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Title: Psychoanalysis and Love
Author: Tridon, André
Language: English
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* * * * *
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LOVE
PSYCHOANALYSIS
AND LOVE
BY
ANDRE TRIDON
Member of
"The Medico-Legal Society of New York City,"
"The Society for Forensic Medicine of New York City," and
"The International Association for Individual Psychology of Vienna,
Austria."
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1922, by
BRENTANO'S
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I THE HEAD AND THE HEART 1
Love is independent from the will.
Victims of Venus. Love and affection.
Erotropism. What is the heart? A dead
heart can be made to beat. The heart is
a respectable organ. The antithesis head-heart.
Nerve memory.
II THE CHOICE OF A MATE 10
What we see in our mate. The meaning
of choice. The donkey's dilemma.
Chance in the discard. The dog's choice.
The behavior of copepods.
III THE QUEST OF THE FETISH 17
The hair fetishist. Everybody a fetishist.
Most common fetishes. The
breast and the bottle. Feminine fetishes.
Physiological necessities. Foot and shoe
fetishism. Non-physical fetishes. Symbolical
fetishes. Antifetishes. Attraction
IV THE FAMILY ROMANCE AND THE FAMILY FEUD 29
The Oedipus complex. The Freudian
view. Jung's interpretation. Adler.
Pseudo-incest. The Neurotic life plan.
Imitation. The glands. Identification
mania. Early conflicts. Death wishes.
Our preferences. Craig's birds.
V INCEST 41
The incest fear. Incest in ancient
times. Inbreeding. The primal horde.
Repressed incestuous feelings. Blood
relations.
VI THE PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE 49
The organism a unit. Love's stimulation.
The successful lover. The unsuccessful
lover. Calf love.
VII THE SENSES IN LOVE 56
Sight. Auditory sensations. Smell.
The sense of taste. Touch. Holding
hands. The kiss. The birth of the kiss.
Kisses and electricity.
VIII EGO AND SEX 65
Neurotic complications. Self-love. Ego
in sex guise. Fatherhood. War prisoners.
Neurotic motherliness. When ego
and sex do not conflict.
IX HATRED AND LOVE 73
A worried wife. The test of love.
Sour grapes. Brothers and sisters. A
negro hater. Reformers. The syphilophobiac.
Deluded martyrs.
X PLURAL LOVE AND INFIDELITY 83
Polyandry. Infidelity. When love dies.
Iwan Bloch's and Hirth's theories. Bored
wives. Getting even. Varietists and
Don Juans. The ultra-feminine. Messalina.
XI IS FREE LOVE POSSIBLE? 95
Man, the dissatisfied. The next step.
Blissful blindness. What of the child?
Disharmony between the parents. The
institution child. Free love plus birth
control.
XII PROSTITUTION 104
Economic factors. Lombrosos's theory.
Sensuality. Father fixation. Prostitution
a neurosis. The pimp. Prevention.
Prostitution has no redeeming grace.
XIII VIRGINITY 112
What men experienced in love want?
Ethical prostitution. The fear of woman.
The will-to-be-the-first. Telegony.
Goldschmidt's explanations.
XIV MODESTY, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL 122
In Turkey. On the modern stage.
Normal modesty. Suggestive draperies.
Excessive modesty. Immodest modesty.
Fear of love. The masculine protest.
Lack of modesty.
XV JEALOUSY 133
Forel's rules for husbands. Very few
men and women admit their jealousy.
Jealousy and impotence. Childish behavior.
The ego rampant. Sexless jealousy.
Husbands and lovers. Cruelty.
Making people jealous.
XVI INSANE JEALOUSY 147
Delusional jealousy. Homosexualism
and jealousy. A jealous wife. A case
of projection. Masked sadism.
XVII HOMOSEXUALISM. ITS GENESIS 155
Male lovers in Greece. Women were
harem slaves. The tide turns. Theories.
The third sex. Transvestites. Are
transvestites homosexual? Metatropism.
Steinach's experiments. Perverse birds.
Freud denies the third sex. Active and
passive types. The homosexual neurosis.
A safety device. Above and below.
A way out. The escape from biological
duties.
XVIII HOMOSEXUALISM A NEUROTIC SYMPTOM 174
A denial of life. Homosexualism is
negative love. The love letters of famous
homosexuals. Deeds of violence. A
homosexual tragedy. Women more homosexual
than men. Boastful homosexuals.
The Nietzsche-Wagner feud. Shall
perverse love be recognized? Man's
emancipation from woman. Homosexualism
and war. Is homosexualism necessary?
XIX CRUELTY AND LOVE--SADISM 188
Algolagnists. The Marquis de Sade's
biography. What Bonaparte thought of
him. Glandular drunkenness. Atavism.
Primitive religions. Primitive races and
sex violence. Animal love fights. The
sadistic mob. Is the male more cruel?
XX LOVE THAT CRAVES SUFFERING--MASOCHISM 200
Sacher Masoch's biography. Love of
the whip. The masochist is like a tired
horse. Shoe fetishism. Craving for
humiliation. Masochistic fancies. Are
women masochistic? Women who enjoy
a beating. A Freudian suggestion.
XXI WHAT LOVE OWES TO SADISTS AND
MASOCHISTS 212
Sadistic and masochistic lovers and
their fascination. The vamp. Those who
are too normal to be interesting or romantic.
XXII LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS 216
Dissatisfaction. The male artist. The
female artist. The woman who accomplishes
things. Flattery.
XXIII THE PERSONALITY BEHIND THE FETISHES.
GLANDS 223
The parent-child relationship. Modern
endocrinologists ignorant of psychology.
Reciprocal influence of glands and behavior.
The pituitary gland. The thyroid.
The adrenals. The gonads.
XXIV GLANDULAR PERSONALITIES 233
The dark skinned type. The tall type.
The lean type. The obese type. The
slender type. Environment. Comfort and
behavior. What teeth indicate. Matrimonial
engineers.
XXV LOVE AND MOTHER LOVE 241
Sex cravings and motherhood cravings.
Pregnancy means health. Fear of pregnancy.
When mother love is lacking.
Frigid wives. Mother and father love.
Mothers adore their sons. Fathers partial
to daughters. The flapper and her
mother.
XXVI SHOULD WINTER MATE WITH SPRING? 251
Two disinterested brides. The case of
Wagner. A parent fixation. Physical
incompatibility. The plight of two neurotics.
What will people say? Having
her fixation-fling. Physical results. The
fate of the younger mate. King David.
XXVII NEGATIVE LOVE 263
A "clean" life. Utterances and conduct.
Oracles and prophecies. Can we
save our vital force. Sublimation. The
sexless. Ideal love. Protective measures.
Lovers of the absolute. A troublesome
patient. Higher aspirations.
XXVIII THE NEW WOMAN AND LOVE 275
George Bernard Shaw's view. The rebellion
against nature. Woman in commercial
life. Was it a sacrifice? The
pursuit. The passing of respectable prostitution.
The abettor of ethical sins.
Health versus sickness. The passing of
the flirt and of the doll. Modesty, old
and new. The unadapted woman. The
proud husband.
XXIX BIRTH CONTROL 291
What we expect of the modern woman.
The only solution. The human milch
cow. The nightmare of abortion. The
plight of the neurotic woman. The child
of the neurotic woman. Birth control
and indulgence. A great love is a holy
thing. The passing of the double standard.
XXX THE PASSING OF THE HUSBAND WORSHIP 303
Is man's vitality declining? Undue
pessimism. The wise husband. Is the
male indispensable? Loeb's experiments.
Twins to order. The mother is the
race. Matriarchal communities. Modern
woman is conceited. The terrors of the
climacteric. Masculine man is in no danger
of passing away.
XXXI PERFECT MATRIMONIAL ADJUSTMENTS 315
Marriage a compromise. Attractiveness
an asset. Forty and hideous. Athletic
movie idols. The foe of married
happiness. Friendship may survive love.
Separate vacations for the married. The
play function of love. Psychoanalysis
to the rescue. Wounded egotism. Democracy
in the home.
INTRODUCTION
Life would be much simpler if love among human beings were similar to
love among the animals. At mating time, any animal of any species feels
automatically attracted to any animal of the opposite sex belonging to
the same species. Age, appearance or relationship seem of no account
in the animal world. The love activities begin at a definite time of
the year, have as their obvious and exclusive purpose the reproduction
of the species and, after attaining their goal, end very early in the
summer of the same year. An exception may be made for a few wild and
domesticated animals which have several mating seasons and for a few
survivals of the prehistoric fauna, like the elephants, among which the
family group seems more permanent than among more "recent" biological
specimens.
Nor do love activities among the animals result in lasting disturbances
of their psychological life. In certain varieties of fish the male
never even sees the female whose eggs he fecundates. While we observe
at times duels to the death between two males for the possession of
one female (elks or moose), animal life seems to suffer few lasting
complications from the fact of such conflicts, which, like animal love,
are purely seasonal.
A greater regularity of the food supply which has intensified the sex
urge among human beings and removed its seasonal character, and the
progress of civilization which, for economic reasons, has placed upon
the union of male and female a thousand restrictions, has complicated
terribly what was merely among animals a periodic biological activity.
Restrictions, however, never bring about the complete suppression of
biological cravings and merely compel them to remain repressed for
varying periods of time. Repressed cravings, denied a direct normal
outlet, create for themselves indirect, morbid outlets.
We are little more than civilized animals who have been trained not to
reveal their primal cravings at certain forbidden times and places.
The cravings are there, struggling for expression and denial of their
reality does not suffice to make them unreal. It only invests them with
morbidity and abnormality.
Much of the fearsome mystery which surrounds sex is due to the fact
that we have forgotten our origin. We have set up a goal which, like
all goals worth striving for, is far ahead of the human procession and
somewhere between the earth and the stars. But that goal should not
cause us to forget our starting point.
It happens too often that "what we should be" blinds us to "what we
really are." Hence our surprise, our puzzled expression, our painful
disappointment, when one of us reveals himself suddenly as he is
instead of as he should be. Hence our absurd statutes which punish the
laggards on the road of evolution instead of helping them along. Hence
our fears in the presence of a mystery we have made mysterious, of a
danger we have made dangerous and which we make more terrifying yet by
burying our heads in the sand.
To this day the study of love has been considered as the almost
exclusive province of poets, playwrights, novelists, movie authors and
philosophers.
Those people have reveled in love's dramatic complications which they
have, whenever possible, exaggerated, for "artistic" reasons. Instead
of clarifying the problem, they have beclouded it.
In anglo-saxon countries a class of neurotics countenanced by the
police and the courts, the puritans, have further distorted the
popular misconception of love by swathing it in the morbid veils woven
by their unhealthy minds.
It is high time, therefore, that the subject of love be reviewed from
an impartial angle, from a purely scientific point of view.
Only one science is qualified to undertake that review, psychoanalysis,
for it has effected in the last twenty years a synthesis of all the
data which biology, neurology, endocrinology and other sciences have
contributed to the knowledge of human psychology and of the human
personality.
No scientist is satisfied with his findings unless they can be
described in terms of accurate measurements, hence, repeated and
checked up by any other scientist having acquired the requisite minimum
of technical skill.
The basis for such a study of love was established by the great pioneer
in the science of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud of Vienna.
By his masterly analysis of the sex life, to which, however, he has
ascribed an undue importance, he has stripped love of many veils
which made it look like a scarecrow. His successors, recognizing the
importance of other factors in the love life, ego cravings, organic
predispositions, etc., have in turn stripped love of other veils which
made it look too romantically unreal.
Thus we are gradually reaching the heart of the problem.
Love to-day is no longer animal love, nor is it as yet angelic love. We
are no longer beasts, altho the primal beast still disports itself in
our unconscious. Nor are we angels, arduous as our striving toward the
stars may be. To determine what love should be, could be or might be,
seems to be an academic waste of time and little else.
To determine, on the other hand, what love REALLY IS AT THE PRESENT
DAY, what actual level it has reached, to explain some of the
difficulties it encounters in trying to remain on that level, and
finally to suggest to MEN AND WOMEN OF TO-DAY workable modes
of adaption at that level, shall be the mission of this book.
In the coming chapters, I will show that our choice of a mate is as
completely "determined" as any other biological phenomenon; that the
"reasons" for that choice are compelling "habits" acquired in our
childhood and infancy within the family circle; that our "standards of
beauty" are memories from childhood and infancy; that in our search
for a mate we are influenced as powerfully by ego and safety cravings
as by sex cravings that the so-called "perversions" are due, at times,
to wrong training, at times, to organic disabilities and at times
to unrecognized safety cravings; that jealousy is, in the majority
of cases, due to ego cravings, not to sex cravings; finally that no
perfect adjustment of the married relation can be brought about until
democracy obtains in the home, replacing the various forms of autocracy
against which bullied wives and henpecked husbands have directed many
ineffective, neurotic revolts.
New York City
June 1, 1922
PSYCHOANALYSIS AND LOVE
CHAPTER I
THE HEAD AND THE HEART
Love, like hunger, fear or pain, is an absolutely involuntary craving.
We may deny it expression and gratification, even as we may pretend
that we are not hungry, afraid or in pain, and go without food,
protection or relief from pain; but no exertion on our part will
prevent us from experiencing love and craving its gratification. Nor
can we experience it thru an act of will.
This absolutely involuntary character of the love craving must be borne
in mind whenever we discuss the complicated and at times puzzling
relations which it brings about between human beings.
The attitude of the average person to this question is extremely vague
and illogical. The person obsessed by love cravings which are not
meeting with the approval of his environment, justifies himself by
stating loudly the overpowering character of his feelings:
"I cannot help loving him or her," "It is a feeling stronger than
myself," "It came over me suddenly," "It was a case of love at first
sight."
=Victims of Venus.= The ancients expressed their strong belief
in man's helplessness against the allpowerful fascination of the love
object by calling the lovelorn a victim of Cupid or of Venus, a puppet
of the gods, of fate.
And on the other hand, we behold modern and ancient lovers, whenever
they feel that the love object is growing indifferent to them,
reversing their attitude, denying their belief in love's involuntary
character, and using words like fickle, changeling, to designate the
love object they are losing. They speak of deception, of betrayal, of
faithlessness.
"You no longer love me," they state reproachfully. They may ask the
stupid question: "Why have you ceased to care for me?" Worse yet, they
may say to the love object; "You should be ashamed of your inconstancy."
Such remarks are not infrequently coupled with another remark which
goes more deeply to the root of the matter: "You should not show your
indifference so plainly."
In other words pretence is expected when actual love has died.
And indeed nothing else could be expected logically by such illogical
lovers, unless of course a deep affection, which may have grown between
two human beings in the course of many years of life partnership,
successfully masks the passing of the peculiar fascination which
differentiates love proper from any other human feeling.
=Love and Affection.= We may love a human being more than
ourselves, enjoy infinitely his presence, delight in giving to him
mental and physical happiness, lavish on him a thousand caresses and
yet not experience the flash of desire which leads compulsively toward
complete physical communion with that human being.
A simile from the animal world will make my meaning clearer.
A large number of animals "enjoy" light but only a small number of
them are so "fascinated" by light that they cannot resist a "craving"
to fly toward a light, contact with which may mean death to them. Only
that small minority can be called in scientific jargon "positively
phototropic," in sentimental parlance "hopelessly in love" with light.
All animals are affected in some fashion by an electric current
passing thru their bodies, but only a minority of them are so affected
by it that they must, whether they wish it or not, face the positive
electrode, as a lover fascinated by the face of his sweetheart. Only
these can be characterised as "positively galvanotropic."
=Erotropism.= Likewise a hundred men may be charmed by the sight
of a woman. Only one or two from their number may feel compelled
to seek complete union with her regardless of the obstacles to
be surmounted, of the criticism their actions may arouse, of the
expenditure of time, money and energy the adventure may entail. Only
this minority may be considered as "positively erotropic."
In other words it is the primal compulsion which nature uses to assure
the continuance of the race and which I might designate as "erotropism"
which must be considered the basis for a discussion of love.
Love as commonly understood or misunderstood at the present day, is a
series of variations on the theme of erotropism, variations due to the
complication of modern civilisation and the restrictions placed upon
all biological phenomena by the necessities of life in communities.
=What is the Heart?= The reader will notice that I have thus
far avoided any mention of the "heart" altho that organ is commonly
identified with the various emotions of love.
Physiologically speaking, the heart is no more vitally concerned with
love than with any other disturbing feeling and emotion. Love may at
times cause our heart to beat wildly, but so does strong coffee, so
does acute indigestion, so does blood poisoning, so does any sort of
violent fear.
The heart, we must not forget, is a mere muscle, which is no more
capable of being the seat of an emotion than our biceps or our calves.
The heart is an elaborate centripetal and centrifugal pump which, in
obedience to orders or impulses coming from elsewhere, draws the blood
out of the veins and sends it into the arteries at a varying rate of
speed.
=A Dead Heart Can Be Made to Beat.= The heart, taken out of
the body and attached to a well fitted system of pipes, thru which
an appropriate fluid is circulating, will start beating anew and
keep on beating until decay sets in, due to the fact that the proper
nourishment is lacking.
Talking of a sensitive heart, of a tender heart or of a heart of
stone means merely juggling with pretty pictures which correspond to
nothing physiologically. There may be sensitiveness, tenderness or
stony harshness somewhere in the organism and the heart may give them
expression by its fluctuating beats, but it acts on such occasions as a
mere registering apparatus.
Adrenin taken by the mouth or injected into the blood stream causes the
heart pump of a perfect indifferent man to throb as wildly as the heart
of a lovelorn swain. Strong doses of the nitrates may cause valvular
insufficiency and "break" a heart more effectively than any catastrophe
in one's sentimental life.
=The Heart is a Respectable Organ.= The choice of the heart as the
organ of the emotions, in particular of the love emotion, is certainly
due to the fact that it is such a faithful registering apparatus and
also to a "displacement upward" frequently observed in modern civilised
thought.
We do not willingly mention the abdomen and therefore have rechristened
it the stomach. We have read many times the appalling statement that a
woman carries her child "under her heart." The seat of the mind which
materialist physicians of ancient Greece located in the intestines,
rose later to the level of the solar plexus and with Descartes finally
reached the pineal gland. Likewise the part of the body where love
cravings receive their physical satisfaction having become taboo, the
seat of love has been raised from the pelvis to the thorax, from the
primary genital region to the breast, which bears secondary sexual
characteristics.
After which, the popular imagination has established an arbitrary
contrast and antagonism between the mysterious clocklike organ in the
chest and the mysterious soft mass in the skull.
=The Antithesis Head-heart= is one which literature is not likely
to abandon for years to come. We read that women "follow the dictates
of their heart" while men are not so prone "to lose their head." The
head is represented as the well-spring of reason while the heart is a
fount of tenderness, if not of foolishness.
Modern scientific research has demonstrated that the brain is nothing
but an apparatus for burning sugar which is transformed into electric
current which the nervous systems distribute throughout the body.
Thought of the normal type is impossible unless the various parts of
the brain are perfectly coordinated, just as the slightest accident to
a telephone wire may leave a subscriber cut off from the rest of the
world, but thoughts, feelings, emotions, cravings, originate elsewhere,
in the autonomic nervous system.
=Nerve Memory.= In our autonomic nervous system all our life
impressions are indelibly recorded, probably thru infinitesimal
chemical modifications of the nerves and the resultant tensions.
Pleasant nerve impressions (pleasant memories) direct us toward
certain objects which are the source of such impressions, unpleasant
impressions drive us away from the outside stimuli which once produced
them.
The former cause our heart to beat slowly, peacefully, powerfully,
the latter speed up the cardiac pump so as to send energy as fast as
possible wherever it is needed for defence against harm.
Pleasure, indifference and pain, built upon billions of nerve memories,
make up the woof of our thinking. They ARE our mind, the mind
that falls in love or falls out of love.
The head supplies the energy and the heart registers the rate at which
energy is sent thru the body, but the memories of which our thinking is
made are stored up elsewhere.
In a scientific study of love, therefore, I shall leave the head and
the heart as individual organs out of consideration.
CHAPTER II
THE CHOICE OF A MATE
=Love is a Compulsion.= The most striking characteristic in the
love craving, one which differentiates it sharply from other cravings,
is the compulsory exclusiveness of its choice. Hunger drives us to seek
a large number of substances which, by filling the stomach, relieve
what Cannon describes as a gastric itch.
The person in love, on the other hand, seeks only one single object
at a time, which alone seems capable of vouchsafing the desired
gratification.
A lovelorn man may be surrounded by many women, all extremely
attractive and accessible, and yet pine away for some other woman who
perhaps does not compare favorably with those he might conquer. He may,
at times, yield to the temporary attraction of a new woman, but in the
majority of cases, he will soon return to the woman he actually loves.
Not infrequently his environment will wonder at his choice. "What can
he see in her?" Physically or intellectually, anyone but himself would
see very little to "admire" in her.
=What We See in Our Mate.= The many handsome men whom we have
met, and who are mated to homely wives, the many wives we have
observed, mated to impossible husbands, and whose affection for their
unprepossessing life partner is genuine and in no way dictated by
sordid considerations, the many triangles we know of, in which a very
inferior lover or mistress is preferred to an admittedly superior
husband or wife, are evidence of the involuntary, nay compulsory,
character of the love choice.
A comparison imposes itself with certain obsessive fears or cravings
bearing upon one object which, to any one but the person experiencing
such fears or cravings, may appear anything but fearful or desirable.
