In a consideration of the essential factors in a happy marriage we are dealing primarily with the most fundamental of the instincts. For all practical purposes it is sufficient to distinguish broadly the two main groups of instincts that are associated with the ideas of love and of ego.

In popular language we are inclined to say that whatever one does without conscious forethought is instinctive, yet on further consideration it appears that unplanned, impulsive acts or groups of acts may, according to one’s bringing up, be habitual acts. These are acquired, not innate acts, and yet as soon as any mode of behaviour becomes habitual or automatic, the acts constituting it, occurring without forethought or conscious control, are as unpremeditated as is any instinctive act. One needs, then, to be careful not to consider as instinctive what is merely habitual.

Habits, because they are imposed upon the mind and body from without, and therefore are not innate and original, may be more easily changed than instincts. Yet it is quite evident that man has to control his instincts as well as to form habits. In spite of the greater difficulty of changing the acts which gratify the instinctive desires, this change can be made.

Asceticism and abstinence both prove that the sex instincts can be given a different expression, and that a permanent, if not always deep, mental satisfaction can come from the formation of ascetic habits. But the effect of these, however spectacular it may be in the accomplishment of egoistic or social ends, is always a bad one on the body.

Indeed, this bad effect on the body was even desired by the early religious ascetics who thought that by mortifying the flesh (making the body as dead as possible), they could immortalize the soul or mind; a view which modern science has shown to be erroneous, dependent as it is on merely verbal reasoning.

§ 43

The instincts whose gratifications are sought primarily in the physical satisfactions of food, clothing and shelter, and secondarily in all other forms of self-magnification, by means of which the individual may take precedence over other individuals, such as wealth and social position, or distinction of any kind, are called in this book egoistic-social instincts.

The egoistic-social impulses are measured by the so-called “intelligence tests.” They test that quality by which a person through shrewdness and acuteness of perception of external relations facilitates his passing ahead of others, always considered as his rivals. Persons with the highest intelligence are likely to subordinate their emotions to the intellect, and to reduce them to a gentle glow experienced while performing complicated and long sustained mental work. Such people look down on emotional people as being less intelligent than they.

§ 44

The direct expression of the egoistic-social impulse is the inevitable comparison made by himself between the individual and others. He compares himself unconsciously, if not consciously, with other men in health, strength, wealth, position, and in every other respect; and whether he voices these comparisons to himself or not, he unwittingly acts in accordance with them.

He compares himself with women too. It may safely be said that while there is no possibility of avoiding comparison with members of the same sex, a comparison of oneself with a member of the other sex is the one comparison that ought to be avoided, particularly when sex relations themselves are in question.

By this is meant that if a man compares his wealth with a woman’s he can say either that she has inherited the wealth of another man or, if she has made it herself, which is a comparatively rare instance, though growing less so each day, that she has done so simply by competing with men in egoistic-social activities. A man generally avoids this comparison if he thinks at all.

Children quarrel on egoistic lines regardless of sex. Comparisons thus begin at an age before the erotism in the complete and synthetized state is possible.

A woman, too, apparently makes a comparison between herself and different men, notably her husband. And women make the same comparisons between themselves and other women, but, it will be admitted, with greater emotional discomforts.

In all these comparisons so far mentioned the standard of comparison is an egoistic-social one. But in the erotic sphere not only are comparisons logically impossible, but, where attempts at them are made, there is a lamentable confusion of thought consisting of a rapid shift from one sphere to another. Thus if a man should say to himself, “Woman is more (or less) capable of love than men,” he would be using terms with no sense. For he would mean that woman is more fond of being controlled in her erotic impulses than man is. This is a comparison without sense; because woman, with every fibre of her being, craves to be erotically controlled, while man has no instinctive desire whatever to be controlled. Such a comparison would be as senseless as comparing infinity with zero.

If on the other hand a man should say to himself that woman is more (or less) capable of love than man, he would mean that woman is more desirous of being controlled in the erotic sphere than man is of controlling her. As the fact is that man, innately, is infinitely desirous of controlling and woman is endlessly desirous of being controlled, such a comparison would be as senseless as comparing one infinity with another.

This second useless comparison may be objected to by the people who accept a current opinion that men are more “passionate” than women. This, they believe, is the real cause of the double standard of sexual morality. But all women are potentially, and so are all men, absolutely under the dominance of the erotic motive, and the only difference between men and women is the degree of repression of its outward manifestation, a degree entirely dependent on the circumstances of their upbringing.

