HOLOGAMY VS. PROSTITUTION
§ 187
Marriage, in the sense of a legal bond between two people who are bound
together in no other way than that affecting the interests of the
egoistic-social type, is not truly monogamous.
True monogamy between two people whose interests are entirely implicated
each with the other’s on both the conscious and the unconscious level of
the erotic sphere needs a new name for which is offered the term hologamy
or whole marriage—complete marriage.
The completeness implied here is that in which both conscious and
unconscious affection and passion are involved. The hologamous union is
the one in which both partners have allowed instinctive impulses from the
unconscious to enter consciousness. Their erotic insight consists in just
this admission.
A hologamous erotic union is the assurance of earthly felicity. It is
utterly uncaused by egoistic-social factors, though it may yet itself
be the cause of egoistic-social success. At any rate it is the most
favourable condition for the development of both members of the union
along egoistic-social lines. No man now imperfectly married will fail
to become more successful in his life outside of the home by improving
the conditions of his life within it. The most important condition has
been clearly indicated. No woman, now imperfectly married, but is waiting
(for that is all she can do) for the time when her husband may chance to
improve his erotic technique, or learn from others how to do so.
It is tacitly assumed by both European and American society that
either the erotic or the egoistic-social motives may independently
and exclusively be an adequate basis for a marriage. On the contrary
psychology shows that the erotic one is the only one necessary, and that
the egoistic-social is never adequate, without the erotic, to constitute
anything but a mildly sentimental business relation between man and woman.
§ 188
The erotic motive is not represented or meant by the ordinary expression
used by married people who say, of course, they love each other, or they
would not have married. Erotic means more than “inspired by love” in the
sense that the uninitiated use the term love, which in common language
is of very wide application including even food and clothing and all
other egoistic-social expressions. Erotic not only means inspired by love
in the most whole, passionate sense but implies also that the persons
activated by erotic motives have at least some knowledge of the art of
love, a knowledge which includes something about the unconscious factor.
Otherwise love has not progressed to its higher phase of erotism, and is
mostly made up of affection which is primarily egoistic-social. Love is a
word that has become too debased in the minds of most people to serve as
a term for what is here outlined.
If on the other hand a marriage is a hologamous one, in which the
husband’s egoistic-social motives are duly subordinated to his erotic
motive, then the erotic motive, freed from extraneous elements, will
cause both his conscious and his unconscious passion to be centred on one
woman. No other marriage deserves the name. “Marriage” is derived from
the Latin word _mas_, male, and originally referred only to the woman.
She was “manned.”
If we should say today that a woman was thoroughly manned we should be
understood to mean that she had sexual relations with one or more men.
To most we should not probably convey the meaning that she had been
completed, as an originally defective demi-human being, by the necessary
complement to fill out her being to the totality of human possibility, or
that this completion involved the development in her of an absolutely new
attitude toward the world which she could not attain without physical and
spiritual union with one man.
This implies also that the corresponding statement should be made of the
truly married man. As an originally incomplete or defective demi-human
being lacking a complement, he needs to be completely womaned, for which
indeed there is no appropriate word of Latin derivation. But if we should
say a man was comprehensively womaned we should be understood to mean
probably that he had both a wife and concubines—that his affection and
egoistic-social impulses were gratified by the former and his erotic
needs by the latter. Yet it is really not possible for a man to be
perfectly and completely womaned except by one woman. If his counterpart
is a mosaic of fifty different varicoloured fragments he cannot be said
to have done anything but use a separate facet of each woman composing
the mosaic, and to have left unused all her other facets. So he cannot be
said to have seen any of the other facets, a lack of vision constituting
a kind of anesthesia already mentioned in § 141.
§ 189
Monogamy is not perfect if there is anesthesia on either side. Anesthesia
prevents complete union. Only the mates who are completely directed each
to other are fully married, and marriage means not partial but complete
union. All degrees of fragmentary attachment are defective monogamy and
so not monogamy at all, but unconscious polygamy.
