Marriage, in the sense of a legal bond between two people who are bound together in no other way than that affecting the interests of the egoistic-social type, is not truly monogamous.

True monogamy between two people whose interests are entirely implicated each with the other’s on both the conscious and the unconscious level of the erotic sphere needs a new name for which is offered the term hologamy or whole marriage—complete marriage.

The completeness implied here is that in which both conscious and unconscious affection and passion are involved. The hologamous union is the one in which both partners have allowed instinctive impulses from the unconscious to enter consciousness. Their erotic insight consists in just this admission.

A hologamous erotic union is the assurance of earthly felicity. It is utterly uncaused by egoistic-social factors, though it may yet itself be the cause of egoistic-social success. At any rate it is the most favourable condition for the development of both members of the union along egoistic-social lines. No man now imperfectly married will fail to become more successful in his life outside of the home by improving the conditions of his life within it. The most important condition has been clearly indicated. No woman, now imperfectly married, but is waiting (for that is all she can do) for the time when her husband may chance to improve his erotic technique, or learn from others how to do so.

It is tacitly assumed by both European and American society that either the erotic or the egoistic-social motives may independently and exclusively be an adequate basis for a marriage. On the contrary psychology shows that the erotic one is the only one necessary, and that the egoistic-social is never adequate, without the erotic, to constitute anything but a mildly sentimental business relation between man and woman.

§ 188

The erotic motive is not represented or meant by the ordinary expression used by married people who say, of course, they love each other, or they would not have married. Erotic means more than “inspired by love” in the sense that the uninitiated use the term love, which in common language is of very wide application including even food and clothing and all other egoistic-social expressions. Erotic not only means inspired by love in the most whole, passionate sense but implies also that the persons activated by erotic motives have at least some knowledge of the art of love, a knowledge which includes something about the unconscious factor. Otherwise love has not progressed to its higher phase of erotism, and is mostly made up of affection which is primarily egoistic-social. Love is a word that has become too debased in the minds of most people to serve as a term for what is here outlined.

If on the other hand a marriage is a hologamous one, in which the husband’s egoistic-social motives are duly subordinated to his erotic motive, then the erotic motive, freed from extraneous elements, will cause both his conscious and his unconscious passion to be centred on one woman. No other marriage deserves the name. “Marriage” is derived from the Latin word mas, male, and originally referred only to the woman. She was “manned.”

If we should say today that a woman was thoroughly manned we should be understood to mean that she had sexual relations with one or more men. To most we should not probably convey the meaning that she had been completed, as an originally defective demi-human being, by the necessary complement to fill out her being to the totality of human possibility, or that this completion involved the development in her of an absolutely new attitude toward the world which she could not attain without physical and spiritual union with one man.

This implies also that the corresponding statement should be made of the truly married man. As an originally incomplete or defective demi-human being lacking a complement, he needs to be completely womaned, for which indeed there is no appropriate word of Latin derivation. But if we should say a man was comprehensively womaned we should be understood to mean probably that he had both a wife and concubines—that his affection and egoistic-social impulses were gratified by the former and his erotic needs by the latter. Yet it is really not possible for a man to be perfectly and completely womaned except by one woman. If his counterpart is a mosaic of fifty different varicoloured fragments he cannot be said to have done anything but use a separate facet of each woman composing the mosaic, and to have left unused all her other facets. So he cannot be said to have seen any of the other facets, a lack of vision constituting a kind of anesthesia already mentioned in § 141.

§ 189

Monogamy is not perfect if there is anesthesia on either side. Anesthesia prevents complete union. Only the mates who are completely directed each to other are fully married, and marriage means not partial but complete union. All degrees of fragmentary attachment are defective monogamy and so not monogamy at all, but unconscious polygamy.

Furthermore, that portion of the ego which is not attached to one’s mate exhibits a tendency to attach itself to some other one’s actual or potential mate, simply because attachment is a case of tension fixed to relax on a definite object, and if the legally sanctioned object has been detached, if the tensions natural to either sex are, by some complex, detached from that object, they tend of themselves to seek relaxation from some other person. If a man is completely satisfied with his wife he will not only seek no other woman, but will be dangerously attracted by no other, and vice versa.

So we can suppose a possible scale on which a husband’s union with his wife, not hologamous, is measured in units from 1 to 100 such that we might say a man was sixty-five per cent married to his wife, while yet she might be a hundred per cent married to him. This gives 10,000 degrees of non-hologamous marital union, M 1 — W 100 representing a man with only slight interest in his wife who is herself quite devoted to him. This man’s other ninety-nine per cent of libido might be directed to any number of other women. If it were directed toward one other woman he would undoubtedly be happier if he divorced and remarried. But it is the thesis of this book that M 1 — W 100 is an impossibility.

