§ 1

We are living in an age when the contrast between intellectual complexity and emotional simplicity is becoming so great that the emotional reactions and, because of them, the creative and destructive acts of men are more and more unpredictable and variegated. Intellectual attainment has reached an extraordinary height. Emotions have not been trained or developed, if indeed they are capable of development. They may not be, though it will be assumed in a later chapter that they are susceptible of the kind of training that is produced by reassociation. Emotions are the organic sensations perceived by the ego as the result of reactions, caused by impressions from the external world, reactions taking place within the tissues of the body, and associated with external impressions. Emotions are no more complex than they were thousands of years ago.

When we say that the emotions of one man are finer than those of another man we may mean either that he has repressed his sexual emotions, which we have not been taught to call fine, or that his emotions of surprise, awe, love, hate, jealousy and others are aroused by, that is, associated with, more complicated external impressions than they are in another man. Or we may call fine emotions the constructive emotions with which pleasure is associated.

The emotions as physical reactions have not changed in ages of evolution. We have the same bodies as sounding boards on which the external impressions reverberate, the same bodies practically that men had five thousand years ago. But the number and variety of external experiences has multiplied in geometrical ratio. The result is that, while intellectually we are men of 1923, emotionally we may be cave men or apes. With the products of modern civilization, the material advances and complications, the means of intercommunication, of graphic representation and of the transformation of natural resources we are, as Robinson says in The Mind in the Making, merely monkeying. In spite of numerous sporadic beginnings in the line of social use of the results of modern scientific advancement we are as a race making almost no progress in the direction of fine living.

§ 2

This is no more clearly evident in any other sphere of life than in marriage. With all the intellectual progress made by humanity up to the first quarter of the twentieth century marriage is still looked upon by many men merely as an opportunity for either legitimized procreation or unlimited sensual self-gratification. A man puts as much intellect into his vocation as he is capable of. Into his marriage he puts not intellect, but the emotions of the ancestral ape. Even in his sublimated war of business he knows that a consideration of the other fellow is in the end a winning card, and the word “service” has come into prominence as advertising material. But in his marriage he uses the same crassly selfish methods he has used for thousands, perhaps millions of years.

The sheer blind, isolating selfishness of the average husband and the misery it causes him are the reason for my writing this book. If a man used one-tenth the intellect in his marital relations that he does in his corporation finance and in his inventions and scientific research, the latter would not be half as necessary as they seem to be, and he would himself be infinitely happier.

§ 3

Unless we are progressing toward a woman-made social order it is imperative that men carry on to a logical conclusion what they have begun.

“Charity begins at home” is one of the many maxims that were originated with a far different connotation from that which they have since acquired. Charity (Latin Caritas) originally meant “dearness” or “fondness” and once had an erotic flavour that it has since lost. The only place for sexual love is in marriage and its having escaped from this, like a captured thing, reflects not so much on itself as on the unnaturalness of its captivity. True erotism has practically fled from most marriages, leaving only an empty shell. Men should reflect that nothing is more necessary for the upbuilding of a real civilization than the personal lives of the individuals themselves. Penetratingly thoughtful men realize that the present state of civilization is diseased throughout, and that it “is not in our stars but in ourselves,” that we are to rely for advance.

§ 4

In this book an attempt is made to show how men can so control their marital situation as to make more and more unnecessary the tightness of the bond that operates to make many marriages so like an imprisonment for both husbands and wives. Also the suggestion is made that a certain type of action on the husband’s part will work in the direction of making both prostitution and divorce less and less necessary.

This type of behaviour, comparatively rare at the present time, is based on a pattern that will at once appeal to the sense of justice innate in every man. Although it implies a relaxation of much present constraint and artificiality in the married relation, it is in no sense antagonistic to true monogamous union but rather constitutes a much more advanced and progressive attitude toward the most vital question of the day.