Furthermore, that portion of the ego which is not attached to one’s
mate exhibits a tendency to attach itself to some other one’s actual or
potential mate, simply because attachment is a case of tension fixed to
relax on a definite object, and if the legally sanctioned object has been
detached, if the tensions natural to either sex are, by some complex,
detached from that object, they tend of themselves to seek relaxation
from some other person. If a man is completely satisfied with his wife he
will not only seek no other woman, but will be dangerously attracted by
no other, and _vice versa_.
So we can suppose a possible scale on which a husband’s union with his
wife, not hologamous, is measured in units from 1 to 100 such that we
might say a man was sixty-five per cent married to his wife, while yet
she might be a hundred per cent married to him. This gives 10,000 degrees
of non-hologamous marital union, M 1 — W 100 representing a man with
only slight interest in his wife who is herself quite devoted to him.
This man’s other ninety-nine per cent of libido might be directed to any
number of other women. If it were directed toward one other woman he
would undoubtedly be happier if he divorced and remarried. But it is the
thesis of this book that M 1 — W 100 is an impossibility.
A division of libido as disproportionate as this would not imply much
split in the man’s libido. He would thus be ninety-nine per cent devoted
to his paramour and only one per cent to his wife. His paramour would
be his _de facto_ wife. But if his ninety-nine per cent of libido were
directed toward ninety-nine other women he would be called a personality
of maximum diffusion.
§ 190
Now the personality in perfect health tends toward the preservation of
unity. The man whose love life should include one hundred women would be
unable to devote more than one per cent of his libido to one woman. He
would be as far from being a unit as, on the supposed scale, he could
get. He would be not one personality but a knocked-down pile of parts
waiting for a skilled mechanic to assemble.
There are different types of men, those who tend more, and those who tend
less, to preserve their own unity of personality.
In general the progress from infancy to adulthood is a progress from
partial synthesis to complete synthesis, so that the type of man
whose synthesis is incomplete is an infantile and dissociated type of
personality; or better than dissociated, he might be called dissipated,
disjointed, dismembered, disassembled.
Unfortunately, the infantile condition can completely satisfy,
consciously, the infant of adult size. This makes it difficult to
approach him, makes him difficult of access. If one present him with a
fully developed adult woman, he immediately recoils much farther into his
youth which he regards as a fine quality. Because of the uncomfortable
nature of the comparison he unconsciously sees his inferiority and
unconsciously compensates for it, by getting (in the only way he can) the
feeling of satisfaction that comes _via_ mental autoerotism whenever it
fails to be obtained from the outside world.
Adult society always produces this reaction somewhere in the sub-adult
psyche; so it becomes a great problem, to devise some method for getting
the sub-adult to desire to react in adult modes.
§ 191
Any plurality of women for a man implies reservation. He cannot love all
of a woman entirely who thinks he loves in any degree any other woman.
If for example he “loved” one woman for her hair and another for her
eyes, another for her smile, this could not be called love, but only
physical sex stimulation, or fetishism. Man’s supposed love of more than
one woman is where his reservation makes him love one woman consciously
and the others unconsciously. But conscious love is not complete love
either, so that a man who consciously loves his wife, but is not able to
arouse in her the erotic acme for any reason, cannot really be said to
love her. He may rationalize to himself that his wife is a good mother to
his children, a good housewife, patient, painstaking, self-sacrificing;
but that other women whom he has seen interest him more in various
intellectual spheres.
His wife could not be a brilliant pianist, good conversationalist, noted
writer, artist, and singer, all at the same time. It would be a physical
impossibility. He is interested in all those spheres in other women; why
should he not find pleasure in their company? Why should he not call love
that interest which the thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating
woman arouses in him? Simply because he would not and probably could not
evoke in her the fullest erotic reaction, and probably has not in his own
wife.
