Evolution has produced in man a being in whom the erotic has now a greater significance than the egoistic-social impulse. In the development of plant and animal forms, science recognizes certain new productions that differ from the norm of the species in which they appear, in such a way that they were at first called freaks or mutations. But as they breed true to their form, they are necessarily regarded not as freaks (lusus naturÆ), but as well established varieties.

The establishment of the erotic as a norm in humans has the further implication that here we have a phenomenon existent nowhere else in life, namely the non-procreative or social love episode.

Indeed it may be that love itself, as distinguished from sensual desire, is a mutation on the psychical level, a form not recognized in any description of natural phenomena until late in man’s evolution—the love that comprises both physical and spiritual reaction for the man, and both physical and spiritual counter-reaction from the woman. Without this interaction man cannot be said truly to love.

For the man of today, who has succeeded in placing the erotic above the egoistic-social impulse, has achieved a height that few, if any, have attained before him, has gained a joy and fullness of living compared with which the so-called happiness of successful marriage according to former standards is but foredawn to noon-day.

The existence of this higher type of erotic control leading to the establishment of the non-procreative or social love episode, brings into clearest relief the distinction between control as repression and control as expression.

Control as expression is analogous to driving a horse and getting somewhere, control as repression is like unharnessing him and letting him run away. Control of the erotic instinct by repressing is not like shooting the horse, because repression never annihilates an impulse but only removes it from conscious control.

Keeping in mind this difference between control by repression, which is only apparent, not real, annihilation, only removal from consciousness and not destruction of the impulse, we shall more easily note the necessary connection between self-control and individuality, i.e., personality.

His individuality is just what he makes up his mind, and exercises his utmost imagination, to do. His work is his own, only in so far as he controls his actions in doing it, so that they are better than the external demand. If he is an office boy and told to put stamps on envelopes, he can do it and only it, or he can put them on so quickly or so straight that the quickness or straightness is immediately seen as his particular part of the performance.

He can control the actions of his work and his play; but, except indirectly, he cannot control his digestion, respiration, blood pressure or circulation. He has to eat more digestible food, or to take more exercise, or to cultivate pressure-raising emotions, or those that lower the blood pressure.

He has been taught to believe that his physical constitution and his instincts are tendencies inherited from his ancestors and that he cannot control them. If his instincts or inherited disposition make him lose his temper so that he is not himself, he is supposed not to be responsible for all he does.

But is he freed from responsibility because he is temporarily governed by his instincts, or is he steered by his instincts only when and because he throws away responsibility? Is it impulsive, instinctive action that excuses him, or is it excuses that are wanted by him, which makes him call his action, or the part of it he wants to be excused for, instinctive?

Is not his only reason for calling some actions instinctive or impulsive the fact that he does not want to be held responsible for them? What he cannot control is not his fault. Therefore, what he does not want to be blamed for he says is not under his control. Any thing, person or mysterious power can be made the scapegoat for his misdeed. Much more likely is he to blame other things, persons or powers for what he does contrary to what he thinks people want him to do, than to account for some praiseworthy action by saying it was the result of some power other than himself.

If his marriage has turned out unhappily he consoles himself by saying all marriage is a lottery. If it turns out well he pats himself on the back and says, in actions though not in so many words: “See what a fine match I have made!” But why should he take only praise and put blame on some mysterious power—luck, or providence or what not?

§ 129

His sexual instinct is most likely to be assigned to some mysterious power. But it is no more mysterious than his heartbeat and no more miraculous than the growth of his beard or finger nail. In spite of the fact that he has not given them much thought, his sex instincts are as much a part of him as any tissue of his body.

The same principle applies to the praise or blame attached by others to the acts which his sexual instincts prompt him to do. If he kiss a strange girl in an environment where strange girls are kissed by everyone, his act is not blamed. So it is his own act and not inspired by some unholy power (unless indeed he has to explain to someone how he happened to be in that environment, or he would have to blame that on his instinct).

If his amativeness shows itself in any place where that form of self-expression is frowned upon, he will be mentally preparing excuses, even if he does not have to use them, and he will simply say he was forced by his irresistible impulse to do that very thing.

If his environment consisted at the time of one woman whose unconscious passion was already directed toward him, she might call upon him for an explanation which of course she wouldn’t really care about, but any sort of explanation logical or not would suffice, because the demand was only conventional.

He takes the praise for what is conventionally praised in his actions. He shifts the blame to anything not himself. Also he takes the praise, if any is accorded, to anything that has cost him much effort. He leaves, or dodges, the blame. So the two ideas according to which he reacts to praise or blame are the idea of whether the actions praised or blamed are his, the result of his conscious effort, and the idea of whether or not the actions or their results are pleasant.

§ 130

On this principle he does always the next best thing to what he thinks is expected of him provided he cannot or fancies he cannot do exactly what people look to him to do.

This praise and blame, coming from other people and this looking to him, to do this or that, are both examples of the control society is exerting on him from childhood up. The clothes he wears, the books he reads, the plays he sees, everything he does is at least partly dictated to him by the people with whom and among whom he lives. If he knows people expect him to wear a linen collar and silk tie he puts them on if he has them. If he has only a collar he puts that on. If he has no linen collar he possibly puts on a paper or celluloid one.

At any rate he gives them the next best thing in any and every line coming up as far as possible to their demands.

In sexual instincts there is only one conventional demand; namely, that, except in marriage, he repress them entirely. The next best thing, the celluloid collar, in this case, is any and everything society calls non-sexual. He may waste his time playing cards and his money on the races or the stock market, and if he succeeds in getting excitement enough out of them to prevent his thoughts turning to sex topics he will have the comparative approval of society. If he leaves women alone entirely he will be called a clean man. Anything short of actual criminality serves as the next best thing to sex in the eyes of conventional society.

Society to date makes only this negative demand on him. It as much as admits that it has nothing to do with sex and still less with love. That simply means that society is so blind it has not yet seen that it can get anything out of sex, or of love either. Society has no eyes, no arms, no lips. Why should society be interested in the employment of these parts of men in amatory ways? They need not expect it to. They have no need to look to it for such things.

Society on the other hand wants the individual’s time and energy devoted entirely to professional, commercial and artistic ends, and grudges him every moment he spends in doing and thinking along lines of pleasure and advantage to himself. Society plans the rÔle of the gods in the old Platonic fable before mentioned (§ 46) but has taken the half-humans and halved them again.

Society, unlike the fabled gods, however, wishes each of these to devote full time to making, manufacturing, buying, selling, even fighting, which always makes more work, but never to loving, which it considers a mere waste of time. Children it wants, but they can be begotten without love; and the less love the greater numbers.

Society therefore completely ignores the individual. It tells him to make chairs and tables but never to make love.

§ 131

One has to reflect thus, so as to disentangle the motives that rule one’s actions. The most individual and intimately personal motive is love. One’s strongest individuality, if one can discount society and be oneself, is seen in the ability to make love.

What a man most controls is most himself. Those actions that are most controlled by forces outside of himself are least his own. In his thinking he has to learn inseparably to link individuality and self-control.

He has been taught from infancy to give up doing what he wanted to do himself and do what other people want. All other people want him to do almost the opposite of what he wants to do himself until, with punishments, retaliations, and all sorts of rebuffs, their wants have snowed under his instinctive desires with such an avalanche of prohibitions that his actions are about ninety-nine per cent controlled by the kind of selfishness that consists of selfishly trying to please other people for a release from this snow pressure, which release is called approbation or praise.

The impulses which come from the avalanche are the egoistic-social motives, social because they come down upon him from everyone with whom he comes in contact, egoistic because he is really protecting and pleasing himself by following these motives.

But one can see for himself how much of the control of his ordinary every-day actions is his, how much is the control of the avalanche.

Really then the only thing left to the individual is his love impulse. Society is not interested in it, or does not see that it is. Society would be a very different thing if it had eyes. It might have some sympathy. The individual’s love impulse is the one bit of leaven in the human mass today. It is the one thing he can call his own, the one thing whose expression he can control. But society has taught by implication that that is the one thing he cannot control except by annihilation.

So it appears society has shown quite Machiavellian abilities in checkmating the erotic impulse which is the individual impulse par excellence. Society is confronted with an apparently antisocial influence and reacts to it on the low intellectual plane of trying to destroy it.

§ 132

But control is not annihilation nor is annihilation control in any sense whatever. If you cannot train a horse by shooting him dead, you cannot drive him by poisoning him. If you do you haven’t got him.

If you kill your love impulse you haven’t got it. You cannot kill it, but you can knock it in the head so that it is unconscious. Ascetics have done it. Society would as lief you did it yourself.