The marriage of the near future, it is hoped, will be inspired by our latest scientific knowledge concerning the psychology of sex, including the ever present unconscious factor, which is the most potent factor in the marital situation and which has been necessarily ignored for the simple reason that, previous to a few years ago, everyone was ignorant of the unconscious mechanisms and their relation to each other, in making for mistakes and unhappiness in marital behaviour.

If every man would exercise the control over himself (the opposite of asceticism in the ordinarily accepted sense), the control which alone will secure that emotional ascendancy over his wife, necessary for happy marriage and unconsciously longed for by the wife, more than any other thing in marital life, he will reduce to the lowest possible frequency both divorce, which is the issue of so many marriages, and prostitution, which has for so many centuries been regarded as the bulwark of marriage and the protection of the wife.

As Grete Meisel-Hess says in her Sexual Crisis, “The happy marriage of the securely placed wife is founded upon the degradation and debasement of another woman, the prostitute”; and Havelock Ellis in the sixth volume of his Psychology of Sex (page 296) says that “the value of marriage as a moral agent is evidenced by the fact that all the better-class prostitutes in London are almost entirely supported by married men,” while “in Germany, as stated in the interesting series of reminiscences by a former prostitute, the majority of the men who visit prostitutes are married.” He then gives several reasons why this is the case.

If every wife should give serious thought to exactly how much degradation the prostitute has been considered to save her from, she would realize that what the prostitute guards her from could be transmuted by the proper attitude on the husband’s part from a crassly physical into a highly spiritual thing. And she would move heaven and earth to induce her husband to study the fine art of love in so thorough a manner that there could be no doubt of the happy issue of their mutual love life.

Critics of marriage as it exists today have amply demonstrated that it shields more immorality, in some cases, than even prostitution itself; and it is a fact that this immorality comes from a lack of spiritual rapport between husband and wife, that can be effected primarily, if not solely, by the husband.

§ 5

While this book assumes that the marital relation is one in which an emotional control is necessary to be exercised by the husband over the wife, it does not assume for a moment but rather denies that the husband should exert any control whatever over the activities of the wife, especially in spheres other than the strictly conjugal.

On the contrary, a husband domineers in small every-day matters only when, and because, he feels unconsciously that he is failing, or is beginning to fail, to dominate in the great and important sphere of woman’s emotional life.

For the health and happiness of them both, this sphere should be the love emotions; at any rate, only the constructive or anabolic emotions. A husband who rightly dominates need not and will not trouble to domineer. If the wife is as profoundly moved erotically by marriage as she should be this deep emotion will impel her to develop her personality to the utmost for the advantage of her husband and, a fortiori, of herself.

It should always be borne in mind by both husband and wife that the love impulse is uniformly to take precedence over the ego (social) impulse, a precedence that, however, in our present competitive society it is very difficult to give. But it is worth every thought that can be devoted to it; to refine the pattern, to ennoble the picture, of marital life.

§ 6

A common misapprehension that psychoanalysis leads to promiscuity in sexual relations needs emphatic correction. The reasoning wrested out of psychoanalytical findings runs somewhat as follows: Most modern ills and notably neurotic disturbances, mild and severe, are the result of the repression brought to bear on the sex instinct by modern civilized life. Therefore, in order to avoid or cure these multitudinous ills, the individual whose natural instincts have been repressed, must dig them up, with great toil and at great expense of time and money, and give them free play in spite of the prohibitions of society. Indeed, in this country, psychoanalysts, of the first rank in other respects, have been said to recommend both men and women patients to make what arrangements they could to indulge in sexual intercourse, even if unmarried.[1]

Now fully admitting that the mental and physical troubles of these patients, and all others who suffer from ills of psychic origin, arise from the repression of the sexual instinct, it still shows a far too great tendency on the part of their advisers to temporize and compromise with facts, if they give this advice. For, while a conflict between two forces, one or both of which were in the unconscious, is more satisfactorily and successfully carried on if the two forces are brought out into the open light of consciousness, the conflict still remains, and is only shifted to another field where it may go on as before, and with unabated fierceness.