If we keep clearly in mind from the outset the inevitability of comparisons between individuals, men or women, in the egoistic-social sphere (a sphere consisting mainly of comparisons) and the utter absurdity of comparisons in the erotic sphere, we shall gain much clarity of thought and subsequently much peace of mind.

Does one woman want, more than another, to be controlled erotically? If she seems to, or says so in clearer words or actions than does another woman, she only happens to be more able to express herself in this way than other women are. Does one man more than another want to control a woman in the erotic sphere? If so, he only happens to have had such experiences that have given him greater erotic insight than the other.

The men who admit that they find money-getting and all that it implies more interesting than making love are only admitting that they have allowed the egoistic-social motives to grow stronger with them than the erotic motives. They are not stating any absolute truth about themselves. They are merely saying that they do not know the truth about themselves, and we listen to them without contradiction for we know that, when they talk about making love, they do not know what we mean by these words. They think that we mean wasting time or wasting substance in riotous living.

§ 45

The egoistic-social impulses are always developed in children by their environment earlier than their erotic impulses can manifest themselves, except in a fragmentary and unsynthetized manner.

This is somewhat analogous to the situation of the plants that “time the explosions” of pollen maturity so as to secure cross-fertilization.

The child has no opportunity to synthetize his erotic impulses which become unified under the leadership of the reproductive organs at the time of puberty.

This separation of egoistic-social and erotic impulse development may have been Nature’s way of securing an excessive egoistic-social development, just as she secures maximum growth of the individual body about the time of puberty. It is obvious that where the struggle against the forces of nature is a keen one, as was the case ages ago before man had begun to coÖperate and really to form the basis of social living, any development of the erotic impulse above the bare needs of propagation would have been impossible.

So it may be supposed that a high degree of development of the egoistic-social impulse was evolved out of the adverse conditions of the physical environment of the prehistoric man.

But today the intensity of this struggle against the forces of nature which developed the egoistic-social instinct is far less than ever before. And the fact that it is now comparatively so slight makes it evident that the original need for this excessive egoistic-social development has passed.

In this development the free expression of the erotic impulse was necessarily checked. One can see this process of inhibition of the erotic going on in present-day savage tribes who are still on the way from an uncivilized to a civilized condition. The sex activity of the individual is even in them restricted more or less to comply with the demands of the social unit.

It would seem that the expression of the erotic impulse would be freer and freer as we approached the ultimate goal of civilization. In uncivilized man, love in the sense used in this book has no existence, but sporadic instances of it appear among civilized peoples.

But the ascendancy gained, in early human life on the earth, over the erotic, by the egoistic-social instincts is now so great, on account of the comparative modernness of the higher type of erotic impulses, that even yet the latter are as young seedlings of some exotic plant in a forest of enormous trees.

And specifically a conscious ideal is needed on every man’s part, to overcome the undue prevalence of mere competition and create anew a civilization based not solely as the present one is on the egoistic-social instinct but on the erotic instinct.

Lest this be misunderstood as advocating an unlimited number of offspring, it should be emphasized that the modern erotic impulse is one leading toward love expression entirely apart from the desire to procreate.

How animal-like (we may for example think in 1950) it was in the year 1923 for people to consider it wrong to go through a love episode—even married people—except when they wished a child to be conceived! Why should the erotic experiences in those days have been left to the rouÉ and the prostitute? “What could have been meant by married love?” they will say.

Now that an increased sense of responsibility has been developed in women, placed on them thoughtfully and purposefully by men, all men are able to find by actual experiment the women whom they wish for mothers of their children, and women, too, are sure beforehand, both that they want their children and that they desire those particular men for the fathers of their children.

§ 46

The fundamental characteristic of the erotic instinct is its recognition of the necessity of heterosexual physical and mental companionship. This belongs to both sexes equally, although men’s clubs, women’s clubs and the other occasional separations of the sexes exist—caused by the overpowering influence of egoistic-social impulses.

If a man cannot see anything in a woman but a child or a fool, he has no rational excuse for seeking her company. He might as well have a dog’s. Those who see no more than that are themselves either children or fools. In such cases the real love instinct has been so overcast with prejudice or tradition that it cannot function as it should. Such a man is judging women by the egoistic-social standard and his statement means no more than that in his experience he has met more unintelligent than intelligent women. Or it means that he himself lacks that degree of intelligence which alone is able to evoke the intelligent reaction in another.

The proper functioning of the true love instinct is seen only in the ineluctable conviction that man and woman are complementary, and that the union of one man and one woman composes the real individual, the social unit. Man alone, or woman alone, is only demi-human.