A division of libido as disproportionate as this would not imply much split in the man’s libido. He would thus be ninety-nine per cent devoted to his paramour and only one per cent to his wife. His paramour would be his de facto wife. But if his ninety-nine per cent of libido were directed toward ninety-nine other women he would be called a personality of maximum diffusion.

§ 190

Now the personality in perfect health tends toward the preservation of unity. The man whose love life should include one hundred women would be unable to devote more than one per cent of his libido to one woman. He would be as far from being a unit as, on the supposed scale, he could get. He would be not one personality but a knocked-down pile of parts waiting for a skilled mechanic to assemble.

There are different types of men, those who tend more, and those who tend less, to preserve their own unity of personality.

In general the progress from infancy to adulthood is a progress from partial synthesis to complete synthesis, so that the type of man whose synthesis is incomplete is an infantile and dissociated type of personality; or better than dissociated, he might be called dissipated, disjointed, dismembered, disassembled.

Unfortunately, the infantile condition can completely satisfy, consciously, the infant of adult size. This makes it difficult to approach him, makes him difficult of access. If one present him with a fully developed adult woman, he immediately recoils much farther into his youth which he regards as a fine quality. Because of the uncomfortable nature of the comparison he unconsciously sees his inferiority and unconsciously compensates for it, by getting (in the only way he can) the feeling of satisfaction that comes via mental autoerotism whenever it fails to be obtained from the outside world.

Adult society always produces this reaction somewhere in the sub-adult psyche; so it becomes a great problem, to devise some method for getting the sub-adult to desire to react in adult modes.

§ 191

Any plurality of women for a man implies reservation. He cannot love all of a woman entirely who thinks he loves in any degree any other woman. If for example he “loved” one woman for her hair and another for her eyes, another for her smile, this could not be called love, but only physical sex stimulation, or fetishism. Man’s supposed love of more than one woman is where his reservation makes him love one woman consciously and the others unconsciously. But conscious love is not complete love either, so that a man who consciously loves his wife, but is not able to arouse in her the erotic acme for any reason, cannot really be said to love her. He may rationalize to himself that his wife is a good mother to his children, a good housewife, patient, painstaking, self-sacrificing; but that other women whom he has seen interest him more in various intellectual spheres.

His wife could not be a brilliant pianist, good conversationalist, noted writer, artist, and singer, all at the same time. It would be a physical impossibility. He is interested in all those spheres in other women; why should he not find pleasure in their company? Why should he not call love that interest which the thought-provoking, intellectually stimulating woman arouses in him? Simply because he would not and probably could not evoke in her the fullest erotic reaction, and probably has not in his own wife.

Plurality of women would compare with Guyot’s violinist who should say he could play “Yankee Doodle” only on one violin and only a concerto on another, or could play only in E flat Major on one, and A flat Minor on another, needing a different instrument for each of the twenty-four keys.

That is not to say women are not different, but only that man’s satisfaction in marrying one is dependent largely on his own erotic technique which is far more important and valuable than either musical, artistic or any other technique; and that if he does not play upon her emotional instrument, to his and her complete satisfaction, he has no right to try to play on any other. Men go from one musical erotic instrument to another, saying, virtually: “I cannot play on this one. Of course, I shall be able to play on the next. This is an inferior one. Besides, the more practice I get the better I shall be able to play. After I have had a hundred or so I shall be a virtuoso.”

Women in general, however, are one as good as another for the production of the erotic music which can completely satisfy a man. He not only needs no more than one but on a priori grounds it can be safely said in almost every case that he can evoke no more satisfactory erotic response from one than from another, regarding this from the purely erotic viewpoint and not confusing it with the egoistic-social one.

Undoubtedly it gratifies a man’s egoistic-social impulse of self-magnification to have a woman flatter him, to make him feel that his very presence excites her, thrills her through and through. It is almost automatic in some women thus to try to play upon a man. But this too is never from purely erotic motives, but largely from egoistic-social ones.

The man who prides himself on his success with all women is constantly confusing the erotic with the egoistic-social aim. And many a man considers that he has fulfilled this erotic aim when, through his personal magnetism or his susceptibility to flattery, he has succeeded in getting a woman to consent to try to surrender herself in toto to him. But in using this pseudo-erotic situation as a factor in the egoistic-social sequence, he is showing an utter blindness to the essence of erotism, which consists in the woman’s fully conscious placing of the erotic motive ahead of the egoistic-social one she has been following in her course of verbal or other flattery and blandishment.

