THE UNHAPPY MARRIAGE
§ 170
Those who marry from merely physical sexual motives, who overemphasize or
overweight the physical side of sex, are not able to gain from marriage
what the rationally controlled love episode can give them. They naturally
never admit that this is the case. They frequently do not know it
themselves.
They think perhaps that they are putting the love instinct ahead of
the egoistic-social, but their knowledge of men, women and things is
defective.
They are to a certain degree anesthetic in the etymological sense,
because they do not know how to live most fully. They are in a position
similar to a child who should find a package of new thousand-dollar
bills, and take them out into the street and play with them. They are
infantile in appreciation of values, which, however, they may later learn.
To overweight the physical factor in the love between the sexes and
to place the love motive ahead of the egoistic-social motive are not
by any means the same thing. It has been already indicated that the
overweighting of the physical factor proceeds from an egoistic motive,
and is thereby vitiated as a truly human motive in the highest sense.
Both parties to such a marriage can, if they see and understand, change
so as to raise the level of their own motive and give the true love
motive its real place, as might be illustrated by the case of a young man
who marries a woman author twenty years older than himself, motivated
at first solely by the glamour of her reputation; but, finding in her a
great heart and womanly qualities he had not before suspected, becomes
her true mate in every sense; or the girl who, dazzled by the wealth of
a suitor old enough to be her father but rich enough to “buy and sell”
her father several times over, finally discovers in him a completeness
and fullness of love that quite satisfies her when she realizes that,
in spite of his egoistic instincts that have made him rich his love
instinct is still richer. All that is necessary in a match “misgrafféd
in respect of years” is the proper subordination by both partners of the
egoistic-social to the love instinct.
§ 171
Unconsciously, of course, such people know from the first that they
should get from each other the sweetness par excellence of human
life, but while they know this unconsciously and it makes some of
them uncomfortable and eccentric, even unhuman, they fancy so many
inhibitions and barriers to it (particularly in the case of narrowly
brought up women) that they do not gain from marriage that unspeakable
and indescribable sense of identity each with the other that would
successfully obviate any tendency whatever to infidelity.
This feeling of identity is not only thus physical in the husband
and wife at the climax of erotism, but is given tangible, visible,
and in all ways perceptible, manifestation in their children. It is
given ideal existence in the community of interests it engenders in
connection with the family life, interests which are here the expression
of the ego-instinct, but here, as they should be, interests arising
from the subordination of the ego-instinct to the now brightly revealed
love instincts, which are not accessible to consciousness until after
enlightenment in the technique of the love drama.
Those people also are unable to give fullest expression to themselves in
the love episode who consciously or unconsciously, frankly or otherwise,
place the egoistic-social motive above the love motive, who marry “for a
meal ticket” or for any other egoistic-social motive such as wealth or
position.
Both of these may be taught, if they can be made to see their false
positions. Those who overweight the physical motive can, unless their
intelligence is of too low an order, be made to see eventually, that they
are contenting themselves, or trying to make themselves content, with
much less happiness than they are capable of. Those who overemphasize the
egoistic-social end of their relation to their spouses, can be instructed
in love, so that they can raise their union to the higher order, unless,
of course, there is the comparatively rare absolute incompatibility of
temperament.
Marriage need not in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred be dissolved.
Within reasonable limits; that is, excluding the widest possible
divergence of taste and interests, almost any man can learn to control
the erotism of almost any woman, if he wishes to take the trouble to
learn how to do it.
§ 172
Most emphatically this does not mean that the control here referred to
is all there is to a perfect marriage. It has been reiterated that the
erotic control is only the foundation, but important as all foundations
are. The erotic control leads not only to the maximum egoistic-social
freedom, but to the greatest possible development of each of the
partners’ distinctive personality.
The love confidence gained by the establishment of the one-way control
in the erotic sphere only opens the windows of the house of love to the
invigorating air of the outdoor world.