The conflict between the individual and society is just as great whether a man takes it out in himself through a neurosis or gives up the neurosis and takes a prostitute or a regular mistress, neither of which has the sanction of society. In the case of many neurotics the cure is worse than the disease simply because the social pressure becomes clearer to the individual if he actually does, even in secret, the things he had before only unconsciously wished. For him the conflict not only is not resolved but is worse, for if like the majority of neurotics he is of a more sensitive type than the average person the contrast between his actions and the implicit demands of his environment will be all the greater. He will be doing in reality the very thing he unconsciously desired but feared to do.

And yet not the same thing after all. For unless the mistress is of that rare and extraordinary type of Mlle. Drouet who supplied for Victor Hugo what he would have much preferred to get from his wife, had she been spiritually able to give it, there will be, for the unfortunately advised neurotic, another conflict not on an ethical but on an intellectual and spiritual plane.

The advice for such people can only be to get married; or, if that is beyond the bounds of possibility, which is seldom the case, the suggestion to adopt a moderate autoerotism has been made by some physicians in good standing as an acceptable substitute at least for the neurotic of either sex. It frees them, at any rate, from the feeling that they are injuring anyone else, either directly or indirectly.

An emphatic reiteration is here appropriate concerning the harmlessness of the physical forms of autoerotism as practised, at some times in their lives, by almost nine-tenths of humanity of both sexes, especially civilized humanity, where a taboo is placed on other normal heterosexual practices. The autoerotism mentioned (in sections 21-25 on mutuality) is purely a psychical intellectual or mental autoerotism entirely apart from the physical. Its results are, in the long run, far worse. (See note, p. 24.)

Grete Meisel-Hess, in The Sexual Crisis, speaking of the men who are sexual compulsion neurotics and whom she describes as male counterparts of the demi-vierges, says (page 155): “They are unable to surmount the ultimate obstacle between I and Thou. They are unable to complete their work, incompetent to possess a woman utterly. The amatory intimacies are never fully consummated. They get through the preliminaries of love and the first preludes; but that which comes afterward, the most beautiful and also the most difficult part, remains unenjoyed, unmastered, unconsummated. I am not referring here to what is ordinarily termed impotence. This sentimental impotence has nothing to do with mere physical weakness, but is far more disastrous, since it forever bars those affected with it from an entry into the deepest experiences of love. It is only the strong in soul who are capable of love in its completeness.”

The physical autoerotic acts, far from having the results of producing physical and mental weakness (as has been unscientifically stated and slavishly repeated for two centuries), are nature’s way of developing the reproductive apparatus for strictly human use. The injuries supposed to result are now scientifically proven to be the result caused by the fear of harm, and the shame inspired in young people by stupidly ignorant elders.

The autoerotic mental attitude described in this section is a peculiarity of men who through lack of enlightenment have not yet outgrown a tendency to remain, in their psychic reactions, infantile or puerile. But there is no proof that the inevitably autoerotic attitude of the young need persist for a moment after they have grasped the idea of the difference between autoerotism and a real object love that contains the growing element of perfect mutuality. And yet many men unnecessarily get the idea fixed in their minds that autoerotic practices have weakened them physically or have produced a mental habit of mind that cannot be broken. From one point of view it is the easiest thing in the world to present the proofs of the utter harmlessness of the autoerotic practices and the utter groundlessness of the fears which make almost every man, that is human, lack the confidence which will give him the necessary control over his own, and incidentally over his wife’s, erotism. (See note, p. 14.)

§ 7

The recommendation to the neurotic patient to take up clandestine sex relationship is based on the same misinterpretation of psychoanalytic theory that is seen in the explanation given by shallow, self-styled psychoanalysts of Freud’s term “polymorphous perverse” as applied to the sexuality of children. Polymorphous means “of many shapes or patterns,” and implies that a child gets as much pleasure and satisfaction from stimulation of any one of its “erogenous zones” as it does from any other including the genital. This is quite easily comprehensible from the point of view that the child’s sexuality, like the unassembled parts of an automobile, is synthetized at puberty under the “primacy of the genital zones” whereupon all the pleasures of stimulation of all the other zones serve only as preliminaries to that of the genital.

