THE CONFLICT BETWEEN SEXUALITY AND LOVE
_The Seeker of Love and The Slave of Love_
It is obvious that even an equilibrium between sexuality and love cannot
always be established, while a genuine and complete unification is very
unusual and may, perhaps, be called utopian. In the previous chapters I
have dealt with the blending of both elements in the highest form of
eroticism; in the following I will attempt to throw light on some of the
principal phenomena resulting from a defective union of sexuality and
love, phenomena which I am convinced have never been correctly
interpreted. I allude to perversions which are not inherently
pathological, although they are as a rule only observed and described in
their pathological form.
The fundamental form of so-called sadism may be discovered in an erotic
type which I will call the seeker of love. A lover of this type is
characterised by an unappeasable longing for pure, spiritual love; he
passes from woman to woman in the hope of realising this desire, but
owing to his own material disposition he is unable to do so. Time after
time he succumbs to sexual promptings. Thus groping, frequently quite
unconsciously--for a fictitious being, he hates every woman whose fate
it is to rouse his desire, for each one cheats him out of that which he
seeks. A genuine illusionist, he knows nothing of the woman of flesh and
blood, and continues seeking his ideal, only to be again and again
disappointed. He blames every woman he conquers for what is really his
own insufficiency; he despises her or revenges himself on her, punishes
and ill-treats her; we recognise the true Don Juan and his morbid
caricature, the sadist. But even the most brutal representative of this
type may still be psychologically described as "a man who seeks
spiritual love in woman after woman and, finding only sexuality,
revenges himself on her." Quite a number of men harbour sadistic
feelings for only one woman, and that the one to whom they owe their
great disillusionment. Doubtless many men have almost lost the psychical
roots of their perversions and are completely involved in physical acts.
There is nothing remarkable in this fact; it occurs in every sphere of
human life. The vague instinct of revenge on woman animates also, though
perhaps unconsciously, the pathological sadist.
There is one thing which the seeker of love and the woman-worshipper
have in common: both seek a higher ideal far beyond the woman of
every-day life; but while the worshipper safeguards the purity of his
feeling by putting the greatest possible distance between him and the
object of his worship (and is therefore never disappointed), the seeker
of love, blinded by the illusion that he has at last found the object of
his quest, draws every woman towards him and again and again discovers
that he is nothing but a sensualist. Every fresh conquest destroys his
dream afresh, and he revenges himself, if he is a Don Juan, by despising
and disgracing the unfortunate victim, and if he is a sadist, by
maltreating her. And yet he never entirely loses his illusion; he craves
for complete satisfaction, and as he is incapable of self-knowledge, he
never abandons the hope of meeting the woman he seeks. He differs very
little from the type represented by Sordello, who loved one woman
spiritually, but regarded all the others from the standpoint of sex. It
is the tragedy of Don Juan to revolt from the low erotic sphere which is
his portion, and where he rules supreme, and for ever to aspire to a
realm from which he is shut out. He is convinced that with the help of a
woman he may redeem himself--and sinks deeper and deeper into the slough
of his own sensuality. He becomes malevolent, cruel and callous; the
pleasure whose slave he is repels him:
From craving to enjoyment thus I reel,
And in enjoyment languish for desire.
He is insatiable, but not as the primitive hedonist, whose natural
element is pleasure, but because he again and again mistakes pleasure
for love. He knows only "women," and thus he sins against personality
and the love which is the outcome of personality.
The opinion that Don Juan is no more than a votary of pleasure is not
worthy of criticism; the famous Casanova, for instance, has nothing in
common with him. Casanova was a sensualist without psychical complexity
and without tragedy. His sole endeavour was to wring the utmost measure
of enjoyment out of life. He knew the woman of reality and did not waste
his time in running after phantoms. In his old age he revelled in the
after-taste and settled down to write his memoirs. Don Juan, on the
contrary, has such a loathing for all the women he betrays, that he
hardly remembers them, and certainly has the strongest disinclination to
evoke their memory. Casanova was an entirely unmetaphysical and
unproblematical nature. His philosophy is clearly expressed in the
preface to his Memoirs: "I always regarded the enjoyment of sensual
pleasures as my principal object; I never knew a more important one."