Plato’s fable in the Symposium, much quoted recently, relates how humans were supposed to be duplex—two heads, two sets of arms and legs, a huge double-size body. Fearing the power of such humans, the gods cut them in two, one half of each binary human forming a man, the other half a woman. After that time the parts were so absorbed in trying to unite, that the gods were no longer worried.

Corresponding to the self-magnification of the separate demi-human which seeks the magnification of its own petty half of the real unit of existence, the true love instinct always includes in its strivings the gratification of the other complement of the true social unit.

The egoistic-social instinct then regards the world from a demi-human standpoint, looking for self-aggrandizement unconsciously, inevitably. The erotic instinct alone takes in the aspect of the world as affecting one other person too, and their children when they come along.

The love instinct seeks gratification through the gratifications of one member of the opposite sex; and fails to find the first except through the second.

It is impossible, from the viewpoint of this book, to love more than one member of the opposite sex at once. Men or women who think they do this are deceiving themselves. It is impossible to call that feeling love which has in it any reservations whatever. Every thought, every feeling, every act that could not be communicated to the mate, diminishes by so much the integrity of the personality in whom it originates and initiates an inceptive disintegration of personality.

By this denial that love at first sight is a fact is meant that either of two things is more likely than anything else to happen in the cases where men and women fall thus instantaneously in love with each other and the union is continued through life, which is indeed comparatively rare.

Either the pair are utterly ignorant of what true love really implies and maintain for years a passionless mariage de convenance; or one of the pair, realizing the emptiness of joy that marks their marital existence, is too proud to acknowledge failure. It is conceivable that the woman may realize how unerotic her husband is, and feeling unable, as most women are indeed, to change her husband’s ideas, to supply him with the ideal he should have had himself, naturally gives up what is essentially for her a hopeless struggle.

§ 47

It is also conceivable that the man, profoundly ignorant as many men are of the erotic needs of women, may utterly fail, in his behaviour towards his wife, to avail himself of the inestimable privilege he has of making himself complete man in the only way possible for a man to do. Through his entire married life he may suppose, in his ignorance, that his wife is by nature cold, unsympathetic and unresponsive. He is unlikely to find by accident the magic key to unlock the treasure of her passion, yet it exists, and he may, though he has fallen in love with her at first sight and she with him, be and remain the rest of his life blind to the possibilities quite within his reach.

In either of these cases love at first sight is as helpless as any other love. The term has no very deep meaning except in so far as all love is love at first sight.

In the majority of people true passionate love can never be experienced at first. Therefore no marriage is ever complete in the sense of ended, as far as possibilities of further development are concerned, until the death of one of the partners. If this is the case, then, it constitutes the unanswerable argument for indissoluble marriage, monogamy, not only with one partner but with that partner for life, providing, of course (an exceedingly rare combination), that it has not been actually demonstrated that there are real and insuperable incompatibilities. No marriage except a life marriage can be complete any more than a single demi-human existence can be complete until death has rendered any further development impossible.

Just as a man can never know till the end of his life all the possibilities his life held for him, and should endeavour in every way to develop to its fullest every potentiality of expression of his personality, so no pair can ever know until the end of their joint life all the potentialities of the different ages of married life; for each age has its own.

§ 48

Adult sexuality is not an egoistic-social expression in any essential sense. While the gratification of sexual desire is at first entirely selfish, starting as it does in every individual before puberty in autoerotic practices, it never becomes thoroughly adult until, in the case of the man, he has secured in his mate her perfect satisfaction on which his own depends. He can never marry in the deepest sense if he retains his autoerotic tendencies. A man’s satisfaction on attaining solely his own erotic acme without reference to that of his mate, is in every case an autoerotic satisfaction. The woman, in this instance, is merely an impersonal object or instrument by means of which he produces an effect on himself. In this respect his woman is no more personal than his food.

It may be said that a man’s satisfaction is none the less selfish, even though it be conditioned on a woman’s. But the self-satisfaction which excludes that of the woman must be greater in selfishness and actually less human. In fact this reciprocal self-satisfaction is the distinguishing human trait without which the sex life of most marriages, like all prostitution, is not other than animal heat.

A man frequently thinks he has to make a conscious choice between courses of action that are predominantly egoistic-social or erotic. He thinks of the erotic life as taking time, and incidentally money in the time lost alone, to pay enough attention to a woman to develop her erotic possibilities, and many men acting under this false impression that erotism weakens practical accomplishment, have decided that the egoistic-social path was the more attractive. But even they can never free themselves from the promptings of the erotic impulse.

