PARENT LOVE
In the serious hour of puberty, the individual passes into his second
phase of accomplishment. But there cannot be a perfect transition
unless all the activity is in full play in all the first four poles of
the psyche. Childhood is a chrysalis from which each must extricate
himself. And the struggling youth or maid cannot emerge unless by the
energy of all powers; he can never emerge if the whole mass of the
world and the tradition of love hold him back.
Now we come to the greater peril of our particular form of idealism.
It is the idealism of love and of the spirit: the idealism of
yearning, outgoing love, of pure sympathetic communion and
"understanding." And this idealism recognizes as the highest earthly
love, the love of mother and child.
And what does this mean? It means, for every delicately brought up
child, indeed for all the children who matter, a steady and
persistent pressure upon the upper sympathetic centers, and a steady
and persistent starving of the lower centers, particularly the great
voluntary center of the lower body. The center of sensual, manly
independence, of exultation in the sturdy, defiant self, willfulness
and masterfulness and pride, this center is steadily suppressed. The
warm, swift, sensual self is steadily and persistently denied, damped,
weakened, throughout all the period of childhood. And by sensual we do
not mean greedy or ugly, we mean the deeper, more impulsive reckless
nature. Life must be always refined and superior. Love and happiness
must be the watchword. The willful, critical element of the spiritual
mode is never absent, the silent, if forbearing disapproval and
distaste is always ready. Vile bullying forbearance.
With what result? The center of upper sympathy is abnormally, inflamedly
excited; and the centers of will are so deranged that they operate in
jerks and spasms. The true polarity of the sympathetic-voluntary system
within the child is so disturbed as to be almost deranged. Then we have
an exaggerated sensitiveness alternating with a sort of helpless fury:
and we have delicate frail children with nerves or with strange whims.
And we have the strange cold obstinacy of the spiritual will, cold as
hell, fixed in a child.
Then one parent, usually the mother, is the object of blind devotion,
whilst the other parent, usually the father, is an object of
resistance. The child is taught, however, that both parents should be
loved, and only loved: and that love, gentleness, pity, charity, and
all "higher" emotions, these alone are genuine feelings, all the rest
are false, to be rejected.
With what result? The upper centers are developed to a degree of
unnatural acuteness and reaction--or again they fall numbed and
barren. And then between parents and children a painfully false
relation grows up: a relation as of two adults, either of two pure
lovers, or of two love-appearing people who are really trying to bully
one another. Instead of leaving the child with its own limited but
deep and incomprehensible feelings, the parent, hopelessly involved in
the sympathetic mode of selfless love, and spiritual love-will,
stimulates the child into a consciousness which does not belong to it,
on the one plane, and robs it of its own spontaneous consciousness and
freedom on the other plane.
And this is the fatality. Long before puberty, by an exaggeration and
an intensity of spiritual love from the parents, the second centers
of sympathy are artificially aroused into response. And there is an
irreparable disaster. Instead of seeing as a child should see, through
a glass, darkly, the child now opens premature eyes of sympathetic
cognition. Instead of knowing in part, as it should know, it begins,
at a fearfully small age, to know in full. The cervical plexuses and
the cervical ganglia, which should only begin to awake after
adolescence, these centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and
cognition, are both artificially stimulated, by the adult personal
love-emotion and love-will into response, in a quite young child,
sometimes even in an infant. This is a holy obscenity.
Our particular mode of idealism causes us to suppress as far as
possible the sensual centers, to make them negative. The whole of the
activity is concentrated, as far as possible, in the upper or
spiritual centers, the centers of the breast and throat, which we will
call the centers of dynamic cognition, in contrast to the centers of
sensual comprehension below the diaphragm.
And then a child arrives at puberty, with its upper nature already
roused into precocious action. The child nowadays is almost invariably
precocious in "understanding." In the north, spiritually precocious,
so that by the time it arrives at adolescence it already has
experienced the extended sympathetic reactions which should have lain
utterly dark. And it has experienced these extended reactions with
whom? With the parent or parents.