The unhappily married are unhappy because each is watching the other
continually, devoting to this conscious and unconscious surveillance so
much energy that either they have none left for the development of the
properly subordinated egoistic-social interests or they lose so much
energy in the unconscious conflict that they tend to become neurotic.
The unhappy married ones’ lack of love confidence is the most deeply
gnawing care known to human misery. No egoistic-social interest of either
but is regarded by the other as drawing him or her away.
§ 173
The marriage of two young people need not be postponed over a month or
two after they have learned enough of each other to be sure that they
are placing each motive, the love motive and the egoistic-social motive,
in the proper relations to the other; namely, that the egoistic motive is
recognized as being of less value toward their happiness. No fears should
be allowed to enter their minds about the happiness of their marriage.
Birth control should prevent any fear from the egoistic-economic point of
view.
§ 174
If it should seem to some that the potentialities of the marriage that
has been called a lottery are usually those of misery, and that the
ordinary marriage only brings out the miseries of existence to which
some shut their eyes, and from which others run away, it need only be
suggested that almost nothing runs itself in the world as we know it, but
everything needs constant upkeep, and it would be unreasonable to expect
that when the nuptial knot is tied all activities in the direction of
keeping it tied could be given up.
If the world about us is in constant change, to which we are obliged to
make constantly changing adaptation, it is even more strikingly a fact
that the world within us is constantly changing; and that we need to
control this change ourselves and could not, if we tried, find a more
fascinating occupation than learning how to make our inner adaptations in
the best manner.
Marriages that run down before death has ended them are those where the
man has lost his psychic potence, due to initial or gradually developing
anesthesia on his part.
In the courtship he has taken a man’s part, presumably; but has stopped
his wooing after marriage, because he has confused egoistic-social
impulses with erotic. He has thought marriage was a civil contract by
which he came into possession of something. Love scorns contracts; as it
evaporates in barter. Most unhappy marriages are of the “run-down” type.
The thesis of this book is that the only distinctive man’s work in the
world is to keep winding them up. The man that lets his marriage run down
is probably a perpetual-motion crank at heart. He thinks that in marriage
he has found a thing that will run by itself forever.
§ 175
A passionate desire for culmination represents well the attitude of the
executive head, or man of affairs who advances business by delegating
details to others. There is no detail of the behaviour of the truly mated
that the husband can want to be delegated to underlings. Love is not a
business and no part of it should be either left undone or delegated to
another man; though there are many husbands who apparently think some
of the preliminaries can be omitted. Possibly the hasty husbands have
thought that only the “high spots” of love could be or should be touched
by them, because their business or professional lives do not permit them
to look into every detail, much less do it themselves. But the minutiæ of
love are like the notes of a violin score; they all have to be played by
the violinist and they are all given their due effect and proper shading
by the true artist.
Possibly one may say that all men cannot be virtuosos in love,
particularly as it is infinitely more complicated than even the
musical art; but at any rate all can use their utmost endeavour in the
performances of the duets, which constitute the most valuable works of
art for the family and the nation.
§ 176
The unconscious polyandry of the average married woman is absolutely
proved if she does not regard her husband as satisfying in every way. If
there is the remotest doubt of this, if she has the slightest repulsion
or disinclination or aversion to any feature, act, mannerism or personal
quality of his, she is withholding from him, possibly blamelessly because
unconsciously, a feeling which, as she cannot give it to him, she must
and does unwittingly give to some other man either seen or dreamed of.
Absolute surrender on her part to one man is essential for a strictly
monogamous union, a complete union entirely excluding the appeal of every
other man under the sun. Any reserve whatever on her part is a reserve
that will be kept by the unconscious part of her solely for the use not
of her husband but of some other man possibly not yet seen by her; later
she may meet him.
How can a woman give herself, if she has keen sense discrimination, to a
man who isn’t strong, isn’t clean, isn’t well-dressed, isn’t generous and
loving? If she has this fine discrimination she will not run the risk of
approaching a marriage with such a man. If a man of undeniable strength
(mental, not physical) makes love to her, his sincerity and the strength
of his desire will enable her to change other characteristics in him
before marriage.