Such men, thinking erroneously that all sexual acts are erotic, making as they do no distinction between the two, believe that they have somehow fulfilled an erotic need by keeping a woman, either a wife or a mistress. This travesty of the truly erotic by a man who acts mainly from egoistic-social motives is self-deception. The two are not only not the same, but never can be made so.

§ 49

Many a young man making a success of his business, paying off his debts and beginning to pile up money, lets up a bit from the strain of business and begins to look about him for amusement keener than the ordinary recreations.

He meets an attractive young woman, puts her down mentally as not quite up to his social scale, but finding her responsive determines to go as far with her as she will let him. Of course this is starting wrongly, on the basis of not so much making her an integral part of his own personality as trying to find in her an objective and nearly impersonal means of procuring autoerotic pleasure for himself. Not how he pleases her is his ultimate thought but how she pleases him. It has possibly not occurred to him that he likes her because he likes the effects she produces in him and that no matter how much money he lavishes on her, it is barter for certain privileges she permits him to take with her. These privileges are not the highest and greatest he could avail himself of, with a woman he would make his wife, the chief privilege being that of developing himself through her and incidentally of developing her to the highest degree of which she is capable.

On the contrary he does not take a great deal of interest in any section of her personality except her body. He may think her cute and amusing or enigmatic if he is interested in solving puzzles; but he is not likely to find any of her mental characteristics engaging, although she probably has such, even if she allows him liberties he might consider impossible in some other women. He will probably not introduce her to his mother or sisters, as he holds them as a different class of women; and with the secretly followed woman he feels on a different social plane, no matter how personally neat and attractive she may be. If she engages with him in any erotic preliminary play, she ostracizes herself in his eyes from the class of women to which his mother and sisters belong, women who would not do that. This comes from his youthful propensity to bisect everything into absolutely good and absolutely bad. Women are thus divided into the mother class (which includes of course sisters and cousins) who are supposed by him to be non-erotic in a sense. Chief goddess in this class of erotically pure women is the mother-imago or angel-imago described in another section.

To the ideas, opinions, beliefs and other spiritual and intellectual characteristics of his clandestine “love” he pays little attention. Believing again, and again erroneously, in the utter bisection of human qualities, he does not know that supreme erotic attainments demand the highest intellectual abilities, or the utmost freedom from traditional superstitions about conventional morals. He does not know that his own greatest intellectual development is conditioned on his own fullest erotic development, which he can achieve only by the deepest and most searchingly passionate pursuit first of the soul and second of the body of his inamorata. His tendency toward gross bisection makes him accept the common shallow opinion that physical and spiritual are far as the poles asunder. He does not know that what he thinks the keenest physical pleasure is, as physical pleasure, far inferior to what it might become for him if he treated his evening love to the full illumination of his intellect and his reason. He also thinks and still erroneously that he can purge away all earthly love from the woman of the mother-imago class and find for his wife, whom he will later love spiritually after he has satisfied his physical passions, a woman absolutely pure of all human passion.

He makes the serious mistake of thinking he can love on a sort of departmental plan, a plan that may work well in his business or in any other egoistic-social sphere, but in the erotic is an utter failure.

He thinks, in other words, that he has passions that should be called base, and that he can gratify these desires with one type of woman. That their baseness is only a matter of the autoerotic mode in which he gratifies them has perhaps never occurred to him. Nor has he ever known that no passion can rightly be called base if gratified allerotically, which is the opposite of autoerotically. For allerotism is the passionate love not of self but of another. No one could be called in any sense unethical who gratified his own desires only through the gratified desires of another. But that is not the state of the well-to-do young man with a clandestine “love” affair.

The hardest thing for this young man to see is the fact, which is quite patent to the unconscious both of the young woman and of himself, the simple fact that his interest in her is merely autoerotic. Some indeed will say that they are fully aware that they are keeping up secret relations with women for purely selfish reasons. They see that, in their day life, business is business and one has to sell and buy; and they wrongly suppose that the selling and buying of women’s bodies is no worse than business. The woman gets well paid for her services. Indeed they may, if they have read him, quote Ellis, who contrasts the reward of the average wife and the average demimondaine, and says that the prostitute is much better paid than the wife, and does far less for the economic reward she gets.