And the word perverse in its etymological significance means only “turned in all directions,” i.e., as much toward one zone as to another. But the word perverse in its ordinary sense has the connotation of moral turpitude.

It would be as senseless to call a child’s interest in its skin, and pleasure in sucking its thumb or a piece of candy, perverse in this latter sense as it would be to call a ring gear of a differential wicked just because it was lying on the floor of a garage, and the mechanic had not yet put it in place.

Thus has Freud been misinterpreted and the good of all his fearless investigation into sexual life annulled by the shortsighted and ignorant misreading of his work on the part of so many of those who would call themselves his followers.

§ 8

Only marriage and only a pure and complete monogamy without anesthesia[2] on the part of either mate will satisfy both conscious and unconscious cravings of the neurotic. It is a great advantage to have these unconscious cravings introduced into consciousness if for the only reason of giving a greater self-knowledge and therefore a greater self-confidence.

Not only all conscious and unconscious love cravings can, but all should be satisfied in every marriage from the beginning of it all through to the end of it. By the majority of healthy people they should be given conscious expression by both mates much more frequently than they actually are.

§ 9

So many unhappily married people ask, “What, Doctor, is a normal sex life?” It is generally considered by all authorities that individuals vary to such an extent that it is impossible to lay down any rule except that in the normal sex life the conscious outward expression should never take place except when it is a mutual and reciprocal expression, and that, on these conditions, no limits that could be called normal really exist.

But the attitude of this book is that the mutuality is largely if not entirely the result of the husband’s love-making. In the ideal marriage he is and always should be the leading factor in the exclusively erotic sphere.

§ 10

Every use of the term erotic episode or love episode or love drama, is to be understood as emphatically affirming the indispensability of an equal emphasis on both the so-called physical and the so-called mental or spiritual factor of the love life, neither one nor the other omitted, neither one nor the other unduly overweighted.

We are minds or souls inhabiting or, better, organically connected with bodies. Everyone knows the body cannot be neglected any more than the mind. But the most mental of the bodily reactions and the most bodily of the mental reactions are the emotions; and as far as present-day physiological researches have been able to discover, both are most closely interrelated by the interlocking system of ductless glands, among which the interstitial or sexual glands are the grand president of all the boards of directors.[3]

Tradition first, in classical Greek and Roman times, unduly overweighted the physical end and, in modern times, has attempted unduly to overweight the spiritual end of the balance, but neither of these processes has restored a balance which is fundamental to the highest type of Christianity—the balance between the erotic[4] and the egoistic-social trends.[5] This balance it is the object of this book to suggest, with the hope that such an approach to equilibrium of two tendencies that are now badly out of balance will help to show the futility of much activity that is now called civilized, but which is not most adapted to producing the greatest happiness of the individual, and through that, the greatest prosperity of such people as are destined by happiness and prosperity to survive the crumbling of the present state of society.

The Surprise of the Imperfectly Married

What? Every pair in every marriage attain absolute bliss in every love episode? Do you mean to tell me that the rose mist of dawn lasts through the entire day?

Of course, why not? Should one expect every day to be cloudy? Must we expect our lives to be unhappy? Is it wholesome to live in an atmosphere of tragedy? Not to have perfect married love is to act lower than the animals—to have abolished instinct, by which they act, and not to have attained knowledge, according to which are regulated the acts of all adepts in the art of love.

The Surprise of the Perfectly Married

What? Do you mean to tell me that every married couple do not go through the same perfect type of love episode we do every day or two? Why, we have never had anything else from the very first and supposed, of course, everybody else was exactly like us.

Of course, they do not. You see how people look, don’t you, after a few years of marriage?