparatively early
learn to manage their mothers, but the man who has failed to learn how
to control his wife erotically has not advanced even as far as these
children.
Such men are the ones who profess to revere the mystery in the feminine
nature. They are simply a case of arrested emotional development. There
should be no mystery in marriage. There is plenty of room for passion and
romance without demanding that there shall be in it any mystery whatever.
The inscrutability of the mysterious expression on the face of the _Mona
Lisa_ was the expression of Leonardo’s extreme infantility, the erotic
childishness of a man who never really loved a woman as a man should.
Man’s projection of mystery upon woman is his infantile attitude toward
her expressing his unconscious desire not to give but to receive.
What constitutes the husband’s complete erotic control is the removal
of all mystery, his full perception of all the factors in the erotic
situation. One of these is the actual fact as to whether or not his wife
has in the love episode reached the erotic acme.
He frequently thinks, if he is one of the numerous men without insight,
that she has; when as a fact she has not.
It is sublimely stupid for a doctor to tell the wife to pretend that she
has reached the erotic acme in every love episode, and to say that no man
can tell whether or not she has reached that degree of exaltation; so she
might as well deceive him in order to keep the marital peace. Such men as
follow this advice have not the remotest resemblance to human men, nor
do they deserve to retain the love of their wives even if they have once
gained it. One can tell whether a person is _unconscious_ or not, or if
she sleeps or not. A real husband can tell whether or not his wife has
reached the erotic acme.
§ 155
The unconscious inference of a man’s reaching the erotic acme is that his
wife has done the same in the erotic episode or surely will when he does.
This feeling is so strong as to make almost everyone take the sign for
the thing signified. The thing signified is the woman’s utter surrender.
It is signified by the sign, which is the man’s losing or letting go his
own control. Prior to the wife’s erotic acme there is no time during
the love episode when the husband’s loss of control will not affect his
wife’s unconscious adversely. She will surely though unconsciously resent
his throwing down his burden of tension before he has torn hers from her,
because his own tenseness is his only instrument wherewith to operate on
hers. His desire lapses with his relaxation. Her relaxation cannot take
place if he loses his tenseness before she does, even if it be only one
second before.
Men would make happy marriage certain if they should universally grasp
this idea; namely, that their letting themselves go entirely without the
prior or simultaneous erotic acme on the part of their wives, is putting
themselves on the same level as the animals without, however, being in
the animal environment.
To that level the wives cannot sink; yet the husbands allow themselves to
do so almost without exception. Because of centuries of repression their
wives are not able to respond to the erotic situation as rapidly as they
do themselves, and yet the husbands act as if they responded fully. This
type of behaviour is practically equivalent to producing a hallucination
in themselves.
To use a term from pathological psychology, every husband who does
not secure his wife’s erotic acme before or with his own, actually
_hallucinates_, for his own benefit, that reaction on her part. He is
exactly like a man walking along a level sidewalk and making as if to
step upstairs each step he takes and thinking he is climbing—in so far,
just crazy, that is all.
It would be much better in some ways for a husband of this type to
renounce love episodes forever, for such actions form no part of a real
one; they are as productive as half a pair of scissors without the other
half.
This solitary vice in a husband (masturbatio per vaginam) always comes
from his hallucinating the effects he should produce instead of producing
them. He is alone with his wife in his sexual (not love) episodes
because she is practically not there. He may never have thought of the
question as to where she may have been. She may have been mentally in the
arms of another man. “With another person and yet alone!” is a terrible
thought.
Yet when we think about what we see and hear among so-called humans we
must realize how much alone all except the very fewest are, alone because
they have not yet discovered the only method of not being alone—the
supernal communion of one man and one woman. The few men who have learned
how to love, and the exactly equal number of women whom they have taught,
are the only persons in the world who are not absolutely and completely
as alone as would be a solitary chemical atom in an illimitable universe
of space.
§ 156
All the crowds and jams of people we see are merely, for the most part,
huddling together, as an unconscious compensation for the sickening
loneliness they feel in their heart of hearts. We see them in amusement
parks, and in all places where hordes of people congregate; and
undoubtedly a part of the impulse which moves them is their unconscious
solitude for which they get only consciously perceptible consolation
in the sight of each other and rubbing of elbows and treading on each
other’s feet.
If one should ask if sex is the sole or major motive in all this the
answer would be, by no means, if physical sex is all that is meant. The
need is for companionship which many followers of crowds, not having the
companionship furnished by the complete love of a man or a woman, fancy
they get from the sight or elbow-touch of masses of people.