But the young man who thinks for a moment that there is anything really erotic in the relations between himself and the young woman whom he disdains to make his wife, knows no more of erotism than a butterfly does of the depths of the ocean. His case is simply that of an undeveloped embryo. His autoerotic love is a wasted gonad that has never met the cell with which alone it could completely fuse and grow into an individual of its appropriate species.

Not all sexual acts are erotic. Many are no more truly erotic than smoking a pipe or chewing gum. The man who for egoistic-social reasons refuses to confine his love to a woman he has married or intends to marry, and thereby removes all chance of the vivifying effects of true erotism being caused in his extra-marital life by the depth of his marital love, is starting in the wrong direction every time. He has left undeveloped the truly erotic part of himself, which, thus banished into the unconscious, will nevertheless, through its indirect manifestations, completely warp his sex life. He will have no love life whatever. In spite of its frequent occurrence in men in general, sex life without love life is a monstrosity.

Erotism, then, may be defined as the highest expression of sex, from which all autoerotic impulses have been removed, or in which they have been so much subordinated that they play an almost negligible part.

§ 50

In our competitive economic social structure of yesterday and today the egoistic-social factor has been stressed to the utmost, almost, indeed, to the breaking point for all civilized people, quite to the breaking point with many of them. This egoistic tendency has evidently changed if not perverted much of the pure love instinct. It has, for instance, caused woman to judge man by his success in economic competition and also to adopt for herself a competitive modus which has spread itself over so much of her activities as in many cases to make her his rival in the activities in which for the time he happens to be engaged.

No work that has to be done in the world is any more peculiarly or properly the work of one sex than that of the other. All work, implying as it does duty, is egoistic-social. No work is erotic; and nothing erotic should be work and so have in it the effort that is connected with duty. Anything looking like work that enters into the erotic sphere is just so much egoistic-social activity. Erotism is the play side of life. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” needs to be reworded into “all egoistic-social strivings and no erotic living makes Everyman (and Everywoman for that matter) an emotional moron.”

Ships are not ordinarily navigated by women, but women could probably navigate quite as well as men if they had equal experience. Some women evidently think they are magnifying their own ego if they take up any occupation simply because it is or has been generally known as man’s work. Yet no man presumably seeks to magnify his ego by becoming a chef or a maker of women’s clothing.

It is strange that we should continue to make financial success an aim for all young men, when innumerable experiences have taught us beyond a doubt that happiness comes not from material success, but rather material success from happiness.

No man can develop the egoistic sphere of his personality to the limit of its potentiality if his erotic sphere is rotten to the core. And it is rotten in many men. No man can feel right toward the outside world or any part of it if his love impulse, the very core of his being and prime mover of all his acts, is so overgrown with egoistic or social fears that he cannot give expression to the most essential part of himself.

§ 51

The egoistic instinct becomes social, even before the intelligence perceives that it may be made subservient to the erotic instinct, quite as soon, indeed, as rivalries, even in childhood, appear for possession and enjoyment. After the child reaches puberty and recognizes the egoistic-social impulse as a possible means of furthering the gratification of erotic desires, it becomes associated with these.

This extension of the egoistic-social interest under the dominance of the erotic is more and more, in modern times, beginning to take on a phase of spiritual growth in distinction to merely material aggrandizement. It is not the best, in any respect, for a man to acquire, for the sake of his wife and children, wealth and social or political or artistic distinction. Indeed, many children are overburdened with the illustrious traditions of their forebears and are even hindered thereby in their own self-development.

A man married and had three children, two daughters and then one son. By the time his son was old enough to desire luxuries the father was wealthy enough to provide them without stint. In doing so, however, he made it plain that the son was expected to follow in his footsteps in the business. The story is common enough where the son becomes simply a wastrel without positive character of any kind.

Not so, however, in this case. The father’s extremely positive and aggressive character produced a different reaction in the son, who had a positiveness of his own. Remaining absolutely unspoiled by the luxuries by which he was surrounded, he continued to disappoint his father by becoming what the elder man thought the most ignominious of all—a teacher, and soon reached the summit of his profession as head of a department in a great university.

To this career, however, the father’s great egoistic-social success in amassing money did not in the least contribute; rather it hindered it. The son’s progress would have been infinitely easier without the rigid egoistic-social atmosphere in which he was brought up. The ill-concealed sneers of the father prevented the son even in his youth from developing a genial open-hearted sociability with which he was by nature endowed, and made his contacts with men and women unnecessarily difficult.

§ 52

The parents’ happy married life, irrespective of wealth and distinction, is the best possible heritage for their children. The father just mentioned could not in any sense have been called happily married. He considered his wife an abject idiot and acted accordingly, domineering over her to the utter extinction of any personality she might have originally possessed and thereby deprived the son of even as fine a mother ideal as he might have had.