Plurality of women would compare with Guyot’s violinist who should say
he could play “Yankee Doodle” only on one violin and only a concerto on
another, or could play only in E flat Major on one, and A flat Minor on
another, needing a different instrument for each of the twenty-four keys.
That is not to say women are not different, but only that man’s
satisfaction in marrying one is dependent largely on his own erotic
technique which is far more important and valuable than either musical,
artistic or any other technique; and that if he does not play upon her
emotional instrument, to his and her complete satisfaction, he has
no right to try to play on any other. Men go from one musical erotic
instrument to another, saying, virtually: “I cannot play on this one. Of
course, I shall be able to play on the next. This is an inferior one.
Besides, the more practice I get the better I shall be able to play.
After I have had a hundred or so I shall be a virtuoso.”
Women in general, however, are one as good as another for the production
of the erotic music which can completely satisfy a man. He not only needs
no more than one but on _a priori_ grounds it can be safely said in
almost every case that he can evoke no more satisfactory erotic response
from one than from another, regarding this from the purely erotic
viewpoint and not confusing it with the egoistic-social one.
Undoubtedly it gratifies a man’s egoistic-social impulse of
self-magnification to have a woman flatter him, to make him feel that his
very presence excites her, thrills her through and through. It is almost
automatic in some women thus to try to play upon a man. But this too is
never from purely erotic motives, but largely from egoistic-social ones.
The man who prides himself on his success with all women is constantly
confusing the erotic with the egoistic-social aim. And many a man
considers that he has fulfilled this erotic aim when, through his
personal magnetism or his susceptibility to flattery, he has succeeded
in getting a woman to consent to try to surrender herself _in toto_
to him. But in using this pseudo-erotic situation as a factor in the
egoistic-social sequence, he is showing an utter blindness to the essence
of erotism, which consists in the woman’s fully conscious placing of the
erotic motive ahead of the egoistic-social one she has been following in
her course of verbal or other flattery and blandishment.
Can any satisfaction come to a woman except the purely egoistic-social
one of superseding another, his wife, in the preference of a man whom
she endeavours to captivate? Can any satisfaction except egoistic-social
come to a man who prides himself on his conquests, on how easily women
fall for him? Can he be said to be motivated more by erotic or by
egoistic-social impulses in his attempts to add other women to his list,
or to run risks and arouse in his soul the excitements of danger?
§ 192
If he need the excitements of a plurality of women, it is proof that
he cannot get a normal amount of tension and relaxation from his own
wife. There are those, of course, who live their married life on the
theory that the physical tensions and relaxations of sex are too gross
for refined marital relations, and that their wives would be shocked if
they experienced them. The boy brought up with the _angel_-imago (or
mother-imago, see § 195) as his ideal of woman necessary to be the mother
of his children would inevitably identify his wife with a prostitute if
he succeeded in evoking the highest psychical exaltation in her erotic
sphere. He has plurality ingrained in his nature from the cradle; the
feminine sex is not one but at least two: angel and prostitute. Unable to
conceive the two existing in one woman, in fact unwilling to conceive
this, he perforce puts the mother of his own children in the angel class
and would be shocked if she evinced any of the characteristics of the
other class.
The irony of which is that whatever reactions the prostitute shows are
her attempt to imitate what she conceives as the highest type of erotism,
what her patron’s highest erotic development would call for. Whatever
impulses of erotic nature she has, which are few enough in the class that
practise promiscuity for pay, are so overweighted by the egoistic-social
impulses of material self-advancement, that they lose whatever value they
might otherwise have.
A so-called prostitute, like Victor Hugo’s Mlle. Drouet, who after
promiscuity devotes herself with absolute fidelity to one man is no
longer a prostitute. She has, in thus placing the erotic above the
egoistic-social motive, fulfilled the highest human function except that
of parenthood.
It is possible that a man of many women may think he is seeking for
his final mate. Such men have been heard to express somewhat similar
sentiments. “If I could,” said one roué, “effect a grand passion with
some woman, she would be the only one for me.” He thought he could not
gain this result from his wife, but if he were a whole man with erotic
unity instead of a roué with the disassembled psyche, he could effect the
grand passion quite as easily with his wife as with another woman.