The deeply, profoundly, thoroughly married couples are the only ones
who have no need to fear anything that comes from incompleteness. They
neither crave nor are averse to other people, but the most fully mated
never appreciate crowds very highly. Into their own mystic circle of
binary personality they cannot take a third.
For these thirds there is no hope but to find each his or her own
complementary personality. The women wait; for there is nothing else to
do. They cannot find by looking; they can only give themselves the gaunt
consolation of distracting their own attention from love until they are
found by the proper men.
For in spite of the great popularity which George Bernard Shaw gives to
his ideas by putting them in epigrammatic and striking literary form,
the truth is manifest to all who think straightforwardly and do not
believe in a statement simply because it is paradoxical and therefore
emphatic—the truth, namely, that women are not the choosers but if there
is any choice they are the chosen, and are themselves utterly helpless
and must remain inactive.
They can try to attract men but the more they try, the more will the
erotically developed men unconsciously and unerringly infer that there
is some weakness about them that necessitates this strenuous attempt
to compensate for it. The harder they try to attract men, the more
suspicious do the men become, particularly those having any deep acumen.
As for the men being simply the helpless puppets of a sex of sirens—it is
ridiculous.
The world is made up of the unmarried, the truly mated and those
ill-assorted thirds whom ignorance has left unhappy and helpless until
knowledge comes to the male partner.
§ 157
Many of these third persons are the wives of ignorant husbands who have
hallucinated the fusion which they have never made. The husband fancies,
perhaps, that the fusion can be effected by the wife; that all he needs
to do is to submit himself to the wife as dispenser of delights and that
by merely having him she will glow and burn with the heat necessary
to fuse their two souls and make them a whole instead of fragments.
Delusion! Hallucination!
The child says to a stick, “This is a horse.” The child husband says to
himself, “This is my wife,” whether he knows it to be a fact or not. And
curiously enough the child knows he is only fancying; but the man, in
thousands of instances, _does not know it_.
This unconscious, and therefore almost irresistible, tendency on the
part of men to believe the existence of what they wish is the main
obstacle to man’s control of the erotic situation. Based on biological
necessity, which in the merely instinctive acts of animals secures the
sexual reaction on the part of the female, the unconscious phantasy still
persists in the human animal, the phantasy that the erotic acme of the
man causes that of the woman every time. But it is a phantasy in the
majority of civilized marriages and tragically enough it may be the only
flaw in some where congeniality and affection are flawless.
The bridegroom has this definite task before him to know his wife,
for he can never know her before marriage. His knowing is a process
of perception, the failure to perceive being a form of anesthesia in
himself. Adam knew his wife—the only good he brought out of Paradise and
fully compensating for the loss of Paradise.
When he knows his bride he will know exactly how much resistance he
has to overcome in order to develop her. She cannot tell him anything
in words, for no woman can know. Not even the most experienced woman
sexually can put into words exactly what unconscious resistance she may
have to even a virgin-pure man.
The bride’s resistance is just as real a force as is the gravity in
a pile of stones. At the bottom of that pile of stones his bride’s
soul waits and he has to remove them one by one; actions which take as
concrete an amount of psychic energy as if they could be measured in
foot-pounds or kilowatt hours.
§ 158
The groom not only has to see what resistance there is, but has to
know that he must remove it all. The bride herself has no more power
or control over these resistances than she would if she were literally
buried under tons of rock. She depends entirely on his work to get at her
soul. Will he ecstatically embrace one of these stones that cover her
up? Like the child calling a stick a horse, will he say: “This stone is
my wife. If I can believe hard enough, she may change, in my eyes, into
my wife and I shall be spared the effort of releasing her from the weight
which now oppresses her. How sweet and tender this stone is! How it
throbs and palpitates as I squeeze it tightly in my arms! There, it has
melted entirely. Dear wife!”
Insane? Yes. And the woman herself, alive and breathing under the load of
stone which antiquity with more than bestial blindness, with infinitely
more than granite heartlessness and marble stupidity has heaped upon her
for centuries, is so deeply buried that she cannot herself even direct
her own release. Dimly she hears her man apostrophizing with love the
outermost stone. Will he ever get the sense to drop it, pick up one after
the other of those overwhelming _her_, and actually penetrate to her and
grasp her in his arms. Good heavens! How can intelligence be conveyed to
that imbecile?
Or instead of hearing her husband hallucinating her release by means of
rapturously caressing a stone that holds her down, she may have the still
more poignant agony of hearing him make love to a woman already released
from her bonds by some other man.
“Damnation inconceivable! Is he, my husband, willing to take the woman
whom other hands have released, whom the work of other men has made
practically theirs, and whom he virtually steals, or as a beggar accepts
like a fruit skin from another’s feast?