§ 177
There is, as Krafft-Ebing argues, a natural “sexual subjection” of woman
(i.e., “women are naturally masochistic”). Saying that the essence
of femininity is to be erotically led, does not mean that women are
naturally masochistic. In no sense does being led, in the purely erotic
or love impulse aspect of the marital relation, imply masochism. Only,
however, when the ego impulse is so strong as to need much sacrifice in
the love episode can really masochistic feelings occur in the wife; and
in the husband only when he uses the love episode as an egoistic act, by
which he is to compete with other men in the favour of his wife.
If that jealous stage occur, it is a condition where the full expression
of the love instinct itself is diminished in favour of the other. The
even momentary thought that his wife could be given a more thorough
relaxation in the purely erotic sphere by another than himself, a more
perfect consummation than perfection itself, which he has induced in her,
is a thought that is in itself masochistic and least likely to occur to
either of a thoroughly married pair.
The idea of masochism as an element in marriage is worthy of
consideration only because it is the ruling motive of the wife in those
unions where the husband has not assumed control of the emotional
situation and the wife has been so well trained in the Christian duty of
self-sacrifice as to believe that she must suffer—truly a humiliating
thought for the husband if he happens to be a man. He thus vicariously
suffers from his own ignorance.
Masochism, the tendency to gain pleasure from the pain another inflicts
on oneself, is a natural phenomenon at a certain stage of pre-synthetic
childish erotic development; and, in all normally developed persons, is
outgrown. Indeed, a woman,—and _a fortiori_, a man, who retains any great
masochistic element in his love life—is, in that respect alone, a child
and not an adult, and incapable of adult love until that tendency is
removed.
But it persists more frequently in women, and constitutes a part of the
sexual inhibition already referred to. It is a tendency about which all
young husbands should be warned in advance. They are not to allow their
wives for an instant to have any reason to infer that the wife’s marital
“duty” is to sacrifice herself or any part of herself to the physical or
mental pleasure of her husband. The eradication of this idea can be begun
by the man long before engagement, in spheres of activity quite far from
the sexual, and should be steadily and consistently carried on. He should
never ask her to do anything “for him,” especially not anything to which
she may have expressed any unwillingness, not to say repugnance, herself.
He should see to it that he gets his pleasure from the knowledge that
what he does is most likely to be gratifying to her. This is, of course,
the attitude of the real man.
A girl should be instructed enough not to be impressed by the mental
autoerotism of “lounge lizards” who are feeding their own erotic
phantasies by sight and touch of her. They are more than likely to become
mentally autoerotic husbands.
While on the topic of masochism it is necessary to warn all young women
that in no sense is self-sacrifice the object of a healthy marriage.
The self-sacrifice which is so lauded in theologies is a sacrifice of
egoistic impulse gratification. In the face of a great erotic exaltation
there can be no such thing as a thought of sacrifice. No woman really in
love can perceive anything but gain in really erotic action, for if she
knows herself she realizes that her strongest impulses are those of Eros.
§ 178
Any conflict in her psyche is between the erotic and the egoistic-social
impulses. The only inhibitions against the erotic impulses, as
everywhere, appear to be the egoistic-social ones, though it has been
pointed out that even the erotic instinct itself contains an innate
antithesis that might cause a conflict even were the egoistic-social
influences minimized or even removed.
One suspects that in the woman these unconscious doubts must come
primarily from not having been completely controlled, so completely
in the erotic sphere that no egoistic-social impulses are for the
time perceptible. A woman of a highly refined nature whose husband’s
erotic control is not forceful enough thus to expunge totally all
egoistic-social impulses for the time being, will have a certain number
of them not disposed of.
It thus happens that such a married woman, when loved by another than
her husband and yielding to him, will in so doing obliterate even this
residue of egoistic-social inhibitions. This explains why an illicit
love is to them so powerful a stimulus. They observe a sudden separation
of the two spheres of impulse in themselves, and they realize the
illimitable enhancement of the erotic motive over the egoistic-social,
the latter naturally appearing as dross against the gold of the erotic.