The psychoanalytic investigation of the origin of such obsessions
always shows that they can be traced back to childhood impressions
which have modified our nervous reactions to certain objects or ideas.
=The Meaning of Choice.= Applied psychology and laboratory
research have in recent years attached a more and more deterministic
connotation to the term "choice." The word, which to academic
psychologists, implied the exercise of free will and "judgment," will
have some day to be accepted as synonymous with "compulsion."
A few examples from animal behavior will illustrate my meaning.
Philosophers have for years wasted breath and ink on the academic
consideration of the following puzzle:
A donkey is standing at equal distance from two bales of hay; the
two masses of fodder are mathematically alike in size, shape, color,
fragrance, quality, etc.
Unless the animal, certain philosophers said, was able to "make a
choice" of his own, he would remain motionless between the two bales
whose attraction would be perfectly balanced. He would, like some
celestial bodies, be held suspended by two forces which would not allow
him to turn to the right nor to the left. He would rationally have to
starve if attraction were a force exerting itself from the outside
exclusively.
Yet no donkey placed in such a situation will fail to make an immediate
choice. He will turn to one of the bales and start eating it.
Even if we imagine a philosophising donkey reasoning as follows:
"The two bales are equally attractive. Hence it makes no difference
which one I start with. Let us begin with either."
Even then, he will have to "make a choice," altho his selection of one
of the bales seems to be due entirely to "chance."
=Chance in the Discard.= Psychological research has eliminated
chance as a factor in human behavior, and whether our donkey starts
with the right or with the left bale, an analyst will insist that there
are reasons why he picks out that one bale to be eaten first.
Laboratory dogs which have supplied solutions for so many psychological
difficulties, have proved of service in this case too.
If the slightest surgical operation has been performed on one side of a
dog's brain, he becomes unable to move in a straight line.
He deviates from the straight line toward the side on which his brain
has been injured. If the lesion is on the right side he will be
compelled to turn to the right and vice versa. This is due to the fact
that the injury has weakened that side and the cerebral dynamo which
supplies the body with power produces less current on the injured than
on the uninjured side.
When you row a boat and slack one oar the boat turns toward the side on
which you are expending more effort. Of course the process is reversed
in a dog because the nerves of the dog cross over, the right side of
his brain supplying the left side of the body, the left side of the
brain supplying the right side of the body with power.
Let us repeat on two dogs, the experiment which academic psychologists
imagined performed on a mythical jackass.
=The Dog's Choice.= Offer two pieces of meat to a dog whose brain
has been injured on the right side and he will invariably eat the
piece of meat nearer that side. Repeat the test on a dog whose brain
has suffered a lesion on the left side and you will see him gobble the
piece of meat on the left side.
Go even further and place both pieces of meat on the left side of the
dog injured on the left side of his brain and he will "pick out" the
one farther out. Not that he "prefers" that one. He will aim at the
nearest but his injury will cause him to deviate too far to the left
and he will be unable to reach the nearest one.
Other experiments on dogs illustrate the purely organic "motives" back
of certain lines of conduct.
When both sides of a dog's brain have been injured in the frontal
region, the dog refuses to go forward or downstairs but has a tendency
to move backwards and to run upstairs.
When the back of a dog's brain has been injured on both sides, the dog
has a tendency to keep on running forward all the time and while he is
unwilling to climb stairs he will willingly go downstairs.
=The Behavior of Copepods.= When we pour carbonated water or beer
or alcohol into an aquarium, certain crustaceans called copepods will
at once swim toward the source of light, as tho they "loved" light, and
appear so interested in light that they will "forget," to eat their
food, if that food is placed away from the source of light. The same
animals when placed in water containing strychnine or caffein, will
shun the light as tho they "hated" it, and as tho they "loved" the
darkness.
We know that if a galvanic current is sent thru our head we will lean
involuntarily against the positive pole. If the current is sent thru an
aquarium, a number of the animals swimming in it will be compelled to
seek the positive pole and to remain there, others to seek the negative
pole.
In the case of the laboratory dogs, a permanent modification of
the nervous system caused a permanent modification of the animal's
behavior, which could not be "cured," (for brain injuries do not
"heal," the cells of the brain being unable to reproduce themselves),
but which would probably be compensated for by gradual adaptation.
In the case of the "phototropic" or "galvanotropic" animals, the
modification of the nervous system was only temporary but might cause a
more or less durable modification of the animals' behavior, if allowed
to last a considerable length of time.
The love attraction or "erotropism" is likewise due to certain more or
less lasting modifications of man's nervous system caused by the fact
that his nervous system was for variable periods of time exposed to the
influence of certain outside stimuli.
CHAPTER III
THE QUEST OF THE FETISH
The papers now and then tell the story of some man who was caught in
the act of clipping a little girl's braid of hair. That man is what
is called technically a hair fetishist. Hair is his fetish, that is
the part of a woman's body which attracts him more powerfully than
any other part. A search of the living quarters of that variety
of "delinquents" generally reveals that they are in the habit of
collecting women's tresses acquired in that fashion. The tresses are
almost always of the same color.
=The Hair Fetishist= whose unlawful activities bring him sooner
or later into the clutches of the police is a neurotic who presents to
an exaggerated, abnormal extent, a trait we find in all normal human
beings.
Every one of us is especially attracted by some part of the human body.
The young man who raves over his sweetheart's hair, the young woman
who blissfully runs her fingers thru her lover's hair are also hair
fetishists. But their craving is not strong enough to lead them into
committing unlawful, perverse, socially inacceptable acts.
Another widely spread type of abnormal fetishist described by novelists
and psychiatrists, but which very seldom gains newspaper notoriety, is
the foot and shoe fetishist, who buys or steals all sorts of shoes. He
too is merely the exaggeration of the man who is delighted by the sight
of a Cinderella foot or a slim ankle.
With hair and shoe fetishists, the fetish is more than a mere
attraction; it is generally a powerful sexual stimulant. Such
fetishists experience, while kissing or caressing their fetish, sexual
gratification of the autoerotic or of the involuntary type.
=Everybody a Fetishist.= There are hundreds of varieties of
fetishism, normal or abnormal. There is no person living who is not
more or less subject to the compulsive attraction of some fetish. There
is in every man or every woman something which catches the onlooker's
eye first and retains his attention longest.
This varies with every human being. Ask ten men to describe one pretty
woman. Every one of them will probably head the list of physical
qualities he has observed in her with a different fetish. One will
describe her as a blonde with a beautiful skin, rather tall and well
shaped; another will state that she is a well-shaped woman, rather
tall and with blonde hair; another will characterise her as a tall
woman with an abundance of blonde hair, etc. I knew a man, in no way
abnormal, who could not describe a pretty woman, regardless of whatever
her build was, without making a gesture of the hand outlining ample
breast curves.
=Most Common Fetishes.= Women's hair, throat, neck, shoulders,
arms and breasts seem to be the most frequently mentioned fetishes.
Fashion and the law recognise that fact. Whenever women plan to make
a physical appeal to men or women, they dress their hair with special
care and they wear low neck gowns, thereby exhibiting those various
fetishes.
It will be noticed that the parts of the body constituting the most
widely appreciated fetishes are those with which the nursing child
comes in most intimate and continuous contact.
To the child, they mean safety, comfort, caresses, food. The color
of skin or hair, the shape of neck, head and shoulders on which
his glances rest while nursing or while being carried about by the
mother, are the only ones which will appear "natural" and safe, hence
beautiful, to him in after life.
The breasts from which he derives a perfect food, at the right
temperature, which flows easily into his stomach and is assimilated
without effort, the breasts, whose texture and elasticity make them
pleasant to lean upon while nursing, may eventually become to his
simple mind the most valuable part of the female's body.
=The Breast and the Bottle.= My observations on several hundred
men fed at the breast or on the bottle in infancy, have revealed to me
that practically all the men nursed by a woman were greatly attracted
to women with well developed breasts.
The majority of men nursed on the bottle, on the other hand, preferred
thin, boyish looking girls, some of them even expressing a distinct
repugnance for rather buxom women.
It may be stated that of the few who did not confirm that rule there
were several more or less neurotic individuals, whom an unconscious
fear of incest (see Chapter V) had conditioned to fear the very type of
women by whom they had been nursed.
Arms and hands, which to the nursling mean protection, service,
caresses, transportation, etc., derive therefrom their great attraction
as fetishes.
=Feminine Fetishes.= I have thus far mentioned almost exclusively
fetishes from the female body. There are several reasons why feminine
fetishes are far more important to both men and women than masculine
fetishes. Children of both sexes are exposed to the influence of
the mother's fetishes more intimately, more constantly and more
"profitably" (nursing), than they are to the influence of the father's
fetishes.
Hence masculine fetishes are fewer and less numerous. Woman is less of
a fetishist than man. The most frequently mentioned masculine fetishes
are the bodily attributes characteristic of strength, and which, hence,
would afford most protection to the infant and the female.
No perverse fetishism is observed in women, no abnormal craving driving
women into securing unlawfully men's hair or clothing, etc.
Some writers consider transvestite women, women who enjoy masquerading
in men's clothes, as clothing fetishists, but such cases are extremely
rare and can be accounted for in other ways.
=Physiological Necessities.= There is another reason, a physiological
reason, for the great importance which men and women attach to the
feminine fetishes. More sexual excitement and a greater muscular
tension are necessary in the male than in the female at the time of
the sexual union. The female, being physiologically submissive, can
wait for her desire to grow under the influence of the male's caresses.
The male, on the contrary, has to be aggressive and cannot fulfill his
biological part unless his desire has been aroused by other sensations
than that of the sexual union.
Hence the greater expenditure of time and effort on the part of the
female to make herself attractive to the male. Hence also the long
drawn courtship of flirtation thru which the female of every animal
species endeavors to bring the male to the highest possible point of
sexual excitement before surrendering herself to him.
=Foot and Shoe Fetishism= is more complicated. The mother's feet
are the part of her body which the infant, crawling on the floor or
attempting to walk, beholds most frequently and at the closest range.
That variety of fetish, however, should not be as strong as other
fetishes more directly related to the child's nutrition, comfort and
safety. When shoe fetishism become compulsive, it is a neurosis due
to the repression of some erotic desire aroused in childhood by some
striking incident. One case cited by Freud, illustrates that process.
"A man to whom the various sex attractions of woman now mean nothing,
who in fact, can only be aroused sexually by the sight of a shoe on a
foot of a certain form, is able to recall an experience he had in his
sixth year and which proved decisive for the fixation of his libido.
One day he sat on a stool beside his governess. She was a shriveled
old maid who, that day, on account of some accident, had put a velvet
slipper on her foot and stretched it out on a foot stool.
"After a diffident attempt at normal sexual activity, undertaken at the
time of his puberty, a thin, sinewy foot like that of his governess,
had become the sole object of his desires. The man was carried away
irresistibly if other features, reminiscent of his governess, appeared
in conjunction with the foot. Through this fixation, the man did not
become neurotic but perverse, a foot fetishist, as we say."
I wish to call the reader's attention to the expression "after a
diffident attempt at normal sexual expression." It indicates a feeling
of inferiority, likely to cause failure and also increased by failure
which is always in evidence in every neurotic and which drives him
toward easier goals, along the line of least effort.
Some of the Freudians have suggested that foot fetishism is due to
the repression of an early craving for the unpleasant odors emitted
by perspiring feet. As against such a far-fetched explanation, I
would offer the fact that foot and shoe are always associated in the
unconscious of neurotic patients with the male and female genitals,
respectively.
We find the association of shoe and genitals clearly indicated in the
old custom of throwing shoes and rice at departing newlyweds (rice
symbolising the fertilising seed).
Odors, sounds, tactile sensations, etc., may also be powerful fetishes
or antifetishes, according to the impression they may have made on the
nursling. This will be discussed in more detail in the Chapter entitled
"The Senses in Love."
=Fetishes may be of a non-Physical Kind.= A profession may be
a fetish, and so can a mental attitude, in short, anything which in
childhood may have been considered as a source of safety, comfort,
egotistical gratification, etc.
Age itself, is at times a fetish. Gerontophilia is a neurosis, the
victims of which are only attracted to very old men or women, safety,
comfort and food having been assured them probably by a grandfather or
grandmother to whom they clung for neurotic reasons.
=Many Fetishes are Purely Symbolical.= Some women fall in love
with a uniform because that type of garment symbolises to them physical
strength, virility, courage, etc.
A uniform fetishist who consulted me during the war had given herself
to half a dozen officers who appeared to her irresistible until they
undressed or donned civilian clothes. After which she felt indifferent
to them and suffered remorse.
=Antifetishes=, parts of the body or their symbols which repel
us in persons of the opposite sex, can be due either to unpleasant
experiences of childhood connected with such parts of the body or to a
neurotic fear of incest. A neurotic's resistance to a mother fixation
may be so strong that in his (unconscious) fear of committing incest,
he shuns everything which in any woman reminds him of his mother.
A man whose violent mother and sister fixation had kept him till
forty-five away from all women and made him homosexual, felt extremely
uneasy and slightly ashamed in the presence of tall blonde women, the
mother and sister type. While he never enjoyed greatly the company of
any woman, he felt more at ease with small brunettes.
In his case, blonde hair and a high stature had become strong
antifetishes.
=The Quest of the Fetish= means then, in last analysis, the quest
of safety. If fetishes are so closely linked with sexuality, it is
mainly because a feeling of safety is one of the necessary conditions
for sexual potency in the male and the female alike.
As soon as fear dominates, the pelvic regions are starved of blood, for
the blood is then needed in other parts of the body, head and limbs,
for fight or flight. Sexual impotence is the result. This is probably
why in primitive races we often find the erect phallus used as a symbol
of safety, as a primitive "fetish" vouchsafing imaginary safety and
confidence.
This throws an interesting sidelight upon the real meaning of morbid
fetishism. As I said in one of the preceding paragraphs, every neurotic
feels inferior and seeks safety. The hair fetishist, for instance, is
inferior in some respect or considers himself inferior, which is about
the same and has the same consequences, as far as ultimate mental or
physical results are concerned.
The normal hair fetishist seeks a woman whose hair will symbolise to
him the safety he enjoyed close to his mother's hair. The abnormal
fetishist will crave the possession of hair which alone will place
him in turn in possession of safety, a condition in which his sexual
cravings will be easily satisfied. Not feeling capable of conquering
a woman, however, he will cut off some one's tresses, which will
symbolise to him woman, and the safety enjoyed in woman's (his
mother's) arms. In that fashion, he also gratifies his craving for
the line of least effort. Unwilling to face the social, economic,
biological responsibilities that go with the possession of a woman, he
seeks in the fetish which he steals, an easy, selfish, unsocial form of
gratification. That gratification is also a regression, for it leads
him back to the autoerotic practices of childhood.
=Attraction or Obsession.= In the normal man, then, the fetish is
an attraction, influencing his choice of a mate. In the abnormal man
it becomes an obsession, the fetish at times becoming infinitely more
important than the part of the body it suggests, at times causing the
elimination of the sexual mate which it replaces entirely.
In the normal man, the fetish, being the bearer of pleasant memories
from childhood days, facilitates one's adaption to a life partner.
The abnormal individual, unwilling to part with his childhood ways,
which were easier and safer, either demands that the life partner be
the absolute image of the person from whom he acquired his fetishes or
prefers one safe fetish to any life partner.
In the next chapter we shall see how mental and physical, real and
symbolic fetishes are forced upon us by the various developments of the
family romance which is always accompanied by a more or less marked
family feud.
CHAPTER IV
THE FAMILY ROMANCE AND THE FAMILY FEUD
The craving for food and safety, gratified in our mother's arms, the
craving for safety gratified by the strong father's presence, develop
in our nerves automatic reactions of love or hatred (fear) toward other
human beings endowed with or lacking our mother's and father's fetishes.
Exposure to pleasurable or painful stimuli in infancy produces in
our nerves a modification which could be roughly compared to the
modification produced surgically in the brain of the dog mentioned in
Chapter II.
Even as a dog can be conditioned to "prefer" turning to the right
and to "hate" (or fear) running down stairs, a human being can,
thru continued exposure to the sight of red hair in infancy, become
conditioned to "prefer" red hair.
Many other factors, however, complicate the question of our likes and
dislikes. A child's environment contains many sources of stimulation
besides the mother's and the father's fetishes, all of them varying in
intensity, duration and character (pleasant or unpleasant).
Besides, the child is forced at some period of his life into a more
or less sudden and more or less pleasant contact with the outside
world. That contact, which at times is a conflict, often causes some of
the early impressions made upon the infant's or child's nerves to be
"repressed," thereby originating a conflict in the individual's nervous
system.
And thus we are brought to a consideration of the family romance which
various conflicts within the family circle and with the outside world,
not infrequently transform into a family feud.
=The Oedipus Complex.= The complication designated by Freud as
the Oedipus Complex is one of the most potent, altho at times one
of the least obvious factors in family conflicts and in the mental
disturbances which those conflicts occasion.
The Oedipus Complex is named after the Greek legend according to which
Oedipus killed his father and later married his mother without being
aware of their identity.
This is the form in which the Oedipus situation appears in real life:
A male child may become overattached to his mother and develop a
morbid, more or less concealed, hostility to his father. The female
child may become overattached to her father and manifest a more or less
overt hostility to her mother.
There is no case of neurosis in which analysts do not discover a more
or less marked maladjustment of that type. In fact Freud has gone as
far as stating that the Oedipus Complex is the central complex of every
neurotic disturbance.
=The Freudian View.= Freudian analysts have somewhat dramatised
the Oedipus complex which they consider as due to incestuous longings.
Those incestuous longings, according to Freud, are in their last
analysis, a yearning of the child to return to the mother's body where
the child enjoyed, in its prenatal life, absolute peace and comfort.
The average child manages to free himself gradually from the mother's
body, first seeking pleasurable sensations in his own body, sucking his
thumb, playing with his genitals, later becoming interested in other
children like himself, finally, at puberty, seeking human beings of the
opposite sex, etc.
Some children, on the other hand, never seem to free themselves from
the parent of the opposite sex. They are technically designated as the
victims of a mother fixation in the case of boys, of a father fixation
in the case of girls.
=Jung's Interpretation.= Jung, head of the Swiss school of
psychoanalysis, considers the Oedipus complication from a broader
point of view. To him the father and mother are not real persons, but
more or less symbolic and distorted figures created by the imagination
of the child. The yearning of the child for its mother, its jealousy
toward the father are simply due to its desire to monopolise a perfect
provider and protector.
=Pseudo-Incest.= To Adler of Vienna, the Oedipus complex is a
fiction created unconsciously by the neurotic who is trying to fall
back on the father or mother for support. The boy, afraid of life and
of the responsibilities imposed upon a man by a normal sexual life, is
naturally inclined to cling fondly to his mother, from whom he receives
a love and adoration which need not be won or paid for or reciprocated
and which in their demonstrativeness only stop short of sexual
gratification.
The neurotic girl dreams of monopolising the father's affection and
financial support which are not to be repaid by sexual intercourse with
its consequences, etc.
Freud's interpretation explains certain details of behavior in boys
with a mother fixation but the yearning to return to the mother's body
does not explain a father fixation in a woman.
On the other hand, Jung's explanation fails to account for some of the
grossly sexual details in the behavior of the fixation child, such as
great curiosity directed toward the parent of the opposite sex, at
times, even, attempts on the part of a boy to possess the mother in her
sleep, etc.
=The Neurotic Life Plan.= Adler has clearly seen that the Oedipus
situation is not the cause, but merely one of the details of the
neurotic life plan. A human being adopts that plan because, owing to
some inferiority, real or imaginary, (real to him), he feels unable
to compete with other human beings on a footing of equality. The
neurosis supplies him with a short cut to power along the line of least
effort. That short cut is selfish, unsocial and, hence, productive of
unpleasant results. The mother-fixation man, the father-fixation woman
shirk their biological duties, thereby leading an easier, cheaper,
self-centered life which, in the end, vouchsafes them no real positive
gratification.
What Adler has left unexplained is how the parent fixation establishes
itself in the neurotic.
=Imitation.= The Oedipus situation is simply one of the consequences of
the imitation by the child of the parent of the opposite sex.
Imitation plays a tremendous part in human life and, as far as behavior
is concerned, is an infinitely more powerful factor than heredity.
Heredity endows us with a certain set of physical organs, hence with a
number of potentialities. But the utilisation of those potentialities
is left to the individual's destiny determined by his environment.
If the son of a splendidly developed prize fighter finds himself in
an environment which countenances and lauds prize fighting, physical
power will probably become his goal early in life. If his environment
casts disobliging reflections on ring activities or if those activities
have an unpleasant financial connotation for him, (father disabled
and poor), the same boy will abstain from athletic training, remain
physically undeveloped, perhaps even grow weak and stunted.
=The Glands.= As we shall see in another chapter, the various glands
of our body have a good deal to do with the shaping of our personality
but the pressure of the social herd within which we live is also a
tremendous factor for it compels us to adopt as models for imitation
certain physical and intellectual types which are acceptable to the
herd.
The degree of the pressure exerted by the herd varies greatly with
social conditions. The pressure is not the same in an Alaska camp and
in a New England village. Unnoticeable in an artists' colony, it may
become difficult to bear in a large family group including several
members of the clergy.