Which is man devouring his own offspring. For to the parents belongs,
once and for all, the dynamic reaction on the first plane of
consciousness only, the reaction and relationship at the first four
poles of dynamic consciousness. When the second, the farther plane of
consciousness rouses into action, the relationship is with strangers.
All human instinct and all ethnology will prove this to us. What
sex-instinct there is in a child is always _adverse_ to the parents.
But also, the parents are all too quick. They all proceed to swallow
their children before the children can get out of their clutches. And
even if parents do send away their children at the age of puberty--to
school or elsewhere--it is not much good. The mischief has been done
before. For the first twelve years the parents and the whole community
forcibly insist on the child's living from the upper centers only, and
particularly the upper sympathetic centers, without the balance of the
warm, deep sensual self. Parents and community alike insist on
rousing an adult sympathetic response, and a mental answer in the
child-schools, Sunday-schools, books, home-influence--all works in
this one pernicious way. But it is the home, the parents, that work
most effectively and intensely. There is the most intimate mesh of
love, love-bullying, and "understanding" in which a child is
entangled.
So that a child arrives at the age of puberty already stripped of its
childhood's darkness, bound, and delivered over. Instead of waking now
to a whole new field of consciousness, a whole vast and wonderful new
dynamic impulse towards new connections, it finds itself fatally
bound. Puberty accomplishes itself. The hour of sex strikes. But there
is your child, bound, helpless. You have already aroused in it the
dynamic response to your own insatiable love-will. You have already
established between your child and yourself the dynamic relation in
the further plane of consciousness. You have got your child as sure as
if you had woven its flesh again with your own. You have done what it
is vicious for any parent to do: you have established between your
child and yourself the bond of adult love: the love of man for man,
woman for woman, or man for woman. All your tenderness, your
cherishing will not excuse you. It only deepens your guilt. You have
established between your child and yourself the bond of further
sympathy. I do not speak of sex. I speak of pure sympathy, sacred
love. The parents establish between themselves and their child the
bond of the higher love, the further spiritual love, the sympathy of
the adult soul.
And this is fatal. It is a sort of incest. It is a dynamic _spiritual_
incest, more dangerous than sensual incest, because it is more
intangible and less instinctively repugnant. But let psychoanalysis
fall into what discredit it may, it has done us this great service of
proving to us that the intense upper sympathy, indeed the dynamic
relation either of love-will or love-sympathy, between parent and
child, upon the upper plane, inevitably involves us in a conclusion of
incest.
For although it is our aim to establish a purely spiritual dynamic
relation on the upper plane only, yet, because of the inevitable
polarity of the human psychic system, we shall arouse at the same time
a dynamic sensual activity on the lower plane, the deeper sensual
plane. We may be as pure as angels, and yet, being human, this will
and must inevitably happen. When Mrs. Ruskin said that John Ruskin
should have married his mother she spoke the truth. He _was_ married
to his mother. For in spite of all our intention, all our creed, all
our purity, all our desire and all our will, once we arouse the
dynamic relation in the upper, higher plane of love, we inevitably
evoke a dynamic consciousness on the lower, deeper plane of sensual
love. And then what?
Of course, parents can reply that their love, however intense, is
pure, and has absolutely no sensual element. Maybe--and maybe not. But
admit that it is so. It does not help. The intense excitement of the
upper centers of sympathy willy-nilly arouses the lower centers. It
arouses them to activity, even if it denies them any expression or any
polarized connection. Our psyche is so framed that activity aroused on
one plane provokes activity on the corresponding plane, automatically.
So the intense _pure_ love-relation between parent and child
inevitably arouses the lower centers in the child, the centers of sex.
Now the deeper sensual centers, once aroused, should find response
from the sensual body of some other, some friend or lover. The
response is impossible between parent and child. Myself, I believe
that biologically there is radical sex-aversion between parent and
child, at the deeper sensual centers. The sensual circuit _cannot_
adjust itself spontaneously between the two.
So what have you? Child and parent intensely linked in adult
love-sympathy and love-will, on the upper plane, and in the child, the
deeper sensual centers aroused, but finding no correspondent, no
objective, no polarized connection with another person. There they
are, the powerful centers of sex, acting spasmodically, without
balance. They must be polarized somehow. So they are polarized to the
active upper centers within the child, and you get an introvert.