If to a happy married life showing itself to the children in every incident of the home and its management is added the best type of sex instruction, both physiological and psychological, the parents have done their duty, and have succeeded, as far as any parents could, in transmitting an environment in which the superiority of the erotic over the egoistic-social impulses is daily recognized.

An exceedingly common environment is the opposite one where any erotic impulses of the children are not only frowned upon but are practically declared by the parents to be either non-existent or impossible of any form of expression.

Psychoanalytic treatment of various neuroses strikes, unsuggested by the analyst, the sexual factor, as Frink says in his Morbid Fears and Compulsions (page 225), in the second or third interview. Most neurotics are brought up with no legitimate sex instruction. It needs a fair and open discussion between parents and children, in absolutely matter-of-fact terms, to prevent sex from becoming compressed, if I may be permitted to use the term in this way. Sex is forced into the focus of attention of many children by being the only topic about which they may not speak to their parents in confidence. The utter exclusion of the erotic from the child’s life is the final compressive factor which reduces it into the smallest possible compass, into dangerously explosive density. The exclusive emphasis on the egoistic-social in the bosom of the family drives out the erotic from the consciousness of children in the only situation, where it would be more ethical than in any other. Many children never see their parents in puris naturalibus, though there is no logical or psychological reason why they should not, and many psychological reasons why they should have experiences that would prevent them, boys as well as girls, from the shock of some later chance revelation.

Many children never see any endearments between their parents, partly because when the children are old enough consciously to notice these, they have ceased to take place. The marriage of the parents has run down. They are no longer lovers but purely egoistic-social business partners in the home.

But where should a tradition arise, and how be perpetuated, of a noble type of marital love, except in and by the children’s home? How should they learn anything or where should they best learn of married happiness except from their father and mother? If they see better marital relations evidenced in the homes of the companions they may visit, surely they will at least unconsciously realize that at home all is not well, and the unconscious principle of identification will make them think that as their parents lacked warmth of affection so they themselves must or will.

Homes in which the marriage of the parents has run down are not the best homes for children. The parents realize this and try to act out frequently a love which they no longer feel in their hearts. But all acting of this character is absolutely transparent to the unconscious of the child.

The best parental environment, the one that gives the erotic its due, is that in which the child is allowed to remain a child until he is required to develop certain phases of the egoistic-social environment. The best home environment is that in which the parents are themselves, and particularly the father, emotionally, i.e. erotically, adult and not, as in so many homes, emotionally childish.

The emotionally childish status, in the erotic sphere of many parents, is due at least partly to fear, which is purely an egoistic-social emotion. Love has in its pure state no such emotion as fear but the fears that are so commonly associated with the expression of love are all of egoistic-social origin.

While love is properly identified with sex, there being no real expression of love that is not fundamentally a sex expression, there is every reason why love should be freed from acquired associations with fear; and if the fear which has, through puritanical views, attached to sex could be removed from sex and therefore from love, people today would be able to live a much more fully expressed life; for the inhibitions irrationally associated with sex have taken away from life an inestimable amount of health, strength and beauty.

The inference from this is that the only possible time to prevent the acquirement of inhibitions is early childhood, and the only possible people to do it are the parents.

The perfect love pattern will never spontaneously originate with the man of the world; but with his children it may if he will, if both parents will, practically refrain from interference. The parents know well enough, sometimes consciously but more often unconsciously, that their love pattern is a poor one—poor in conception and poor in execution. It is poor in joy and rich in misery. According to this perverted pattern they have lived their own love, and if they but pause to think, they will withhold their hands and their words from interfering with the illumination which is slowly reaching the younger generation, but which blinds the parents’ eyes to true life values.

§ 54

In order to be a wholesome one, the relation between the parent and child must involve a wholesome relation between the two parents.[15] You cannot prevent divorce and prostitution if you do not develop before the children’s eyes a marital pattern which will put both of these family evils out of commission. You cannot annihilate even an idea by repressing it into the unconscious. In order to obviate in the next generation the worst features of this, we must recognize them intellectually and react to them emotionally; and to be specific, in order to remove as far as possible the chances of divorce and prostitution in our own children, we must show them an environment in our own families in which the marital pattern is such that any deviation from it must be revolting to the little boy and the little girl who are now getting their first impressions of married life from their own parents.