Children become grown ups by imitating grown ups. A boy acquires a
man's behavior by imitating his father. A girl acquires womanly manners
by imitating her mother.
At the same time a boy with a strong organism and, consequently, a fair
amount of self confidence, is not as slavish in his imitation of his
father's ways as one who is cursed with a delicate constitution or who
may have been made timid by fear-producing or humiliating experiences.
The former is more adventurous in every way and will, not only roam
farther away from his home, but let his eyes also roam on men outside
of the family circle, whom he will pick out as secondary models.
The weak boy, seeking safety and following the line of least effort,
will cling to the closest model, his father, and in extreme cases, will
identify himself with him.
=The Identification Mania.= An exaggerated mania for identification is
always a symptom of weakness and inferiority.
The weak man joins numberless organisations and derives a great deal
of pride from the mere fact of his membership in them. In general he
will not allow anyone to discuss or criticise those organisations.
The anonymous citizen of Chicago or Chillicothe is easily aroused by
criticisms of his native city overheard elsewhere, for he identifies
himself with his native city for lack of any distinction of his own.
Members of so called "aristocratic" families, themselves incapable
of any achievement, are most unbearable owing to their family pride.
They obscurely feel that if their relationship to some more or less
distinguished ancestor was taken away from them they would sink into
complete obscurity. The stupid traveler who constantly flaunts the flag
of his country wherever he happens to be, is also an inferior who is
trying to claim all the virtues which the jingoes of his land consider
as national characteristics.
Close imitation and identification with the person we imitate cannot
but lead to conflicts, for it sooner or later means that we encroach
upon the rights of our model.
=Early Conflicts.= The little boy who imitates his father,
identifies himself with him and tries to "become" his father, may
only provoke mirth when he dons his father's garments or carries his
father's walking stick.
When he carries his imitation to the point of handling his father's
razors or sampling his cigars, he may court what, to him, is a very
unintelligible, illogical and humiliating form of punishment.
"If father is always right, why do I get spanked for doing what father
does?" the child asks himself with a child's pitiless logic.
A profound hostility to the oppressive father may then grow in the mind
of the imitative child, in no wise due to sexual complications.
This is also the way in which a rivalry may arise between son and
father for the non-sexual possession of the mother, the freedom of her
room and her bed, the sole enjoyment of her caresses, the sole disposal
of her time, the sole domination over her.
The father enjoys all those privileges, and in order to be exactly like
him, the son must also enjoy them "exclusively" which is logically
impossible and leads to unconscious death wishes.
=Death Wishes.= The death wishes that lurk in the son's mind when his
father and rival is concerned and reveal themselves thru dreams, are
not simply murderous cravings. They are symbolical, like the death
wishes which some fond mother may express thru her dreams when her
beloved child has interfered too much with her activities in her waking
hours.
The imitative boy, beaten in the race for all of his father's
possessions, of which the mother is the most valuable, wishes his
father "out of the way." If there are female children, the imitative
boy may, after giving up the mother as an unattainable goal, adopt
toward one of his sisters the attitude of protection and ownership
his father assumes toward his mother. In such cases, the feud is far
from being as serious as it would be otherwise. A sister fixation, it
goes without saying, is far less dangerous than a mother fixation. The
sister is younger than the mother, the obsession of her image being
unlikely to attract the brother later to women much older than himself.
The love which a sister returns is also far from being as unselfish,
intelligent and indulgent as that which a mother lavishes on her child.
Almost everything which has been said about the mother fixation applies
to the father fixation in girls. But we must bear in mind that owing to
the tremendous biological importance of the mother, a mother fixation
is likely to have a deeper influence on a boy than a father fixation on
a girl.
=Our Preferences.= Thus it is that the "preferences" we show when
grown up, for a certain human type, are determined by the appearance
and behavior of the males and females which were closest to us in the
formative years of our life.
In the majority of cases it is the mother type or the father type which
proves most attractive to boys and girls respectively, the type being
represented or symbolised by certain physical or mental fetishes.
In many cases, the mother or father type have been modified or replaced
by other masculine or feminine types which took the place of the mother
or father during that important period of our life.
The woman who suckled us or fed us and attended to our various physical
needs, nurse or nurse maid, may become the bearer of our fetishes.
In Europe where the wet nurse and the nurse girl are infinitely more
common than in this country, the ancillary type of love, love for
servants and menials, is observed with much greater frequency than here.
The Southern man does not show the same repugnance as the Northern
man to consort sexually with colored women of the servant class. The
colored mammy's fetishes are found competing successfully in many cases
with those of the white mother.
=Craig's Birds.= Those who believe that heredity, instinct, the call
of the blood, etc., have much to do with the choice of a mate, should
read reports of experiments performed by William Craig on pigeons. Ring
doves and passenger pigeons never mate. When the eggs of a passenger
pigeon, however, have been hatched by a ring dove, the young male
passenger pigeons will, at mating time, ignore entirely the females of
their species, "their flesh and blood," and mate with female ring doves
(the mother image) exclusively.
The fetishes which to them meant food and safety in the nest mean to
them beauty and eroticism when they reach adulthood.
CHAPTER V
INCEST
The family romance has been presented by the Freudians as complicated
by actual incestuous entanglements. Adler on the other hand has shown
that the incestuous situation is rather an "as if" introduced by the
neurotic as a part of his absurd life plan.
Barring a few exceptions, the small boy does not desire his mother
sexually nor does the small girl feel erotic at the thought of her
father.
That such incestuous desires arise at the time of puberty cannot
be doubted. But they are observed mostly in neurotics to whom the
incestuous situation suggests, as I pointed out in the previous
chapter, to the boy, food, comfort, the mother's easily won love, to
the girl, the protection and the attentions of the strong father. In
many cases too, homosexual and incestuous practices among the children
in one family mean nothing but the neurotic search for the line of
least effort.
Freud seeks at times very far fetched explanations for very simple
phenomena in order to show the sexual motive at the bottom of them. He
states in his _Introduction to Psychoanalysis_ that a girl may show
great affection for a younger sister "as a substitute for the child she
vainly wished from the father." The truth is that the older daughter,
in her close imitation of her mother, also starts "mothering" a child.
"A boy," Freud states in the same book, "may take his sister as the
object of his love to replace his _faithless_ mother." He rather
imitates his father and starts to protect and order about a little
female of his age, which at times, when both have witnessed the
parental embraces, may lead to actual incest.
=The Incest Fear.= Incest is at the present day the form of sexual
relation which provokes the most powerful expression of disapproval
on the part of civilised and uncivilised races alike. In fact the
primitive races seem obsessed by a panicky fear of incest. In many
tribes, brothers and sisters are not allowed to meet or speak to each
other and, in certain cases, they must even avoid the sight of each
other and eschew every mention of each other's names.
In the Fiji Islands, where the rules against incest are especially
rigorous, there are, on the other hand, special holidays on which
orgies are held in which incest becomes permissible.
In other words, the natives of those islands, while recognising the
irresistible nature of the incest temptation and taking all sorts of
measures in order to prevent the commission of that sin, supply at
stated intervals an outlet for incestuous cravings.
Innumerable details of primitive legislation separate the son-in-law
from the mother-in-law, the father-in-law from his son's bride.
The Basogas of the Upper Nile loathe incest to such a degree that they
punish it even in animals whenever it can be observed among them.
=Incest in Ancient Times.= The horror of incest, however, is a
relatively recent development in human psychology and ethics. The
ancient dynasties of Egypt and Peru practiced incest. Incest was
indulged in by all the archaic gods. The authors of the book of Genesis
must have accepted the idea of incest as the sole means of explaining
Adam's and Eve's descendants.
The horror of incest which we all feel or pretend to feel, is indeed an
acquired feeling. Since every race has adopted stern legal measures to
prevent incest, it can only be because a desire for incest is one of
the cravings which mankind is constantly struggling against.
As Frazer says: "There is no law commanding men to eat and drink or
forbidding them to put their hands in the fire. Men eat and drink and
keep their hands out of the fire instinctively."
If men and women avoided incest instinctively no legislation would be
needed compelling them to avoid it.
Indeed the confessions received by psychoanalysts reveal that the
first sexual desires of the young are directed toward children of the
opposite sex within the family circle. The many slight or serious
indiscretions of an incestuous nature in which neurotic brothers and
sisters indulge in infancy and childhood are generally "forgotten,"
that is, repressed, in later years, but analytic probing brings a great
amount of such repressed material to the surface.
Since neither animals nor human beings experience any natural fear of
incest, why is it that all races are officially so afraid of it?
=Inbreeding.= It cannot be due to the fear of race deterioration
consequent upon inbreeding. Inbreeding is not necessarily a harmful
process of reproduction as East and Jones have shown in their book on
"Inbreeding and Outbreeding." It seems to have, at times, for instance
in Athens during the classic age, led to the production of many very
superior individuals.
Furthermore the primitive savages who punish incest even among domestic
animals have no conception of such eugenic theories. Some of them,
incredible as it may sound, do not even realise the relation of cause
to effect which exists between intercourse and pregnancy.
Freud offers an explanation based upon the Darwinian hypothesis of the
primal horde in which the old father kept all the females for himself
and drove away the growing sons.
This state of affairs has been observed among herds of wild cattle
and horses. It generally leads to the killing of the oldest bull or
stallion by the younger males.
=The Primal Horde.= Freud assumes that this must have been the usual
occurrence in the primal horde. One day the sons joined hands and
killed the father.
"Though the brothers had joined forces in order to overcome the father,
each was the others' rival among the women. Each one wanted to have
them all to himself like the father, and in the fight of each against
the others the new organization would have perished. For there was no
longer any one stronger than all the rest who could have successfully
assumed the role of the father. Thus there was nothing left for the
brothers to do, if they wished to live together, but to erect incest
prohibitions, perhaps after many difficult experiments, in the course
of which they may all have renounced the women whom they desired."
In other words, the incest taboo was adopted to assure peace within the
family circle, a convenience measure dictated by jealousy.
=Repressed Incestuous Feelings= may at times drive one into a most
objectional form of behavior. A brother who in childhood was too fond
of his sister (or vice versa) may, from an unconscious desire for
self-protection, adopt a hostile attitude to his sister. The more
attracted he was to her the more sadistic he will appear in later years.
He may even avoid all the women who would in any way suggest his sister
and in that way never feel satisfied in love, for the women who cannot
possibly suggest to him his sister, lack all the fetishes which would
vouchsafe him safety and eroticism.
Such a man should be analysed and made to realise the incestuous
cravings which he has repressed into his unconscious. His hatred would
then change into affection and in his search of a mate he would
logically seek the sister image which alone would insure him sexual
happiness.
I have reconciled in that way several groups of brothers and sisters
who had never been able to get along after puberty, altho most of them
had developed a dangerous fondness for each other before puberty.
Repressed sister fixation like repressed mother fixation has been found
on several occasions as one of the components of homosexualism in the
man, father or brother fixation as one of the causes of frigidity in
the woman.
=Blood Relations.= Mother or sister fixation is frequently the cause of
marriage between blood relations. This sort of union has been unjustly
suspected of breeding mental inferiors. We should rather say that it
is the mental inferiors who seek their mate within the family circle.
Unable to secure the mother or the sister as a mate, they select a
woman who has as many of the family traits as possible, that they may
feel more secure in her company. If a defective child is bred of such
unions, it is not due to the close relationship of the parents but to
the fact that too often one of the mates was deficient physically or
mentally.
In this respect as in many others, self-knowledge and acceptance
of one's personality, coupled with a courageous understanding of
unavoidable biological facts, are the necessary conditions for perfect
mental health and freedom.
The man with a mother or sister fixation, the woman with a father or
brother fixation should be made aware of it, however slight or severe
the fixation may be.
They must be made to realise that incestuous cravings are biological
phenomena which for reasons of convenience have been made unlawful but
which do not brand the individual experiencing them as a degenerate or
a vicious person.
They must also be made to realise that their incestuous craving
may be one of the symptoms of the neurotic search for the line of
least effort, knowledge of which weakens the craving to the point of
insignificance.
The individual with a biologically real incestuous fixation should
accept it and seek its substitute gratification thru association with a
suitable mate presenting in his or her person the fetishes of the loved
parent or brother or sister.
The individual whose fixation is purely neurotic should be freed of
it by analysis and allowed to seek a mate without being inhibited by
ghosts.
CHAPTER VI
THE PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE
A human being has met another human being of the opposite sex and
is attracted to him or her by the conscious or unconscious memories
which his or her physical and mental make up brings back. An organic
compulsion drives a man to seek a certain woman who is to be his sexual
mate. We say then that the man is in love. What is the tangible,
observable, measurable meaning of the condition of being in love?
To understand this clearly we must bear in mind the principle which
modern psychology is gradually adopting, that of the unity of the
organism.
=The Organism is a Unit= which cannot, except for reasons of pure
convenience, be split into entities of a contrasted character, such
as body and mind, matter and soul, etc. To every physical phenomenon
corresponds a simultaneous mental manifestation and vice versa. The
body is the tangible aspect, the mind, the intangible aspect of the
organism.
Nor can any scientific distinction be drawn between the so-called
grossness of the body and the spiritual quality of the mind.
Nor can we establish in the body absolute lines of cleavage between
the various organs, heart, stomach, liver or sexual organs. They are
all closely interrelated and there again we find a profound unity of
action. When the nerves of the "life division" of the autonomic nervous
system are set working, the pupil will be contracted, the saliva flow,
the heart beat more slowly, the stomach secrete gastric juice and churn
food, the intestines push digested food toward the rectum, and the
sexual organs fill up with blood.
When the "safety nerves" are in action the pupil is dilated, the saliva
scarce, the heart beats faster, gastric activities cease or become
reversed (vomiting), the intestines either stop their activity or are
affected by diarrhea and the sexual organs are emptied of blood. Any
stimulation applied to any of those organs will produce the specific
stimulation indicated above in ALL THE OTHER ORGANS, tho in
varying degrees.
In other words perfect peace and safety promote all the activities
of the "life nerves," danger and fear promote all the activities of
the "safety nerves." Peace and safety build up the body and assure
the continuance of the race. Danger and fear stop all the activities
which are not directly concerned with fight or flight, hence weaken the
organism and stop the sex life.
Peace and safety represented by the mental and physical fetishes of the
mate toward whom we are driven by an organic compulsion are bound to
produce in us most gratifying results.
The sight, smell and taste of good food, the sight of pleasant objects,
the sound of good music, etc., produce a powerful stimulation.
=Love's Stimulation=, reaching us, as we shall see in another chapter,
thru all the senses and thru a thousand memories, is incomparably more
powerful than that of any other craving.
Nutritious food in sufficient quantities is generally synonymous with
good health. Improper food in insufficient quantities is generally
synonymous with bad health.
The mental connotation of good and bad food, however, is far from being
as important as the mental connotation of love or lack of love. There
are besides the sexual factors, such tremendous egotistical factors in
the love life (as will be shown in Chapter VIII,) that love is the
most powerful stimulus known and the lack of love or the loss of love
the most terrible depressant for the human organism.
=The Successful Lover= has a good appetite, regular heart action,
(hence a healthy complexion); he enjoys sleep undisturbed by
nightmares, is capable of continued effort (good thyroid action), has
firm muscles (regular adrenal section), is self-reliant, etc. In other
words his organism is working on a hundred-per-cent basis and under the
influence of that stimulation he can accomplish tasks which, under any
other circumstances, would appear too difficult, and understand things
which under the influence of a sluggish thyroid or bowels would have
appeared very obscure.
People indifferent to physiology might attribute some of love's magic
results to "inspiration," to "spiritual uplift" and other vaguely
conceived factors of a romantic and sentimental nature.
I am always reminded when encountering such explanations in the
literature of love, of the nuptial flight of the bee.
When a male and female bee fall in love, they both fly to a dizzy
height in the direction of the sun and there perform the sexual union.
To an unscientific mind of the Maeterlinckian type, there might be in
that picture a beautiful symbol of love's exaltation.
The cold blooded scientist, on the other hand, will simply tell us that
erotic excitement in the bee produces a large amount of irritating
phototropic materials which compel the bees to fly toward the source of
light.
At the end of the sexual act, the production of phototropic materials
ceases and the bees come back to earth .... like lovers tired of each
other.
In love the conqueror feels like a conqueror and is a hard adversary
to defeat. Like the amorous bees which can reach, physically speaking,
heights which they would never dream of exploring when out of love, the
successful lover can rise to infinite heights physically and mentally.
=The Unsuccessful Lover=, on the other hand, may be, in extreme cases,
a pitiful individual to contemplate.
The humiliation of defeat and the fear of other defeats, the starvation
of all the senses which the love object would have gratified, produce a
depression which stops temporarily all the life activities.
Appetite is lacking and there may be nausea and vomiting; diarrhea or
constipation replace the normal activities of the intestine, thereby
inducing weakness or autointoxication which, through a vicious circle,
still increase the depression. The heart action is disturbed, which
increases the uneasiness of the sufferer, his breathing is difficult,
causing much sighing, the surface capillaries are emptied of blood,
producing a morbid pallor, etc.
A person in that condition is incapable of continued effort in any
direction. The stoppage of all the life functions induces a sense of
worthlessness. The fear of defeat not infrequently drives the sufferer
to suicide, which is a symbolic attempt at returning to the safest
condition in which the organism ever found itself: death, the return to
uterine life, to _mother_ earth, etc.
It may, if the adrenal cortex, productive of anger and violence
chemicals, has been sufficiently stimulated by suffering, provoke
attempts at vengeance, cause hatred, murderous cravings, which, if
indulged in, land the patient in jail, if repressed with difficulty,
land him in a sanitarium.
=Calf Love.= Those things should be borne in mind by parents
attempting, for instance, to break up some absurd infatuation which is
the more overwhelming as the unexperienced lover is not restrained by
the many social or financial considerations which hover in the mind of
a more sophisticated person in the throes of "erotropism."
Those complications are to be borne in mind too by the psychoanalyst
who must not mistake symptoms of physical deterioration due to
unsatisfied love cravings with gastric or intestinal derangement due
to toxic agents, and who must bend all his energies to separate what
is "purely" sexual, from all the parasitic cravings of an egotistical
nature which make the patient's sufferings more acute.
CHAPTER VII
THE SENSES IN LOVE
Friedlander has wisely remarked that there is more sensuality than
sexuality in love. Which after all means that sex is only a small part
of love. It is only after the various senses have reported to the
central nervous system the presence of numerous fetishes symbolising
peace and safety, that the sex union is not only possible, but
extremely attractive and creates a durable bond between two human
beings.
=Sight= is naturally the most important of the senses. Like hearing, it
is a long distance sense, which does not require close proximity like
smell, nor close contact like taste and touch.
Thru association of memories, sight becomes the perfect, all embracing,
descriptive sense, able to substitute for all the other senses.
A glance reveals not only the color, size and shape of an object, but
its consistency, firmness or softness, its state of preservation or
deterioration, its probable odor and taste, etc.
Sight perceives the exposed and obvious fetishes and, thru memory
associations, imagines those which are neither exposed nor obvious.
Visual sensations are the most powerful experienced by the organism;
a slight injury to the optic nerve produces a greater shock than
major injuries to any other nerve of the body. The popularity of
the movies is based upon that characteristic. To the unimaginative,
primitive people who relish that childish form of entertainment, visual
sensations replace and suggest almost every other form of sensory
gratification.
I have shown in Chapter III that the large majority of fetishes are
visual, being impressions of color and size, which were produced on the
child's visual nerves thru close proximity with the mother's body.
=Auditory Sensations= which enhance erotic states also hark back very
obviously to infancy. The caressing tone of the lovers' voices, the
well modulated words of praise which they speak to each other in a low
monotonous sing-song during their embraces, the baby talk in which so
many lovers indulge, remind one unavoidably of the crooned lullabies
with which the loving mother created a state of peace and safety that
would enable the nursling to doze off.
=Smell.= In animals the sense of smell plays probably a more important
part than the sense of sight. In man the olfactory sense has become
more negative and protective than positive. It enables him to avoid
rather than to locate certain objects. This partial atrophy of the
positive olfactory capacities is undoubtedly due to the progress of
hygiene and cleanliness in human life.
The child whose mother is carefully shampooed and bathed will not
consider strong odors emanating from hair or arm pits as a symbol of
safety. On the contrary, they will be something foreign to him, hence
suggestive of danger.
In ancient times, bodily odors were frequently mentioned as love
stimulants. The Homeric poems, the Song of Songs, the Kamasutra and
other Hindoo erotic works, the Arabian Perfumed Garden and even in more
recent times, poems like Herrick's "Julia's Sweat," extolled strong
body odors which at the present day not only are deemed offensive but
cannot be mentioned except in medical writings.
The modern bathroom has exiled olfactory allusions from literature.
Odors can be, not only fetishes but very often powerful antifetishes.
This is partly due to a repression of the child's interest in his
excretions which later burst forth in the use of perfume by women,
smoking by men and women. Cigar smoking for instance supplies an outlet
for a number of childish polymorphous perversions, to use Freud's
expression.
In this case as in many others, violent repugnance to odors good or bad
in adulthood may be traced to a morbid craving for them in childhood.
=The Sense of Taste= is not very important in love, altho some
experienced lovers detect a distinct flavor in the skin of various
parts of one woman's skin, cheeks, arms, etc.
Taste observed in purely nutritional activities reveals constantly
its unconscious infantile origin. However completely we may have been
weaned, we constantly pay a tribute of appreciation to our first food.