“Or is it,” the poor soul may think to herself, “that really in my
own true being, I am less attractive than the women whose weight of
oppression so many men have cheerfully lifted? What have I done to make
myself so unattractive? Must I curse my parents, who have, besides,
perhaps, helped to entomb me alive under these stones?”
§ 159
The situation in many marriages is not less tragic than this. The husband
in this case has either not been able to see the obstacles that lie
between him and complete emotional fusion with his wife, or if he has
seen them, he has not thought himself able to remove them. In either case
he may be more ignorant than to blame; but not after he once gets the
point of view of this book.
His accomplishment, the only virile accomplishment in the world, is
plainly before him. He must acquaint himself with the exact amount of
resistance and repression; and he must remove it piece by piece if it
takes a half a century. He must realize fully that it is a piece of
constructive work, and that no one else can do it for him.
§ 160
The anesthesia of the husband and the failure to come up to the constant
test are both increased by man’s ignorance of the fundamental biological
nature of the woman.
The only remedy for it, which will improve the conditions of marriage
and reduce to the minimum infidelity of wives and of husbands as well,
is the husband’s deeper knowledge of the feminine element. This
knowledge, which should be an essential part of a man’s education, cannot
be entirely given him by another, but must be the result of his own
observation.
It is obvious that the intimate adaptations required of each marriage
are absolutely individual. While all women and all men are actuated by
similar unconscious motives, the specific working out of these motives
results in an interplay of forces which is different in each individual
marriage. There are over a thousand types of this intimate interplay of
personalities within the marital state; also the types change in special
cases from time to time. It is easy to see, therefore, that the minutiæ
or marital living have endless combinations of possibilities, concerning
which the husband would do well to become as well informed as possible.
§ 161
The hasty husband takes his own motions and his own erotic acme, which
are but parts, for the whole. He takes the most physical aspect for the
love episode. Naming the part for the whole is a sort of metonymy, which
is a figure of speech and not literal truth. The hasty husband is in this
sense unconsciously a liar. He cannot tell the truth because he cannot
know it. If we say that this fragmentary performance of his is taken by
him to be logically or intellectually like the whole, we must say that
he rates low in discrimination. He ought to know that the fragment is no
more like the whole thing than a hand is like the body.
Giving the physical side of the love episode too great a value is like
connecting it too closely with the imagination, or with that part of the
imagination that is bound up with the emotions. The factor in the sex
life of most of the animal-like humans, that is, most closely connected
with the strongest emotions, is the acme. In true human love, then, the
strongest emotions are reassociated with other elements of the love
episode than the acme. And the acme is the greatest desideratum only from
the unconscious or instinctive point of view.
The imagination, the power of visualizing (and other forms of
representations as well) then involves the power to affect, or to effect
changes in the somatic reactions of the husband that render possible the
prolongation of a sex act, and its transformation, into a love episode.
The imagination of organic sensations in himself, in the normal husband,
retards the progress of the love episode for the benefit of the wife. The
hasty husband lacks just this imagination and the love episode is hurried
through in the manner of an animal sex act.
The husband who reaches his acme of erotic relaxation even before actual
contact with his love object has not in consciousness dwelt much upon the
numerous preliminaries. Methods of retardation are methods of admitting
into consciousness the different innate associations between emotions and
the touch and movement sensations constituting the first stages.
§ 162
The use of the imagination as a transformer of unconscious energy is a
comparatively modern technique and one made use of with great effect in
autosuggestion.
As a transformer of unconscious psychic energy, or possibly, better, a
re-shaper, it has sharply to be distinguished from phantasy.
Phantasy is the continuous mental activity that goes on night and
day in the mind of every man, woman and child. It consists of visual
images, auditory images, tactual, kinesthetic, thermal and a dozen other
qualities all combining with each other in the patterns by no means
fortuitous, but organized into groups, some of which have been called
complexes. This organization is the unconscious wish. The patterns
formed are unrelated to time, are unmoral and follow exclusively the
pleasure-pain principle.
Phantasy, which is entirely spontaneous, or independent of any conscious
volition on the part of the individual, is about ninety-nine per cent
submerged in the unconscious. The one per cent more or less that emerges
into the consciousness of the ordinary man of the world comes in as
day-dreaming or as dreams of the night. In these two forms it appears
in a shape least disguised, and is therefore the chief material of
psychoanalysis, which is an inventory of the contents of the unconscious
of the individual, an inventory that shows what possibilities he has of
future better adaptation to his environment. It also shows why the people
who are ill-adapted have failed to adapt themselves.