Your love impulse, not the Sunday school variety but the full red-blooded variety of woman-loving (or man-loving) impulse is not only the most individual thing about you because it is capable of the most complex development in your case but it is the most valuable dynamo you have generating endless power whose source is the sun itself.

Control of the love impulse therefore, and not annihilation of it, is the individual’s most personal advantage.

§ 133

An essential difference obtains between the average man’s control and the average woman’s chiefly in that the woman’s is a control by repression, virtually, of course, no control at all; while the man’s control wherever it exists is a control through expression.

It accords with the nature of masculinity and femininity that the control of the woman’s erotism, if it be a control through expression, is the control exercised over it by the man. Any control she may obtain over it cannot but be the control by repression. In other words no woman has any control over her own erotism except the ability to refuse to express it, and even that she may lose if she meets the right man. And no control is exercised over her erotism except by her true mate, if she is thus developed by him.

The man’s control over his own erotism is a real control only after he has succeeded in freeing his psyche from the mental autoerotism in which he has been born, and has achieved a real allerotism. No consideration need be given to the objection possibly raised here by some; namely, that the double standard of sexual morality that obtains so widely may have given the man a taste of allerotism, and may thus have given him a control through expression. But it must be clearly understood that no clandestine liaison of any sort whatever, except where there is a true love of one woman, to the social recognition of which there is some insuperable barrier, has any real value as an erotic control through expression.

Finally in the differentiation between masculine and feminine erotic control it may be said that the woman needs and can, by the nature of the circumstances, have no control through expression herself. She needs no release from her own natural autoerotism. Her love problem is toto cÆlo different from man’s.

§ 134

The question—Are not all healthy men prone to relax their erotic tensions more rapidly than women?—may be answered. Possibly they are, but they need not be. If a man is sick he is more likely to feel like crying, yet he does not always do so. If a man receives any great blow, he is proportionately more likely to regress to the stage of infantility.

Healthy men, on the contrary, need not be short-winded in the love episode any more than in playing a baseball game, painting a picture, singing a song or writing a book. It may be that no art can be taught. Even if this is true, we shall always attempt to teach arts of all kinds. It may be that the art of love requires a certain amount of innate taste in a man, for him to make any great progress.

History has shown a few great geniuses and a few great lovers. Few great lovers figure in history because the average human adult married lover has no penchant for advertising himself. The average childish married man can, however, learn to take steps in the direction of adulthood in married relations, even if he never becomes truly great as a lover.

This is indeed the most important point of all. Divorces in large numbers and unhappy marriages in still larger numbers occur simply because the husband will not have, or has not had the opportunity to learn the main lessons of the married life, the greatest of which is that it is his privilege to insure his wife’s attainment of the erotic acme, preferably before his own, but at least simultaneously, and every time his own occurs.

They are not truly mated unless this plan of simultaneity or succession is followed whole-heartedly. If it is not now followed, it must be begun at once, and the only method is through the appropriate action of the husband.

A baby takes its mother’s milk and gives nothing in return except smiles and gurgles and sleep. A man taking his wife’s body and giving her no adult emotional return for the emotional catharsis he gets himself, except the infantile smile and sleep, is himself no less a baby.

And she will “mother” or “baby” him, first, and unconsciously hate him later. Asking him if he has his rubbers, his umbrella, his overcoat and the thousand and one things that more or less consciously irritate him, show (but, in the average man, only to his unconscious) that what really irritates him in these minor solicitudes is his manifestly infantile situation.

§ 135

This complete lack, on the woman’s part, of any ability whatsoever to secure erotic control over man leads her to try, unconsciously, of course, to compensate, for her inability in this region, by securing egoistic-social control over man. This she succeeds in doing every time she meets a man who has not yet developed from a mental autoerotism, in which he thinks that she has pleasures to bestow upon him and that he has to get them from her, with or without payment of egoistic-social services.

It thus appears that woman not only has no exclusively erotic control, which by the nature of things belongs entirely to man where he has developed sufficiently to assume it, but also she invariably confuses the two types of control, getting a vicarious satisfaction from different forms of egoistic-social control, and missing, in a great number of instances, the deep biological and organic satisfactions from the exercise of control over her by the man.

A hazy notion that happiness is her prerogative at least in the first months of her marriage leads many a woman to believe even to the extent of a virtual hallucination that she is happy, i.e., that she is erotically controlled by her husband.

A love episode in which this control has not been secured by her husband, or in which he may not even have tried to secure it leaves her in a state of psychical conflict. She consciously knows she ought to be supremely happy, unconsciously she feels blankly unhappy; and if, as so many women are, she is without erotic insight, she fancies that her husband has slighted her in some purely egoistic-social action.

Woman’s negative control in the erotic sphere results in the complete depersonalization of her body.

§ 136

Unconsciously as well as consciously she wishes to find all pleasure in her honeymoon, and so strong is that wish that she is impelled to believe that all the several experiences of it are pleasurable. They must be pleasurable or she must admit that at the start even, she is not happily married. This is the state of mind of those who enter the married state with the most disingenuous sincerity. Those who marry with any initial conflict, such as feelings of guilt for any previous illicit sexual adventures, are more unfortunate.

Those whose wishes for happiness are so strong as to interpose a rose-coloured glass between their eyes and their actual experiences are deceiving only their conscious selves. One cannot deceive the unconscious.

Unconsciously they are disappointed in the lack of rapport between their own emotional erotic situation and their husbands’. They are in the position of a starving man looking through a plate-glass window, at a restaurant full of merry feasters.

According to her bringing up she may repress all or a part, or none, of her natural resentment at this situation; and the resentment is going eventually to make her more exacting of her husband, if she is to surrender to him even her impersonal body. For impersonal her body does become even to her. She regards it as belonging by law to him and she will not virtually inhabit it when he is with it. At his approach she flees from it every time. And as this flight is an unconscious, though a real flight, we cannot blame her if her husband will not, or cannot, take enough care of it and its reactions to enable her to assimilate the necessary food of love.

She will think: “He says he loves me, but I know only that he likes my body. I begin to hate it because it does not give me the satisfaction it does him. I can’t understand it a bit. It’s a strange world. But I suppose it’s got to be as it is. I can’t do anything about it.”

And she cannot, if he will not or cannot. Is there any more powerful deterrent than despair to prevent a young wife from being able to produce in herself a relaxation of erotic tensions? Her usual course, when she begins to despair thus is to deny to herself that she has any sex feeling at all. Her husband then agrees with her and calls her frigid. This crystallization of her feelings not merely retards but annihilates whatever abilities she has to express her love in an erotic way. She fortifies herself with the compensating thought that sex is, as she has always heard, sinful, filthy, nauseating. Her face begins to become hardened, to develop a wrinkle or two and she is in a fair way to become an anti-something.

She begins to realize that he has not done this or that, such as remembering to post a letter or make a purchase or keep an appointment with her; or he has contradicted or opposed her in some judgment concerning practical every-day occurrence. He has not done what he should have done, to be sure; but not only does she not know what that thing is but she has no means of knowing what it is. She therefore is forced to express her dissatisfaction with him in terms of a sphere of impulse with which she is acquainted; namely, the egoistic-social. She cannot talk to him in a language of which she knows not a single word.

The relations between a new bride and her husband in their first love episode are those of an examination or test. The bride tests the groom, of course, in the majority of cases unconsciously. There is nothing else for her to do. There is no test she has to meet. By the circumstances of the case she is not required to do anything for the conscious performance of which she is to be judged or tested by anyone. She has not to do but merely to be, to exist—as if, asleep, to be awakened.

The unconscious situation is quite the reverse. The husband is the one who is tested. If he fails in any detail of this test there remains in the story of his actions a lacuna which she has no means of filling, but which forms the nucleus of a doubt in her unconscious mind and the centre toward which all subsequent failures on his part tend to congregate in such numbers that she may become later completely skeptical. She will say she knows he loves her. To be sure, he does a thousand little things for her all of egoistic-social, none of truly erotic value.

If he even once takes these virtually friendly, unconscious examinings of hers as real evidence of hostility or lack of interest, he is failing her where she feels it most keenly, and is beginning to lose his control of her erotically. If he continues to be switched off the main track by her well-nigh inquisitorial attitude he as much as admits to her that he is not longer able to come up to her standards—a humiliating admission for any man to make to any woman.

Kittens are born blind. Women are born love-blind. No woman is other than anesthetic, which means “not perceiving” until she has perceived something. And there is nothing for her to perceive except what her husband does.