§ 55

Instinct in Humans Generally Inadequate or Misleading

Instinctive reactions are adequate responses only in natural environments before civilization has set in. The more complicated life of modern civilization renders purely instinctive reactions more out of date than a twenty-year-old model of an automobile.

Not only is mere instinct not a good guide in the egoistic-social activities, but in the erotic life it is almost worse than useless. This is so because modern life is so different from the prehistoric environment that humans are today unable to follow erotic instinct, or even, on account of traditional inhibitions, to get at it in its purity.

We live today in an environment so preponderantly egoistic-social that the majority of motives for any act are egoistic-social ones, and only a small fraction of them erotic. This makes it as difficult to follow erotic instincts as for a compass to point north, when a magnet is lying three inches to the east of it.

Instinct alone would naturally prompt a boy and a girl to dwell long over the preliminaries to the love episode. If left together and alone, they would take some time to reach an erotic acme, and would instinctively find that out last of all, as is so beautifully described in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, and so delicately suggested in Paul and Virginia.

Not only has the social convention of the present day tended more and more to inhibit the introduction, prelude, first and second acts of the love drama but it has raised such a barrier against the third act as to give it an entirely disproportionate value in comparison with the others.

§ 56

There are three separate fusions involved in any perfect heterosexual union: (1) the bodily fusion of the man and the woman, (2) the fusion of their souls each with the other and (3) the fusion of the soul and body of each more closely together.

The last comes from the man on his side and the woman on hers, each seeing the world more sub specie Amoris—as manifestation of erotic passion; but it also comes from the fact that the admission into consciousness of the innate erotic reactions, in spite of the opposition of environment—the legitimate admission of these feelings—vitalizes not only the physical body of man and woman, but also all the multitudinous and diversified contacts of both man and woman with people and things.

Instinct alone, if it were possible to follow it unchecked, would lead to those three fusions; but the sex instinct in men and women has been so submerged by various forms of prohibition that even in the married state most husbands and wives do not know of the joy of any of these three fusions.

§ 57

One type of instinctive behaviour is the almost universal tendency to reason by analogy which frequently turns out to be a reasoning by false analogy and by association of the contiguity type.

It would be quite as reasonable for a woman to say that, because a prostitute enjoys roast beef or lobster (or anything between), the pure wife should feel it a sin to enjoy good food.

Of course there are people who think it is wrong to enjoy anything, but while overgratification from food or drink has a certain essential sensuality about it and gluttony was one of the “seven deadly sins,” there is no psychological principle according to which intense enjoyment is rightly prohibited, providing the consumption of food does not exceed the necessity of the body for growth and restoration of tissue. Up to that point the more one enjoys one’s food the better for himself and incidentally for everyone else. If, however, the enjoyment has to come from an increase in the amount consumed or the cost of it, then a quite unjustifiable element of unsocial action surely enters.

One should enjoy food, and the more enjoyment the better, provided the enjoyment does not depend on the increase in amount or expensiveness of it.

Similarly there is every good reason why both women and men should enjoy sex and regard it as quite as necessary as food.

Instinctively both women and men would do so if their sexual instincts were accessible. Those men and women to whom their instincts are accessible do gain their greatest comfort if not their greatest happiness through the uninhibited expression of the sex instinct.

§ 58

If the greatest happiness in life be something other than the emotions incident to the fusion of man’s and woman’s beings in the love drama, then, whatever that greatest happiness may be said to be, it is surely conditioned on a happy marriage. Those who think otherwise are not happily married and they need to become so before their words can have any authority. Those not happily married have, of course, no means whatever of knowing at first hand what is, or should be, implied in that term.

§ 59

Instinct has taught the woman to expect strength, physical or spiritual, or both, of the man. Let it not be forgotten that mental and spiritual strength is a perfect substitute for physical strength. It does not mean that intellectual ability is the equivalent of spiritual strength as the former may be coexistent with an emotional undevelopment which is the same as spiritual weakness. A man may, even a child may, be an intellectual prodigy as a chess player or mathematician without implying any emotional development in the direction of normal erotism.

In this the sexes are different, for woman’s instinct here guides her rightly. Biologically she is unconsciously forced, against her will, and quite without her knowing it to test her man continuously for some kind of strength. For some women indeed physical strength is all-satisfactory but in the majority of cases of civilized woman physical strength, without an accompanying spiritual strength, which will insure the necessary erotic control of her by her husband, will always leave her disappointed and discontented.