If in the clandestine love they have swept away all egoistic-social
conventions, they have practically rendered themselves subject to erotic
impulses alone. Thus the very fact of this love being illicit appears
to render it purely erotic, absolute, all-comprehensive, the conflict
settled beforehand.
§ 179
Freud in his paper on the love life already referred to[26] makes the
observation that there is a type of “love” in a certain class of men in
which the man seems to prefer as his loved one a woman who is at least
nominally possessed by another man. His attentions to her are carried
on as if he were rescuing her from some oppressor. In extreme instances
he often professes to be solicitous for her virtue, which consists
in his eyes only in not being used by the other man. Freud continues
that the other man from whom this type of lover wishes to rescue the
woman represents this lover’s own father, the woman his mother, and he
himself is the little boy in the original family triangle where the son,
according to Freud, is always jealous of the father and continually
trying to get his mother away from the father. The “love” type here
described is another instance of the compulsion to repeat, referred to
in his book _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_.
It should be the privilege of the husband to sweep away all
egoistic-social inhibitions. He should see to it that his actions
throughout his married life are such that his wife makes to him the total
surrender here implied. If he does not, he has not taken all the steps he
might, to render his marriage absolutely happy.
§ 180
It is likely that the woman who responds thus erotically to the illicit
love situation, because love is thus cleared of all egoistic-social
inhibitions, may be the counterpart of the man just described. If he
wishes to rescue her from a personality, apparently her husband, but
in reality the father influence (from the point of view of the lover),
so she may wish to be rescued, i.e., removed from all influence of
authority—the father influence in her own personality. For in the
unconscious the father factor represents the egoistic-social impulses. It
is the father who requires compliance with egoistic-social demands. And
whoever can sweep away all these influences symbolically rescues her from
her own father. It should be, and in many cases indeed is, the husband
that does this; and if he does it completely there is no motive for
illicit love.
In no sense can the so-called sacrifice made by a woman of these
egoistic-social demands be regarded as a masochistic self-sacrifice
involving any erotic factor. The erotic is not sacrificed but magnified.
The misfortune is only that in some cases the husband does not cause the
sacrifice which then is left for some other man to bring about.
Without for a moment implying that this illicit love on the woman’s
part has any more ethical value than the man’s attempted rescue, it is
impossible not to believe that the periodical abolition by the husband
of all egoistic-social inhibitions of his wife is a purification of the
erotic factor. Taking place within the marital state and effected solely
by the husband, this makes the light of love burn so much more brightly
as to illumine every other life activity.
§ 181
Jealousy is treated by Ellis in a vein apparently unaware of the
contribution made to this subject by Freud, who shows that the man is
jealous because he is either physically or psychically impotent. If the
husband either knows or thinks that he is unable to lift his wife into
the empyrean, the thought inevitably comes to him that there must be some
other man who can do it. If this thought is an unconscious one it is
manifested in every restrictive measure taken to prevent his wife from
meeting other men, for which measures he assigns not the real cause,
for he does not know it, but all sorts of reasons developing through
the unconscious mechanism of rationalization, either that she is not
attending to her duty, or neglecting him and his interests or spending
too much money, or what not. This condition of jealousy is all the more
likely to exist in the husbands who are so ignorant of love that they are
unaware that there is any such thing as the woman’s acme of pleasure in
the love episode. This form of jealousy, primarily due to the husband’s
ignorance, is all the more painful to him because he does not understand,
and all the more tragic in its irony.
It seems, too, quite probable that part of the jealousy of women is due
to a corresponding situation of their own erotic life. A woman who fails
to apperceive in consciousness the overwhelming somatic reactions which
occur at the climax of the love episode is in a condition quite analogous
to that of psychic impotence in man. If man’s jealousy, as has been shown
by psychoanalysis, is really caused by his psychic impotence, i.e., his
anesthesia, woman’s jealousy is evidently also caused by her anesthesia
which is a form of psychic impotence.