Woman’s negative control, coming as it does from her anesthesia which is innate in her and is removed only by the proper kind of marriage, makes her “uncertain, coy and hard to please.” If not met and handled erotically by a man who has abandoned autoerotism, it develops in her a degree of opposition, antagonism, obstinacy and resistance that is completely misunderstood by a man without erotic insight.

§ 137

Women confuse the control on the egoistic level with that on the erotic level, because the latter prompts them to keep testing their men in the unconscious attempt to assure themselves of their own security. This testing is done on both levels. When it is done on the upper or superficial level of egoistic-social acts it takes the form of all varieties of fantastic and capricious behaviour. The most “temperamental” woman is using her moods only to try the steadfastness of the man concerned, although she is quite unaware of the unconscious motive. She either cannot explain her actions or she assigns reasons that are pure rationalizations. When the testing is done on the erotic level it sometimes assumes the form of coldness or anesthesia.

Women will later come to see that their use of egoistic-social tests is only an indirect manner (and never a reliable one) of assuring their erotic security, but they will attain this insight only after they have made the distinction between the two groups of motives and have given to the erotic its true superior value.

If the young bride has had the good fortune to be enlightened on sexual matters, and thus to be prepared for a descent upon her of an expression of force which otherwise is easily too great a shock, she may even welcome its impetuosity.

If on the other hand, as is almost universally the case, she is ignorant of sex, her reaction to an uncontrolled husband will be one of utter despair. The majority of educated women today have been brought up with all the inhibitions which crass ignorance of sexual psychology produces. As a precautionary measure many of them were instructed by their mothers that boys and men are uncontrolled brutes and should not be allowed to touch girls, who are destined to become married mothers.

Therefore the majority of women enter the married state with faces at least slightly averted from sex, just as some religious sects train their believers to wash in the dark and never under any circumstances to look at their bodies undraped, much less any other persons’.

So the chance is that the husband will have as his first duty to eradicate this sex inhibition, for which his wife is in no way to blame, for as a child she started in the right direction, and was misdirected by her parents, guardians or teachers.

If a man is constitutionally unable, or has trained himself to be unable, to control his own emotional catharsis, and must see to his own satisfaction, before (or even instead of) his wife’s, the prognosis of happiness, if he gets a woman with the sex inhibition, is negative.

§ 138

That the soul as well as the body of the newly married, in their first love episode, should be inexplicable and unreservedly “blended with the only other soul and body in all the world for him” certainly requires a mental ante-nuptial preparation that has rarely been attained in the past. It implies the belief on the man’s part that the woman should have from the first exactly the same true physical and psychical ecstasy that he expects himself. How many men think that?

It must be admitted, however, as has been indicated above, that the woman’s erotic development progresses, and that in some cases it takes months and even years for it to reach its full expansion. In the meantime the hasty, anesthetic husband has lost his grip and, unconsciously unwilling to grow up with his wife, remains at his selfish, animal level.

Incidentally, too, he holds his wife there; for it must be remembered that the wife’s erotic development, on which depends not merely her contentment, but the stark possibility of her becoming more than a gynecoid female, is absolutely nil, if it be not developed by her husband. This is unequivocally a one-way process. All the latent love and beauty of being and action on the woman’s part are dependent solely on the ability of her husband to unfold her.

§ 139

It may be argued that the woman’s erotic acme is conditioned by the prior or simultaneous emergence of the man’s. But this argument is the working out of a defence mechanism coming from the unconscious of the man. He makes this statement not because it is true but because, from an autoerotic phantasy, he wishes it were true.

The statement, too, may be sincerely made by the woman, but, if it is, it is because she has heard him make it or correctly inferred from his unconscious actions its tacit existence in his mind. It is shown in another place that there is always in the man’s unconscious a phantasy that his part in the love episode will produce his wife’s erotic acme at once and without effort on his part. This phantasy amounts in some cases to an hallucination.

§ 140

It was said above that you cannot control what you cannot see or touch or otherwise perceive. To what you cannot see, you are blind; to what you cannot hear, you are deaf; to what you cannot smell you are—but there is no English word for that, so we have had to take a Greek word—anosmic. Similarly if you could not taste, touch, feel, you would be insensible. There are many more forms of insensibility than merely being knocked out in a fight. The insensibility to the penultimate one of the various phases of the love episode has been called in a woman anesthesia. In the love episode of the hasty husband there are innumerable reactions of his wife to which he is insensible, anesthetic; but which would be a revelation of supreme joy to him if he could but see them; therefore it is better that the love episodes should take place in the light rather than in the dark.

Yet not alone the visually perceptible reactions. For there are reactions of every variety. If you have ever used a blow pipe on a piece of copper, and observed the iridescence which soon comes, you will realize the same beauties in every sense preceding the complete annealing of your wife by the heat of passion you engender in her. If you have ever watched the iridescence of a spraying fountain in the sun, you will see the same effect in the emotions of your wife when the relaxation of tension has broken up her being into fine particles that float slowly down and refract the light rays of your love. And the beauty and calm of the rainbow after a summer storm is nothing to that of the mental state of a woman after the downpour of her erotic passion.

All these are features to which the anesthetic man is insensible. Although the similes used are visual, there is not a sense quality that cannot be thrilled by the perception of the woman’s reactions. And although the similes rather hint at the finale than at the preliminaries they all refer to the effect produced on the woman by the activities of the man. The kinesthetic sense of the husband must be developed. He is much wiser if he will give these sensations some appreciative study. It will help to give him control by taking his mind off the burden of tension he has to carry himself, and enable him to acquire over his wife that domination in the exclusively erotic sphere which is essential not only to his wife’s happiness but to his own.

§ 141

Anesthesia is love-blindness. Love is pictured blind because he does not see defects. The worst blindness of love is its not seeing beauties. Most husbands’ love is blind. This is the anesthesia meant. When one is given surgically an anesthetic it is to make one insensible to pain. Love anesthesia is the insensibility to the love emotions which are stirred in every man by every woman.

Can a man be aware of these appeals, made by every woman, and choose to remain true to the woman he has married? What good would be done to him if the anesthetic to which, by virtue of conventional repression, we are all subject, should be suddenly removed? Would not such a man be irresistibly impelled to make love to any and every woman he saw? Where then would monogamy be? But if monogamy depended on anesthetics of this type it would be on a very insecure basis. It would not endure a week.

Yet most men are love-blind, are anesthetic to woman’s deepest erotic appeal. Furthermore the securest protection for monogamy is the removal of that anesthesia.

§ 142

This doctrine of the supremity of masculine erotic control will be objected to, and by the best of women. They will say that they get their joy in perfect marriage from the knowledge that their husbands are made happy. They will also say that it is only fair play if there is a give and take on both sides, and that the denial of woman’s control relegates them to an inferior position.

They misunderstand, however, the biological foundations of the marital state if they consider woman’s position of receiver and not giver as in any way implying inferiority. They confuse erotic control, which is demonstrably a one-way control, with egoistic-social control, which is quite as normally exercised by women as by men, by women over men, as by men over women.

They fail to see also that the secure establishment of the one-way masculine erotic control will so satisfy men that no dispute can arise as to the rights of women in the egoistic-social sphere. They fail to see also that the solid foundation of truly erotic control over them by their husbands will release for egoistic-social activities an enormous fund of energy which is now irrationally locked up in the erotic sphere. In other words if they are fortunate enough to be married to a man who is in perfect control erotically they will not need to worry about his approval of whatever they may find interesting to do in egoistic-social spheres of action.

§ 143

The excellent women who may on theoretical grounds, object to their husbands’ supreme erotic control, are merely echoing the sentiments of traditional convention, which are man-made sentiments, made by men centuries ago, dictating what was right and proper for women to do centuries ago.

Today there is nothing, even in the ordinary every-day service a man receives from his wife that he would not rather have servants do for him—cooking, house-tending, clothes-mending or the supervision of these. If he were rich enough he would.

But the personality reaction in the most intimate psychical as well as physical relations of married life he can secure from no other than a true wife, and in no other sphere than the exclusively erotic and in no other way than as she, like the vibrating string of a musical instrument, responds to his technique.

§ 144

The main thesis of this book is that in the instincts and emotions of love the self-control of the husband and, through this, his control of the exclusively erotic emotions of his wife are essential to a successful marriage.

A continuous interplay of control on the egoistic-social level between husband and wife tends to exist in all marriages. There is an impulse in women to control the actions of men at this level quite as much as men attempt to control women. But the control of the egoistic-social impulses of each by the other has nothing to do with real marriage, and the impulses and emotions peculiar to it, which are erotic only and, at that, subject to a one-way control.