This is how introversion begins. The lower sexual centers are aroused.
They find no sympathy, no connection, no response from outside, no
expression. They are dynamically polarized by the upper centers within
the individual. That is, the whole of the sexual or deeper sensual
flow goes on upwards in the individual, to his own upper, from his own
lower centers. The upper centers hold the lower in positive polarity.
The flow goes on upwards. There _must_ be some reaction. And so you
get, first and foremost, self-consciousness, an intense consciousness
in the upper self of the lower self. This is the first disaster. Then
you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands
exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in
masturbation. You get a pornographic longing with regard to the self.
You get the obscene post cards which most youths possess. You get the
absolute lust for dirty stories, which so many men have. And you get
various mild sex perversions, such as masturbation, and so on.
What does all this mean? It means that the activity of the lower
psyche and lower body is polarized by the upper body. Eyes and ears
want to gather sexual activity and knowledge. The mind becomes full of
sex: and always, in an introvert, of his _own_ sex. If we examine the
apparent extroverts, like the flaunting Italian, we shall see the same
thing. It is his own sex which obsesses him.
And to-day what have we but this? Almost inevitably we find in a child
now an intense, precocious, secret sexual preoccupation. The upper
self is rabidly engaged in exploiting the lower self. A child and its
own roused, inflamed sex, its own shame and masturbation, its own
cruel, secret sexual excitement and sex _curiosity_, this is the
greatest tragedy of our day. The child does not so much want to _act_
as to _know_. The thought of actual sex connection is usually
repulsive. There is an aversion from the normal coition act. But the
craving to feel, to see, to taste, to _know_, mentally in the head,
this is insatiable. Anything, so that the sensation and experience
shall come through the _upper_ channels. This is the secret of our
introversion and our perversion to-day. Anything rather than
spontaneous direct action from the sensual self. Anything rather than
the merely normal passion. Introduce any trick, any idea, any mental
element you can into sex, but make it an affair of the upper
consciousness, the mind and eyes and mouth and fingers. This is our
vice, our dirt, our disease.
And the adult, and the ideal are to blame. But the tragedy of our
children, in their inflamed, solitary sexual excitement, distresses us
beyond any blame.
It is time to drop the word love, and more than time to drop the ideal
of love. Every frenzied individual is told to find fulfillment in
love. So he tries. Whereas, there is no fulfillment in love. Half of
our fulfillment comes _through_ love, through strong, sensual love.
But the central fulfillment, for a man, is that he possess his own
soul in strength within him, deep and alone. The deep, rich aloneness,
reached and perfected through love. And the passing beyond any further
_quest_ of love.
This central fullness of self-possession is our goal, if goal there be
any. But there are two great _ways_ of fulfillment. The first, the way
of fulfillment through complete love, complete, passionate, deep love.
And the second, the greater, the fulfillment through the
accomplishment of religious purpose, the soul's earnest purpose. We
work the love way falsely, from the upper self, and work it to death.
The second way, of active unison in strong purpose, and in faith, this
we only sneer at.
But to return to the child and the parent. The coming to the
fulfillment of single aloneness, through love, is made impossible for
us by the ideal, the monomania of more love. At the very _age
dangereuse_, when a woman should be accomplishing her own fulfillment
into maturity and rich quiescence, she turns rabidly to seek a new
lover. At the very crucial time when she should be coming to a state
of pure equilibrium and rest with her husband, she turns rabidly
against rest or peace or equilibrium or husband in any shape or form,
and demands more love, more love, a new sort of lover, one who will
"understand" her. And as often as not she turns to her son.
It is true, a woman reaches her goal of fulfillment through feeling.
But through being "understood" she reaches nowhere, unless the lover
understands what a vice it is for a woman to get herself and her sex
into her head. A woman reaches her fulfillment through love, deep
sensual love, and exquisite sensitive communion. But once she reaches
the point of fulfillment, she should not break off to ask for more
excitements. She should take the beauty of maturity and peace and
quiet faithfulness upon her.