§ 182
The case cited by Ellis (that of Mrs. Samuel Pepys, as recounted in the
famous diary) contains only the man’s side. Possibly if the lady’s side
were known it would be found that she was herself deficient in love
and that she dreaded her husband’s possibly finding a woman who could
react toward him in a more complete and satisfactory way than she could
herself, this entirely apart from the question whether or not it should
be the duty of the man to evoke such a response. She would feel unhappy
and all the more conscious if she knew it was his duty and that he had
fled from her to others where perhaps the task would be easier.
It is also insignificant that Pepys himself records: “I must here remark
that I have lain with my moher (wife) as a husband more times since this
falling out than in, I believe, twelve months before, and with more
pleasure to her than in all the time of our marriage before.” This cannot
be adduced as a proof that the jealousy aroused in the wife was the cause
of any improvement in the marital relations of the Pepyses, but that
his noting an increase in her pleasure simply indicates that because of
his own lack of imagination he had not been playing the husband’s part
for the preceding twelvemonth as he should have. His own imagination
was probably stirred by “Deb’s” propinquity; as it would not have been
had his erotic life with his wife been on the high passional level it
should. This is the only reason why a little jealousy is supposed to whet
the edge of love. If Pepys had been grounded in true love instead of a
small-minded man, flinging notes to his wife’s maid, advising her to
help him out in the lie he told his wife, he would not have failed so to
control his wife’s erotic emotions that she would have outshone any other
woman in attractiveness.
§ 183
Furthermore Ellis admits, and quotes his authorities to show, that
jealousy is “an emotion which is at its maximum among animals, among
savages, among children, in the senile, in the degenerate, and very
specially in chronic alcoholics.” He notes that the supreme artists and
masters of the human heart, who have most consummately represented the
tragedy of jealousy, clearly recognized that it is either atavistic or
pathological. Shakespeare made his Othello a barbarian, and Tolstoy made
the Pozdnischeff of his _Kreutzer Sonata_ a lunatic. But the jealous
person is above all (at least psychically) impotent and projects, on the
most likely object, his own desires, which he cannot fulfill for himself.
Let every jealous husband ponder this. If he cannot utterly satisfy his
wife erotically, he is jealous of other men simply because consciously
or unconsciously he thinks some other man can. Also if he cannot, his
inability probably proceeds either from ignorance of the art of love or
from a foolish disbelief in his physical powers, a most common delusion
in the ordinary man who is brought up in the tradition that sex activity
involves a loss of vitality, instead of constituting, as it does, an
exercise of the interstitial glands, whose functioning is necessary to
the most robust health and success, both of which are inimical to or
destructive of the emotion of jealousy.
§ 184
One of the factors that make marriage a lottery for those who cannot or
do not know about the unconscious element in the marital situation is the
unconscious homosexuality characterizing so many men and women.
It is quite probable that the only impossible women, psychically, are
those who have this unsuspected homosexual trend. It is an absolutely
proven fact that the men who have it strongly developed are themselves
impossible, unless they are cured of it.
The subject of homosexuality is one of the most serious, most complicated
and most difficult ones of all the subjects connected with the marital
question.
Let it not be understood that the homosexuals are all manifestly
woman-hating men or man-hating women. Their homosexuality is not as
evident as that. Sometimes its only visible sign is being what is called
a man’s man or a woman’s woman.
The man who enjoys men’s company almost exclusively, the club man, the
man who never misses an opportunity to meet men, who invariably rides in
the smoker but who does not invariably smoke there, who is much more at
ease with men than with women, is in all these reactions motivated not
solely by the conscious motive of carrying on so-called male activities,
but partly by an unconscious homosexual tendency which, though it may
never express itself in overt acts, is still an influence dominating the
majority of his actions, and, to that extent, is an influence working
against his completely hologamous status. It is, in some if not all
cases, undoubtedly the factor that is most powerful in preventing him
from obtaining the erotic control over his wife necessary to a perfect
hologamy.