In the sphere of the erotic emotions man should be supreme. Neither husband nor wife is ever really happy unless he has this control, and is indifferent to the other control on the egoistic-social level.

The facts that control is neither annihilation nor repression, that control is of the very essence of personality and individuality, that biologically man’s control of woman is the only control needed in the erotic sphere, and that woman, not being able to control there (and feeling, if she be not controlled, a need which she unconsciously interprets as a need to control others)—all these are facts that are of slight importance, however striking they may be, compared with the fact that man, on the average, is brought up without knowledge of the erotic control he needs to assume in order to make both himself and his wife happy.

The unsatisfied woman experiences the fact that she has bestowed upon her mate unutterable joy and bliss. A satisfied woman’s recognition of this fact, however, cannot occur at the same time that her own erotic acme takes place, for at that particular time she is as oblivious to anything save her own sensations as if she were the only being existing in the universe, and her sensations are as indefinite and infinite as though she were taking chloroform. She must, in all the processes leading up to her temporary psychic dissolution, realize that these processes are being accomplished for her by the being and doing of her husband-lover. She may not ever know exactly what he does do, but she is translated—and by her husband.

§ 145

The man of the twentieth-century type gets his supreme gratification, not from anything that is done to him, nor yet from any sensations which his activities produce in him, which indeed he could get blindfolded from any living woman of similar proportions and somatic reaction, but from the knowledge his own visual and tactual sense gives him of the effect of his acts on his partner, the physical and psychical effect which his being and doing have not on himself directly (which is the ordinary autoerotic procedure) but indirectly on him through the body and soul of his mate.

The analogous statement cannot be made about the woman. To be sure, she both is loved and loves, both is desired and desires, but she can herself do nothing that gives the man other than autoerotic pleasure. His joy, on the contrary, comes not from what she does to gratify him directly. His appreciation and response to any artful action on her part is a feminine reaction, and while excusable in egoistic spheres of action is inexcusable in the erotic.

For he neither wants her, nor does she want, essentially and biologically, to be the active, creative factor in the love episode, just because this factor is the exclusively masculine factor. Her unconscious reaction to this reversal of masculinity and femininity may amuse her for a while, as a variation; but it cannot continue. Conscious purposive action on her part gives neither her nor him a lasting gratification, as it is a step in the direction of psychic autoerotism on his part to receive such satisfactions.

Her reactions on the contrary should have such a degree of spontaneity and unreflective artlessness as to give him assurance of their being true unmeditated responses as sure and inevitable as the chemical action in an opening flower, but as purely hypersomatic (spiritual) as they are inevitable.

Otherwise, he will never be able to know her as she is. He will know her as the traditional suggestion of her environment has taught her to be. This pervasive influence of environment, which is well enough in egoistic-social impulses, is wholly out of place in the erotic sphere.

The truly modern husband will wish more than any other thing to know his wife as he himself alone can know her, and will more and more consciously resent, as the century grows older, any egoistic-social conventionality slipping into the purely erotic.

In order for him to gain his greatest joy from marriage with this particular woman, she will have to be made sui generis. The only means toward this end is her utterly unpremeditated, spontaneous response, unclouded by the suggestions of tradition as to how she ought to respond.

A woman thus rendered sui generis by her husband’s erotic control will more than fulfil any requirements or specifications of a pattern of romantic love. Such a woman, thus known by a fully percipient husband, takes on for him a value, transcending far those of the ordinary so-called loves of the every-day, mildly contented variety, and becomes for him alone, incandescent with vitality.

The considerations offered in the preceding paragraphs point to the conclusion that the average man’s lack of erotic control is due first of all to his mental autoerotism.

Man’s lack of erotic control is due also partly to a certain anesthesia on his part, taking the word in its etymological sense of a failure to perceive.

He fails to perceive that his function in married life is giving and not receiving. He also fails to perceive the difference between woman’s spontaneous reactions and those suggested to her by her environment. He fails to perceive that woman’s resistance has a deep biological cause and that she is unconsciously forced to test him hourly. He fails to perceive that she inevitably confuses erotic and egoistic-social instincts.

§ 146

The man to whom the love episode is only an animal sex act, a swift and dizzy whirl, is one who, so to speak does not in advance plot out the trajectory of this flight, does not let the component factors enter his consciousness for long enough to observe them and devote some conscious love to them. These innate associations are there in his unconscious; but his training has repressed them. Such a man to whom the love episode is like a swift gulping of strong liquor has no time to reflect upon its various bouquets and glints in natural and artificial light.

The ideal enactment of the love episode, if permitted to enter consciousness in the proper manner, enables one to prolong it, because this admittance of new factors into consciousness, that were all along in the unconscious, gives a reason for stopping and taking account of the phases of it as they occur. The most important phases are those where the husband takes note of the effects of his being and doing upon his wife. The hasty husband is the one who has no regard for any other’s feelings save his own. If his own were the only ones that existed, he would of course have no reason to retard his own erotic acme. With an insensate spouse he might go through the love episode as often and as rapidly as he wished.

It must be kept in mind always that there is a definite biological cause for the slow progress of woman through the phases of the love episode—the inescapable necessity that she shall assure herself continuously and beyond the slightest doubt of the erotic strength of her partner.

It is probable that the women who are not slow in this progress are in a sense degenerate, if that term have any real meaning. They would be the ones who would not, unconsciously, of course, express that biological need for impregnation by the strongest male, which is expressed by the average woman in her slowness. They would tend to reproduce what might be called a lower order of humans in which the erotic in itself, the hypersomatically or spiritually erotic plays a much smaller part, an order of humans that were nearer the animals than those humans who have amplified the erotic factor.

The hasty husband, as will later be shown (§ 158), unconsciously reasons that his own speed demonstrates his quick and masterful control over his wife’s erotic emotions. This unconscious fallacy is made worse if the wife has followed the doctor’s advice to simulate an erotic acme in order to preserve the marital peace.

If the effect on her of his mere presence were so overwhelming, and if, as soon as he embraced her, she soared into the empyrean of ecstatic bliss, his mere embrace might have the effect at once of producing, in her, her own erotic acme. This would, however, imply either that she was herself weak, judged by the standard just given, or that she had assumed, without testing, his superior strength in the erotic sphere.

This assumption is an exceedingly rare one, depending on an inference from mere physical muscular strength, or from the fact of a great egoistic-social reputation. In other words such a woman might think that because her husband was or is an athlete his physical strength implies erotic strength, or that because he was a famous man he would be a great lover.

§ 147

The husband’s lack of erotic control based on his own lack of perception renders him too precipitant in the love episode.

It is believed, on the authority of physicians and such others as have studied the subject, that the love episode, in about seventy per cent of civilized marriages, is but a one-sided affair from the first. This is due almost exclusively to the impetuosity of the husband during the first weeks of marriage. Sometimes under the inspiration of the purity of his bride-to-be, or from an increased cautiousness against the chances of contracting venereal disease, he abstains from resorting to prostitutes.

If this practice of his has come from a belief on his part that he was obliged, as he believes all men are, to relax his sexual tension periodically, he will generally believe that his temporary pre-marital continence is piling up tension in him, and he will approach his bride for the first time with an idea probably that his tension is greater than it has ever been in his life.

A very important distinction must here be kept in mind; namely, that between the perfect erotic love episode, free from conflict, and involving both hyper- and hyposomatic levels of the personality, and the imperfect, illicit sex act. It has been pointed out[24] that the physical sex act does not relax a true love tension, that the instinct itself may not be satisfied even with numerous hyposomatic sex activities.

If, therefore, the young husband be of the type that believes that an illicit sex act invariably produces the desired relaxation of erotic tension, he will be the more likely to give way to an impulse that has a large proportion of the purely hyposomatic (or physical) factor in it. This abandon on his part will exclude all possibility of mutuality. He will thus lose at the start the possibility of that control which he might have gained over his wife’s erotic reactions, had he been able to control his own. And he would have been able to control his own but for the erroneous belief that the tensions he relaxed clandestinely with the demimondaine were the main tensions, which undoubtedly they are not.

It is obvious that the annihilation of his bride’s natural responsive actions that results from his faulty procedure is fatal to married happiness.

§ 148

This hastiness marks the love episode on the part of the average man. What he wants is a reaction that is to take place in himself, for which his bride is merely the external complementary mechanism. The purely mechanical side of this he could either purchase from a courtesan or seize against her will from an innocent “honest” girl, but he fears venereal disease in the former and trouble of accidental paternity or discovery or both in the case of the latter. Eventually he regards both types of women with equal impersonality. Either is merely food for his sexual (not erotic in the highest sense) hunger, and it is his own sex hunger that he is bent on appeasing, with absolutely no idea of the difference in erotic value between the two types of women, in the way he acts. There is none, for neither is more appropriate to his spiritual need than hay would be for his stomach.