Casanova, who, strange to say, enjoys such high erotic honours, was
merely an ordinary, very successful man of the world, and is of no
importance to the subject in hand. But even the greater and wilder
Vicomte de Valmont (the hero of the famous novel of Choderlos de Laclos)
is in spite of all his art and _esprit_ and perverse principles no
seeker of love and no Don Juan, but a fop and a braggart, seducing women
in order to boast of his success. He is moreover only a representative
of the bored Upper Ten of the _ancien régime_, and not by any means
unique.
Thoughtful critics contend that Don Juan was an autocrat, a destroyer, a
criminal nature with satanic tendencies, bent on the enslavement of
women, on their social and moral death; that conquest only, not
enjoyment, was his passion. I do not altogether reject this
interpretation, but it fastens too exclusively on the external and the
obvious, and overlooks the essential. What is the reason of his
preposterous procedure? Is he really actuated by the evil desire to
injure the women he woos? Such a motive may occur occasionally (the
Vicomte de Valmont was so constituted), but it cannot be regarded as the
guiding principle of a life--and above everything its pettiness is the
exact reverse of so great and demoniacal a character as Don Juan. Were
he conqueror in the highest sense, then--ascetic and proud--he would be
content with the mere consciousness of victory. But his whole attitude
belies the idea of a conqueror; he is not in the least interested in the
women to whom he makes love. They are as necessary to him as "the air he
breathes," but they are unable to give him what he seeks. At the moment
of disappointment he abandons them in disgust, innocent of any despotic
desires (which would pre-suppose interest). As far as he is concerned,
women exist only for the purpose of quickening something in his soul.
But his soul remains dead; divine love has no part in him, he cannot be
saved and is doomed to eternal damnation.
But what is the reason why women cannot resist him? Let us first settle
the point as to why women are attracted to men. I will answer this
question briefly, and though my answer may appear dogmatical, it need
not therefore be wrong. Women know very little of man, but there is one
thing they feel with unfailing certainty, and that is whether their sex
is of great or of small significance to him. (I am only alluding to the
general effect of men on women, not to genuine personal love which is
always incommensurable.) The greater the importance a man attaches to
women, the more readily do they respond to his influence. They are
attracted by his erotic will, not by one or the other of his spiritual
or physical qualities. Women cannot resist a man to whom they mean much,
everything. It is as if they were compelled to throw themselves into the
chasm of his vacuity--every fresh victim with the fond hope of filling
it--but all of them perish. And yet, at the moment of their defeat they
are supremely happy, for they experience the full intensity of his
passion and the boundlessness of his longing. The erotic craving of a
man simply means that women are to him the most important thing in life.
Women instinctively yield to that man who most eagerly desires them. The
coarse sensualist, to whom all women are alike, attracts sensual women,
not exactly because they find in him the satisfaction of their craving,
but because they themselves act on him indiscriminately. But a woman
will adapt herself with the greatest ease to the needs of the
differentiated erotic (for instance, she will become really sentimental
to please the man who prefers sentimental women), for she loves to give
herself to the man who most desires her and as he desires her.
Don Juan, animated by illimitable erotic yearning, is therefore the
undisputed master of the other sex. He has the power of bestowing
absolute happiness, even if only for a brief hour, because in his
boundless love (which is projected on anything but her) a woman receives
the supreme value. Maybe he would be saved if a woman denied herself to
him--maybe he would cease to be a seeker of love and become a
worshipper, for he could not refuse to believe in the woman who
rejected him; but it is his fate that no woman he woos can resist him,
that all throw themselves into his arms without an exception and without
a struggle.
Thus the seeker of love, too, though in a restricted sense, may be
regarded as a metaphysical erotic, for he loathes sexuality--his
portion--and yearns for a higher form of love. He shares this attitude
with the slave of love, who is also a sensualist and a would-be lover.