Can any satisfaction come to a woman except the purely egoistic-social one of superseding another, his wife, in the preference of a man whom she endeavours to captivate? Can any satisfaction except egoistic-social come to a man who prides himself on his conquests, on how easily women fall for him? Can he be said to be motivated more by erotic or by egoistic-social impulses in his attempts to add other women to his list, or to run risks and arouse in his soul the excitements of danger?

§ 192

If he need the excitements of a plurality of women, it is proof that he cannot get a normal amount of tension and relaxation from his own wife. There are those, of course, who live their married life on the theory that the physical tensions and relaxations of sex are too gross for refined marital relations, and that their wives would be shocked if they experienced them. The boy brought up with the angel-imago (or mother-imago, see § 195) as his ideal of woman necessary to be the mother of his children would inevitably identify his wife with a prostitute if he succeeded in evoking the highest psychical exaltation in her erotic sphere. He has plurality ingrained in his nature from the cradle; the feminine sex is not one but at least two: angel and prostitute. Unable to conceive the two existing in one woman, in fact unwilling to conceive this, he perforce puts the mother of his own children in the angel class and would be shocked if she evinced any of the characteristics of the other class.

The irony of which is that whatever reactions the prostitute shows are her attempt to imitate what she conceives as the highest type of erotism, what her patron’s highest erotic development would call for. Whatever impulses of erotic nature she has, which are few enough in the class that practise promiscuity for pay, are so overweighted by the egoistic-social impulses of material self-advancement, that they lose whatever value they might otherwise have.

A so-called prostitute, like Victor Hugo’s Mlle. Drouet, who after promiscuity devotes herself with absolute fidelity to one man is no longer a prostitute. She has, in thus placing the erotic above the egoistic-social motive, fulfilled the highest human function except that of parenthood.

It is possible that a man of many women may think he is seeking for his final mate. Such men have been heard to express somewhat similar sentiments. “If I could,” said one rouÉ, “effect a grand passion with some woman, she would be the only one for me.” He thought he could not gain this result from his wife, but if he were a whole man with erotic unity instead of a rouÉ with the disassembled psyche, he could effect the grand passion quite as easily with his wife as with another woman.

§ 193

Some considerations on the status of prostitution are necessary in every book that attempts to discuss marital relations. Far as the poles asunder though they may be in externals, they are yet the common activity of the same man in many instances. Figures show that the married man is the main support of the prostitute. What he does to his psyche in the direction of actually splitting it by this double life has been described more or less in the following manner. It is not merely that he either lies to one woman and consorts with another and is under the psychical strain of remembering never to confuse the parts of this double drama he is enacting. It is worse than that.

It has been shown through studies of the unconscious in men that show a strong leaning toward fallen women, that they are unwittingly reËnacting a jealousy drama of their own infancy in which they try to rescue from the father their own object of earliest love, their mother (cf. § 179).

Furthermore, the average man’s bringing up leads him unconsciously to separate all the women in the world into two classes. This simple division is characteristic of childhood, which sees everything either black or white and does not conceive fine gradations. The two classes of women are the angel-mother type and the devil-prostitute type, and this distinction with hardly any other he maintains sometimes till the end of his life.

§ 194

Strangely enough this division of women into two classes, while it is made by most men in their unconscious, evokes opposite reactions in two types of men, some of whom are found by the psychoanalysts as “more potent” with the prostitute type, while others are more potent with their wives. Yet these men are not wholly potent to the extent of carrying out the love episode to a conclusion perfectly satisfactory to their wives, and in the illicit relation they are still more precipitant.

It seems, however, most probable that the illicit woman has the effect on them of producing an overvaluation of some particular factor in the nature of a fetish which has lost its overplus of emotional value in the case of the wife. As has been already pointed out, this overvaluation of one or another factor in the total situation of the episode has an accelerating effect in the episode with the less familiar woman, an effect which, because of habit, has become less in the episode with the wife.

Another element in the situation is that with the woman of the prostitute type the man is concerned in no degree with any reaction on her part, whereas with his wife he may, in some cases, feel a certain dim sense of responsibility. Added to which the professional prostitute frequently pretends to be controlled, while the average wife does not.

It happens that this unimaginative paucity of merely twofold division of women unfortunately involves almost without exception the unconscious assumption that his sexual gratification is the function of the prostitute and is both absent from and not supplied by the woman of the angel type, from which stratum of society he naturally selects his wife. No wonder then that many men consider their wives “oversexed” if they show any great passion. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” This type of man who rigidly demands that his wife shall be an angel (as, when an infant, he thought that his mother was) makes, or tries to make out of her a sexless worker or butterfly while he goes to the prostitute weed for the satisfaction of his imperative sexual needs. He is unable to act as if his wife had exactly the same human body as himself, the same or homologous glands and identical sexual needs with himself, the denial of which is the cause of much if not most of the nervousness of women and accountable for a good part of their ill health and weakness.