The man who desires a wife either for the purely sexual or for the purely domestic motive has no conception of marriage whatever. If he is influenced either consciously, or unconsciously by such a motive he might as far as his own sole advantage is concerned, confine himself to sexual affairs with prostitutes. He is unaware of the new light that has been thrown on love by the recently acquired knowledge of the work of the ductless glands. He has never heard of them, of course, and could not be expected to know how intimately they are connected with each other and with his entire mental and physical welfare.

What he later finds out, and that with no help whatever from science, but from tough experience, is that the two things that he craves—namely, sexual satisfaction and all the good things of domestic life—are in some way inevitably and more and more sundered. His wife either is and remains “cold” or acquires suddenly or gradually a coolness which increases to actual pseudo-frigidity. He notices a change in her. He knows he has not himself changed.

The change should have been in him and then there would have been in her a change which would have gratified him instead of disappointing him. But, never having been taught how to behave in the most intimate relations of marriage, he is feeling the results of his ignorance just as would a landlubber feel eventually the resulting shipwreck if he undertook, or were forced against his will, to pilot a big ship. The husband should be the matrimonial pilot, but he has received no course of instruction in that form of navigation.

§ 149

Haste in the husband comes primarily from fear. Fear makes the thief hurry through his thieving. The pickpocket must be so deft and swift that the victim’s consciousness is not aroused to the theft. But a true husband-lover is not, in the love episode, stealing anything from his wife, no matter how much his actions may resemble those of a thief. His aim should be not to avoid arousing her consciousness, but to awaken it to the gift he is offering her.

Fear makes anyone telescope, curtail, syncopate and abbreviate any act, selecting out of all the portions of the act some element of it, considered perhaps the cream of it, and cutting out all the rest of it. Fear alone—the fear felt by the thief—is unconscious motive enough for haste on the husband’s part. If he did not fear her erotic acme, or her reactions that occur prior to it, he would not repress them, or allow her to repress them. Why should he fear to give his wife the same erotic acme in every love episode that he uniformly gives himself?

He fears—unconsciously, to be sure, for the most part—that, if his wife develops so strong an erotic reaction, she may have an irresistible craving to satisfy herself when he is not present, thus giving herself to another.

Haste in the husband is therefore due to a fear that he may lose his wife’s passion, if it be aroused. He does not realize that the modern educated civilized woman is unable to give herself to any but the one man who has first aroused her deepest passion; and that the more educated and cultivated she is, the more surely she is centred upon the one man about whose being the entire erotic sphere rotates as on an axis.

Man’s fear that his wife may be or become “oversexed” is at least a part of the cause for his haste in the love episode. Unconsciously, of course, he does not want her to have the same ecstatic pleasure as he has himself. Not only because, in his squinting regard, this puts her in the prostitute class, but also because he fears her becoming too passionate for one man and therefore requiring two or more. This is based on an undercurrent of opinion among men that a woman’s sexuality is fundamentally stronger than a man’s; and that her comparative leisure in view of his own, will tend to foster in her the desire for sexual gratification.

Added to this is the other erroneous supposition, common among ignorant men, that excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the love episode has a weakening effect on the man. Viewed as excretions, as the seminal products have been until today, it would seem quite illogical to fear an evacuation of these at least once a day. But although they have been regarded as excreta, there has always been an unconscious belief in men that their retention somehow strengthened the brain. Still a way has been pointed out (see § 100) for the love episodes to be continued without this fear.

A consideration favouring the erroneous belief that the seminal products should not be ejaculated too freely is the phenomenon of a certain lassitude and inactivity following the love (?) episode as it has been hastily put through by many men. On the contrary the perfectly balanced love episode cannot have this unpleasant result. It ensues only when the episode has been imperfect either through too great haste or through the lack of suitable response on the wife’s part. If both share equally, i.e., if the husband reserves his own acme, the result is perfect. It cannot be perfect in any other way than that perfectly shared in flawless mutuality. The evocation of the suitable response on the wife’s part lies wholly in the husband’s self-control. Whether the effect is caused principally by psychical or by physical causes, it is he that in all cases is responsible. Without his proper conducting of the love episode, she is impotent and anesthetic. She cannot feel what he does not do. She cannot see what he does not show her. Who can blame her if her unconscious passion, over which she has never had, has not now and never will have any control, is magnetized by the really superior conduct of another man?

In brief, divorce is in the power of the husband to render imperative or impossible. The wife has essentially nothing to say in the matter except that she has found in her husband a rover among women, a beast that treats her brutally or an ignoramus who is not competent to be either a good husband or a good father.

§ 150

Some men are always delighting the conscious life of women by the intensity and frequency and rapidity of their emotional relaxations. Such men seem so generous in their spending of the small change of emotion. But they are always maddening the unconscious of their women, whether these women be wives or mistresses, for they are repeatedly, almost universally, taking in the woman’s presence, and through the instrumentality of her presence, what she cannot herself get, and what she has biologically an expectancy, if not a right, to have. Such men are practically annihilating the chances of their own and their wives’ happiness.

The woman that is governed by the egoistic-social instinct unwittingly plans for the man’s hasty emotional relaxation, the while completely holding her own emotional reactions in check, under perfect repressive control. In the average civilized woman brought up under sex inhibitions this control by annihilation is the only control she has. The ability thus to annihilate the finest possibilities of erotic reaction in herself is the result of the only training many women get. It is the fine art of the prostitute, but not all of hers, however. The rest of it is to simulate a loss of control on her own part in order to effect the aggrandizement and unconscious sense of superiority on the part of her patrons.

This conscious retaining of erotic control is, to be sure, based on the biological necessity of man testing. The best of women cannot of themselves let go their own erotic control. It has to be taken from them by men who are emotionally their superiors in strength.

In so far as it (woman’s tendency to lie) is “almost physiological”[25] and based on radical feminine characteristics, such as modesty, affectability and sympathy, which have an organic basis in the feminine constitution, and can therefore never altogether be changed, feminine dissimulation seems scarcely likely to disappear.

Woman’s tendency to dissemble is dependent on her unconscious reaction of testing the male. But she must test her male for the deeply biological purpose of finding out whether he is strong enough for her. He needs to be, for her purposes, only stronger than she is, to be strong enough; although, when this motive is sometimes transferred to consciousness, she may become a fortune hunter or vampire, and throw away any man for the next egoistic-socially stronger she finds available. This does not of course refer to physical muscular strength but to psycho-sexual strength. If physical strength were enough there would be almost no divorces and no marital unhappiness.

§ 151

Her testing her male, therefore, whether it is in pre-marital egoistic-social relations or after marriage erotically, is a resort to the negativism (which is indeed a characteristic of infantility). This negativism is seen in the critical attitude which is so intense in some of the later incidents in married life. And in the first love episode any coolness on the bride’s part is a tacit resistance which seems to say: “I am not yet fully mastered. Any opposition I present to you is no more than what as a man you should be able to overcome. You may be my superior in physical strength but there are numerous kinds of strength. I did not obviously marry you for your physical strength much as I appreciate, value and need it. But the love episode,” she continues unconsciously, in blushes, averted gaze, occasional paleness, interspersed with impulsive advances, all of which are here set down in their equivalent words, “the love episode consists in far more than physical violence. In fact for many centuries physical violence has formed no essential part of it. It has on the other hand a tendency to fluctuating, wavering, more or less trembling behaviour, that to the uninitiated appears contradictory or inanely silly. If you are upset or disconcerted audibly or visibly by any of the obstructions I am placing in your way, you are really not strong enough for me. By my instinctive need for being controlled, I am impelled to see how much strain you can bear, how strong your mental and spiritual nature is, for I need that control more than anything else in the world. I hope you will not fail me at this juncture, for I want above all things to find a firm base to which to attach the wavering, vacillating, fluctuating algÆ of my emotions.”

All this she says in her actions, while her words may be: “Oh, Rob, you certainly are awkward. You don’t understand me a bit.”

How tragic if Rob should take her words as gospel truth and substantiate them by showing any irritation whatever!

§ 152

Possibly this is the place to say that if the young husband shows surprise or, worse, irritation at any of the, to him, seemingly bizarre acts of his new wife, he is providing her with exactly the reaction which her careful and thorough unconscious is looking for, finding which it says to itself: “Well, if I find many of these defects, farewell! I’ll attach myself to some other man.”

Whereas consciously she is triumphant in her power over him to make him anything from miserable to blissful.