§ 193
Some considerations on the status of prostitution are necessary in every
book that attempts to discuss marital relations. Far as the poles
asunder though they may be in externals, they are yet the common activity
of the same man in many instances. Figures show that the married man is
the main support of the prostitute. What he does to his psyche in the
direction of actually splitting it by this double life has been described
more or less in the following manner. It is not merely that he either
lies to one woman and consorts with another and is under the psychical
strain of remembering never to confuse the parts of this double drama he
is enacting. It is worse than that.
It has been shown through studies of the unconscious in men that show a
strong leaning toward fallen women, that they are unwittingly reënacting
a jealousy drama of their own infancy in which they try to rescue from
the father their own object of earliest love, their mother (cf. § 179).
Furthermore, the average man’s bringing up leads him unconsciously
to separate all the women in the world into two classes. This simple
division is characteristic of childhood, which sees everything either
black or white and does not conceive fine gradations. The two classes of
women are the angel-mother type and the devil-prostitute type, and this
distinction with hardly any other he maintains sometimes till the end of
his life.
§ 194
Strangely enough this division of women into two classes, while it is
made by most men in their unconscious, evokes opposite reactions in two
types of men, some of whom are found by the psychoanalysts as “more
potent” with the prostitute type, while others are more potent with their
wives. Yet these men are not wholly potent to the extent of carrying out
the love episode to a conclusion perfectly satisfactory to their wives,
and in the illicit relation they are still more precipitant.
It seems, however, most probable that the illicit woman has the effect
on them of producing an overvaluation of some particular factor in the
nature of a fetish which has lost its overplus of emotional value in the
case of the wife. As has been already pointed out, this overvaluation
of one or another factor in the total situation of the episode has an
accelerating effect in the episode with the less familiar woman, an
effect which, because of habit, has become less in the episode with the
wife.
Another element in the situation is that with the woman of the prostitute
type the man is concerned in no degree with any reaction on her part,
whereas with his wife he may, in some cases, feel a certain dim sense of
responsibility. Added to which the professional prostitute frequently
pretends to be controlled, while the average wife does not.
It happens that this unimaginative paucity of merely twofold division of
women unfortunately involves almost without exception the unconscious
assumption that his sexual gratification is the function of the
prostitute and is both absent from and not supplied by the woman of the
angel type, from which stratum of society he naturally selects his wife.
No wonder then that many men consider their wives “oversexed” if they
show any great passion. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.”
This type of man who rigidly demands that his wife shall be an angel
(as, when an infant, he thought that his mother was) makes, or tries
to make out of her a sexless worker or butterfly while he goes to the
prostitute weed for the satisfaction of his imperative sexual needs.
He is unable to act as if his wife had exactly the same human body as
himself, the same or homologous glands and identical sexual needs with
himself, the denial of which is the cause of much if not most of the
nervousness of women and accountable for a good part of their ill health
and weakness.
§ 195
The boy of five or less has no means of knowing that his mother has any
sexual needs, jealous though he may be of his father. The same boy when a
man of thirty, if he keep the same childish viewpoint that women of the
angel type are as angelically sexless as his mother was to him, will,
unless he picks out a woman of the other type for a wife, which is, of
course, exceedingly rare, never be wholly free from inhibitions against
the full development of the true love episode with his wife. Regarding
the prostitute as of another caste, he thus avoids with her alone the
inhibitions caused by his childish separation of all women into two
diametrically opposed castes.
It is obvious that this early-formed association of mother (and of
course, later, wife) with absence of sexual interests or even instincts
may in some men be a large factor in causing the repression of the
majority of the components of the love episode. One component, however,
alone, is impossible for the man to repress, though he may later find to
his supreme satisfaction that he can control it and retard it; namely,
the final relaxation of all his erotic tension.