The exaggerated and unjustified importance we attribute to milk in
the diet of adults, the way in which we designate a white complexion
as "milky" or "creamy," and in which we praise many tender foods by
stating that they are "like cream" or "melt in our mouth" illustrates,
together with the popularity of breast fetishism, the influence which
infantile gustatory impressions have made on all of us.
=Touch= is probably as important as sight for physico-chemical reasons.
All animals seem to enjoy the close contact of other animals of their
own species. Even on very warm days, puppies, kittens and young birds
derive a very great comfort from being huddled together in kennel,
basket or nest.
There are two reasons for that craving for contact. The safest period
of our life which our automatic nerves remember is the fetal period
during which the contact of the child with the womb is constant and in
perfect relation to the fetus' growth.
Also, contact facilitates the electrical exchanges between human
beings, especially between male and female, exchanges which owing to
the removal of organic inhibitions, must be singularly powerful between
lovers.
=Holding Hands.= Whenever conditions separate their bodies, lovers
generally revert to the childish practice of holding hands, which to
the child meant an assurance of safety when led by the strong parents
and also facilitated electrical exchanges of distinct value to the
young and old alike.
=The Kiss.= This brings us to the consideration of a love
manifestation in which sensations of a tactile, gustatory and olfactory
character are combined: the kiss.
The kiss, curiously enough, is found both in certain animal and human
races but not in all human races.
Many mammals, birds and insects exchange caresses which remind one of
the human kiss. "Love birds" seem to spend much of their time kissing
each other.
On the other hand, Eastern races do not seem to relish the caress which
Western peoples call a kiss. In China a form of affectionate greeting
corresponding to our kiss consists in rubbing one's nose against the
cheek of the other person after which a deep breath is taken thru the
nose with the eyes half-shut.
In some primitive races the equivalent for our "kiss me" is "smell me."
In other races, the kiss is a manifestation of respect rather than a
proof of love. Anglo Saxons on certain occasions kiss the Bible. In the
early Christian and Arab civilisations, the kiss was a ritual gesture
and has remained so in certain Catholic customs: kissing the pope's
foot, relics, a bishop's ring, etc.
In certain races, kissing is a proof of affection but not of love.
Japanese mothers kiss their children but Japanese lovers do not
exchange caresses of the lips, according to Lafcadio Hearn.
The dark races of Africa are ignorant of that caress and so are the
Malays, the aborigines of Australia and many other primitive tribes.
=The Birth of the Kiss.= It appears that even among the kissing races,
the kiss is a relatively recent development. It is rarely mentioned in
Greek literature. In the Middle Ages it was a sign of refinement, being
almost unknown among the lower classes.
Some analysts have come to the conclusion that the kissing habit is
derived from sucking the mother's nipple.
If this was the proper explanation, all the races would naturally
indulge in it.
The kiss is infinitely more complicated than that. The Freudian
explanation should not be discarded entirely but it does not explain
everything.
The kiss has grown in importance with the restrictions placed by
civilisation on sexual activities. The more primitive the races, the
more promiscuous they are and the less they kiss.
The kiss seems to have become among the more repressed and advanced
races a displacement upward of the act of possession, a sublimation of
intercourse. It is, next to sexual union, the closest contact which the
male and female may attain.
=Kisses and Electricity.= If we adopt Crile's theory according to
which the life stream is an electric current produced by the brain and
constantly discharging itself, we may realise concretely the import of
the kiss.
The physical union is probably the neutralisation of two electric
currents, positive and negative, altho we do not know as yet what
correspondence there is between sexes and opposite electric currents.
Anyone familiar, however, with experiences in galvanotropism, some of
which I have mentioned in Chapter II, will when reflecting upon the way
in which the spermatozoon directs itself infallibly toward the egg,
conclude that it is headed toward a strong electric current issuing
from the woman's womb and ovaries.
The kiss is only a milder, less complete neutralisation of the currents
issuing from two human beings.
If the kiss on the lips is preferred by lovers, it is because the
moist mucus of the lips is a better conductor of electrical current
than the skin. In very passionate kisses, the lovers' tongues play a
double part, a symbolic part, representing the mother's nipple, and
a physico-chemical part, securing a closer connection, like plug and
socket in electric appliances.
In Anglo-Saxon fiction which does not countenance descriptions of
lovers' embraces, a very passionate kiss is always symbolical of
complete surrender. Physiologically this symbolism is quite accurate.
The temporary exhaustion which follows a protracted kiss is often equal
to that following a lovers' embrace and this can be easily understood
when we remember the protracted electrical discharge which must follow
the contact of the conductive surfaces of the mucus of the lips.
CHAPTER VIII
EGO AND SEX
If the course of love was regulated solely by sexual factors its
study would be a comparatively simple matter. Sexual cravings find
themselves, however, in conflict with many other manifestations of the
life force. For the _sexual libido_ is not the life force as certain
psychoanalysts believe. It is only one of the manifestations of the
electric stream produced in the brain and seeking an outlet.
In fact, sex is only a _temporary_ manifestation of the life force,
late to appear, early to disappear. Embryonic life begins several
months before sex becomes observable in the fetus. Actual extrauterine
life is in full swing before sex is ripe, that is, capable of
fulfilling its biological destiny. Life continues sometimes many years
after sex has ceased to serve its reproductive purpose.
The most powerful urge to which sex has to adapt itself in the life of
the human animal is the ego urge, the craving for food and power, the
selfish urge par excellence. At times, sex and ego work in perfect
accord as they should, considering the close relationship of the
nervous divisions carrying power to them.
=Neurotic Complications=, however, due to the necessary repressions of
modern civilisation, throw them too often into conflict.
We might say that there is a natural source of conflict between them,
for the ego urge is selfish, aiming as it does at the conservation of
the individual and its personal upbuilding, while the sex urge, whose
aim is to assure the continuance of the species, is altruistic.
By altruistic I mean that one human being must, before finding the
complete gratification of his sex urge, join his body to that of
another human being of the opposite sex, whose sex urge he helps
gratify, the result of that cooperation being the creation of a third
human being.
From this we may see clearly how the neurotic temperament, unusually
self-centered, is likely to exacerbate whatever conflicts may exist
between ego and sex.
Even in the so called normal human being, that is, the human being
who in spite of life's repressions, manages to live at peace with his
environment and himself, the will-to-power, the desire for possession
and domination expresses itself constantly in what is generally
considered as typically sexual manifestations of love.
Do not lovers say that they "possess" each other. Was not the Biblical
God power before he became creation? In the beginning there was the
Word, that is the expression, the utterance of the divine ego.
Does not the unmated God of the Western nations symbolise the absolute
supremacy of power over sex? And when people pray to God, what do they
ask for, in the majority of cases, if not power (help)?
=Self-Love.= Yet we often consider the craving for power as a form
of love, self-love. When Jesus said "Love thy neighbor as thyself" he
testified to the fact that our self-love is the most powerful human
feeling and he presented it as a goal which our love for others _might_
reach.
He admitted that we all love ourselves first and he was too world-wise
to advise men, as some of his followers have done, to repress their
self-love. He only advised men to try and love others as much as they
loved themselves.
All the great conflicts between nations have been precipitated by ego
rather than by love. Love and sex were responsible, we are told for
the most famous war in history and legend, the Trojan war. I am quite
sceptical about it in spite of the "evidence" presented by a poet who
probably never existed as an individual, Homer.
I know, however, that the most atrocious war ever fought, the world
war, was unchained, not by sexual jealousy, but by the most sordid, the
grossest form of predatory ego cravings, the will-to-commercial-power.
In innumerable cases, ego overpowers sex and compels it to suit its
purposes. It masquerades in the guise of sex and deceives many as to
its true nature. Prostitution, in its last analysis, is the enslavement
of sex by ego, sex working to feed the ego and supply it with
necessities or luxuries.
=Ego in Sex Guise.= Certain customs of ages past are sexual
in appearance but the egotistical motive back of them is easily
discovered. Take the right of the first night, which in several parts
of the world survived until modern times.
The tribal chief or the lord of the manor had the right to spend a
night with every bride within his jurisdiction before the rightful
husband was allowed to enjoy his marital privileges. That custom made
the first born of every family the putative descendent of the chief
and fostered a deeper loyalty to him among his followers.
Even as economic exhibitionism prompts people to spend at show
eating places sums in no way commensurate with their hunger, or to
buy diamonds which are not in any way beautiful but only symbolical
of the wearer's indifference to returns on his investments, egotism
causes many men to pretend sexual cravings which they do not feel.
Many stage women, actresses, singers, dancers, etc., are kept by men
whose sex life is at low ebb but who parade their "conquest" before
their associates or perfect strangers to demonstrate their sexual and
financial powers.
=Fatherhood.= A constant craving for fatherhood is not infrequently a
neurotic symptom, an egotistical desire to compensate for low sexual
potency.
Physicians and druggists dispensing aphrodisiacs can testify to the
prevalence of large families in the homes of almost impotent men.
The man who can fulfill his sexual duties once a year for fifteen years
and foils his mate's attempts at contraception, is quite able to raise
a very large family and to pass among his associates for a very virile
man. The sight of his numerous progeny silences any scepticism as to
his sexual vitality.
Some of the most astonishing vagaries in the choice of a mate are
traceable to purely egotistical cravings. Neurotic women married to a
superior man may refuse to express any sexual joy in his arms. They
remain frigid in his company and then give themselves to some rather
inferior individual to whom they feel superior and in whose arms
they show the most complete abandon. The medical and lay press very
often relates cases of fine looking and apparently normal women who
marry idiots or morons. Their sense of inferiority and their fear of
ego-defeat makes them seek inferior mates unlikely to dominate them in
any respect. Some young women conceal their morbid desire to mate with
a degenerate under a philanthropic mask. They pretend, when marrying a
drunkard or a thief, that their aim is to regenerate him.
And so do some young men with an inferiority complex explain to their
family and friends that they have married a menial or a prostitute to
reclaim her.
=War Prisoners.= German newspapers mentioned several times during the
war that war prisoners were treated too cordially by the women, many
of whom had affairs with the defeated enemies. In several cities, it
became necessary for the military authorities to issue proclamations on
the subject, berating the offenders for their "shameless behavior." The
same facts were observed in France and in Italy altho they were given
less prominence in the American newspapers.
Why was it that those women idolised men they were supposed to hate
as enemies and accorded sexual favors to them? Why was it that they
did not enjoy more completely the victory of the males of their race
and jeer at the defeated foes? Those women were neurotics who, unable
to enjoy the embraces of victorious, superior males, felt themselves
superior in the arms of defeated and humiliated men.
=Neurotic Motherliness.= A patient of mine who had always shown herself
rebellious in her attitude to her sexually potent lover, became all
tenderness and submissiveness one day when sickness almost cut off his
potency.
"I never loved him as much as I did yesterday," she told me, "for I
felt then that I could really mother him." Which translated into honest
parlance meant, to use Adler's vocabulary, that on that occasion he was
"below" and she was "above."
=When Ego and Sex do not Conflict=, a combination of the two gives
results which stamp human love as distinctly superior to animal
sexuality. Just as higher egotism has created cooperation, which
eliminates individual fights and establishes in their place group
fighting, healthy egotism added to sex has introduced cooperation and
altruism into love. The egotistical desire to please and dominate the
female thru vigorous caresses has thrown into the shade the primitive
cavemanlike ways. Man no longer strikes the female unconscious in order
to satisfy his sex cravings on her prostrate body. His aim is rather
to satisfy his mate first. This of course carries sexuality far away
from its primal aims. Love's byplays, in many cases, replace love's
specific functions, the road from sensuality to sterility being a short
one. When the goal of sterility is attained, we see sex willingly
relinquishing its biological aims to egotism. In the plays of sex and
ego as in the conflicts between the two urges, ego is more frequently
victorious than sex.
CHAPTER IX
HATRED AND LOVE
Hatred and love seem diametrically opposed feelings. Yet there are many
cases when love masquerades as hatred and hatred as love.
Altho such hatred and such love are not genuine they may drive us at
times into acts of cruelty or self-sacrifice which to all appearances
seem to emanate from perfect love or from savage hatred.
Very exaggerated feelings should always be viewed suspiciously as
blinds for the opposite feelings. An extravagant display of affection
is generally a desperate attempt on the person indulging in that
display at repressing loathing and hatred. On the other hand, morbid
hostility toward one person is generally an attempt at repressing a
love which would be unjustifiable or detrimental for the personality.
A few illustrations from life will make my meaning clear.
=A Worried Wife.= One woman I analysed was thrown into hysterical
anxiety whenever her husband reached home a little late. She pictured
him dead, dismembered by a train or knocked down by robbers. When she
first called on me, she stressed the struggle going on in her heart.
She loved two men and her nobility of soul, her delicacy of feelings,
and many other qualities she bestowed on herself very liberally, were
making that double life unbearable for her. "I have wronged my dear,
dear, hubby," she kept repeating. "And he is so good, so kind, so
considerate."
The wife who never tires of singing her husband's praise is always
somebody else's mistress. It is generally her way of settling accounts
with her conscience.
In this case, the anxiety she felt over her husband's whereabouts and
health when he was late in reaching home, supplied the expiation which
neurotics seem to crave for their misdeeds.
But there was more in that anxiety than one of the manifestations of
her sense of sin. I asked her whether she had ever experienced the same
anxiety when her lover was late in coming to their trysting place.
"No," she said, "and this is what leads me to think that I don't love
him nearly as much as I do my husband." Her reaction to her lover's
lateness was simply one of anger. She felt herself slighted and she
suspected him of stopping somewhere to flirt with some woman. Even
once, when a wreck on a suburban line leading to his home town, had
prevented him from meeting her, she never imagined him the victim of
any accident.
Further questioning elicited the information that death wishes had
crossed her mind on several occasions in relation to her husband. She
finally came to see that those repressed wishes were simply finding an
outlet in her wish fulfilment fears. She was constantly visualizing the
tragedy which would have given her her freedom.
=The Test of Love.= In other words, her unconscious wished her husband
dead. The repression of that wish compelled it to masquerade as a
hysterical concern for his health. The thought of her lover, however,
never suggested to her any death scenes.
During the war a woman patient who had two sons at the front, was
tortured every night by a nightmare in which she saw her older son
killed in action. She very naturally interpreted those dreams to
herself as convincing evidence of her greater fondness for that boy
than for his brother. In the course of our conversations, however, she
gradually admitted that her elder son was a gambler and drunkard and
had found himself in many an unpleasant complication.
She had thought several times, altho she had at once repressed the
thought, that death would be preferable to his life of embarrassment
and degradation. Those repressed death wishes found an outlet in
nightmares accompanied by a great display of emotion consciously felt
as love and grief.
Parents who continually warn their children against accidents "likely"
to happen to them, who grow panicky when some street commotion takes
place and imagine that their child has been hurt or killed, are not
quite as loving as they imagine.
In such unjustified fears, as in death dreams, there lurks an ill
concealed desire to be freed from the thraldom of parenthood and to
regain the selfish happiness of the childless state.
A young woman fainted several times when she heard shouts on the street
where her young child had been taken by the maid. She "knew" something
must have happened to her boy. Her dreams would with alarming frequency
picture accidents befalling the child. After I made her realise the
way in which her child had interfered with her social activities, with
her attending dances, theatrical performances, etc., a change became
noticeable in her dreams. Instead of visualising her child dead she
saw him in her day and night dreams as an adolescent, no longer in her
way, no longer a handicap to her in her pursuit of pleasure. Her panics
disappeared about the same time.
More elusive at times are cases of hatred which analysis reduces to a
struggle of the personality against an inacceptable love.
=Sour Grapes.= A man, unduly attracted to a woman who socially,
intellectually or financially, is or should remain outside of his
reach, and would probably make an impossible mate, is likely to
manifest violent hostility to her, to disparage her or even slander her.
Every analyst has seen in his office the middle aged woman who "breaks
down" soon after her daughter's marriage to a man whom she "despises."
Either a family scene or a campaign of nagging and disparagement has
caused a break between her and her daughter and son-in-law.
Analysis reveals that she is love with her son-in-law, a situation more
frequent than the layman imagines. This infatuation which she cannot
accept as a fact is repressed savagely. To protect herself against
overt acts which would make her sinful or ridiculous, she exaggerates
every defect of the man she loves. She pursues him with a stubbornness
which cannot deceive a psychologist. His name is constantly on her
lips, coupled, of course, with abusive remarks, but the fact remains
that she is constantly speaking, if not dreaming of him.
Her peace of mind is only restored to her when she accepts as a fact
a situation which need not be translated into a transgression of the
ethical laws.
For, in spite of what puritanical critics of psychoanalysis repeat,
a conscious sex craving is more easily controlled and less likely to
overthrow our willpower than an unconscious one.
=Brothers and Sisters.= A similar complication is frequently found, as
I stated in Chapter V, in the history of neurotic brothers and sisters.
A brother and sister may to all appearance be irreconcilable enemies.
Investigate their childhood and you will find memories of actual or
attempted incestuous indiscretions which, after a while, were repressed
either by punishment or voluntary restraint. In later years, fear
of a possible recurrence of tabooed incidents may express itself in
the shape of hatred leading at times to acute family conflicts, the
brother or sister running away, the sister becoming a prostitute, etc.
When hatred is unmasked and revealed as one of the avatars of
inacceptable love, it dies off and is replaced by protective measures
of a less objectionable nature, reserve or distance.
=A Negro Hater.= A hysterical patient of mine who had always been a
terrific negro hater and advocate of lynching, was disturbed at night
by symbolic sexual dreams in which negroes took an active part. She
could not help feeling uneasy in the presence of a colored man. "Those
beasts" was her favorite designation for colored people.
What drove her into my office was that on one occasion she had behaved
in a, to her, inconceivable way to a colored janitor's helper who had
come to her apartment to inspect the radiator.
The presence of that man had aroused her so powerfully that for a
few minutes she had been on the point of making advances to him. She
fortunately came to her senses and fled from what had always been to
her an unconscious temptation.
Such incidents as that make one wonder how many lynchings have been
precipitated by the hysterical actions of neurotic women.
It may be stated broadly that every exaggerated attempt at protecting
ourselves against a danger or a temptation is a confession on our part
that the danger or the temptation is very fascinating to us.
=Reformers.= Many "bold" reformers are merely very weak individuals
struggling against sexual temptation and hating some vice which holds
them in its power. The biography of Anthony Comstock which I have
reviewed in detail in "Psychoanalysis and Behavior" proves that the
obscenity he was so stubbornly ferreting held a strange fascination for
him.
I must not create the absurd impression, however, that all reformers
are abnormal and moved by neurotic impulses. But between the scientist
who warns people of venereal disease and combats it whenever possible
and the so called "syphilophobiac" who sees everywhere chances for
infection and would jail every prostitute, there is a great difference.
=The Syphilophobiac= is always a weak, oversexed individual, whose
only protection against his promiscuous cravings is the fear of disease
and the absurd assumption that every woman is infected.
The syphilophobiac hates prostitutes because he would love them too
well but for the protection he erects between their body and his
desire. The feverish energy displayed by many prohibition enthusiasts
is at bottom the hurrying away from a temptation to which they know
they would have to yield. The great prohibitionists crave alcohol and
could not, without a terrible struggle, protect themselves against the
lure of drunkenness if strong beverages were available.
The stage has pictured many times the crusty old bachelor who is a
ferocious woman hater. In the end he succumbs to the wiles of the
ingénue, who is generally the first woman he ever associated with.
The poor devil realised too well all his life the irresistible charm
of women as well as his overwhelming craving for love and the joys of
the flesh. Some neurotic incest fear, or craving for selfish pleasures,
or money complex, however, caused him to avoid women and to protect
himself against them by a display of hostility. The first time,
however, when fate forces him into close contact with temptation he has
to yield.
=Deluded Martyrs.= In every social upheaval there are martyrs who
sacrifice themselves for apparently very noble causes but whose
unconscious reasons for their acts are much less sublime. Stupid
bomb throwers who wreck a building or kill an individual, (acts most
unlikely to change a social system to which they object), profess
to be moved by their love for the people. Their actual motive is
father hatred. Brutus and others who delivered the "people" from some
"tyrant," in reality gratified an unconscious grudge and sought their
own liberation from some form of authority made loathsome by infantile
complexes.
The most grotesque example of it was the destruction of the Bastille
on July 14, 1789 by a French mob which imagined that it was thereby
freeing crowds of innocent prisoners and abolishing arbitrary death
sentences. There were less than a dozen people in the fortress at that
time. The mob venting its wrath on a symbol of authority pretended to
be animated by a love of freedom and a desire to benefit others.
CHAPTER X
PLURAL LOVE AND INFIDELITY
Lecture audiences often ask me whether plural love is possible. This
would indicate on the part of the questioner a more or less unconscious
wish to justify polygamous cravings. Plural marriages exist but I doubt
whether any such thing as plural love has even been observed at any
period of mankind's history.
For the most complicated examples of plural marriage, as for all the
varieties of sexual complications, we must turn to Greece of the
classical period. Demosthenes wrote somewhere: "We have prostitutes to
give us pleasure, concubines to minister to our daily needs and wives
to bear us children and to watch over our homes."
When we remember that besides the three types of women with whom they
had sexual relations, many and among them some of the greatest men of
those times, indulged in homosexual unions with young men of feminine
appearance, we must draw two conclusions: first, that those men must
have been sexual supermen, as they were at times mental supermen,
second, that love as we understand it at the present day, can only have
had very little to do with their sexual life.