This unconscious tendency to test the husband, based on the biological necessity of choosing a mate at least slightly stronger spiritually, psychically, mentally than herself, determines much of the actions of a maid with a man.

In married couples where the man is properly schooled in love, this wrangling on a low level does not take place except at its minimum at the outset. Frequently the woman immediately senses, unconsciously, that the man whose attentions she is receiving is of the stronger type necessary to compel her emotional submission.

This theory admits the possibility of perfect marriage between the lowest and highest types of intellect (which is an egoistic-social expression, not erotic) with proportionally happy results.

It also shows how every married couple can reinstate themselves in the most satisfactory mutual relation, even if they have already started on the wrong path.

If the husband realizes that he is only being tested, and by a sympathetic examiner who really wants him to pass the test, and that it requires only a little thinking on his own part to make him erotically a fully followed husband instead of a led one, he will certainly give the necessary time to visualizing the pattern his actions will have to take thereafter in order to make him successful.

In married couples where the man does not know or cannot learn the erotic principles, the surface wrangling based on the perpetual unconscious test continues, involving more and more of the couple’s egoistic-social activities, until finally it becomes so acute that nothing can prevent an open rupture.

In other couples where the man’s reactions satisfactorily answer the woman’s first tacit interrogation, the dramatic testing automatically stops.

Woman’s tendency to dissemble thus includes not merely verbal lies but also all forms of her behaviour toward her husband. Of course, if her erotic nature is entirely engaged she will have (for example) no possible motive to spend his money above what is needed for pleasing him through her developing her own personality in every way, or in acting in any capacity whatever that would in an egoistic-social sense be to his detriment, for through the perfect love episode she so strongly identifies herself with him that all his interests, even the egoistic-social, are superlatively hers, quite in contrast with the wife whose love impulses have been ungratified.

The wife with the ungratified love impulse reacting unconsciously, as described above, with irritated but unsatisfied desires, unconsciously reasons to herself on the talion plan because she has not risen from that to total identification. The irritated but unsatisfied wife, still on the “eye for eye” level of reaction, unconsciously says to herself: “If I cannot get something out of him one way, I will another, to pay for all he is getting out of me. If I cannot make him give me a real love episode I will make him give me other things. I will buy what I want and send him the bill. He shall give me money if he cannot give love. Love is what I want but I must have something.” This is unspoken, but still it exists.

A man cannot feel what isn’t there without phantasying up to the point of hallucination. But what isn’t there is simply what he hasn’t put there in the way of response to appropriate action on his own part. He cannot put it there if he is mentally autoerotic. (§ 112).

He must know in advance what to expect, and what is the necessary expression of woman’s erotic feelings. If he does not, he is doomed to surprise of an unpleasant character; for he will either be disappointed when he finds that his wife’s reactions are not up to his narrowly limited pattern or he will be embarrassed by a too great gush of feeling on her part and an arousal of passion so tremendous that he does not know how to handle it.

This embarrassment is related to a certain type of mild disgust or aversion felt by men to whom some women make advances not considered truly feminine by the men. This does not refer to the brazen self-assertiveness of the prostitute which is by most men clearly recognized as egoistic-social. It refers to a truly erotic abandon sometimes seen in a woman who absolutely throws herself upon the man that has inspired her fancy. This attitude makes impossible for some men the satisfaction of victory or conquest.

This too great abandon on the woman’s part evokes in such a man the thought either that she is sexually more potent than he (an erotic reaction in no way connected with egoistic-social impulses); or that her own environment has been such as to bring out this expression in her. If she has been brought up in a family where love needs are frankly recognized, their wholesomeness will make her much more responsive, at once, to her husband’s love.

Naturally he will be neither embarrassed nor dismayed, if he has himself been trained to believe that his capacity for woman’s love is, if fully developed, as great as or greater than any woman’s could be. If he was thus well oriented, he would be pleased rather than otherwise to be relieved of the task of removing love’s inhibitions from his wife.

§ 154

Fate is inscrutable and mysterious. Dame Fortune is a mother-imago. The husband who does not understand his wife is a child who does not understand his mother. According to her fancy she may give or not give what he wants her to bestow upon him. Children comparatively early learn to manage their mothers, but the man who has failed to learn how to control his wife erotically has not advanced even as far as these children.

Such men are the ones who profess to revere the mystery in the feminine nature. They are simply a case of arrested emotional development. There should be no mystery in marriage. There is plenty of room for passion and romance without demanding that there shall be in it any mystery whatever. The inscrutability of the mysterious expression on the face of the Mona Lisa was the expression of Leonardo’s extreme infantility, the erotic childishness of a man who never really loved a woman as a man should.

Man’s projection of mystery upon woman is his infantile attitude toward her expressing his unconscious desire not to give but to receive.

What constitutes the husband’s complete erotic control is the removal of all mystery, his full perception of all the factors in the erotic situation. One of these is the actual fact as to whether or not his wife has in the love episode reached the erotic acme.

He frequently thinks, if he is one of the numerous men without insight, that she has; when as a fact she has not.

It is sublimely stupid for a doctor to tell the wife to pretend that she has reached the erotic acme in every love episode, and to say that no man can tell whether or not she has reached that degree of exaltation; so she might as well deceive him in order to keep the marital peace. Such men as follow this advice have not the remotest resemblance to human men, nor do they deserve to retain the love of their wives even if they have once gained it. One can tell whether a person is unconscious or not, or if she sleeps or not. A real husband can tell whether or not his wife has reached the erotic acme.

§ 155

The unconscious inference of a man’s reaching the erotic acme is that his wife has done the same in the erotic episode or surely will when he does. This feeling is so strong as to make almost everyone take the sign for the thing signified. The thing signified is the woman’s utter surrender. It is signified by the sign, which is the man’s losing or letting go his own control. Prior to the wife’s erotic acme there is no time during the love episode when the husband’s loss of control will not affect his wife’s unconscious adversely. She will surely though unconsciously resent his throwing down his burden of tension before he has torn hers from her, because his own tenseness is his only instrument wherewith to operate on hers. His desire lapses with his relaxation. Her relaxation cannot take place if he loses his tenseness before she does, even if it be only one second before.

Men would make happy marriage certain if they should universally grasp this idea; namely, that their letting themselves go entirely without the prior or simultaneous erotic acme on the part of their wives, is putting themselves on the same level as the animals without, however, being in the animal environment.

To that level the wives cannot sink; yet the husbands allow themselves to do so almost without exception. Because of centuries of repression their wives are not able to respond to the erotic situation as rapidly as they do themselves, and yet the husbands act as if they responded fully. This type of behaviour is practically equivalent to producing a hallucination in themselves.

To use a term from pathological psychology, every husband who does not secure his wife’s erotic acme before or with his own, actually hallucinates, for his own benefit, that reaction on her part. He is exactly like a man walking along a level sidewalk and making as if to step upstairs each step he takes and thinking he is climbing—in so far, just crazy, that is all.

It would be much better in some ways for a husband of this type to renounce love episodes forever, for such actions form no part of a real one; they are as productive as half a pair of scissors without the other half.

This solitary vice in a husband (masturbatio per vaginam) always comes from his hallucinating the effects he should produce instead of producing them. He is alone with his wife in his sexual (not love) episodes because she is practically not there. He may never have thought of the question as to where she may have been. She may have been mentally in the arms of another man. “With another person and yet alone!” is a terrible thought.

Yet when we think about what we see and hear among so-called humans we must realize how much alone all except the very fewest are, alone because they have not yet discovered the only method of not being alone—the supernal communion of one man and one woman. The few men who have learned how to love, and the exactly equal number of women whom they have taught, are the only persons in the world who are not absolutely and completely as alone as would be a solitary chemical atom in an illimitable universe of space.

§ 156

All the crowds and jams of people we see are merely, for the most part, huddling together, as an unconscious compensation for the sickening loneliness they feel in their heart of hearts. We see them in amusement parks, and in all places where hordes of people congregate; and undoubtedly a part of the impulse which moves them is their unconscious solitude for which they get only consciously perceptible consolation in the sight of each other and rubbing of elbows and treading on each other’s feet.

If one should ask if sex is the sole or major motive in all this the answer would be, by no means, if physical sex is all that is meant. The need is for companionship which many followers of crowds, not having the companionship furnished by the complete love of a man or a woman, fancy they get from the sight or elbow-touch of masses of people.

The deeply, profoundly, thoroughly married couples are the only ones who have no need to fear anything that comes from incompleteness. They neither crave nor are averse to other people, but the most fully mated never appreciate crowds very highly. Into their own mystic circle of binary personality they cannot take a third.