§ 195

The boy of five or less has no means of knowing that his mother has any sexual needs, jealous though he may be of his father. The same boy when a man of thirty, if he keep the same childish viewpoint that women of the angel type are as angelically sexless as his mother was to him, will, unless he picks out a woman of the other type for a wife, which is, of course, exceedingly rare, never be wholly free from inhibitions against the full development of the true love episode with his wife. Regarding the prostitute as of another caste, he thus avoids with her alone the inhibitions caused by his childish separation of all women into two diametrically opposed castes.

It is obvious that this early-formed association of mother (and of course, later, wife) with absence of sexual interests or even instincts may in some men be a large factor in causing the repression of the majority of the components of the love episode. One component, however, alone, is impossible for the man to repress, though he may later find to his supreme satisfaction that he can control it and retard it; namely, the final relaxation of all his erotic tension.

If he continues love episodes with his wife and has a fixed but unconscious idea that with a wife all varieties of preliminary love actions, in brief, every component but the one to him absolutely essential component of dropping his burden of erotic tension,—which by the way he might just as well drop elsewhere—are actions more appropriate in a brothel than in a home, he will tend more and more to avoid with his wife all but the essential, as he virtually conceives it.

§ 196

It is admitted by all students of married life that not less passion but more is needed, and the precipitant husband undoubtedly needs more. For him the love episode’s passion is concentrated into the climax of it. It has no beginning, no middle, and no end, for it rarely if ever gives the full satisfaction that is gained by the husband who really takes care of his wife’s erotic responses. For the ignorant husband, who is emotionally about five years old, the love episode is featureless and crude like a five-year-old child’s drawing of a man on a slate. It has no proportions, a head, rectangular body and two straight lines for legs and quadrangular sinkers for feet and asterisk hands.

The passionless love episode is no love episode at all as it lacks the essential of deep love. Putting more passion into his love for his wife is of course exactly what the man, whose woman’s world consists of only two widely sundered castes, is unable to do unless he succeeds in overcoming the early-fixed habit of his thought about what he knows as love. But putting more passion into his love for his wife is exactly what he must do to be fully a man and to control her erotic emotions.

One who is fully a woman latently, as are all with negligible exceptions, is never fully developed into a woman, actually, except by the man who can play on her, as on a violin, all the melodies of which she is capable. She will never know herself unless she is thus developed by man. She will be like an undeveloped photographic plate.

§ 197

The attitude of society toward prostitution is, as a whole, as unorganized and haphazard as could be, in all civilized countries. Both kinds of laws are made, prohibitive and regulative, neither of which has any more effect on men’s actions than would a law have which attempted to prohibit drawing breath or to regulate the number of inhalations per hour. In general the laws have been prohibitive and have met the same fate as any prohibitive legislation. It has been realized by a few deep thinkers that no prohibitions have to be made against what nobody ever thinks of doing, and that the existence of a prohibitive law is proof of a widespread tendency to do the thing prohibited. All prohibition is, from the point of view of both conscious and unconscious psychology, unscientific.

§ 198

A part of the motive that leads the husband to resort to the prostitute is the widespread notion mentioned by Ellis (op. cit., VI) that prostitution has a civilization value in adding “an element of gaiety and variety to the ordered complexity of modern life, a relief from the monotony of its mechanical routine, a distraction from its dull and respectable monotony.”

These are the arguments advanced for the use of alcohol also. While admitting, however, the desirability, indeed even the necessity, of variety in life which means the family life as well, we should not forget that the lack of variety in marital existence is mostly if not exclusively due to the infantility of the husband. Marriage is the most vital institution of society, but the one that has been most carelessly left to its own haphazard development.

For this abandonment of marriage to its own fate amidst the most hostile possible environment of rapidly developing egoistic-social impulses, the husband is solely to blame. His fault, however, is primarily due to his bringing up and chiefly to that feature of the mother-imago which leads him invariably to look for interest, variety and all good things from the mother.

The child’s frequent whine, “Mother, what can I do?” is here virtually repeated by the unimaginative husband, defended by the sexologist and answered by the prostitute. If, as has been intimated before in this book, age cannot wither woman nor custom stale her infinite variety, then the infinite variety, or enough of it, at any rate, to satisfy any husband, should be evoked from his wife.

In the fragmentary love of the average married man it is not to be expected, of course, that he will find much variety. For fragments do not, or at any rate, a single fragment does not, provide much.

The relief from the monotony of the average married life is most desirable in every way, but the relief can come in the best way only from the variegation of the marital pattern, a change that is fully within the power of any husband who will acquaint himself with the findings of the modern psychology of love.