Our man-made civilization has strongly homosexual tendencies, and has
had them for centuries, expressed not only in men’s (and women’s)
clubs, associations, fraternities and secret societies, but also in
the compensatory woman-hunting and woman-worshipping done by some of
the individual men, as a reaction from the unconsciously perceived
homosexuality of their environment.
Psychoanalysis has shown, indeed, that some of the illicit sex
relationships maintained by men are mostly for the purpose of
demonstrating to the men themselves, bachelor club men, for example, that
they are not really homosexually inclined.
Psychoanalysis also shows the close connection of this deficient
masculinity with jealousy on the one hand, and with paranoia on the
other. Also it has been shown that morbid jealousy in woman has
sometimes the same cause. “The root of this jealousy is a non-conscious
homosexuality. She is jealous of her woman friend, because she herself is
in love with the friend. She puts herself in the rôle of the man.”[27]
From these considerations it will be evident that the man or woman with
the unconscious homosexual trend cannot be a true mate until the trend is
redirected. The obverse of this is also quite suggestive, although not
necessarily operative in all instances; namely, that, if the passion for
his wife cools, it _may_ be because he has, or has developed, in himself
a homosexual tendency of which he is unconscious.
§ 185
A careful distinction needs here to be made between the sex activity that
is really erotic—that of two perfectly mated lovers—and that which does
not rise above the hyposomatic (physical) level. This latter invariably,
except in the most unintelligent and spiritually undeveloped of humans,
contains a conflict which may or may not enter consciousness. There is
in people highly civilized according to puritanical ideals always a
conscious conflict between the physical expression of love and their
traditional ideas that the body is base and ignoble and the soul is a
thing separate from the body and superior to it.
Psychoanalytic research into the unconscious shows that there in the
levels below, and inaccessible to consciousness, the conflicts that like
a perpetual tug of war are uselessly consuming large amounts of psychic
energy are also, in that shunting of energy from its natural destination
to other termini which may be practically any of the organs of the body,
causing a derangement that if long continued easily becomes a functional
disease.
The conflict that is conscious also produces a physiological derangement
that may become a disorder. So in either case, whether the conflict be
conscious or unconscious, the physiological processes are more or less
disturbed.
If, as sometimes happens, a man’s inhibitions are too great, he is
absolutely unable even to begin to have a love episode. If they are less
great, he may be able to begin it but not to continue it. If there is any
inhibition at all his part in the love episode is affected by just that
amount of psychic energy that represents the force of his inhibition.
The conflict that is expressed in physical derangement, disorder, malaise
or any other unpleasant result is almost always a mental conflict that
can be resolved by mental means better than by physical.
In sex activity that is truly erotic there is no conflict in the man and
none in the woman. It may be said that sex activity never becomes truly
erotic until these conflicts have subsided.
But in the unhappy marriage a part of the conflict on the husband’s part
comes from his unconscious realization that he has not assumed the truly
masculine rôle.
§ 186
A brief résumé will be now given of conclusions so far reached. Man’s
control, while difficult for him to gain and particularly in the love
episode, is yet essential to his perfect union with his mate, unless
there is proved to be, which has not yet been done, a congenitally
uncontrollable type of men. Such men could never satisfy any except women
who are erotically the most highly developed, in the sense that anything
or nothing would send them into transports—a comparatively rare type of
woman.
Haste on the man’s part in the love episode, his acknowledged
precipitateness, his hurry to relax sexual tension, is due directly to
his own anesthesia, his insensibility to the preliminary reactions of
his mate, and in some cases a total ignorance of the existence of her
final reaction. He does not know what effect in his mate he should really
strive to get.