For these thirds there is no hope but to find each his or her own complementary personality. The women wait; for there is nothing else to do. They cannot find by looking; they can only give themselves the gaunt consolation of distracting their own attention from love until they are found by the proper men.

For in spite of the great popularity which George Bernard Shaw gives to his ideas by putting them in epigrammatic and striking literary form, the truth is manifest to all who think straightforwardly and do not believe in a statement simply because it is paradoxical and therefore emphatic—the truth, namely, that women are not the choosers but if there is any choice they are the chosen, and are themselves utterly helpless and must remain inactive.

They can try to attract men but the more they try, the more will the erotically developed men unconsciously and unerringly infer that there is some weakness about them that necessitates this strenuous attempt to compensate for it. The harder they try to attract men, the more suspicious do the men become, particularly those having any deep acumen. As for the men being simply the helpless puppets of a sex of sirens—it is ridiculous.

The world is made up of the unmarried, the truly mated and those ill-assorted thirds whom ignorance has left unhappy and helpless until knowledge comes to the male partner.

§ 157

Many of these third persons are the wives of ignorant husbands who have hallucinated the fusion which they have never made. The husband fancies, perhaps, that the fusion can be effected by the wife; that all he needs to do is to submit himself to the wife as dispenser of delights and that by merely having him she will glow and burn with the heat necessary to fuse their two souls and make them a whole instead of fragments. Delusion! Hallucination!

The child says to a stick, “This is a horse.” The child husband says to himself, “This is my wife,” whether he knows it to be a fact or not. And curiously enough the child knows he is only fancying; but the man, in thousands of instances, does not know it.

This unconscious, and therefore almost irresistible, tendency on the part of men to believe the existence of what they wish is the main obstacle to man’s control of the erotic situation. Based on biological necessity, which in the merely instinctive acts of animals secures the sexual reaction on the part of the female, the unconscious phantasy still persists in the human animal, the phantasy that the erotic acme of the man causes that of the woman every time. But it is a phantasy in the majority of civilized marriages and tragically enough it may be the only flaw in some where congeniality and affection are flawless.

The bridegroom has this definite task before him to know his wife, for he can never know her before marriage. His knowing is a process of perception, the failure to perceive being a form of anesthesia in himself. Adam knew his wife—the only good he brought out of Paradise and fully compensating for the loss of Paradise.

When he knows his bride he will know exactly how much resistance he has to overcome in order to develop her. She cannot tell him anything in words, for no woman can know. Not even the most experienced woman sexually can put into words exactly what unconscious resistance she may have to even a virgin-pure man.

The bride’s resistance is just as real a force as is the gravity in a pile of stones. At the bottom of that pile of stones his bride’s soul waits and he has to remove them one by one; actions which take as concrete an amount of psychic energy as if they could be measured in foot-pounds or kilowatt hours.

§ 158

The groom not only has to see what resistance there is, but has to know that he must remove it all. The bride herself has no more power or control over these resistances than she would if she were literally buried under tons of rock. She depends entirely on his work to get at her soul. Will he ecstatically embrace one of these stones that cover her up? Like the child calling a stick a horse, will he say: “This stone is my wife. If I can believe hard enough, she may change, in my eyes, into my wife and I shall be spared the effort of releasing her from the weight which now oppresses her. How sweet and tender this stone is! How it throbs and palpitates as I squeeze it tightly in my arms! There, it has melted entirely. Dear wife!”

Insane? Yes. And the woman herself, alive and breathing under the load of stone which antiquity with more than bestial blindness, with infinitely more than granite heartlessness and marble stupidity has heaped upon her for centuries, is so deeply buried that she cannot herself even direct her own release. Dimly she hears her man apostrophizing with love the outermost stone. Will he ever get the sense to drop it, pick up one after the other of those overwhelming her, and actually penetrate to her and grasp her in his arms. Good heavens! How can intelligence be conveyed to that imbecile?

Or instead of hearing her husband hallucinating her release by means of rapturously caressing a stone that holds her down, she may have the still more poignant agony of hearing him make love to a woman already released from her bonds by some other man.

“Damnation inconceivable! Is he, my husband, willing to take the woman whom other hands have released, whom the work of other men has made practically theirs, and whom he virtually steals, or as a beggar accepts like a fruit skin from another’s feast?

“Or is it,” the poor soul may think to herself, “that really in my own true being, I am less attractive than the women whose weight of oppression so many men have cheerfully lifted? What have I done to make myself so unattractive? Must I curse my parents, who have, besides, perhaps, helped to entomb me alive under these stones?”

§ 159

The situation in many marriages is not less tragic than this. The husband in this case has either not been able to see the obstacles that lie between him and complete emotional fusion with his wife, or if he has seen them, he has not thought himself able to remove them. In either case he may be more ignorant than to blame; but not after he once gets the point of view of this book.

His accomplishment, the only virile accomplishment in the world, is plainly before him. He must acquaint himself with the exact amount of resistance and repression; and he must remove it piece by piece if it takes a half a century. He must realize fully that it is a piece of constructive work, and that no one else can do it for him.

§ 160

The anesthesia of the husband and the failure to come up to the constant test are both increased by man’s ignorance of the fundamental biological nature of the woman.

The only remedy for it, which will improve the conditions of marriage and reduce to the minimum infidelity of wives and of husbands as well, is the husband’s deeper knowledge of the feminine element. This knowledge, which should be an essential part of a man’s education, cannot be entirely given him by another, but must be the result of his own observation.

It is obvious that the intimate adaptations required of each marriage are absolutely individual. While all women and all men are actuated by similar unconscious motives, the specific working out of these motives results in an interplay of forces which is different in each individual marriage. There are over a thousand types of this intimate interplay of personalities within the marital state; also the types change in special cases from time to time. It is easy to see, therefore, that the minutiÆ or marital living have endless combinations of possibilities, concerning which the husband would do well to become as well informed as possible.

§ 161

The hasty husband takes his own motions and his own erotic acme, which are but parts, for the whole. He takes the most physical aspect for the love episode. Naming the part for the whole is a sort of metonymy, which is a figure of speech and not literal truth. The hasty husband is in this sense unconsciously a liar. He cannot tell the truth because he cannot know it. If we say that this fragmentary performance of his is taken by him to be logically or intellectually like the whole, we must say that he rates low in discrimination. He ought to know that the fragment is no more like the whole thing than a hand is like the body.

Giving the physical side of the love episode too great a value is like connecting it too closely with the imagination, or with that part of the imagination that is bound up with the emotions. The factor in the sex life of most of the animal-like humans, that is, most closely connected with the strongest emotions, is the acme. In true human love, then, the strongest emotions are reassociated with other elements of the love episode than the acme. And the acme is the greatest desideratum only from the unconscious or instinctive point of view.

The imagination, the power of visualizing (and other forms of representations as well) then involves the power to affect, or to effect changes in the somatic reactions of the husband that render possible the prolongation of a sex act, and its transformation, into a love episode. The imagination of organic sensations in himself, in the normal husband, retards the progress of the love episode for the benefit of the wife. The hasty husband lacks just this imagination and the love episode is hurried through in the manner of an animal sex act.

The husband who reaches his acme of erotic relaxation even before actual contact with his love object has not in consciousness dwelt much upon the numerous preliminaries. Methods of retardation are methods of admitting into consciousness the different innate associations between emotions and the touch and movement sensations constituting the first stages.

§ 162

The use of the imagination as a transformer of unconscious energy is a comparatively modern technique and one made use of with great effect in autosuggestion.

As a transformer of unconscious psychic energy, or possibly, better, a re-shaper, it has sharply to be distinguished from phantasy.

Phantasy is the continuous mental activity that goes on night and day in the mind of every man, woman and child. It consists of visual images, auditory images, tactual, kinesthetic, thermal and a dozen other qualities all combining with each other in the patterns by no means fortuitous, but organized into groups, some of which have been called complexes. This organization is the unconscious wish. The patterns formed are unrelated to time, are unmoral and follow exclusively the pleasure-pain principle.

Phantasy, which is entirely spontaneous, or independent of any conscious volition on the part of the individual, is about ninety-nine per cent submerged in the unconscious. The one per cent more or less that emerges into the consciousness of the ordinary man of the world comes in as day-dreaming or as dreams of the night. In these two forms it appears in a shape least disguised, and is therefore the chief material of psychoanalysis, which is an inventory of the contents of the unconscious of the individual, an inventory that shows what possibilities he has of future better adaptation to his environment. It also shows why the people who are ill-adapted have failed to adapt themselves.

