Emotions, including moods and many nameless feelings, are some of the innate organic sensations evoked in our bodies by sensations that are not organic. In other words, they form a part of the internal sensations, which so far as generally named are originally associated with external sensations.

Frink remarks that “the emotion, from the point of view of physiology, is these various preparatory changes in the content of the blood, in the innervation of the various muscles, endocrine glands and other viscera. The emotion, from the point of view of psychology, is the afferent, sensory report of these changes.” And William James’ classical statement is as follows: “Bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.... The more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike or tremble, because we are sorry, angry or fearful, as the case may be.”

While most emotions of the simple type, like surprise, admiration, joy and others are in infancy and childhood originally, though not innately associated with certain definite sensations from the outer world, they are frequently reassociated by experience through the influence of the environment, so that, in later life, one enjoys or detests quite the opposite of what caused instinctive attraction or repulsion in early life.

The complex emotions of love, jealousy and hate are not, in their greatest complexity, existent in humans before puberty, although the unsynthetized elements out of which they are finally composed are present in childhood, particularly hate. This, according to psychoanalysis, is a more archaic emotion than love and is not its direct opposite. It is likely that human emotions are progressing from a dominant hatred toward a reigning love.

Love in its fully synthetic and complicated form is not only impossible in children, but its higher types, spoken of in this book as erotic, occur at their best in those more intricately complicated personalities that are the peculiar product of modern civilization.

The expression of erotic emotion does not involve activity on the man’s part solely, and absolute passivity on the woman’s. Passion and passive are etymologically the same word, but the natural inferences from this are erroneous. It happened that emotions were called passions by some old Roman pseudo-philosopher who was translating Stoic doctrines and used “passions” to translate patheia, which, in Greek, means “sufferings.” The Stoics believed that emotions were sufferings inflicted on men by Fate. Their great discovery was that men could conquer them by training (askesis). Hence comes “asceticism”: the training by which a man might free himself from the suffering which was caused by feeling anything. Now we are beginning to realize that there are emotions that ought to be felt, and repeatedly—emotions that are as necessary to the growth of the soul as food is to the growth of the body. Asceticism (training), therefore, of the future will be a training in the emotions of love.

§ 34

Women are said to be more emotional than men. In the sense that their actions are guided by their emotions more than by the verbal processes of logical reasoning this may be true. For there is a type of mental process that may be called logical in which verbal consistency is sought and with little difficulty maintained. But as words are only counters, symbols or representatives of things and are used in only a part of all the thinking, conscious and unconscious, that goes on in the mind continuously day and night, a term is needed with which to describe the wordless thought-processes that are quite as important causes of action as are the verbal processes; and to these has been given the term psychological.

Emotions are for the most part indescribable, not to be adequately represented by words, and are therefore to be regarded as psychological processes tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal thought or reasoning.

Men are characterized more than women by a tendency to subject their mental processes to verbal control, while women utter many words in the vain attempt to give verbal expression to their feelings. In men on the average words have more weight in the determination of action; in women feelings or emotions.

§ 35

In the sense, however, that women perceive with greater clearness and intensity the internal organic sensations (or emotions) it is not true that women are more emotional than men. Unconsciously, “down deep in their hearts” the members of one sex are as emotional as those of the other. Men have as many and as powerful emotions as women, but have controlled some emotions more than women have, by annihilating or attempting to annihilate, them by means of repression. But women too have been forced to repress certain other emotions, notably the erotic.

§ 36

The most vital emotion is the erotic. I hope I shall not be misunderstood in my use of the term “erotic.” I place it above all the other emotions in dignity and complexity. It is sex plus love and more than that. “All the wonder and wealth of the mine in the heart of one gem.” All the dynamics of the ages in the force of one feeling. It is the physical plus the spiritual, the combination of bodily and psychical, the paradox that makes the individual’s greatest personal happiness consist in his feeling the happiness of another person of the opposite sex, the spiritual force that vitalizes and sublimates every physical thing it touches, the psychical that completely evaporates, if not supported by the most physical, an emotion that, unlike any other emotion, comes from the experience not of other things but of another’s emotions, the only emotion that responds pleasurably to every manifestation of bodily and spiritual activity of the member of the other sex. Erotism is the most nearly perfect type of conjugal love.

§ 37

“After she has had sexual experiences,” Kisch maintains, “a woman’s sexual emotions are just as powerful as man’s, though she has more motives than a man for controlling them.” (Ellis, Psychology of Sex, Vol. III, p. 202.)

Her motives for controlling them, which here means annihilating them or repressing them, are egoistic-social ones (see § 43) just as man’s; but in man-made society these motives are stronger in the woman than in the man, because man has placed more repression on her sex impulses than on his own.

In placing more repression on hers than on his, he has not, however, given anywhere near a full expression to his own erotic instincts. Because of the dominance of egoistic-social impulses in modern civilization his erotism does not permit the expression of such fundamental strata of his unconscious as are stirred in woman, whose more flexible erotism is aroused to a pitch that he finds it difficult because of his egoistic-social interests to ascend.