The slave of love imitates the attitude of the worshipper, but he
infallibly sinks into the sexual sphere. What the psychopathist since
Kraft-Ebbing designates as masochism, is the pathological degeneration
of this particular emotion, which is very common and appears in various
forms, but does not seem to me to be at all morbid. Certainly it is
morbid when a man allows himself to be insulted, bound and flogged, but
it is fairly normal when his passionate admiration is roused by an
imperious woman, who passes him by like a queen without even noticing
his abject adoration; when he longs to kneel down before her and kiss
her feet, which in reward would spurn him. Quite normal, too, is the
boyish happiness in serving an admired and adored woman (Kraft-Ebbing
calls this pageism) described so beautifully in Dostoievsky's novel, _A
Young Hero_, and fairly common among troubadours and minnesingers. (I
need only mention Ulrich von Lichtenstein.) There are numerous degrees
of this feeling--we frequently come across it in the novels of
Dostoievsky, Jacobsen, Strindberg, D'Annunzio, and others--but the
essence of it is always contained in the fact that the man, although
yearning to worship the beloved woman, cannot maintain himself in the
sphere of spiritual love, and aspires to direct physical contact. His
attitude, which closely imitates purely spiritual love, cannot be other
than sexual. The blending of love and sexuality together with the
incapacity of effecting a real synthesis, the confusion of value and
pleasure is most clearly shown in the masochist--far more clearly than
in the case of the (rare) seeker of love. The outward modes preferred by
the individual are a matter of indifference; for the most part they are
symbolical acts, indicating the lover's inferiority and the loftiness
and power of his mistress. What is really of importance is the spiritual
attitude which induces him to commit these strange acts, and in these we
find the characteristic attitude of the woman-worshipper: that of the
slave before his queen. The slave of love is a sensualist incapable of
approaching woman in a normally manly, instinctive and natural way, but
requiring the pose of the spiritual worshipper. One might be tempted to
believe that he harboured the secret wish to atone for his incapacity of
feeling a pure love by being degraded and ill-treated. Thus from a human
point of view the slave of love is a higher type than the seeker of
love; all his transgressions, the fault of his morbid disposition, come
home to him; he takes the blame of his sin upon his own shoulders, while
the seeker of love revenges himself on his victims for his own
shortcomings. The seeker of love is by nature polygamous, while the
slave of love is, as a rule, monogamous (and consequently has little
success with the opposite sex). Both aspire to a union of sensual and
spiritual eroticism, but in both cases the union is a failure. All the
repulsive and terrible manifestations of these perversions which have
been recorded, can easily be shown to fit my theory. In psychological
research it is merely a question of selecting the great types from the
mass of phenomena and determining them correctly.
The so-called _fetichist_, too, whose passion is roused by indifferent
objects which belonged, or might belong, to the beloved, or in fact to
any woman, is a variant of the slave of love. The classical
representative of fetichism is the mediaeval knight who carried a
handkerchief, a glove, or any other article of clothing belonging to his
lady, next to his heart, thus believing himself proof against evil
influences. There we see already spiritual love groping for material
objects in order to gain earthly support; not every man is a Dante, not
every man is capable of keeping his soul free from the taint of this
earthly sphere. But even the "plait-cutter," so well known to the reader
of newspapers, the collector of garters, and similar desperadoes,
require a relic, a fetich which they apparently worship. To the same
category belongs the idolatrous cult which some men, especially
artists--but also madmen--practise with female pictures and statues
(more especially with heads). In this case the fundamental feeling of
the love of beauty, which we know as an essential factor of purely
spiritual eroticism, is made to serve sensual purposes. The desired
illusion of spiritual worship is facilitated, and is protected from
self-revelation, owing to the fact that a painted head rouses in the
normal individual no passion, but inspires him with purely spiritual
sentiments.
I have briefly touched on this subject because my theory of the two
roots of eroticism permits of a new, and in my opinion plausible,
explanation of erotic perversions; one might even go as far as to say
that the existence of perversions follows as a necessary consequence;
that they must exist because it obviously cannot _always_ be possible to
maintain a harmonious balance of sensuality and love. This chapter is
therefore a necessary supplement to the previous ones in which the
perfection of modern love is dealt with. The seeker of love and the
slave of love are phenomena of dualistic eroticism incapable of
attaining to unity. For this reason they neither existed in antiquity,
nor do we find genuine examples of them in the female sex. All female
perversions closely examined are hysteria--that is to say, want of inner
balance--in various forms; a woman's subjection to the will of a man is
in very many instances a natural symptom, and cannot be regarded as
perverse. And thus we again perceive that the eroticism of woman is more
harmonious and natural than that of the eternally groping and eternally
erring man.