We are obliged to assume a causal connection between the phantasies of unconscious mind and the physiological process in the body on the one hand and on the other the broader life currents of the individual.

§ 163

Only by assuming this causal connection, which must also be a two-way connection, can we explain any influence of mind upon body. From innumerable instances, however, we are all absolutely sure that the mind influences the bodily functions and that the bodily functions influence the mind.

In no sphere of human activity is the influence of the mind on the body more clearly demonstrable than in the erotic sphere, both in its equatorial physical zones and in its polar intellectual zones.

This makes it absolutely incontrovertible not only that man can control his emotions, including the erotic; but that he should, if he wishes to be human and not merely animal.

In the causal connection between hypersomatic (mind) and hyposomatic (body) there is at least one link called the imagination. But the fact that imagination is so broad a term makes the understanding difficult as to how the various mental mechanisms, mostly unconscious, interact with each other.

The fact, however, is well known and admitted by all scientists that the mind does influence the body. It causes changes in the functions of the bodily organs. A purely mental state caused by external stimulation, for example, the hearing of some bad news or witnessing of some tragic occurrence, will alter the internal secretions of some of the endocrine glands, postpone digestion or upset it, accelerate circulation and respiration and cause other changes.

Sex phenomena are no exception to this principle that bodily processes are conditioned, that is, partially caused, by mental processes. Sex cannot be a part of love until love which is hypersomatic (mental) is in control.

It would be exceedingly satisfactory if one could devise a mental pattern for love that would apply to all individuals; but the fact that the various factors are over twenty in number, making over four hundred combinations of only two at a time, render it practically impossible to do more than make a generic verbal formula such as “better and better every day.”

It is impossible however, to get away from the fact that the sense type of imagination has not a little influence in the original rapport that springs up between two persons of opposite sex. Obviously a colour-blind man could not be much influenced by the iridescent beauty of some young women. There are people who are tone-deaf, and, to such, a monotonous voice might not have the deterrent effect it would for some. There are individual variations in the sensitivity to every one of the twenty-odd sense qualities that enter consciousness from time to time. Any of these variations may play a part in the first attraction exerted by young people on each other.

§ 164

Every one of these twenty-odd different qualities of sense impression may enter consciousness from time to time as a representation or reverberation of an original sensation. The commonest of these is sight. The appearance of some facial expression, for example, of an attractive woman, will, spontaneously recur to a young man for a long time. Motivated by pleasurable emotions experienced at the first sight, these visual memory images will recur again and again, each time accompanied by, if not caused by, the continuance or reËmergence of the pleasurable emotions.

But visual images are not the only ones that spontaneously recur. If the individual belongs to the auditory type, there will be numerous auditory “images.” He will hear in his mind’s ear the joyous timbre of a woman’s voice, also perhaps motivated by the same recurrent pleasurable emotion he experienced when listening to it the first time.

Visual and auditory “images” or representations may be supplemented by those of any of the other twenty-odd qualities of sense impression. The memory of a dance recalls a number of these, tactual, olfactory, kinesthetic, mostly, however, in the average person, not clearly conscious.

People have to be taught to see what is before their eyes. They also have to be taught to recognize timbres of musical instruments, intervals between tones, composition of various chords, etc.

Conscious attention must be used to enable some people to recognize the difference between various flavours, perfumes, odours, bouquets of wine, etc.

This sharpening of sense discrimination is accomplished by means of the conscious attention to the various images.

The sharpening of sense discrimination with the assistance of the mental standard supplied by the various representations of former sense impressions involves a change in the sense organ itself if we include in the organ, as we must, its nerve connections with the brain and with other organs.

§ 165

This is how we may conceive the effect of mind upon body. The imagination, composed of its various qualities of images visual, auditory and other, involves the change in the sense organ and in the brain and the other organs connected. We are thus being changed continually, both body and mind, by impressions coming from without and by the reverberations of these impressions that are known as mental images.

Is it any wonder that the drama, and lately the moving picture, is recognized as one of the deepest transmuting influences in human life?

§ 166

Every sense impression is a suggestion. It is a psychological axiom that every idea tends to work itself out into an act on the part of the person that accepts the idea. This is the basis of hypnotism and any form of non-hypnotic suggestion.

It is evident then, that the sense impressions received every second of our waking life (together with the images or reverberations of these impressions that continue to live in the unconscious and appear only occasionally in consciousness) accumulate suggestive force. It is evident that every individual is subjected from birth to a continuous stream of suggestions, some of which he accepts (among them the most often repeated ones).

If these suggestions are formed of images (conscious or unconscious) of health, happiness and triumphant activity, they will be accepted and constitute a pattern for the entire life activity of this individual. And the same is true vice versa.

The impressions thus received constitute the content of the imagination and this content produces either well-being or ill-being (not to say illness) in the individual so influenced.

§ 167

The inference that a wholesome erotic pattern must be provided for young people, and adopted by older married persons, is therefore irresistible.

The only way actions of any kind can be made better is by introducing into the mind a pattern according to which these actions are to be carried out. The only means for introducing this pattern into the mind of a man, if he does not already possess it, is by way of the imagination. The various visual, auditory and other images must be created in the mind of the individual before it will be physically possible for him to follow this pattern.

Mere verbal reiteration of a clumsily worded command or prohibition never provides the imaginative factor which is the essential one. Prohibitions are discussed elsewhere (§ 197).

Thus it appears that the imagination is the vital factor in any action just because it constitutes the pattern of the action.

It is always much better psychologically to show or describe a person doing what one desires him to do than in abstract terms, to tell him to do it.

§ 168

Therefore a love pattern is needed. It is needed by the husband in order that he may control the erotic situation. It is not needed by the wife in order that she may control, for in the erotic sphere control is not hers nor does she want it; but it is needed by her in order to know whether or not she is being properly controlled erotically.

As no two individuals are alike, this makes it evident that the function of the husband necessary to create a happy marriage is to emphasize the mental (or hypersomatic) side of it, for the purpose of including every physical aspect in the most comprehensive way.

Again it must be reiterated that instinct alone can never guarantee a successful married life. The erotologist knows full well that the husband, relying on instinct alone, remains unutterably selfish, and therefore anesthetic, in thousands of cases; and that he can, if he has the confidence of knowledge, make of his wife a whole wife and not, as in the majority of cases a fragmentary wife.

A man should not let his wife remain fragmentary. He should not be content with either the domestic-servant fragment or the cook fragment, nor should he regard her solely as washwoman, stenographer or performer of any other essentially egoistic-social function. “Wife” should be restored to its original Anglo-Saxon concept of “the trembler,” i.e., the thrilled woman. Many men on the contrary speak of “the” wife, exactly as they would say “the” cook, or “the” chambermaid.

Instinct alone, which is purely selfish, in spite of its occasional marvellous faculty of providing for the future of others, can in almost none of the intimate marital relations insure a continuance of completely satisfactory love episodes. Continuance of these alone cements married love and furnishes the foundation for a truly artistic erotic superstructure—a love mansion, having a beauty far surpassing the lust hovels in which, after their tinsel and gingerbread honeymoon cottages, the average married pair spend the remainder of their lives.

§ 169

If, as assumed broadly above, the remedy for the ills which beset the married life which is guided by instinct alone are more excitement for the woman and less for the man, this only in one way suggests a balance which (as many wives consciously or unconsciously perceive) grows less and less as the years go on.

The man advances in his profession, makes more money, gains more or less gratifying triumphs in the world of affairs, joins a club or lodge, meets and has more or less stimulating contacts with more and more of his fellow-men. His wife the while remains mostly in the home, is restricted by the necessity of care of children, if any. If there are no children, she is generally steered by her husband into the least stimulating life possible, for he knows unconsciously that the interest of his wife in other people is mildly displeasing to him. He wishes to own her all—her actions, her thoughts. If he does not someone else will, and she will be, to that extent, not his. It will be difficult for him to reason that this type of ownership is merely the gratification of an egoistic-social instinct. If there is one thing a man should not, for his own erotic interests, want to do, that thing is the establishing of an ownership or possession. Ownership of wives dates back at least to the early Roman times when one had to own and control one’s wife’s whereabouts in order to satisfy oneself, and one’s neighbours, that one’s freeborn children were one’s own.

As a gratification of the egoistic-social instinct, ownership of the wife’s person, property, actions and thoughts is in direct antagonism with pure love instinct, which controls most satisfactorily and gratefully when there is no egoistic-social compulsion acting through husband on wife. Pure love instinct is gratified only when the control is perfected by eliminating all egoistic-social motives of husband or wife from the situation.

This is realized by some young women who marry but insist that they be not supported by their husbands.

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