We are obliged to assume a causal connection between the phantasies of
unconscious mind and the physiological process in the body on the one
hand and on the other the broader life currents of the individual.
§ 163
Only by assuming this causal connection, which must also be a two-way
connection, can we explain any influence of mind upon body. From
innumerable instances, however, we are all absolutely sure that the mind
influences the bodily functions and that the bodily functions influence
the mind.
In no sphere of human activity is the influence of the mind on the
body more clearly demonstrable than in the erotic sphere, both in its
equatorial physical zones and in its polar intellectual zones.
This makes it absolutely incontrovertible not only that man can control
his emotions, including the erotic; but that he should, if he wishes to
be human and not merely animal.
In the causal connection between hypersomatic (mind) and hyposomatic
(body) there is at least one link called the imagination. But the fact
that imagination is so broad a term makes the understanding difficult as
to how the various mental mechanisms, mostly unconscious, interact with
each other.
The fact, however, is well known and admitted by all scientists that the
mind does influence the body. It causes changes in the functions of the
bodily organs. A purely mental state caused by external stimulation,
for example, the hearing of some bad news or witnessing of some tragic
occurrence, will alter the internal secretions of some of the endocrine
glands, postpone digestion or upset it, accelerate circulation and
respiration and cause other changes.
Sex phenomena are no exception to this principle that bodily processes
are conditioned, that is, partially caused, by mental processes. Sex
cannot be a part of love until love which is hypersomatic (mental) is in
control.
It would be exceedingly satisfactory if one could devise a mental pattern
for love that would apply to all individuals; but the fact that the
various factors are over twenty in number, making over four hundred
combinations of only two at a time, render it practically impossible to
do more than make a generic verbal formula such as “better and better
every day.”
It is impossible however, to get away from the fact that the sense type
of imagination has not a little influence in the original rapport that
springs up between two persons of opposite sex. Obviously a colour-blind
man could not be much influenced by the iridescent beauty of some young
women. There are people who are tone-deaf, and, to such, a monotonous
voice might not have the deterrent effect it would for some. There are
individual variations in the sensitivity to every one of the twenty-odd
sense qualities that enter consciousness from time to time. Any of these
variations may play a part in the first attraction exerted by young
people on each other.
§ 164
Every one of these twenty-odd different qualities of sense impression
may enter consciousness from time to time as a representation or
reverberation of an original sensation. The commonest of these is sight.
The appearance of some facial expression, for example, of an attractive
woman, will, spontaneously recur to a young man for a long time.
Motivated by pleasurable emotions experienced at the first sight, these
visual memory images will recur again and again, each time accompanied
by, if not caused by, the continuance or reëmergence of the pleasurable
emotions.
But visual images are not the only ones that spontaneously recur. If the
individual belongs to the auditory type, there will be numerous auditory
“images.” He will hear in his mind’s ear the joyous timbre of a woman’s
voice, also perhaps motivated by the same recurrent pleasurable emotion
he experienced when listening to it the first time.
Visual and auditory “images” or representations may be supplemented by
those of any of the other twenty-odd qualities of sense impression.
The memory of a dance recalls a number of these, tactual, olfactory,
kinesthetic, mostly, however, in the average person, not clearly
conscious.
People have to be taught to see what is before their eyes. They also
have to be taught to recognize timbres of musical instruments, intervals
between tones, composition of various chords, etc.
Conscious attention must be used to enable some people to recognize the
difference between various flavours, perfumes, odours, bouquets of wine,
etc.
This sharpening of sense discrimination is accomplished by means of the
conscious attention to the various images.
The sharpening of sense discrimination with the assistance of the
mental standard supplied by the various representations of former sense
impressions involves a change in the sense organ itself if we include
in the organ, as we must, its nerve connections with the brain and with
other organs.
§ 165
This is how we may conceive the effect of mind upon body. The
imagination, composed of its various qualities of images visual, auditory
and other, involves the change in the sense organ and in the brain and
the other organs connected. We are thus being changed continually,
both body and mind, by impressions coming from without and by the
reverberations of these impressions that are known as mental images.
Is it any wonder that the drama, and lately the moving picture, is
recognized as one of the deepest transmuting influences in human life?
§ 166
Every sense impression is a suggestion. It is a psychological axiom that
every idea tends to work itself out into an act on the part of the person
that accepts the idea. This is the basis of hypnotism and any form of
non-hypnotic suggestion.