If he continues love episodes with his wife and has a fixed but
unconscious idea that with a wife all varieties of preliminary love
actions, in brief, every component but the one to him absolutely
essential component of dropping his burden of erotic tension,—which by
the way he might just as well drop elsewhere—are actions more appropriate
in a brothel than in a home, he will tend more and more to avoid with his
wife all but the essential, as he virtually conceives it.
§ 196
It is admitted by all students of married life that not less passion but
more is needed, and the precipitant husband undoubtedly needs more. For
him the love episode’s passion is concentrated into the climax of it. It
has no beginning, no middle, and no end, for it rarely if ever gives the
full satisfaction that is gained by the husband who really takes care of
his wife’s erotic responses. For the ignorant husband, who is emotionally
about five years old, the love episode is featureless and crude like a
five-year-old child’s drawing of a man on a slate. It has no proportions,
a head, rectangular body and two straight lines for legs and quadrangular
sinkers for feet and asterisk hands.
The passionless love episode is no love episode at all as it lacks the
essential of deep love. Putting more passion into his love for his wife
is of course exactly what the man, whose woman’s world consists of
only two widely sundered castes, is unable to do unless he succeeds in
overcoming the early-fixed habit of his thought about what he knows as
love. But putting more passion into his love for his wife is exactly what
he must do to be fully a man and to control her erotic emotions.
One who is fully a woman latently, as are all with negligible exceptions,
is never fully developed into a woman, actually, except by the man
who can play on her, as on a violin, all the melodies of which she is
capable. She will never know herself unless she is thus developed by man.
She will be like an undeveloped photographic plate.
§ 197
The attitude of society toward prostitution is, as a whole, as
unorganized and haphazard as could be, in all civilized countries. Both
kinds of laws are made, prohibitive and regulative, neither of which has
any more effect on men’s actions than would a law have which attempted
to prohibit drawing breath or to regulate the number of inhalations per
hour. In general the laws have been prohibitive and have met the same
fate as any prohibitive legislation. It has been realized by a few deep
thinkers that no prohibitions have to be made against what nobody ever
thinks of doing, and that the existence of a prohibitive law is proof of
a widespread tendency to do the thing prohibited. All prohibition is,
from the point of view of both conscious and unconscious psychology,
unscientific.
§ 198
A part of the motive that leads the husband to resort to the prostitute
is the widespread notion mentioned by Ellis (op. cit., VI) that
prostitution has a civilization value in adding “an element of gaiety
and variety to the ordered complexity of modern life, a relief from the
monotony of its mechanical routine, a distraction from its dull and
respectable monotony.”
These are the arguments advanced for the use of alcohol also. While
admitting, however, the desirability, indeed even the necessity, of
variety in life which means the family life as well, we should not
forget that the lack of variety in marital existence is mostly if not
exclusively due to the infantility of the husband. Marriage is the most
vital institution of society, but the one that has been most carelessly
left to its own haphazard development.
For this abandonment of marriage to its own fate amidst the most hostile
possible environment of rapidly developing egoistic-social impulses, the
husband is solely to blame. His fault, however, is primarily due to his
bringing up and chiefly to that feature of the mother-imago which leads
him invariably to look for interest, variety and all good things from the
mother.
The child’s frequent whine, “Mother, what can I _do_?” is here virtually
repeated by the unimaginative husband, defended by the sexologist and
answered by the prostitute. If, as has been intimated before in this
book, age cannot wither woman nor custom stale her infinite variety,
then the infinite variety, or enough of it, at any rate, to satisfy any
husband, should be evoked from his wife.
In the fragmentary love of the average married man it is not to be
expected, of course, that he will find much variety. For fragments do
not, or at any rate, a single fragment does not, provide much.
The relief from the monotony of the average married life is most
desirable in every way, but the relief can come in the best way only from
the variegation of the marital pattern, a change that is fully within the
power of any husband who will acquaint himself with the findings of the
modern psychology of love.