As is maintained steadfastly in this book, he has repressed his own, but hers still more. In so doing he has lowered the moral, spiritual and psychical status of marriage, which should, if they two are to become one flesh, accept the entire body as well as the whole soul each of the other. In repressing what he has deemed the physical side of love man has put on himself a quite unnecessary burden. With the natural desire to control, which constitutes masculinity, he has, in his thinking, blunderingly made annihilation an equivalent of control.

This placing of more repression on her erotism than on his is due to the fact that his own is so quickly satisfied in comparison with hers. He acts en masse as if it would take so much of his time, now devoted to egoistic-social ends, to equal, in erotic expression, her greater capabilities.

§ 38

The most striking fact of most emotions, except those of love, is the facility with which they are reassociated with ideas different from those with which they first occurred.

The love emotions appear to be the least easily transferred, as indeed they are the least easily stirred to their depths. This is said advisedly on the well grounded observation that most people who say they love do not love fully, and deeply. The more deeply they love, the more their passion instills itself into every fibre of their being and the more slowly they are able to change their love object.

But ordinary emotions, other than the erotic, are readily and almost universally shifted from one object to another. Indeed, it may be asserted that there is no innate content of any of the emotions except love. Love innately requires an object of the opposite sex.

To illustrate the reassociability of the other emotions it is necessary only to recall what things one has liked or feared years ago and compare them with the present likes or fears.

And it would be enough to take fear itself as an illustration of the variability of its content. When fear becomes fixed in a phobia, it is extraordinary how irrational the association is, viewed from any logical standpoint. A woman fears mice or snakes, although she has never been injured by either, or beetles, although possibly she has never touched one. Or she fears to cross an open square, and nearly faints if she has to do so alone, although there is not a chance in ten thousand that any harm would come to her. An association of an emotion so profound as fear with some chance place or occurrence is ample proof that the emotions themselves have no essential connection with any external object. The absence of fear in some persons under circumstances where people generally would be afraid also demonstrates the ready dissociation of emotions from particular experiences. One can learn to like or to dislike almost anything.

To a certain extent this is true of love but far less so if we restrict the use of the term “love” to its more ideal phases. When we speak of “Off with the old love and on with the new,” it will be conceded that we speak not of true love but of a very shallow interest.

§ 39

A young woman, Miss F., married a man who made an ideal lover and to whom she responded passionately; but yet she was not happy with him. She had in reality fallen in love more or less unconsciously with a previous suitor. She frankly told her husband she could not love him fully, divorced him and subsequently married her first lover.

One might say that, if the reassociation of love emotions were as easy as that of most other emotions the young woman might have learned to love her husband. She evidently tried to do so, but she made the mistake, made by many uninstructed young women, of going against her better judgment in marrying the man she did. Her first lover was not in a financial condition to marry. She wanted to marry, and took the first available man. So, as in many cases, the fear of not getting married at all forced her to take a man whom she did not love enough. She must have been more or less conscious of this all the time. She made, however, a definite attempt to reassociate her love emotions. She was not able to do it. Her husband, although he is described as an ideal lover, was not able to arouse her full passion.

§ 40

Then there is the case of Mrs. G., who married the prominent Dr. G. practically on a wager. She did not love him, but in a spirit of bravado declared to a girl friend that she could make him marry her. Not himself being in absolute control of his own erotism, he succumbed to her charm. Not knowing also the part a husband is required to play in the marital life in order to make it a success, he did not make her love him, did not evoke in her the responses which make a woman the object of a man’s deepest passion. So, as in a great many marriages, he did not really love her, and she divorced him after a few years.

Both women were unfortunate in their choice of a man. The resultant divorces could have been obviated by the knowledge neither man had. But this is the history of most divorces where the couples have come to grief on obstacles considered to be erotic.

Neither of these women clearly distinguished between egoistic-social and erotic motives because neither of them had had erotic experiences, and in their marriages they failed also to get the highest type of erotic experience.

§ 41

But it is impossible for any woman to know what sort of erotic life will be hers with any man whom she consents to marry. At present every marriage is a trial marriage for a woman, and for the uninstructed man as well. Only the marriage composed of a woman and a fully prepared man can be said to have any reasonable assurance of being permanent.

The other emotions than love are readily transferred from one object to another. Love is not easily transferred as, primarily, it has only one object, the human of the opposite sex, and where the love in question is the elaborately developed love, that has its roots deep in the erotic soil of the unconscious of both partners, which it invariably has, if the husband knows how to control himself, the transfer is more like the transplanting of a huge tree.

It all depends on the unconscious depth of the love whether it can be transferred or not, or how long it may take. From this the corollary is that the so-called love that is fickle is not worthy of the name. Fickleness in a woman shows lack of skill in the man. Fickleness in the man shows him to be not a man but an autoerotically minded boy.