This she won't do, however, unless the man, her husband, goes on
beyond her. When a man approaches the beginning of maturity and the
fulfillment of his individual self, about the age of thirty-five, then
is not his time to come to rest. On the contrary. Deeply fulfilled
through marriage, and at one with his own soul, he must now undertake
the responsibility for the next step into the future. He must now give
himself perfectly to some further purpose, some passionate purposive
activity. Till a man makes the great resolution of aloneness and
singleness of being, till he takes upon himself the silence and
central appeasedness of maturity; and _then, after this_, assumes a
sacred responsibility for the next purposive step into the future,
there is no rest. The great resolution of aloneness and appeasedness,
and the further deep assumption of responsibility in purpose--this is
necessary to every parent, every father, every husband, at a certain
point. If the resolution is never made, the responsibility never
embraced, then the love-craving will run on into frenzy, and lay waste
to the family. In the woman particularly the love-craving will run on
to frenzy and disaster.
Seeking, seeking the fulfillment in the deep passional self; diseased
with self-consciousness and sex in the head, foiled by the very loving
weakness of the husband who has not the courage to withdraw into his
own stillness and singleness, and put the wife under the spell of his
fulfilled decision; the unhappy woman beats about for her insatiable
satisfaction, seeking whom she may devour. And usually, she turns to
her child. Here she provokes what she wants. Here, in her own son who
belongs to her, she seems to find the last perfect response for which
she is craving. He is a medium to her, she provokes from him her own
answer. So she throws herself into a last great love for her son, a
final and fatal devotion, that which would have been the richness and
strength of her husband and is poison to her boy. The husband,
irresolute, never accepting his own higher responsibility, bows and
accepts. And the fatal round of introversion and "complex" starts once
more. If man will never accept his own ultimate being, his final
aloneness, and his last responsibility for life, then he must expect
woman to dash from disaster to disaster, rootless and uncontrolled.
"_On revient toujours a son premier amour._" It sounds like a cynicism
to-day. As if we really meant: "_On ne revient jamais a son premier
amour._" But as a matter of fact, a man never leaves his first love,
once the love is established. He may leave his first attempt at love.
Once a man establishes a full dynamic communication at the deeper and
the higher centers, with a woman, this can never be broken. But sex in
the head breaks down, and half circuits break down. Once the full
circuit is established, however, this can never break down.
Nowadays, alas, we start off self-conscious, with sex in the head. We
find a woman who is the same. We marry because we are "pals." The sex
is a rather nasty fiasco. We keep up a pretense of "pals"--and nice
love. Sex spins wilder in the head than ever. There is either a
family of children whom the dissatisfied parents can devote themselves
to, thereby perverting the miserable little creatures: or else there
is a divorce. And at the great dynamic centers nothing has happened at
all. Blank nothing. There has been no vital interchange at all in the
whole of this beautiful marriage affair.
Establish between yourself and another individual a dynamic connection
at only _two_ of the four further poles, and you will have the devil
of a job to break the connection. Especially if it be the first
connection you have made. Especially if the other individual be the
first in the field.
This is the case of the parents. Parents are first in the field of the
child's further consciousness. They are criminal trespassers in that
field. But that makes no matter. They are first in the field. They
establish a dynamic connection between the two upper centers, the
centers of the throat, the centers of the higher dynamic sympathy and
cognition. They establish this circuit. And break it if you can. Very
often not even death can break it.
And as we see, the establishment of the upper love-and-cognition
circuit inevitably provokes the lower sex-sensual centers into action,
even though there be no correspondence on the sensual plane between
the two individuals concerned. Then see what happens. If you want to
see the real desirable wife-spirit, look at a mother with her boy of
eighteen. How she serves him, how she stimulates him, how her true
female self is his, is wife-submissive to him as never, never it could
be to a husband. This is the quiescent, flowering love of a mature
woman. It is the very flower of a woman's love: sexually asking
nothing, asking nothing of the beloved, save that he shall be himself,
and that for his living he shall accept the gift of her love. This is
the perfect flower of married love, which a husband should put in his
cap as he goes forward into the future in his supreme activity. For
the husband, it is a great pledge, and a blossom. For the son also it
seems wonderful. The woman now feels for the first time as a true wife
might feel. And her feeling is towards her son.