A knowledge of that effect involves a recognition of the fact that all
women are unconsciously trying continually to test the man’s psychical
strength. Many actions of women cannot be accounted for except by
assuming this unconscious motive, for which, of course, there is a
biological cause in the attempt of nature to mate the woman with the
strongest man. The congenitally uncontrollable (if any exists) man will
go down under this test, uniformly.
This biological cause produces in the woman the tendency to dissemble.
This tendency makes the woman coy, bashful, modest, reserved, retiring.
As animal she is always facing away from the male in the sexual act and
as Ellis has noted, only the human female has in the human love episode
turned so as to face the man. But this subhuman characteristic is always
present in the woman, manifesting itself in some of her actions if not
in all, and constitutes an obstacle to the man’s self-control; for,
unless he has insight enough into the feminine character to discount her
dramatic prevarications, he will infer that it is useless and hopeless
for him to try to produce any effect whatever in her, so he might as well
produce what effect he can—namely, in himself. He does not know that the
most satisfactory result in his own feelings is produced by the reactions
which he effects in her, through the reservation of his own supreme
reaction until she is past knowing it herself, until, therefore, he has
convinced her that his control is greater than hers, that his strength is
greater.
As it is evident that in animal copulation whatever acme is reached is
reached simultaneously by both sexes, because of the briefness of the
act, it is reasonable to suppose that the man’s unconscious situation
contains the implication that his own erotic acme necessarily involves
the woman’s. In other words every man has an unconscious phantasy
that when he has completely satisfied himself his mate is completely
satisfied. Only after years of married life do some husbands begin to
suspect that something is missing from the marital relation.
If the male _subhuman_ animal is excused from any concern as to the
proper reaction of the female, that does not excuse any man and yet
in so far as he is animal he has no cause to act otherwise than take
his satisfaction without delay. The female animal is accessible only
in the rutting season. Human woman is at all times accessible to the
love expressed in true mating. Human sexuality has not only made a
fundamental distinction between procreative and erotic love episodes but
also has almost obliterated the periodicity in the sexual accessibility
of the woman. Therefore human love is _toto cælo_ different from animal
copulation.
Considerations of the matter of control lead to the conclusion that it
is possible only by means of the imagination, and because imagination
is only the reawakening with possible recombination of images of past
experiences, we are again confronted with the problem of explaining how
the experience to be imaged in advance and looked for and waited for may
be presented both to the men who have and to those who have not had sex
experience.
As one cannot control anything except according to a pattern, the pattern
of controlled action must be in the mind of any who intend to achieve
control.
The method then, by which the husband is to achieve control of his own,
and thus over his wife’s erotic reactions, is simply observation. He
absolutely requires fully to note the effect that what he does has on his
wife. If he succeeds in averting his gaze, figuratively, from himself to
his partner, he will find that his own reactions take on a lessened value
in his eyes. His own reaction, one of ecstatic pleasure is, in comparison
with his wife’s, highly concentrated on one detail of the love episode.
This is, of course, the most important one in animals and would be in
humans, if humans were animals, but the fact that they are not and that
erotic values have developed in humans that do not exist in animals,
makes the man’s erotic acme take on a much smaller significance and value.
Most husbands go through the love episode as if they were animals, merely
procreating progeny, while yet starting from no such purpose. The purpose
is, of course, in so many men solely the purpose to gratify themselves
and not anyone else, that, of course, any deliberate thought of ways and
means of gratifying any other, does not occur to them.
Many men, indeed, are filled with embarrassment, if not dismay, in
perceiving a deeper and more extended reaction in their women than they
perceive in themselves. With such a power which they observe developing
in their wives they do not know how to compete. The situation of a
husband who finds himself developing in his wife a much richer and fuller
erotism than he thinks he has himself, contains the unconscious factor
of unflattering comparison. Unconsciously he does not wish to find
her richer than himself because that gives him a sense of unconscious
inferiority and injures his feeling of control. So the marital situation
contains the unconscious wish on the husband’s part not to find in his
wife an erotism greater than his own, entirely apart from any conscious
idea he may have that he should not have an “oversexed” woman as a wife.