Modern love as we shall see in Chapter XXXI means mutual love, the
equal gratification of the mates thru the rites of sex communion.
=Plural Love=, be it of the ancient Greek type, of the Oriental or
mormon type, means varietism for the male, scanty gratification for
the female. At best a mild form of sexual slavery, most humiliating to
the woman and possible only under a social system debarring woman from
financial independence.
Only a man suffering from priapism could gratify the eroticism of a
large number of wives and the latest or youngest wife would naturally
receive a larger share of physical attention than the earlier and
older mates. The jealousy and hatred thus engendered are in no way
minimised by the fact that the custom of certain lands countenances
such arrangements.
=Polyandry= as it existed in ancient times and still exsists in Tibet,
where a woman marries several men (generally brothers) may be more
satisfactory for the primitive female. Owing to her physiological make
up, and also to her passive rôle in love, woman can gratify several
men and receive gratification from them. The neurotic disturbances
which may arise as a result of a woman's lack of sexual gratification
are avoided by the polyandric scheme of union. But this is the only
superiority which polyandry has over polygamy.
Both polygamous and polyandric nations and civilisations have gradually
receded as far as numerical importance and world prestige go and both
institutions are bound to disappear.
The development of the human ego, both in men and women, will not
permit much longer of the enslavement of one sex to gratify the
pleasures of the other. Nor can any group, male or female, enforce its
domination over individuals of the opposite sex and make them accept
the dogma of an inferior sex by embodying that dogma in any religious
creed of the mormon or mohammedan type.
=Infidelity.= Plural love is passing but infidelity has taken its
place in every possible respect as a sexual and an egotistical form of
gratification.
When dealing with infidelity we must establish a careful distinction
between forms of infidelity due to "normal" causes and other forms
due to unconscious complexes. On the other hand we should beware of
admitting, as many unscientific writers do, that there is a distinct
difference of attitude to infidelity in the two sexes.
That shortsighted viewpoint has been unfortunately voiced in hundreds
of popular sayings which represent man as the great examplary of
infidelity and woman as faithfulness incarnate.
Economic conditions, not sexual differences, are at the bottom of the
levity with which men treat their heart affairs and of the gravity with
which women, officially at least, consider the marriage relationship.
Financial dependence and the fear of motherhood compel the
domesticated, parasitic type of woman to secure the services of a
breadwinner, and after achieving that object, to avoid hurting his
susceptibilities.
Independent and professional women, especially the sterile or
sterilised ones, are frankly "masculine" in their love habits.
But I insist on considering certain forms of infidelity as normal and
others as abnormal, independently from the question as to whether they
are socially desirable or undesirable.
The human type which is so perfectly normal that it has no fixation
and no definite fetishes, except species fetishes, and which weaklings
and puritans designate as "animal," is not likely to be faithful to any
mate. Like every strong and healthy animal at rutting time, he or she
is sexually aroused by every individual of the opposite sex. No safety
complex restrains him as far as sexuality is concerned. The only fears
which restrain his search for gratification are fear of exposure and
ostracism within his herd, fear of pregnancy or infection and fear of
final complications, not to mention of course the fear of inflicting
suffering upon a lifemate of whom he may be extremely fond.
For we must never forget the fact, unpleasant as it may appear to
unscientific hypocrites, that lasting love is a matter of fixation and
fetishism, hence, always slightly tainted with neurosis.
=When Love Dies.= "Normal" infidelity may also be merely the only hope
of sexual gratification for the normal man or woman whose mate has
ceased to present the fetishes needed to awaken his or her eroticism.
Healthy individuals are neither willing nor capable to forego sexual
gratification. Now and then complications arise, a man being very
fond, for sexual reasons, of a woman who would prove undesirable as
his mate and, for sentimental reasons, of a woman who is infinitely
congenial but no longer arouses his desire. Likewise, a woman may be
deeply attached to both her lover and her husband. Ivan Bloch writes:
"It is quite possible to love more than one person at the same time
with nearly equal tenderness and be honestly able to assure each of the
passion felt for him or her. The vast psychic differentiation involved
by modern civilization increases the possibility of this double love
for it is difficult to find one's complement in a single person and
this applies to women as well as to men."
George Hirth, in his "Wege zur Heimat" also points out that women,
as well as men, can love two persons at the same time. Men flatter
themselves with the prejudice that the female heart, or rather brain,
can only hold one man at a time and that if there is a second man, it
is by a kind of prostitution. Nearly all the erotic writers, poets
and novelists, even physicians and psychologists, belong to this
class. They look upon a woman as property and of course two men cannot
"possess" one woman.
"Regarding novelists, however," remarks Havelock Ellis, "the remark
may be interpolated that there are many exceptions. Thomas Hardy, for
instance, frequently represents a woman as more or less in love with
two men at the same time."
Hirth maintains that a woman is not necessarily obliged to be untrue to
one man because she has conceived a passion for another man. "Today,"
Hirth writes, "truly love and justice can count as honorable motives
in marriage. The modern man accords to the beloved wife and life
companion the same freedom he himself took before marriage, and perhaps
still, takes in marriage. If she makes no use of it, as is to be
hoped, so much the better. But let there be no lies, no deception, the
indispensable foundation of modern marriage is boundless sincerity and
friendship, the deepest trust, affectionate devotion and consideration.
That is the best safeguard against adultery. Let him, however, who is,
nevertheless, overtaken by the outbreak of it, console himself with the
undoubted fact that of two real lovers, the most noble minded and deep
seeing friend will always have the preference."
Even under an economic system countenancing free love and birth
control, such complications would surely arise and cause much suffering.
=Bored Wives.= Infidelity is often also a refuge from boredom for
the middle class woman who has no definite training or ability in
any direction and is thereby condemned to idleness. Left alone all
day and a few evenings every month by a busy husband, she yearns for
companionship. Unless she is slightly homosexual, she soon tires of
stupid teas, bridge and gossip parties and she accepts the attentions
of some man who brings into her life a little romance and a different
aspect of the world's activities. The French cynic Willy had that type
in mind when he wrote: "adultery has become the key stone of society.
By making married life tolerable it prevents the breaking up of the
home."
Besides normal sexual cravings, there are many unconscious or only
partly conscious causes which drive human beings into being faithless
to their life mates.
Many women take lovers, many men take mistresses for purely egotistical
reasons. Justly or unjustly they feel a certain lack of appreciation in
their mates and make up their minds to get even with them.
="Getting Even"= is one of the great neurotic cravings, one which
has led to numberless offences, including crime and suicide.
To some neurotics with a sense of inferiority, an extramatrimonial
affair seems to be the sole means of restoring one's self confidence.
"I am of no account at home but to some one else I mean the world."
Many neurotics use "romance" and "inspiration" as convenient scapegoats.
"But for the inspiration I derive from my affair with So and So, I
could not do my work properly," and this is true in a good many cases,
but in many more cases, any one else would do just as well as a lover
or mistress. Some neurotics, who remind one of Madame Bovary, the
heroine of Flaubert's great novel, feel that accomplishment and the
fullness of life are naturally associated with sexual irregularities.
Too inferior to accomplish anything by dint of hard work, Emma Bovary
childishly expected love to accomplish everything for her. Other
neurotics, incapable of any creative work, consider romance as an
achievement in itself and proceed to call every carnal dissipation
romance. Just as inferior boys at the gang age steal or destroy in an
absurd attempt at "doing something out of the ordinary."
Some neurotics never feel safe very long with any sexual mate; they
grow afraid or suspicious and seek safety in the arms of some other
human being in whom they unconsciously hope to find the father or
mother image to which they were over-attached. Their search for the
safe mate, that is, for the parent image, is, of course, always
unsuccessful.
=Varietists.= I have observed a number of men and women who liked
to designate themselves as varietists and who were simply unconscious
or partly conscious homosexuals struggling against perverse tendencies
to which they did not wish to yield.
I have seen in my office several Don Juans who were unconsciously
attracted to men and refused for a long while to admit that such a
craving was a part of their personality. Every woman they met only
meant one thing to them: "If I could capture her, I would feel sure
that I was a real man." A few days after catching their prey they were
once more obsessed by doubts and had to seek new evidence.
Many partly conscious homosexuals seek women who in their appearance,
manner of dress and behavior are the best substitutes for men, that is,
mannish girls, flat chested, with narrow hips, bobbed hair, wearing
tailor-made garments, engaged in masculine pursuits, etc.
They often meet with disappointment for such women are frequently
homosexual and hence unlikely to yield to a man. When the woman is
sexually normal, however, the neurotic's happiness is far from assured.
As soon as sentimentalism or tenderness allows the feminine component
of those masculine women to break thru their masculinity, the
unconscious homosexual loses his love for them. One patient of mine did
his hunting among equestriennes in Central Park. On two occasions his
attentions were accepted. His disappointment was terrible; calling upon
the women who had attracted him when wearing a mannish derby and riding
breeches, he was greeted by very womanly persons attired in the most
feminine finery.
Several times in his life my patient has been in love with rather
masculine women. The first flash of femininity in them had always cured
him entirely of his infatuation.
=The Ultrafeminine.= Other homosexuals struggling savagely against
the appeal of the masculine, seek safety in the arms of extremely
feminine creatures who could not in any way awaken the slightest
suggestion of a perversion.
Their obsessive fear, however, does not allow them to enjoy the affair
very long. Small physical details which a normal man would not notice
suddenly fill them with fear or disgust. A masculine gesture, a raucous
intonation, a slight growth of hair on the upper lip or the limbs may
suggest unavoidably the sex from which they are fleeing in panic. Their
love cools off and safety has to be sought, altho it is never found,
in the arms of some other woman of very feminine appearance, who is in
turn discarded for the same absurd reasons.
As fixations and fetishism have infinitely more importance for men
than for women (see Chapter III) the male neurotic is naturally more
"promiscuous" and faithless than the female neurotic.
=Messalina.= Every psychoanalyst, however, has met the Messalina
type, who is constantly seeking the "love that will endure." Like her
masculine counterpart, the Don Juan, she is in the majority of cases
seeking safety and trying, by conquering many men, to reestablish her
self-confidence which every little disappointment and humiliation
destroys so easily.
However loving and worshipful the neurotic's mate may be, he or she
cannot hope to save the neurotic from further love entanglements.
One of the most striking neurotic traits is a craving to disparage
everything and everybody in his environment.
The praise of the most affectionate husband or lover, wife or mistress,
is insufficient to raise the neurotic's self-esteem. With all
neurotics, familiarity breeds contempt and it must be from the lips of
a new man or new woman that they must hear their praise sung before
their feeling of inferiority is deadened and allows them to enjoy that
praise.
CHAPTER XI
IS FREE LOVE POSSIBLE?
"American Medicine" commenting upon the fact that divorces have
increased twenty per cent in eight years and that, if the rate of
increase continues, there will be as many divorces as marriages in
thirty years from now, reaches the conclusion that "the individual has
moved on far in the past two thousand years, while the institution of
marriage has remained unaltered through the centuries.... The basis
of marriage as it was originally conceived was entirely a racial one
in which the individual counted for little; it was meant as a means
of building a family and conserving it. Nothing else counted and the
primitive individual exacted little else.... The modern man and woman
demands in his mate more than that and it is here that the marriage
institution is most defective in that it does not yield to these
greater demands."
Polygamy and polyandry have been found wanting and have been abandoned.
Monogamy is, at the present day, tempered by frequent infidelity and
numerous divorces. Which means that it does not satisfy the needs of
the human race. Shall free love offer a solution?
=Man the Dissatisfied.= I might as well voice here my pessimistic
belief that there is no permanent solution for any human problems.
The only tangible difference between man and the animals is that the
animals are satisfied and man everlastingly dissatisfied. No cat was
ever dissatisfied enough with the primitive feline way of catching mice
to invent a mouse trap.
The animals solved their problems thousands of years ago. Unless
domesticated and exposed to the exclusive influence of men, they never
vary from the form of behavior of their particular species.
The only problem they have been unable to solve is how to get rid of
man, the invader and parasite, and they will never cope with it.
Man's satisfaction with every new improvement is only temporary.
=The Next Step.= Free love may be the next step in the evolution
of the sexual partnership but it certainly will not be _the_ solution
of the marriage problem.
As far as the mates themselves are concerned, free love will only be a
success in the case of extremely normal individuals for whom the sexual
relationship means solely physical gratification. As soon as affection
intervenes in those unions, the thousand forms of jealousy we shall
describe in another chapter will enter into play.
Jealousy among free lovers cannot but rage more fiercely than among the
legally married. A thousand details of married life are simply meant to
establish the mates' ownership of each other in their own eyes and in
the eyes of the world. The number of war marriages contracted hastily
during the great European conflict by young men and women on the eve
of the bridegroom's departure for Europe testifies to the powerful
"safety" symbolism of the marriage ceremony.
A gullible young man in love with a girl would not have trusted her
alone during his absence from home. She might have experienced a change
of heart. After going thru a wedding ceremony with him, however, he
_knew_ that she could not change her mind and love another. As a matter
of fact most of those unions were disastrous. A virgin might have
waited. A young woman left alone after a few days of erotic enjoyment
was naturally an easy prey for any clever tempter. The bridegroom,
on the other hand, went away blissfully, secure in the thought
that the marriage certificate, the ceremony, the wedding ring, the
transformation of Mary Brown into Mrs. John Smith would protect his
"honor" while he was away.
=Blissful Blindness.= Some of the cleverest, most cynically suspicious
husbands and wives go thru life blissfully blind to their mate's
sidesteps. They see thru anyone else's husband or wife but they seldom
suspect _their_ husband or _their_ wife. The stress which they place on
the possessive works in their case as the fetish which a savage takes
into battle. In hoc signo vinces.
It is only in the so called smart set that men and women allude to
their mates by their first names. The working classes, sexually the
most conservative and puritanical, use the expressions "my man" or "the
missus"; middle class men and women pompously refer to their mates
as Mr. Smith or Mrs. Smith, always reminding their hearers of the
legitimacy of their union. The celebration of wooden weddings, silver
weddings, etc., is a means of reminding the community that Mr. and
Mrs. John Smith _own_ each other, just as the engagement diamond is a
scarecrow proportionate in visibility to the prospective bridegroom's
fortune.
Even if free love unions became the adopted standard of the land, those
unions would be celebrated with appropriate ritual, the aim of which
would be to tie the man to the woman and the woman to the man and to
warn away sexual hunters of both sexes.
Free love will not be possible until the absolute equality of men and
women has been accepted, not only theoretically but practically.
Before that equality is a fact, there must be written into the
statute books some form of financial assistance to the woman disabled
by pregnancy and lactation and which will enable her to retain her
independence regardless of her physiological condition.
Even this will not be enough. Birth control measures will have to
become lawful and the subject of careful scientific teaching before
woman can hope to lead her life unenslaved to her children's father.
=What of the Child?= Besides, in free love arrangements, the mates
are not the only parties to be considered. There is a party of the
third part: the children, if any.
If a perfectly independent male decides to cohabit for an indefinite
period of time with a perfectly independent female, the community can
hardly interpose any objection. For after all, most of our ethical
indignation at the thought of temporary unions is due to the miserly
fear of the community lest a pregnant woman and fatherless children
be thrown upon it for support. No one's rights would be trespassed
upon by such arrangements, ephemeral as they might be. As they would
not cost anyone any money they would be considered acceptable. When
a self supporting Sarah Bernhardt or Isadora Duncan bears children
out of wedlock and we run no risk of being taxed for the support of
her "illegitimate" progeny, we assume more liberal views than we
would should a stenographer or a switchboard operator commit the same
"errors."
When children are the outcome of any form of union, however, the
psychoanalyst, broad as he may be, is compelled to remember the pitiful
stories he has heard in his office. No neurotic ever had a pleasant
childhood. No neurotic was the child of a father and mother united
by real love and manifesting within the family circle the mutual
tenderness which is the poetry or the music of the home.
=Disharmony Between the Parents=, culminating in divorce or
desertion, has wrecked the future of thousands of children. Not every
unhappy home has produced neurotics, but, every neurotic is the
product of undesirable home conditions.
Furthermore, it seems as tho a child in order to reach normal
adulthood should be brought up by both a male and female. Many male
homosexuals I have observed were brought up by a widowed mother or a
woman abandoned by her husband or lover. In other cases, impotence or
frigidity affected respectively boys and girls who had lost the parent
of the same sex. Many other disturbances of the mental life, due to
incompleteness of the parental environment or to its imperfection,
could be mentioned if the limits of this book would permit.
From the point of view of psychiatry, there is only one answer to be
given to the question if free love is acceptable. Free love _must_
be supplemented by birth control. Those free lovers who decide to
procreate children must also agree to live together until the youngest
of their offspring has reached at least its fifteenth year.
Creating children with the intention of turning them over to some
charitable institution is also a proposition which to a student of
mental disturbances appears just short of criminal.
=The Institution Child.= Few children thrive well mentally or
physically under institutional treatment.
Children need love in order to grow strong mentally or physically. I
read somewhere a story to the effect that a mediaeval ruler directed
that some children be brought up by nurses who would never show them
the slightest sign of affection or interest, his aim being, if my
memory serves me well, to make extremely virile fighters out of those
children, by protecting them against any weakening influence.
As the story goes, all the children died.
I do not vouch for the authenticity of the story but the vital
statistics of orphan asylums affirm its plausibility. Children fare
better in a poor, unsanitary home, at the hands of a stupid and
ignorant but affectionate mother than in an up to date, well appointed,
sanitary asylum. They need, in order to develop a strong, serviceable,
well balanced autonomic nervous system, the safety which emanates from
the breasts, the kisses, the hands, the admiring glances of their
mother.
If no doting mother has ever told a child that he is wonderful and the
most precious thing on earth, he will never quite consider himself as
of much avail and will probably never become wonderful in any respect.
=Free Love Plus Birth Control= may reduce the actual population of the
earth, but when only real lovers deeply attached to each other and only
bound to each other by sexual desire and intellectual regard, will live
together and decide to rear children as a monument to their love, free
love and birth control will cause the population of insane asylums to
dwindle to nothing and will save the world from the thousands of morons
and neurotics who are the products of married disharmony and married
slavery.
CHAPTER XII
PROSTITUTION
Prostitution, as I stated in a previous chapter is one of the results
of the overthrowing of sex by the ego. The craving for food and power
triumphs over all the sexual cravings and compels one individual to
pursue apparently sexual goals which are no longer sexual as far
as that individual is concerned. The female prostitute lends her
sexual organs to many men for money (food, power), not for her own
gratification or to reproduce her species.
That phenomenon is very complex and cannot be dealt with in detail
within the limits of this book. I shall confine myself to pointing
out some of the psychological problems which have to be elucidated
before the causes, nature and results of prostitution can be clearly
understood.
=Economic Factors.= Certain radicals simplify a little too much the
problem of prostitution by considering it solely as a by-product of the
competitive system which would disappear as soon as a more equitable
system of production and distribution was introduced into the modern
world.
No one can deny that under our social system, woman, burdened as she
is, by many physical and social handicaps, is easily driven to the wall
in times of stress and compelled to sell her body. Nor is there any
doubt that under a system assuring every one a livelihood, regardless
of business conditions, many women would be saved from adopting such a
disgusting form of labor.
At the same time, the radical interpretation fails to explain why, when
submitted to a practically identical pressure, some women do not become
prostitutes but either kill themselves or beg or steal.
=Lombroso's Theory.= Very unsatisfactory also is Lombroso's attitude to
prostitution.
He finds a constant coincidence between prostitution and crime and
states that the female offender _is_ a prostitute, one of the varieties
of the "reo nato," of the born criminal.
The female offender is not always a prostitute and modern research
makes the theory of "congenital criminality" untenable.
Kurt Schneider in his exhaustive study of seventy prostitutes brings
out interesting details of their biography which throw a clearer light
upon the psychology of prostitution.
There were certain characteristics which all of those seventy women
exhibited. They were all unwilling to work. They all were very
grasping, altho, at the same time, very extravagant spenders when
it came to personal adornment. Eroticism seemed to play a very
insignificant part in their choice of a livelihood. Most of them were
frigid, many homosexual, the majority of them sadistic.
Fifteen of them had been punished for larceny (money and clothes).
Many of them kept a pimp or cadet.
Most of them were unhappy, dissatisfied types.
All of them were greatly attached to children.
Many of them were drunkards.
One half of them were weak minded.
Seven per cent of them had been brought up in institutions.
We have there a striking picture of inferiority. An endocrinological
examination of those unfortunates, similar to those which have been
conducted recently at St. Elizabeth Hospital, Washington, D. C., would
have probably revealed back of their unwillingness to work and of their
thirst for money, weak thyroids and poor adrenals, not to mention
unbalanced pituitary glands. The fires of the body burnt slow in them,
producing and consuming little energy, a condition which, causing an
obscure unconscious fear of the future, compelled those women to seek
easy ways of gathering money, the only protection they could think of.
Their inferiority complex revealed itself in their craving for personal
adornment, to which they sacrificed their protective earnings.
=Sensuality.= All the rant of the purity prophets to the contrary
notwithstanding, it is not sensuality which "lures" women into a "life
of shame."