It is evident then, that the sense impressions received every second of
our waking life (together with the images or reverberations of these
impressions that continue to live in the unconscious and appear only
occasionally in consciousness) accumulate suggestive force. It is evident
that every individual is subjected from birth to a continuous stream of
suggestions, some of which he accepts (among them the most often repeated
ones).
If these suggestions are formed of images (conscious or unconscious) of
health, happiness and triumphant activity, they will be accepted and
constitute a pattern for the entire life activity of this individual. And
the same is true _vice versa_.
The impressions thus received constitute the content of the imagination
and this content produces either well-being or ill-being (not to say
illness) in the individual so influenced.
§ 167
The inference that a wholesome erotic pattern must be provided for young
people, and adopted by older married persons, is therefore irresistible.
_The only way actions of any kind can be made better is by introducing
into the mind a pattern according to which these actions are to be
carried out._ The only means for introducing this pattern into the
mind of a man, if he does not already possess it, is by way of the
imagination. The various visual, auditory and other images must be
created in the mind of the individual before it will be physically
possible for him to follow this pattern.
Mere verbal reiteration of a clumsily worded command or prohibition
_never_ provides the imaginative factor which is the essential one.
Prohibitions are discussed elsewhere (§ 197).
Thus it appears that the imagination is the vital factor in any action
just because it constitutes the pattern of the action.
It is always much better psychologically to show or describe a person
doing what one desires him to do than in abstract terms, to tell him to
do it.
§ 168
Therefore a love pattern is needed. It is needed by the husband in order
that he may control the erotic situation. It is not needed by the wife in
order that she may control, for in the erotic sphere control is not hers
nor does she want it; but it is needed by her in order to know whether or
not she is being properly controlled erotically.
As no two individuals are alike, this makes it evident that the function
of the husband necessary to create a happy marriage is to emphasize the
mental (or hypersomatic) side of it, for the purpose of including every
physical aspect in the most comprehensive way.
Again it must be reiterated that instinct alone can never _guarantee_
a successful married life. The erotologist knows full well that the
husband, relying on instinct alone, remains unutterably selfish, and
therefore anesthetic, in thousands of cases; and that he can, if he has
the confidence of knowledge, make of his wife a whole wife and not, as in
the majority of cases a fragmentary wife.
A man should not let his wife remain fragmentary. He should not be
content with either the domestic-servant fragment or the cook fragment,
nor should he regard her solely as washwoman, stenographer or performer
of any other essentially egoistic-social function. “Wife” should be
restored to its original Anglo-Saxon concept of “the trembler,” i.e.,
the thrilled woman. Many men on the contrary speak of “the” wife, exactly
as they would say “the” cook, or “the” chambermaid.
Instinct alone, which is purely selfish, in spite of its occasional
marvellous faculty of providing for the future of others, can in
almost none of the intimate marital relations insure a continuance of
completely satisfactory love episodes. Continuance of these alone cements
married love and furnishes the foundation for a truly artistic erotic
superstructure—a love mansion, having a beauty far surpassing the lust
hovels in which, after their tinsel and gingerbread honeymoon cottages,
the average married pair spend the remainder of their lives.
§ 169
If, as assumed broadly above, the remedy for the ills which beset the
married life which is guided by instinct alone are more excitement for
the woman and less for the man, this only in one way suggests a balance
which (as many wives consciously or unconsciously perceive) grows less
and less as the years go on.
The man advances in his profession, makes more money, gains more or less
gratifying triumphs in the world of affairs, joins a club or lodge, meets
and has more or less stimulating contacts with more and more of his
fellow-men. His wife the while remains mostly in the home, is restricted
by the necessity of care of children, if any. If there are no children,
she is generally steered by her husband into the least stimulating life
possible, for he knows unconsciously that the interest of his wife in
other people is mildly displeasing to him. He wishes to own her all—her
actions, her thoughts. If he does not someone else will, and she will
be, to that extent, not his. It will be difficult for him to reason that
this type of ownership is merely the gratification of an egoistic-social
instinct. If there is one thing a man should not, for his own erotic
interests, want to do, that thing is the establishing of an ownership or
possession. Ownership of wives dates back at least to the early Roman
times when one had to own and control one’s wife’s whereabouts in order
to satisfy oneself, and one’s neighbours, that one’s freeborn children
were one’s own.
As a gratification of the egoistic-social instinct, ownership of the
wife’s person, property, actions and thoughts is in direct antagonism
with pure love instinct, which controls most satisfactorily and
gratefully when there is no egoistic-social compulsion acting through
husband on wife. Pure love instinct is gratified only when the control is
perfected by eliminating all egoistic-social motives of husband or wife
from the situation.
This is realized by some young women who marry but insist that they be
not supported by their husbands.