The qualities instinctively called for in the woman by the man are the opposite in some respects. He unconsciously, if not consciously, expects sweetness, docility, compliance, adoration in his wife, all qualities that are a necessary background and basis for his childish and autoerotic enjoyments. It is almost unheard of to find a man who takes pleasure in the negativism which characterizes the child and also many women, and in the opposition which alone, when deftly overcome, constitutes the only proof that he is or has been purely masculine and creative in his positive activities in effecting a change in that part of his environment.

It may be objected that this demand for compliance, softness and accessibility in woman may not be purely instinctive; but, if it is not, it is of such early origin as to be undistinguishable from true instinct. It is the common experience of every infant to be treated with the utmost tenderness by its mother.

§ 60

When the average unreflective man meets opposition, in any degree of strength, from his wife he tends to reËnact the mother-infant situation in his own married life. This results in the husband’s reproducing more or less exactly the original infantile tantrum. Naturally he tends toward an explosive use of force when he does not find in his wife the qualities he has sensed in his mother. However much he may conceal or transform the outward manifestation of this infantile trend, the trend exists and is a positive factor in the situation which contains the wife’s opposition. From this it follows that instinct is a better guide for women than for men.

Woman is in every way justified in her demand for strength in her mate. Man is wholly unjustified in expecting sweetness, adoration and the other qualities except perhaps the docility implied in the susceptibility to male control in the erotic sphere which is undoubtedly innate in every woman. It does not occur to him that the negativistic opposition of woman is her means of testing his own strength, and that he has in it the best possibility of proving his essential masculinity. That he should totally ignore the opposition by the sole means of suggestive replacement of her antagonistic ideas by the ideas which he knows are the best ones in the situation, and that he should convince and persuade her through his perfectly confident attitude that this type of action on his part is exactly what she is instinctively trying to evoke in him by her apparent perversity, are too infrequently even glimpsed by the man who relies on his instinct.

§ 61

From the erotic viewpoint it makes no difference whether a woman is well dressed or not or even tidy, provided her ill-dressed condition does not interfere with her physical health. A woman in rags wielding a hoe or a rake or even a spade may be just as radiant and have just as fine and attractive physique as a lady in silks. It is a fallacy to suppose that erotic attractiveness consists only in the cosmetic art. This motive to keep herself in the pink of visual perfection appeals only to sight, and is at bottom more egoistic-social than erotic, however much the woman may think she is making an erotic impression by her appearance. The conscious appeal to sight is frequently only an overcompensation for her erotically unsatisfied condition.

As sight is only distant or vicarious touch, it is evident that the visual appeal is only a substitute touch appeal. That a woman with a homely face may be erotically attractive then is no paradox. The beautiful face is only the symbol of the “skin you love to touch.” The visible symbol may be absent and yet the kinesthetic quality be present. Furthermore all lovers who take pleasure from the sight of beautiful lines of the human form are only vicariating for kinesthetic sensations. The original sculptor is the caressing hand.

§ 62

In modern human civilized life instincts in general, even irrespective of the sex of the person in whom they are manifested, are the worst possible guides. The love instinct is also among the worst, simply because its present-day vestiges are so overlaid with restrictions and conventions that it cannot be seen clearly. It has been so inhibited that it needs an apologist.

When looking at the two broad divisions of egoistic-social and love instincts, one has to have demonstrated the essential superiority of the love instinct and its far greater ability to cause happiness, health, and, in the deepest sense, success.

Over two thousand years ago Aristotle saw, and said, that the greatest satisfaction comes from fullest use of all one’s powers. Today we are beginning to realize, after the study of the ductless glands, that there is a kind of reaction in the body not mediated by nerves, as are muscular reactions, and that we have, in the hormones, a mode of interaction between the parts of the body that has been as yet unnoted by physiologist and psychologist alike, an interaction that places marriage in the forefront as a necessity not only for health but for the fullest development of our latent powers.

§ 63

For among the dozen or so ductless glands, which Berman[16] has called an “interlocking directorate” of all the human activities, is the interstitial gland which places in circulation in the blood a hormone that vitalizes all the secretions of all the other glands, and which requires for its own perfect working the concomitant and synchronous perfect working of the homologous gland in the mate, in the other demi-human of the complete social unit. In other words perfect physiological health is secured in no better way than by marrying provided marriage is complete marriage and not merely a “Platonic” or business relation.

From these considerations it is evident that as motives for action that leads to happiness, the erotic instincts (if we can succeed in extracting their ore from the mine of our unconscious and refining it from the dross of egoistic-social accretions) are infinitely superior to the egoistic-social.

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