If the prostitute sought in her means of livelihood mere gratification
of "vicious" instincts, why would she so often submit to the whims
of a pimp who despoils her of her earnings. The prostitute hates the
men who can compel her thru their financial superiority to submit to
their sexual desires. The pimp, whom she keeps and who depends upon her
bounty, is her inferior and the more she degrades him, the less she
feels her own degradation.
The prostitute, like all inferiors, is dissatisfied, but so are the man
of genius, the inventor and the artist. The genius is the dissatisfied
individual who organically is able to compensate for his feeling
of inferiority by creating a more pleasant environment, physical
or mental, and derives therefrom credit, praise, rewards, small as
those rewards may be. The prostitute, too weak organically to find
a suitable, socially valuable, form of compensation, flees from a
reality which is unpleasant to her. Alcohol and drugs supply her with a
convenient form of escape from reality, the more acceptable to her as
her intelligence is the more limited.
=Father Fixation.= Kurt Schneider found that fifty per cent of the
prostitutes he examined were weak minded. The Chicago Vice report
published a few years ago revealed the fact that fifty per cent of the
prostitutes examined by the vice investigators were the victims of a
violent father fixation.
One half of them, when asked by whom they had been seduced,
incriminated their fathers. To a psychoanalyst such an answer is an
obvious morbid wish fulfilment.
All of the women probably experienced unconscious incestuous cravings
at some time or other, and in the minds of the weak minded, (fifty per
cent of them according to Schneider), those cravings had produced an
absolute delusion. Whether the incest was real or imaginary, the fact
remains that those unfortunates either believed in it or considered it
as a plausible explanation and scapegoat. A lie, when accepted as a
part of our biography, often affects us as mightily as tho it were an
actual fact. For, after all, every lie we tell is a fact unconsciously
acceptable to us and which affords our ego a certain protection.
The woman with a father fixation is usually frigid. She either never
marries or is a prey to prostitution fancies, until analysis has
freed her of her unconscious incest fear or has led her to accept her
incestuous cravings as a part of her personality.
=Prostitution is a neurosis=, affecting mostly the hypothyroid,
hypoadrenal female of low culture and low intelligence.
Psychoanalysis, which requires a certain grade of mental development on
the part of the patient, is rather impotent in the majority of cases
of prostitution when the woman has crossed the line which separates
fancies from practice.
There are male prostitutes also, of the normal sexual type. I do not
allude here to the homosexual males whose mentality shall be considered
in another chapter. By male prostitutes, I mean men who consort with
women, in or out of wedlock, for purely sordid considerations.
=The Pimp= who exploits some prostitute is a prostitute himself, but so
is the man who marries for money or power a woman who does not attract
him sexually. The male prostitute is, if anything, ethically inferior
to the female prostitute.
=Prevention=, rather than any form of cure, may some day solve
the problem of prostitution. Repressive measures are, of course,
a dishonest farce which deceives no one and benefits no one. The
prostitute cannot be reeducated or adapted, for she is a weakling and
the modern world offers to her no equivalent for what she would have
to give up in order to reform. Female children, on the other hand, if
trained properly and made independent, mentally and financially, could
grow up free from the handicaps and the fears which, at the present
day, drive too many girls into adopting the "easiest way."
=Prostitution has no redeeming grace.= It may have saved many
young men from impotence but it has made quite as many impotent thru
venereal infection. Some claim that it has saved many pure wives and
daughters from temptation but it has contributed also thru infection to
making thousands of innocent women sexual invalids.
Prostitution is a maladjustment whose worst sin is perhaps the
maladjustment of married life which it occasions in thousands of cases.
Too many young men, who acquired their sexual experience with
prostitutes solely, imagine that they know and understand women, and
they proceed to treat their life mates as tho the latter were only
slightly different from the unfortunate neurotics they hired to relieve
their sexual cravings. To that sort of experience we owe the horrible
type of the "typical husband" who never misses an opportunity of
reminding his wife of the fact that "she is only a woman."
CHAPTER XIII
VIRGINITY
I am very sceptical when it comes to drawing a clear line of cleavage
between what is typically masculine and what is typically feminine
in behavior, and I believe that many of the so-called fundamental
differences between the sexes are artificial and temporary ones due
to the economic and social pressure which woman has to bear. Even in
the valuation of virginity, it is difficult to say that there is a
masculine attitude and a feminine attitude.
Broadly speaking, we might state however that women, the world over,
are more indifferent to the prematrimonial past of their future
husbands than men are to the purity of their brides.
=Men Experienced in Matters of Love= wield a definite attraction
over all women, whether the latter are willing to admit it or not.
This is not due to any especially feminine trait but rather to the
difficulties which women encounter when they endeavor to secure
positive information on tabooed sexual topics. They expect, therefore,
their initiators to be conversant with the subject which is kept
carefully shrouded in morbid mystery.
The majority of men, on the other hand, when marrying a woman who is
neither a widow nor a divorcée, expect her to be absolutely pure, that
is, not to have had any sexual relations with any other man.
=Ethical Prostitution.= In certain parts of the world, on the other
hand, males appear rather indifferent to the female's past. In some
parts of Japan and among certain Arab tribes, comely girls may go to
larger centers of the population and devote themselves for a period
of years to prostitution. After which, they return to their native
place sometimes with a dowry they have accumulated thriftily, find a
husband and settle down as wives and mothers, in no way disqualified
by their promiscuous past. In certain parts of Central Europe, "window
courting," as it is sometimes called, leads to unofficial trial
marriages which do not arouse the jealousy of the final winner of a
girl's favours.
Among the Western nations, it is rather the very young, the stupidly
conservative, the unsophisticated and the senile, who consider
virginity as a great attraction and in some cases as a powerful sexual
stimulant.
The reasons for that are to be sought in the egotistical component of
the masculine attitude. The strong and powerful male who has frequently
proved his virility is not obsessed by the fear of defeat in love's
intimacies.
The innocent young man, on the other hand, who is full of misgivings
and of diffidence, the elderly man whose sexual powers are on the wane
and who is no longer sure of himself, prefer a woman who is totally
ignorant of physical love. Their embarrassment or their shortcomings
may escape a virgin but would not escape a woman of the world, a widow
or a divorcée.
There is, therefore, in the search for virginity, a slightly neurotic
factor, the fear of defeat, the line of least effort, the search for
ego safety.
It must be noticed that it was during the great neurotic ages, the
Middle Ages, which witnessed the bursting forth of so many hysterical
epidemics, that both the cult of the Virgin and the belief in witches
spread over Europe.
=The Fear of Woman.= Man has always tried to protect himself against
woman. In his fear of sex equality he has either made her an angel or
a beast. The witch, perverse and filthy, was lowered to the level of
hell. The virgin, on the other hand, unsexed and raised to heaven, was
removed far enough from the world for perfect safety.
=The Will-to-Be-the-First.= In the overemphasis placed by certain
men upon virginity in the woman, and in the anxiety shown by certain
husbands at the thought that their wife may have had sexual relations
with another man previous to her marriage, we see the operation of the
neurotic trait which Adler has called "the will-to-be-the-first" and
which manifests itself, not only in the love life, but in all of life's
situations.
The neurotic of that type, obsessed with a feeling of inferiority is
tortured by the thought that he may not have been the first to caress
his wife. Analysis proves that in early childhood, he had a tendency
(observable in certain breeds of dogs) to try to outrun every waggon,
horse, train, etc.; that in later life he always tries to walk ahead
when in company and hastens his steps whenever anyone threatens to pass
him on the street. That type is given to hero worship, as he likes to
identify himself with his favorite hero, Cæsar, Napoleon, etc. States
of anxiety develop whenever his preeminence in society or business is
threatened.
=Telegony.= In the search for virginity there may also be in the male
an unconscious "intuition" of some scientific facts. The phenomenon of
telegony, explained by Dr. Jules Goldschmidt, of Paris, in the Medical
Review of Reviews for April 1921, would, if confirmed by careful
observations, throw a new light on the meaning of virginity.
The first male, Goldsmith states, leaves an indelible impress on the
female he possesses. Goldsmith believes that sperm plays a twofold part
in the female organism that receives it. It not only fecundates the egg
but modifies the blood of the female. He cannot believe that Nature
would waste millions of spermatozoa in order that one of them should
reach the egg. The millions of spermatozoa which are not needed for
purposes of fecundation are absorbed, he thinks, by the mucous tissues
of the woman's genitals and make her gradually more and more like her
mate. To this factor Goldschmidt attributes the likeness of mates who
have lived together many years.
"When we reflect," he writes, "on the deep impress produced by the
action of a single spermatic cell, we at once ask what will be
the fate of the myriads of spermatozoids entering at the moment of
fecundation, and later on into the female organism. Again we have to
insist on the fact that nature works with excessive profusion, and that
to secure success its means of action are multiple. Everywhere in the
living world male generative cells are brought forth in an overwhelming
abundance.
"Their multiplicity guarantees at least the possibility of meeting the
rather far-off ovulum, just as out of the multitude of male bees only
one is chosen to impregnate the queen.
"But it is inconceivable that the uncounted other male cells are
condemned to useless death without any action on the entire female
organism, into which, by reason of their mobility they can easily
penetrate, either into the mucous membrance of the uterus or into
the lymphatic and blood capillaries, and thru them into the whole
circulation.
"Kohlbrugge has demonstrated that in the case of a certain bat, the
spermatozoids do enter in great numbers into the superficial stratum
of the mucous membrance as well as into the glands and the adjacent
tissues. Their fate is, of course, dissolution. We know that blood is
the receptacle of all the products that are created by healthy life or
disease. We know of no other liquid in the whole organic world so rich
in the most heterogeneous chemical substances as blood.
"Certain important substances circulate in it, which we only assume are
there, not having been able to isolate them, but with which we work
when we elaborate preventive or curative serums. All the antigens,
antitoxins, antibodies, introduced into the blood by the living action
of pathogenic bacilli, as those of diphtheria, typhoid, tetanus, after
the happy termination of these diseases, present themselves in such
infinitesimal quantities that we can only designate them by their most
remarkable biological effects. They either confer for a lifetime an
efficient immunity against renewal or, exceptionally, an increased
susceptibility (anaphylaxis) for the bacilli which have created them.
"If nature, in its morbific attacks on the organism, uses great
quantities, extremely small ones answer its purpose for defense. Can we
not by analogy conclude that the dissolved spermatozoids confer on the
blood and thru it on the whole female organism, qualities which it had
not possessed before their invasion?
"From all of these facts we may return to our problem, and infer that
not alone the solitary male cell which fecundates the ovulum is of
importance to the economy of the female organism, but that we must
not disregard the extremely numerous spermatic cells accompanying
fecundation or the further introduction of these elements.
"Just as the bacillary products during and after infectious diseases
represent substances able to confer immunity from any renewed attack
and therefore cause an important transformation of the human system, so
the inference must be allowed that the spermatozoids, too, do exercise
an ultimate lasting effect on the females organism, which will acquire
a greater sensibility for the original and an insensibility for, or
non-susceptibility towards extraneous generative cells, even those able
to fecundate."
This exclusive adaptation of the female organism to the male one is the
phenomenon called telegony.
"A curious example of telegony offers itself when a white woman,
who has at first lived with a negro and afterwards with a man of
her own race, presents her second husband or lover with a more or
less intensely colored child. Such cases have given rise to dramatic
and even tragic scenes when the innocent woman was simply modified
(telegonized) by her first cohabitant.
"All breeders are acquainted with the fact that the bull confers
telegony on the cow. The dark colored bull having fecundated a light
colored cow, the latter being subsequently covered by a red bull will
put down dark and white streaked calves.
"It is quite possible that the biological reaction of the blood in
human and animal impregnation becomes identical in the mother with that
of the first father, and that the influence of another male does not
change sensibly the maternal blood."
If demonstrated beyond the possibility of doubt, thru careful
observation, telegony would be a tremendous fact which would, to all
the egotists and neurotics, enhance tremendously the value of virginity
in the woman. What a joy it would be for the self-centered, narcistic
neurotic to know that he can gradually make his mate like unto himself!
On the other hand, it might lead to most interesting experiments in
eugenics and animal breeding.
Thru deferred impregnation, brought about by special contraceptive
measures, a better human type and better breeds of animals might be
evolved.
It might also sound the death knell of certain contraceptive methods
which prevent the human mates from attaining the physical and mental
oneness which, Goldschmidt says, is the result of life-long sexual
association.
Goldschmidt's thesis is worth investigating. Thus far the unverified
observations and the sayings of more or less scientific breeders do not
allow us to draw positive deductions.
CHAPTER XIV.
MODESTY, NORMAL AND ABNORMAL
Modesty is not easy to define, for it varies with races, epochs and
climes. As I said in the preceding chapter, in some parts of Japan
and in one Arab tribe, it is almost shameful for a young woman to be
married without having had sexual experience. A woman of the Western
races on the other hand, regardless of her age and past, must in order
to show a ladylike breeding, pretend a certain ignorance of things
sexual when in the company of men, even in the company of her fifth or
sixth husband.
=In Turkey=, a woman may show her eyes but must veil her mouth; in the
Southern Sahara, men of the Tuareg tribes go about veiled like Turkish
ladies. Certain African tribes cover their backs carefully while
exposing the rest of their bodies. In other tribes, men, instead of
concealing their genitals, wear sheaths which exaggerate the size of
their organs. In most parts of the earth, women keep the fact of their
menstruation a secret. In others, they wear a cloth of a special color
proclaiming that condition when present.
=On the Modern Stage=, modesty seems satisfied if the nipples and the
genitals are duly covered. In some parts of Europe entirely naked
dancers have been seen in public. Until recently, an unwritten law made
it more or less necessary for the male performers to wear more clothing
than female ones did. The wave of homosexualism which has followed
the war is probably responsible for the growing numbers of naked male
actors and dancers who disport themselves nowadays on the French stage
and elsewhere.
There is a normal form of modesty, however, and there are many abnormal
aspects of that elusive feeling.
Many animals seek safety and seclusion when performing certain
important functions of their life, nutrition, reproduction and
defecation, which naturally place them at a disadvantage in emergencies
requiring flight or fight. Even the boldest among the carnivorous
animals, lions and tigers, drag their prey to a cave or into the depths
of the bush before devouring it.
Naked and otherwise shameless and "indelicate" savages will often walk
a considerable distance from their village to satisfy their natural
needs, and then hide behind bushes or trees.
Many birds and animals pair off and isolate themselves at mating time.
Races and nations differ greatly in their degree of modesty in relation
to nutrition, reproduction and defecation. European races dine in
the open, are more or less "shameless" in their love making, they
talk freely on sexual topics and erect urinals and comfort stations,
designated by their exact name, in many public places. Anglo-Saxons
hide themselves while eating, are very silent about the processes of
reproduction, seldom indulge in public kissing and designate urinals
and toilets, which are very scarce in their lands, by cover names such
as lavatories, smoking rooms, etc.
=Normal Modesty= may then be a survival of the fear which the
primitive men and women experienced of being surprised and overpowered
by hostile animals or tribesmen during an embrace or when unprotected
by garments or armor.
In fact, modesty seems to disappear as soon as safety reigns or when no
hostile element may be suspected of lurking in the environment.
A woman strips without shame to undergo a medical examination, men and
women appear naked in public baths where only one sex is admitted at a
time, etc.
Then also normal modesty must be considered as an offgrowth of the
unavoidable repressions of modern, civilised life. Like the incest
taboo, it has been cultivated for reasons of convenience.
Modern community life having placed a thousand restrictions upon the
age at which we can marry and the conditions under which we should
marry, in other words, having delayed considerably our normal sexual
gratification, an effort has been made to "repress" erotism by
concealing "suggestive" parts of the human body.
This is, of course, an abortive attempt, for habit is a more potent
protector against temptation than veils. The races which live
practically naked are not more erotic than the fully clothed, civilised
races or the Arabs who not only cover their entire body and heads but
conceal even the shape of their bodies in the loose folds of their
ample garments. A husband, no longer erotically aroused by his wife's
naked body, may be attracted violently by the partly draped body of
another woman.
=Suggestive Draperies.= One of the results of the policy of
body-concealment has been to transform certain draperies into sexual
symbols of great aphrodisiac power. Certain garments lend to the human
body an appeal which it might not have if fully exposed. In other
words, the obstacles which are meant to hold back erotism may be used
neurotically as a morbid expression of erotism.
At the present day, however, that form of protection against temptation
serves its purpose to some extent and cannot be discarded until mankind
has been reeducated. Custom and the law uphold official modesty. The
mere fact, however, that modesty has to be enforced legally is one of
the best arguments against the sentimental, unscientific view that
modesty is an "innate," "natural" feeling of "delicacy" based upon some
"higher," "spiritual" values, etc.
Modern, official modesty is merely a compromise with sexual reality.
It has been, like all inhibitory feelings, greatly overestimated and
forced upon the weaker sex by egotistical men to prevent a display of
their female's charms, likely to attract other women-hunters. Weak
males with a sense of inferiority have called modesty the typically
feminine virtue.
=Excessive Modesty=, in men as well as in women, is an abnormal
phenomenon, a mask for unconscious lewdness and obscenity. It is a
neurotic means of protection against uncontrollable desires, or at
times an expression of one's "sour grapes" attitude to others.
It is always the shapeless and unattractive woman who is the most
vociferous champion of highneck gowns and long skirts. A sense of
bodily inferiority obsesses the woman who does not allow any caresses
unless the room is darkened. Her modesty yields rapidly, however, to
the praise of her attractions which she hears from the mouth of her
lover.
=Immodest Modesty.= A woman took her daughter to a specialist's
office for an examination. The girl, asked to strip, complied at once
with the doctor's request and stood naked before him without any
display of shame.
When they left, the mother made the very unwise remark that her
daughter must have lacked modesty entirely to have stood the ordeal
without any embarrassment. In this case, it was the mother who lacked
"true modesty" and the daughter whose mind was "pure." The girl knew
she was in the presence of a physician, but to the more highly sexed
mother, the physician was above everything a "man."
This sort of prurient modesty which, very often, exerts a baneful
influence on the love-life of the individual, is usually due to
repressed childhood memories and complexes.
=Fear of Love.= Stekel, of Vienna, cites the case of a girl who evinced
on every occasion a morbid fear of everything connected with love. She
avoided men, she protected herself zealously against every "suggestive"
influence, she decried love and marriage and was constantly trying to
"spiritualise" the things of the flesh which she considered "bestial."
Analysis showed that until the age of thirteen she had been perfectly
normal in her behavior, considering love and marriage as natural human
goals.
One day, however, she chanced upon a collection of pornographic
photographs belonging to her father. Instead of "corrupting" her mind,
the incident disgusted her and caused her to renounce all the things of
the flesh and to become unusually, negatively modest.
A patient of mine declared on the occasion of her first call at my
office that all men were "beasts." Whenever she associated with a
man, at dinner, theater or dancing parties, she suffered from choking
sensations, nausea, etc. Analysis revealed that at the age of six she
had been subjected to an attempt at seduction.
Another woman patient who went thru a mental crisis in the course of
which she gave up all worldly pleasures and decided never to marry,
merging into hysterical states very soon afterward, had bow legs and
a tendency to skin eruptions which had, on many occasions, proved
humiliating to her egotism. Her decision never to marry meant: "I shall
not risk showing my deformed legs and my skin blemishes to a man."
Also, at the age of ten, she had witnessed a scene of brutality in
which a man had dragged his wife on the street by her hair.
She was morbidly modest and wept bitterly once when a man whom she knew
only slightly, pressed a kiss upon her lips. Withal her dreams revealed
a violently erotic temperament.
Like all exaggerated feelings morbid modesty is the mask for the
opposite feelings, passionate sexual cravings. The woman who allows
every one to kiss her is aroused but little by such caresses. The woman
who never kisses any one and pretends she does not like being kissed,
is usually the one who knows that a kiss might cause her to lose her
self-control and to abandon all modesty.
The puritanical male, paragon of modesty among his sex, is either an
inflammable type who is afraid of his own sensuality or an impotent
individual who protects himself against being put to any sexual test.
That exaggerated modesty is only one of the components of the neurotic
temperament has been well demonstrated by Adler: "The morbid modesty
of neurotics," he writes, "who cannot visit a public toilet, who are
unable to urinate in the presence of others, who avoid the society of
women on account of blushing or anxiety or heart palpitations, reveals
to us the strained manly ambition which supports itself against the
original feeling of inferiority.
"=The Masculine Protest= (craving for virility) of those patients,
insecure to the core, forces them into this arrangement whose
boundaries encroach upon those of bashfulness and awkwardness. Often,
in neurotics of either sex, one observes an inability to go to a toilet
in cases of great necessity if some one is looking at them. The greater
modesty of women, especially of neurotic women, in all relations of
life, originates from the fear which is implanted in them from the
earliest childhood that attention might be directed to their sex.
"I have often convinced myself that the behavior of girls and of women
is considerably influenced by this more or less unconscious factor,
indeed that the progress of their sexual development, like that of male
patients who feel unmanly, the formation of social and professional
relations and love relations, are immediately checked as soon as the
patient is allowed to play a real 'feminine' or subordinate part or
presupposes this expectation from others.
"This fact is in no way affected when repressed sexual stimuli come
to light as the present source of the checks of aggression. They are
similarly arranged and have the purpose of enhancing the fear of the
partner and of permitting the retreat decided upon in the plan of
life, to be entered upon with certainty; they are therefore acts of
foresight. The neurotic had already in childhood laid the foundation
of this foresight and in it is reflected the feeling of shame as the
guiding line of reassuring modesty and the prudery of civilisation.