Or, instead of mother and son, read father and daughter.
And then what? The son gets on swimmingly for a time, till he is faced
with the actual fact of sex necessity. He gleefully inherits his
adolescence and the world at large, without an obstacle in his way,
mother-supported, mother-loved. Everything comes to him in glamour,
he feels he sees wondrous much, understands a whole heaven,
mother-stimulated. Think of the power which a mature woman thus
infuses into her boy. He flares up like a flame in oxygen. No wonder
they say geniuses mostly have great mothers. They mostly have sad
fates.
And then?--and then, with this glamorous youth? What is he actually to
do with his sensual, sexual self? Bury it? Or make an effort with a
stranger? For he is taught, even by his mother, that his manhood must
not forego sex. Yet he is linked up in ideal love already, the best he
will ever know.
No woman will give to a stranger that which she gives to her son, her
father or her brother: that beautiful and glamorous submission which
is truly the wife-submission. To a stranger, a husband, a woman
insists on being queen, goddess, mistress, the positive, the adored,
the first and foremost and the one and only. This she will not ask
from her near blood-kin. Of her blood-kin, there is always one she
will love devotedly.
And so, the charming young girl who adores her father, or one of her
brothers, is sought in marriage by the attractive young man who loves
his mother devotedly. And a pretty business the marriage is. We can't
think of it. Of course they may be good pals. It's the only thing
left.
And there we are. The game is spoilt before it is begun. Within the
circle of the family, owing to our creed of insatiable love, intense
adult sympathies are provoked in quite young children. In Italy, the
Italian stimulates adult sex-consciousness and sex-sympathy in his
child, almost deliberately. But with us, it is usually spiritual
sympathy and spiritual criticism. The adult experiences are provoked,
the adult devotional sympathies are linked up, prematurely, as far as
the child is concerned. We have the heart-wringing spectacle of
intense parent-child love, a love intense as the love of man and
woman, but not sexual; or else the great brother-sister devotion. And
thus, the great love-experience which should lie in the future is
forestalled. Within the family, the love-bond forms quickly, without
the shocks and ruptures inevitable between strangers. And so, it is
easiest, intensest--and seems the best. It seems the highest. You will
not easily get a man to believe that his carnal love for the woman he
has made his wife is as high a love as that he felt for his mother or
sister.
The cream is licked off from life before the boy or the girl is
twenty. Afterwards--repetition, disillusion, and barrenness.
And the cause?--always the same. That parents will not make the great
resolution to come to rest within themselves, to possess their own
souls in quiet and fullness. The man has not the courage to withdraw
at last into his own soul's stillness and aloneness, and _then_,
passionately and faithfully, to strive for the living future. The
woman has not the courage to give up her hopeless insistence on love
and her endless demand for love, demand of being loved. She has not
the greatness of soul to relinquish her own self-assertion, and
believe in the man who believes in himself and in his own soul's
efforts:--if there _are_ any such men nowadays, which is very
doubtful.
Alas, alas, the future! Your son, who has tasted the real beauty of
wife-response in his mother or sister. Your daughter, who adores her
brother, and who marries some woman's son. They are so charming to
look at, such a lovely couple. And at first it is all such a good
game, such good sport. Then each one begins to fret for the beauty of
the lost, non-sexual, partial relationship. The sexual part of
marriage has proved so--so empty. While that other loveliest
thing--the poignant touch of devotion felt for mother or father or
brother--why, this is missing altogether. The best is missing. The
rest isn't worth much. Ah well, such is life. Settle down to it, and
bring up the children carefully to more of the same.--The
future!--You've had all your good days by the time you're twenty.
And, I ask you, what good will psychoanalysis do you in this state of
affairs? Introduce an extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit and
make you feel how thrillingly immoral things really are. And then--it
all goes flat again. Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams:
pah, when we've had the little excitement out of them we shall forget
them as we have forgotten so many other catch-words. And we shall be
just where we were before: unless we are worse, with _more_ sex in the
head, and more introversion, only more brazen.