"The previous history of the patient reveals an exaggerated modesty
and this is true at times of those who in other respects show a boyish
nature; the anxiety of nervous children on being exposed may be
observed in their conduct. They exclude every one from the room and
lock the door when they are going to undress. This conduct is also
observable in boys who have grown up among girls. In the prognosis
of neurosis, this expedient of cowardice is a bad symptom. It is the
equivalent of later castration thoughts and neurotic wishes, the wish
to be a woman, for instance, which expresses itself as soon as the fear
of the life mate becomes actual or a decision has to be avoided."
=Lack of Modesty=, when it assumes a morbid form, has, according
to Adler, the same meaning as prurient modesty.
"The very shameless, obscene talker," Adler writes, "is trying to
demonstrate to his listeners the fact of his great manliness of
which he is not very sure himself, the very immodest woman merely
demonstrates her inability to adapt herself to her feminine role.... In
the analysis of such women, at times only in their dreams, is observed
the childish expectation of a metamorphosis into a male, an attempted
substitute for the will-to-power, the will-to-be-above."
CHAPTER XV
JEALOUSY
Jealousy has been subjected to the distortion which every sexual
manifestation suffers under the influence of our modern puritanical
civilisation. It has to be concealed and lied about and derives from
that fact an immense obsessional power. It becomes a mask for other
feelings and, in its turn, may masquerade in the guise of other
feelings.
Both its presence and its absence may denote normality or abnormality.
Intense jealousy may be the projection of our feelings into another
individual and be a symptom of paranoia. On the other hand, the entire
lack of jealousy of a husband who enjoys the sight of his wife caressed
by another man, certainly reveals a most morbid masochism.
Hunger, thirst, erotism always find their satisfaction at some time.
Intense pain deadens itself thru its very intensity. Jealousy on the
contrary feeds on itself. It can be aroused by the unseen as well as by
the obvious. In fact, like many neurotic elements, it thrives best on
the invisible and the unreal.
Jealousy based upon unseen things, hunches, intuition, borders
dangerously on hallucinatory states. The absolute blindness of some
husbands, on the other hand, reveals a form of egotistical cocksureness
closely allied to delusions of greatness.
=Rules for Husbands.= Forel, in some ways very old fashioned and
unimaginative, has summarised as follows the proper rules of conduct
for "reasonable husbands" suffering from jealousy.
"An intelligent husband," he writes, "should quietly find out thru the
usual agencies whether his suspicions are justified or not. For what
is the use of being jealous? If his suspicions are unfounded, he can
only annoy his wife and make her unhappy thru his jealous behavior. If
he was right in suspecting her, there is only one of two things to be
done: either an otherwise excellent wife has yielded to the attraction
of another man and may feel perfectly miserable over it. She should be
forgiven and led back into the right path. Or a wife has no affection
left for her husband or she is an unworthy, characterless deceiver, and
in such cases, what is needed is not jealousy but a divorce."
Instead of "reasonable" husbands, Forel should have written, husbands
"free from complexes," for jealousy is little besides a neurotic mask
for an unrecognized feeling of inferiority.
There are thousands of husbands who would not dare to find out whether
their wives are untrue or not. Some may be so enslaved to their wives'
bodies that they cannot contemplate the possibility of losing them.
Public opinion, if a scandal should break out, would compel them to
seek a divorce and therefore they prefer to remain in ignorance of the
real state of affairs and of their "defeat."
Others are so egotistical that they refuse to suspect their wives of
infidelity and are honestly trying to protect their wife's reputation
when they make a jealous scene. This is frequently observed among the
"after-me-who-has-a-chance?" type of husband.
Other egotists fear the ridicule that might follow upon exposure and
which might destroy some of their self confidence. They would be too
weak to bear up well under their friends' open or concealed sarcasm.
The jealous scenes they make to their suspected wives are in the nature
of a punishment which they inflict on the faithless one.
Other husbands, entangled in extramatrimonial affairs, are in no way
desirous to create a scandal but work themselves into jealous moods to
keep up a pretence of interest in their wives.
Others, very old fashioned, believe in a double standard and, while
condoning their own weaknesses, condemn every appearance of evil in
"their" wives.
=Very Few Men or Women Admit Their Jealousy.= Most of them cover it
with ethical veils of the most transparent type: "You neglect your
household," "you are a poor mother (or father) to your children," "you
are making yourself (or me) ridiculous," etc.
Some husbands deny they are jealous but declaim against low neck gowns,
flesh-colored stockings, face powder, rouge, lip sticks to which they
object on "moral grounds."
The last two groups derive a great comfort from their assumed ethical
and moral superiority which they use as a justification for their
endless nagging.
Some jealous husbands force motherhood upon their wives year after year
as a protection against unfaithfulness. A woman disabled by pregnancy
and lactation is, of necessity, more faithful. Attempts at freedom on
the part of a woman burdened with a numerous progeny can easily be
repressed by admonitions such as "Remember the children," etc.
=Jealousy and Impotence.= Jealousy in a man is often caused
by the fact that he has become impotent. Unable to gratify his
wife physically, he imagines that she seeks consolation elsewhere
and in that way he "gets even" with her: "I am impotent but she is
promiscuous," so runs the neurotic's logic.
Not infrequently a woman who has been brought up to consider physical
relations as slightly shameful and something which a well brought up
female submits to, but never "enjoys," may, if she is very erotic,
develop terrible fits of jealousy.
Frink, mentioning one of those rather frequent cases, dissects the
psychology of that type of jealous women as follows: "If her husband's
caresses leave her unsatisfied, she is caught between the two horns of
a dilemma. If she grants that this is enough to satisfy her husband's
'animal instincts' she must then admit that she is more erotic than he
is, hence, more 'animal' than he. And such an admission is impossible
to a woman of puritanical upbringing. Hence 'logically' she concludes
that he must be untrue to her."
Frink adds: "Undue jealousy in a man usually means that he has, or
thinks he has, some deficiency of sexual power. It means in a woman,
not, as many seem to think, that she is unusually in love with her
husband, but rather, that she is not perfectly satisfied with him,
and often that she thinks that if he really knew her, he would not be
satisfied with her. In most patients suffering from morbid jealousy
there is an overaccentuation of the homosexual component of the libido."
Very often some unattractive individual feels jealous because he or she
has ceased to attract sexually his or her life mate.
A neurotic, whose face had been made hideous by a discoloration due to
illness, was sure his wife must have a lover, because she no longer
seemed to feel erotic in his company. His way of reasoning was as
follows: "I cannot disgust her, hence some one else must attract her."
=Childish Behavior.= Some neurotics with a strong father or mother
fixation become jealous of an otherwise perfectly faithful and devoted
mate because they fail to receive from their husband or wife, the sort
of attention and uncritical devotion they would expect from a parent.
Those people are still children who never admit the possibility of
adult equality between them and their mate. The mate must be the strong
father or the self-sacrificing mother. They themselves remain babies,
constantly to be petted, admired and consoled. If their husband or wife
fails to shower on them the thousand little attentions which a nursling
requires, they fly into a petty and unjustified rage, suspecting that
some one else has robbed them of their privileges.
The Don Juan and the Messalina are quite as jealous as faithful mates.
Men leading a double life may watch wife and mistress with equal
suspicion. This is probably due to the fact that they feel unable to
satisfy both women sexually. Orientals with a harem are said to be
infinitely more tigerish in their jealousy than Western men of the most
monogamous type. I have known several married women who, altho they had
deceived their husbands on several occasions, were terribly upset when
their husbands showed too much interest in some other woman.
=The Ego Rampant.= The proprietor of a hotel in a Western town,
who lived a few blocks from his inn, was annoyed when his wife refused
more and more frequently to come and keep him company at the hotel in
the evenings.
When a young lawyer took up his residence at the hotel, however, she
never failed to put in an appearance, regardless of the weather or of
her health, which she had used so often as excuses for staying at home.
Later on, detectives supplied him with enough grounds to secure a
divorce. Curiously enough, what brought forth the greatest display of
anger on his part when he recalled the incident, was not the thought of
the caresses which his wife and the other man may have exchanged. His
humiliation was indescribable when he realised that the other man had
wielded more influence upon his wife than he had himself. "One night,"
he said to me, "when she came down thru a heavy snowstorm, just to see
him, I could have killed her."
=Sexless Jealousy.= All the foregoing tends to show that jealousy
has very little to do with sex. Many domestic animals evince violent
jealousy when their masters show attentions to strange animals. A feud
may be precipitated among the household pets when the dog beholds his
mistress petting the cat and conversely. Fox terriers often attempt to
bite people who shake hands with their master or, in friendly ways, lay
hands on him.
Likewise, it was jealousy which drove Cain to slay Abel and which
caused Joseph to suffer many indignities at the hands of his brothers.
A Freudian might say that Cain and Joseph's brothers were seeking
the father's (God's) homosexual love and begrudged whatever of it was
lavished on their victims. Adler would more plausibly suggest that
the prestige and power wielded by Joseph and Abel were too much of an
irritant for their inferior and greedy brothers.
In other spheres than the sexual sphere, we notice that success
won by undisputed superiors or absolute inferiors does not arouse
our jealousy. A young pianist does not resent honors bestowed upon
Paderewksy, nor does Paderewsky begrudge the stripling his early
success. Jealousy, on the other hand, rages among great artists of
about the same rank. In the first case, superiority or inferiority is
taken for granted. In the case of equals competing for the same laurels
inferiority is "feared."
=Husbands and Lovers.= Many men feel no jealousy over the caresses
their mistress may receive from her husband. The husband has been
defeated by the lover, hence is "absolutely" inferior.
The same, it goes without saying, applies to women in love with a
married man. Many men, in fact, prefer to have extramatrimonial affairs
with married women and many women with married men. They no longer fear
the husband or wife whom they have defeated in the struggle for his or
her mate's favor. They consider him or her as a watchful guardian of
their mistress's or their lover's sexual life, less formidable than an
unknown man or woman might be, who had not been defeated yet.
The suttee custom in India, the various wills left by Western men or
women, providing that the surviving spouse shall be disinherited if he
or she marries again, shows that jealousy has little to do with love,
sexual or affectionate. That posthumous jealousy is a distinct attempt
at controlling one's "property" after one's death, whether the property
be a woman or a certain sum of money.
=Cruelty.= Adler has pointed out the cruel character of jealousy
and the constant attempts made by jealous neurotics to disparage and
belittle their love object.
"The neurotic suffering from jealousy is insatiable in his search for
ways to test his mate. This indicates his lack of self confidence,
his lack of self esteem and his uncertainty. His jealous efforts are
calculated to bring him more into notice, to attract more attention to
himself and thus to increase his self-esteem. He revives upon every
possible occasion the old feeling of being neglected and disregarded,
and assumes anew the childish attitude of wishing to have everything,
to obtain a proof of superiority upon his mate.
"A glance, a word spoken in company, an acknowledgment of a favor, a
show of interest for a painting, for an author, for a relative, even a
protective attitude toward servants, may be taken as the cause of the
operation. In certain cases the impression is distinctly given that the
jealous individual cannot rest because he has no confidence in peaceful
happiness or account of his misfortune. Then a neurosis develops in
which an effort is made to subdue the life mate by a system of attacks,
to arouse his or her sympathy; or perhaps the attack is intended as a
punishment. Headaches, weeping fits, weakness, paralysis,[1] attacks
of anxiety and depression, silence, etc., have the same value as
alcoholism, perversion or lewdness. The line of distrust and doubt,
often about the legitimacy of the children, becomes more pronounced,
outbreaks of wrath and scolding, mistrust of the entire opposite sex,
are regular phenomena and reveal the other side of jealousy as a
preparation for the disparagement of the life mate.
"Often pride prevents consciousness of jealousy but the behavior is
the same. This situation is at times made worse by the fact that
the suspected mate beholds the helplessness of the jealous one with
unconscious satisfaction and fails to find the words or the tone that
would hold jealousy within bounds."
=Making People Jealous.= This is why the efforts made by certain
men and women to arouse their sexual partner's jealousy are productive
of rather baneful results. They do not bring out the love or affection
of the person who is made jealous but his worst egotistical and
sadistic traits.
One of the strongest factors in love being the egotistical satisfaction
we derive from the possession of the love object and the realisation
of our influence over it, our love wanes rapidly when we see another
person wielding much power over it.
The stratagem has temporary effects which may deceive the person using
them. The jealous lover, at first makes decided efforts to regain his
position, but he soon feels swayed by egotistical considerations which
lead him toward the line of least effort. Slighted by one woman, he
turns to another for consolation, and usually finds it.
The man or woman who considers it shrewd to let his mate suspect
that "there are others," for one thing encourages faithlessness by
creating a precedent. It is especially when the other (or others)
are distinctly inferior in appearance or position that this sort of
game ends disastrously. The woman who likes to mention the attentions
bestowed upon her by some inferior man and seems to enjoy them
accomplishes two things. She makes herself appear inferior and "easy"
and makes her lover feel that any inferior man could compete with him
for her love and that, hence, he himself must be inferior.
He may run away from her to escape that feeling of inferiority.
If he does not leave her, he no longer feels compelled to make any
effort to please her, since worthless homage seems so valuable to her.
=Jealousy is the Hell of Love= and no one should dare to open its
gates lightheartedly.
One should be the more careful in arousing jealousy as the "green eyed
goddess" now and then is responsible for some killing. The sexually
jealous husband may kill his wife's lover, the egotistically jealous
husband may kill the unfaithful wife. The former removes temptation
from her path, the latter avenges his wounded egotism.
It is not always the sort of love that flares up frequently in jealous
outburst, sexual or egotistical, which is the deepest. I know of a
case in which a husband repressed entirely his anger and desire for
vengeance when his wife left him to live with another man. A clever
psychologist, he realized that lack of opposition to her plans would
kill the romance of his wife's rash step. He also knew that any
violence to which he might submit her lover would crown him with the
halo of martyrdom. He wrote to her: "I shall not interfere with your
adventure, for uninterrupted intimacy will soon cause you to tire of
each other. Nor will I shoot him for I would thereby transform him in
your mind into a hero." Eventually, the "erring" wife returned to her
home.
CHAPTER XVI
INSANE JEALOUSY
One form of jealousy which has absolutely nothing to do with love in
the normal sense of the word, and one which not infrequently leads to
acts of violence, to the "love tragedies" of newspaper headlines, is
simply one of the first symptoms of paranoia.
=In Delusional Jealousy=, the patient suffering repressed homosexual
cravings, projects his own desires into the personality of his life
mate. An unconsciously homosexual husband, attracted sexually by every
man in his environment, assumes that his wife is also subject to the
same attraction and suspects her of having sexual relations with every
man who arouses him. An unconsciously homosexual wife imagines that
her husband has a liaison with every woman who appeals to her perverse
fancies.
The paranoiac being at times very clever and convincing, that form
of jealousy, insane as it may appear to the man or the woman who is
the victim of it, may deceive the outsiders. In certain cases, the
delusional character of it is obvious to everybody, including the
jealous person.
A paranoiac told me that every night he "saw" a man entering his wife's
bedroom thru a window protected by solid iron bars so close to one
another that a cat could have squeezed thru them only with difficulty.
This was, of course, a case of hallucination, pure and simple.
=Homosexualism.= Other cases are more complicated. Dr. S.
Ferenczi, of Budapest, reports two of them which illustrate well the
mechanism of insane jealousy due to unconscious homosexualism.
He had a housekeeper whose husband, a man of thirty-eight, also busied
himself about the house in his spare time. He was constantly cleaning
Ferenczi's rooms, putting fresh polish on the doors and floors,
pottering around, evidently anxious to show his good will and his
devotion to his wife's employer.
This man was very intemperate and beat his wife on several occasions.
Altho she was most unattractive, he constantly accused her of
infidelity with Ferenczi and every male patient treated by him.
When the woman revealed those facts to Ferenczi, he gave the couple
notice but decided to have a serious talk with her husband.
The man denied having beaten his wife, altho this had been confirmed by
witnesses. He maintained that his wife was a real vampire, whose lust
was sapping his life strength. During this explanation, he impulsively
took Ferenczi's hand and kissed it, saying that he had never met anyone
dearer or kinder than the doctor.
A talk with the woman revealed to Ferenczi that the man had always been
very distant in his attitude to his wife. He would often push her away
brutally, calling her all sorts of opprobrious names.
When he learnt that Ferenczi had given her notice, the insane man
abused and hit his wife, and threatened to throw her out on the street
and to stab "her darling." Ferenczi at first paid no attention to those
threats for the man remained very devoted, respectful and well behaved.
When he learnt, however, that the man was sleeping with a sharp kitchen
knife under his pillow and when he woke up one night to find him
standing in his bedroom, he notified the authorities and the maniac was
committed to an insane asylum.
"There is no doubt," Ferenczi writes, "that this was a case of
alcoholic delusion of jealousy. The conspicuous feature of his
homosexual attachment to me, however, allows the interpretation that
the jealousy he felt of every man, was only the projection of his own
desires for the male sex. Also, his lack of desire for his wife was not
simply impotence but was determined by his unconscious homosexuality.
"To him alcohol played the part of an inhibition-poison and brought to
the surface his crude homosexual erotism, which, as it was intolerable
to his consciousness, he imputed to his wife.
"It was only subsequently that I found a complete confirmation of this.
He had been married before, years ago. He lived only a short time in
peace with his first wife, began to drink soon after the wedding and
abused his wife, tormenting her with scenes of jealousy until she left
him and secured a divorce.
"In the interval between his two marriages, he was said to have been
a temperate, reliable and steady man and to have taken to drink only
after his second marriage. Alcoholism was not the deeper cause of his
paranoia; it was rather that, in the insoluble conflict between his
conscious heterosexual and his unconscious homosexual desires, he took
to alcohol, which brought the homosexual erotism to the surface, his
consciousness getting rid of it by way of projection, of delusions of
jealousy. He saddled his wife with his desires and by jealous scenes
assured himself that he was in love with her."
=A Jealous Wife.= The other case is that of a woman, still young, who
after living in harmony with her husband for a number of years and
bearing him daughters, began to suffer from violent fits of jealousy
soon after the birth of another child, a boy. Alcoholism played no part
in this case.
She suspected every move her husband made. She dismissed maid after
maid and finally had only male servants in the house. Curiously enough,
her jealousy was directed against very young and very old, even very
ugly women, while she was not jealous of her society friends or of the
pretty women whom she and her husband occasionally met. Her conduct
at home became so unbearable and her threats so dangerous that she
was taken to a sanatorium upon Freud's advice. After which Ferenczi
proceeded to analyse her.
She harbored many delusions of greatness and ideas of reference. She
thought she found in the local paper veiled allusions to her depravity
and to her ridiculous position as a betrayed wife. The highest
personalities in the land were banded against her, etc.
She had married her husband against her wishes and when she bore the
first daughter and he manifested his disappointment, she began to feel
that she had indeed married the wrong man. She then made the first
scene of jealousy in connection with a little girl of thirteen who came
to help the servant girls. While still in bed after her confinement,
she made the little girl kneel and swear by her father's life that she
was still pure. This oath calmed her at the time.
After the birth of her son, she felt she had fulfilled her duty to her
husband and was free. She flirted with every man but would not tolerate
the slightest liberty from them. At the same time, she made her husband
violent scenes of jealousy and tried to incapacitate him, thru her
constant passionate advances, for relations with any other women. When
taken to a sanatorium, she gave evidence, thru her behavior toward the
other women inmates of strong homosexual leanings. She confessed to
Ferenczi that there had been homosexual experiences in her childhood.
She then became more and more unmanageable and the analysis had to be
abandoned.
=A Case of Projection.= This is Ferenczi's comment upon this example
of insane jealousy: "This case of delusional jealousy becomes clear
when we assume that it was a question of projection upon the husband of
her desire for her own sex. A girl who had grown up in an exclusively
feminine environment is suddenly forced into a marriage of convenience
with a man she dislikes. She reconciles herself to it, however,
and only shows indignation when her husband proves cruelly unkind
(disappointment over the birth of a girl) by letting her desire turn
toward her childhood ideal, the little girl of thirteen. The attempt
fails, she cannot endure homosexuality any longer and has to project it
upon her husband.
"Finally after the birth of her son, when her 'duty' is done, the
homosexuality she had kept in bounds takes possession in a crude erotic
way of all the objects that offer no possibility for sublimation (young
girls, old women etc.), although all this erotism, (with the exception
of cases when she can hide it under the mask of harmless flirtation),
is imputed to the husband. In order to support herself in that lie, the
patient is compelled to show increased coquetry toward the male sex,
to whom she had become very indifferent and, indeed, to demean herself
like a nymphomaniac."
I have cited both cases at length for they confirm the statement I have
made elsewhere in this book that very exaggerated feeling is usually
a mask for the opposite feeling. Ferenczi's two patients, in love
with persons of their own sex, "simulated" neurotically a passionate
attachment for their heterosexual mates, who, naturally could not
attract them.
=Masked Sadism.= Their stormy jealousy was more akin to hatred than
to love. There was no tenderness in it but a good deal of sadism, of
cruelty, and they used it in order to torture their mates on whom, in
the course of their jealous scenes, they could heap up abuse, which
they would not, under any other circumstances, dare to voice as freely.
Many a husband would like to insult a wife he detests. Neurotic
jealousy supplies him with an excuse which he might not find elsewhere.
After which, if the vocabulary he used on that occasion is especially
vile, he has a good scapegoat at his disposal. "I was crazed by
jealousy and did not realise what I was saying."
CHAPTER XVII
HOMOSEXUALISM; ITS GENESIS
Love's normal goal is the union of the male and the female in a way
which may insure the reproduction of the species. At times, however, we
behold love deviating from the path that leads to that goal: a man may
love another man as passionately as he would love a woman, a woman may
be consumed with desire for another woman.
Certain parts of the ancient world looked with indifference upon
such deviations from the normal. The poems of Sappho, the dialogues
of Plato, to only mention the best known sources of information on
the subject, prove that in classic Greece homosexual unions were
countenanced by public opinion. In the "Banquet" young Alkibiades
describes, with a frankness reminiscent of eighteenth century novels,
his attempts at "seducing" Socrates. In the holy island of Thera an
inscription commemorates the "wedding" of two young men, Erastos and
Klainos, which was celebrated with all sorts of ceremonies.
A distinction was even drawn in those days between homosexual love
which was purely sexual and the kind of love which was both sexual and
intellectual.
=Groups of Male Lovers=, Harmodios and Aristogeiton, Kratinos and
Aristodemos, etc., became famous and legendary owing to their unusual
faithfulness and constancy. Pederasty was countenanced by the very
behavior of the Greek gods, of Zeus in particular.
The various philosophers granted women the right to indulge in
homosexual love if they wished, but, nevertheless, Lesbian love, as it
was called after Sappho of Lesbos, was rather considered as a freak
of nature, if not a vice. The low social condition of Hellenic women
accounts for that illogical difference in treatment.
=Women Were Harem Slaves= with little opportunity for intellectual
development and their homosexualism could not drape itself in the
mantle of intellectual pretence which it wore in the gymnasiums and
schools frequented by men.
Greek mythology offers no example of love between goddesses.
Sappho and the Lesbian poetesses gave female passion an eminent place
in Greek literature but the Aeolian women did not found a tradition
corresponding to that of the Dorian men.
We even find in Lucian's works a passage indicating that some of the
Greeks felt at the thought of female homosexualism the repugnance which
we feel at the thought of male homosexualism.
=The Tide Turns.= About the third century and until the
eighteenth, the tide turned, at least in the Western world, and
homosexualism found itself confronted by a barrier of penalties
which in certain lands included capital punishment. After the French
revolution such extreme penalties were abandoned in several European
countries.
At present, death is no longer the wages of the homosexual sin, but
jail sentences and ostracism of the most severe sort punish the
sinner when detected. Legally, then, homosexualism is considered as
a voluntary "perversion," to be punished, not as an abnormality, to
be treated or accepted. This position is absolutely ridiculous and
goes counter to every possible scientific view of homosexualism, its
nature and its genesis. Whether psychiatrists consider sexualism from
a "purely physical" point of view or from a "purely psychic" point
of view, they all consider it, not as a matter of free choice, but as
a compulsion, an organic compulsion according to the first view, an
unconscious mental compulsion according to the latter.
Opprobrium and punishment constitute no solution for any compulsion, be
it physical or mental.
=Many Theories= have been advanced as to the genesis of homosexualism
and most of them are very unsatisfactory because every one of them
generally excludes the others and because they attempt one thing which
cannot be done: to found homosexualism either on a purely physical or
on a purely mental basis. We can never understand homosexualism until
we consider it from an organic point of view, according to which mental
states are neither the cause nor the result of physical states, or vice
versa, but mental and physical states are two aspects of the organism,
of the personality.
The first hypothesis I intend to review is that of the Berlin
sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld which has had more influence on modern
thought than any other theory of homosexualism and which unfortunately
has been accepted as gospel truth by many homosexuals.
=The Third Sex.= Hirschfeld reminds us in his book "Intermediate
Sexual Stages" that during the first eight weeks of its existence, the
fetus is neither male nor female. It is only about the eighth week that
a differentiation takes place and that the sex of the unborn can be
determined.
A thousand physical influences may be at work in fetal life which
may cause underdevelopment of the male fetus' organs, which then may
resemble a female's in many particulars, or the overdevelopment of a
female's clitoris which may make it slightly similar to a man's penis.
Thousands of variations can be observed which, in certain cases, have
caused the attending physician to declare the child's sex as "doubtful."
According to the degree of development of their sexual organs,
Hirschfeld suggests a classification of the intermediates into
hermaphrodites, androgynes, transvestites, homosexuals and metatropists.
I shall not touch upon the first two classes, hermaphrodites and
androgynes, which are obvious, gross, physical malformations of a
congenital character.
Transvestism, homosexualism and metatropism, however, deserve careful
consideration.
=The Transvestites= are men who experience a craving to go about
dressed as women, women who are anxious to dress themselves as men.
Hirschfeld considers them as closely related to the male androgynes who
crave to have breasts like women and are ashamed of facial or bodily
hair, and to the female androgynes who are ashamed of their breasts and
wish to have a beard and body hair.
Transvestites generally explain that they do not feel free except in
the garb of the opposite sex. "In men's clothes," a male transvestite
said, "I have the feeling of wearing a uniform." "In feminine clothes,"
a female transvestite said, "I feel inhibited and hampered. It is only
when wearing masculine garments that I feel energetic and efficient."
The late Dr. Mary Walker, the French painter Rosa Bonheur, the French
explorer Madame Dieulafoy, were characteristic examples of energetic
women who felt compelled to abandon the garb of their sex and to dress
themselves as men.
=Are Transvestities Homosexual?= Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna objects
to drawing a line between transvestites and homosexuals. But we must
make a distinction. Hirschfeld is right in stating that there are no
more homosexuals among transvestites than among normal individuals. He
means, of course, _conscious_ homosexuals practicing their abnormal
form of love. We know however, that there are thousands of men and
women who, while _consciously_ experiencing the greatest disgust at
the thought of homosexual practices are _unconscious_ homosexuals.
Their dreams leave no doubt as to the nature of their cravings. We
may reconcile the Stekel view with the Hirschfeld view by saying that
transvestites are in the majority of cases unconscious homosexuals.
They may _consciously_ lead a most normal life: Madame Dieulafoy was
married and apparently very devoted to her husband whom she followed on
all his voyages of exploration.
_Unconsciously_, however, and for reasons which we shall examine later,
transvestites crave a change of sex.
=Metatropism= is masculine behavior in women, feminine behavior in
men. Normal man is physiologically aggressive in love, normal woman is
submissive. In cases of metatropism, those characteristics are reversed.
=The Metatropic Man= prefers tall, strong, powerful women,
often of a different nationality or race, at times, women with some
physiological handicap, lameness or deformity (the French philosopher
Descartes was attracted to women suffering from strabism). He generally
selects a woman older than himself, either very intellectual or very
low ethically. In one case he is dominated by her mental superiority,
in the other he feels that he is sacrificing his principles or
his social standing. Professional or business women appeal to him
especially. He is often a shoe fetishist. Clothing which denotes power,
authority, impresses him.
=The Metatropic Woman= seeks feminine, beardless men, with perhaps
a good head of long hair (poets, artists). Madame Dudevant, the French
novelist, adopted the masculine name George Sand and had affairs with
two sickly artists, Musset, the poet, and Chopin, the composer.
The metatropic woman is often a professional or business woman who, in
her love relation, assumes a very independent, dictatorial attitude to
men. She favors young men whom she can dominate better.
In what Hirschfeld calls metatropists, we recognise parent-fixation
men and women, obsessed by a conscious or unconscious incest fear, a
complication which has been discussed in another chapter.
Krafft-Ebing and Albert Eulenburg classify metatropic men with
masochists (see Chapter XX) and metatropic women with sadists (see
Chapter XIX).
=Dr. Steinach's Experiments= show the close relationship between
homosexualism and the secretions of the interstitial cells of the
genital glands.
After castrating young rats which, after the operation, remained in
an infantile stage of development, Steinach transplanted into their
inguinal region male or female gonads.
Males into which female gonads had been implanted, developed all the
physical characteristics and all the mannerisms of the female, paid no
attention to females at mating time and, on the contrary, attracted the
rutting males and were attracted to them.
Castrated females in whose body he implanted testicles, showed the
hardier hair growth of males, tried to mate with females and remained
indifferent to males.
Prof. Brandes, director of the Zoological Garden in Darmstadt, has
repeated those experiments on deer with identical results. The female
in which testicles were implanted behaved like a male and grew antlers.
The male's mammary glands grew very fast after the implantation of
female gonads.
It is said that Steinach has successfully transformed homosexuals
into normal men but the last statement of his on the "Histology
of the Gonads in homosexual Men," (Vol. 46, No. 1, Archiv für
Entwickelungsmechanismus der Organismen) contains no mention of such
results.
=Perverse Birds.= If we now turn to experiments reported by William
Craig in the _Journal of Animal Behavior_, we see an apparently
different process at work. Young male birds kept for a year in a cage
with females and away from all males, will at mating time ignore
entirely the females, and offer themselves to males in the mating
position of the female.
The same process is observable in females brought up with males
exclusively.
Imitation in this case seems to give exactly the same results which
Steinach obtained thru castration and transplantation of gonads.
If we now leave the physiologists and consult the psychoanalysts,
Freud, Ferenczi, Stekel and Adler will show us that homosexualism can
be produced by "purely" psychic factors.
=Freud Rejects the Hypothesis of a Third Sex=: "Homosexual men who have
started in our times an energetic action against the legal limitations
of the sexual activity," Freud writes, "are fond of representing
themselves, thru theoretical spokesmen, as evincing a sexual variation,
which may be distinguished from the very beginning, as an intermediate
stage or sex, a third sex. In other words, they maintain that they are
men who are forced by organic determinants originating in the germ
to find in a man the pleasure which they cannot find in a woman. As
much as one would wish to subscribe to their demands, out of humane
considerations, one must nevertheless exercise reserve regarding
their theories which were formulated without regard for the psychic
genesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis offers the means to fill the
gap and to put to test the assertions of the homosexuals. It is true
that psychoanalysis has fulfilled that task in only a small number of
people, but all the investigations thus far undertaken have brought the
same surprising results.
"In all our male homosexuals, there was a very intense erotic
attachment to a feminine person, as a rule to the mother, which was
manifested in the very first period of childhood and later entirely
forgotten by the individual. This attachment was produced or favored
by too much love from the mother herself, but was also furthered by
the retirement or absence of the father during the childhood period.
Sadger emphasises the fact that the mothers of his homosexual patients
were often masculine women, or women with energetic traits of character
who were able to crowd out the father from the place allotted to him
in the family. I have sometimes observed the same thing, but I was
more impressed by those cases in which the father was absent from the
beginning or disappeared early so that the boy was altogether under
feminine influence."
"It almost seems that the presence of a strong father would assure for
the son the proper decision in the selection of his love object from
the opposite sex.
"Following this primary stage, a transformation takes place whose
mechanism we know but whose motive forces we have not yet grasped. The
love of the mother cannot continue to develop consciously so that it
merges into repression. The boy represses his love for the mother by
putting himself into her place, by identifying himself with her, and
by taking his own person as a model thru the similarity of which he is
guided in the selection of his love object. He thus becomes homosexual;
as a matter of fact, he returns to the stage of autoerotism, for the
boys whom the growing adult now loves are only substitute persons or
revivals of his own childish person, whom he loves in the same way as
his mother loved him. We say that he finds his love object on the road
to narcism, after the Greek legend of Narcissus to whom nothing was
more pleasing than his own mirrored image.
"Deeper psychological discussions justify the assertion that the person
who becomes homosexual in this manner remains fixed in his unconscious
on the memory of his mother. By repressing the love for his mother, he
conserves the same in his consciousness and henceforth remains faithful
to her. When as a lover he seems to pursue boys, he really thus runs
away from women who could cause him to be faithless to his mother."
=Active and Passive Types.= Ferenczi draws a distinction between the
active and the passive types of homosexuals, that is, between the man
who, in love acts like a woman, in a submissive way, and the man who
loves men as he would women, in an agressive way.
"A man who in his love relations with men feels himself to be a woman,"
he writes, "is inverted in respect to his own ego (homo-erotism thru
subject inversion, or, more shortly, subject-homo-erotism). He feels
himself to be a woman, and this not only in the love relationship but
in all relations of life.
"It is quite otherwise with the true active homosexual. He feels
himself a man in every respect, is as a rule very energetic and active,
and there in nothing effeminate to be discovered in his bodily or
mental organisation. The object of his inclination alone is exchanged,
so that one might call him homo-erotic thru exchange of the love
object, or more shortly, object-homo-erotic.
"A further and striking difference between the subjective and the
objective homo-erotic consists in the fact that the former (the invert)
feels himself attracted by more mature, powerful men, and is on
friendly terms, as a colleague, one might say, with women; the second
type, on the contrary, is almost exclusively interested in young,
delicate boys with an effeminate appearance, but meets a woman with
pronounced antipathy, and not rarely with hatred which is badly or
not at all concealed. The true invert is hardly ever impelled to seek
medical advice, he feels at complete ease in the passive rôle and has
no other wish than that people should put up with his peculiarity and
not interfere with the kind of satisfaction that suits him. He is not
very passionate and chiefly demands from his lover the recognition of
his bodily and other merits.
"The object-homo-erotic, on the other hand, is uncommonly tormented
by the consciousness of his own abnormality; sexual intercourse never
completely satisfies him; he is tortured by qualms of conscience and
overestimates his sexual object to the uttermost.
"The subject-homo-erotic is a member of the intermediate sex, in the
sense of Magnus Hirschfeld and his followers. The object-homo-erotic,
is the victim of an obsessional neurosis."
The distinction between active and passive homosexuals is convenient
but slightly arbitrary. Certain homosexuals are at times passive and
at times active. Both types become at times the victims of obsessions
and seek the help of psychotherapists. Active as well as passive
homosexuals may be married and heterosexually potent.
=The Homosexual Neurosis.= Dr. Wilhelm Stekel of Vienna calls
homosexualism the homosexual neurosis. He summarises the genesis of
homosexualism as follows:
"As a child the homosexual is very precocious sexually and can only
repress his cravings by developing fear, hatred and disgust at the
thought of heterosexual relations. The result of that repression is a
flight from normal into abnormal forms of sexual gratification."
=A Safety Device.= To Adler, homosexualism is a detail of the
neurotic picture, a compromise and a safety device.
"Every neurotic," he writes, "experiences at some time during his
childhood doubts as to whether he will ever attain complete virility.
Giving up the hope of being a real man, is, for a child, synonymous
with being a woman. This carries in its wake a whole cycle of childish
valuations: aggression, activity, power, freedom, wealth, sadism are
male attributes; inhibitions, cowardice, obedience, poverty are female
attributes.
"The child plays for a while a dual part, being submissive to his
parents and teachers but indulging in dreams which express his craving
for independence, freedom and importance.
"This duality in the child's psyche, the forerunner of a split in his
consciousness, can have varying results in later years. The individual
will oscillate between the male and the female poles with a constant
striving toward the unification of those two tendencies.
"The masculine component prevents a complete assumption of the
feminine rôle, the feminine component is an obstacle to complete
virility. Hence a compromise: feminine behavior thru masculine means: a
timid submissive male, masculine masochism, homosexuality. Or masculine
behavior thru feminine devices."
=Above and Below.= A series of comparisons has established itself
in the human mind, owing to the enslavement of the female by the male,
starting with the antithesis: male-female: good and bad, right and
left, HIGH, and LOW, ABOVE and BELOW.
In every female neurotic, according to Adler, there is a refusal to be
a female, that is, to be BELOW (socially as well as sexually).
The female who is inferior in looks or intelligence or position and
cannot either compensate for that inferiority by displaying superiority
in some other way (artistic or scientific accomplishment), or reconcile
herself to her inferior position, wishes consciously and unconsciously
to be a man. Consciously she makes herself as masculine as possible.
Unconsciously, she dreams herself into a male personality, physically,
mentally, socially AND sexually. Her wish to be ABOVE makes her play a
man's part in love as well as in the world's life.
=A Way Out.= Homosexualism is, like every neurotic symptom, a way
out of life's difficulties.
A male homosexual I treated associated the idea of woman with "trouble,
sickness, expense, lack of freedom." "Every" woman was to him a "leg
puller," a "gold digger," a liar, insatiable in her demands, spying on
her husband, constantly suffering from "female trouble."
This man had never been married and his only sexual experiences, which
were of the most ephemeral type, had been gained in the few hours of
his life which he spent with a woman much older than himself, a cabaret
singer and a prostitute. Yet, he was convinced that "women are too much
trouble."
An unconsciously homosexual male who is married, and quite potent and
who consulted me after a serious "breakdown," had a dream in which he
saw himself at the top of a mountain in Africa (flight from reality and
his present environment). Six large negroes (powerful male sexuality)
carried away his wife's coffin, (flight from the sexual partner). A
long line of negroes then walked past him and he felt that as long as
he would be on friendly terms with them, he would not want for anything
(line of least effort).
Female homosexuals who had never had any normal heterosexual
experience ranted along the same line of thought: "A husband is too
much trouble." "The idea of submitting to a brute of a man," "I don't
wish to be a slave to a man," etc.
All this voices what Adler terms the "masculine protest."
=The Escape from Biological Duties.= Kempf also considers homosexualism
as a compromise and a convenient escape from biological duties.
"Heterosexual potency," he writes "judging from the behavior of many
psychopaths and normals of both sexes, varies in its vigor and is never
quite secure from the possibility of disintegration in the face of
depressing influences, such as disease, a frigid, unkind, terrifying,
neurotic or disgusting mate, hopeless economic burdens, fear of
pregnancy, or venereal diseases, social scandals, an inaccessible
or unresponsive love-object, death of the mate or a too fixed
mother-attachment.
The intrigues and usurpations of power by the family of the mate,
suppressing the idealised wishes of the individual, often cause the
regression to the lower level of homo-sexuality, where, at least,
parental sacrifices need not be made."
CHAPTER XVIII
HOMOSEXUALISM, A NEUROTIC SYMPTOM
The varying views as to the genesis of homosexualism, which I have
attempted to summarise in the preceding chapter, can be easily
reconciled.
Doubts as to one's "completeness" and a craving for safety may, even at
an early age, cause the gonads to remain undeveloped or to develop in
the wrong direction. Craig's pigeons were as completely "perverted" by
the wrong environment as Steinach's rats by surgical operations.
Hirschfeld's intermediate sex, in its concealed forms, that is, when
the individual, upon gross examination, appears normal, may well
be produced by the environment. Freud's Oedipus situation is not
incompatible with Adler's theory of the neurotic constitution.
Gonads are not different from any other glands. Thyroid involvement may
produce fear or, at least, a picture of fear (exophthalmic goitre),
but fear also produces many forms of thyroid involvement (goitre and
exophthalmic goitre were alarmingly frequent in French towns submitted
to bombardment during the world war). A study of psychic impotence
in men and frigidity in women has proved that impotence was mainly
a refusal to be a potent man, frigidity a refusal to be woman in
intercourse. In certain cases, exaggerated cravings for impotence or
frigidity may modify the gonads so completely that they present the
condition Hirschfeld has called typical of the intermediate sex.
Homosexualism can be best understood when viewed as a neurotic
phenomenon, not as a neurosis in itself, but as a detail of the
neurotic attitude to life outlined by Adler. Homosexualism is, in its
last analysis, an organic striving away from life's normal goals.
=A Denial of Life.= Homosexualism cannot be understood unless we
associate it with a denial of life and all its duties. Nor could love
be understood if we tried to dissociate it from its primary sexual goal
which is the acceptance of life with its duties, symbolised by the
procreation of life and the creation of new duties by the individual,
duties which he considers as a source of joy.
=Homosexualism Is Love, Negative Love=, quite as involuntary and
as obsessive as normal, heterosexual, positive love.
A homosexual teacher wrote to Plazek: "A glance at the literature and
art produced by homosexuals as well as insight into actual conditions,
reveals that abnormal love can conjure up the same emotional display as
normal love. Longing, faithfulness, devotion, self sacrifice, blossom
forth in abnormal love as well as in normal love.
"In both, complete communion may be the goal and climax of feelings
which are perhaps among the deepest and finest which mankind can
experience."
=Their Love Letters.= The absolute similarity of heterosexual and
homosexual love in their written expression can be judged by perusing
the sonnets which Michael Angelo wrote to young Tommaso dei Cavalieri
and which could very well have been addressed to a woman.
A sober scientist like Winckelman was carried away by his homosexual
love for Frederick von Berg to the point of writing the following
epistle which might emanate from a lovelorn highschool boy:
"All the names I might call you are not sweet enough and do not do
justice to my love. All the things I might say to you sound too weak
to give voice to my heart and my soul. I love you, my dearest, more
than the whole world and neither time nor circumstances nor age could
ever cause my love to diminish."
=Deeds of Violence.= Homosexual love has led to as many deeds of
violence on the part of disappointed lovers as heterosexual love. The
papers frequently publish without comments stories of the shooting of
a woman by another woman, caused by the fact that the victim was "too
attentive to another woman."
Psychiatrists who can read between the lines recognise in those murders
the result of homosexual jealousy and infidelity.
In that respect the behavior of the two sexes seems slightly different.
"It is well known," remarks Havelock Ellis, "that the part taken
by women generally in open criminality, and especially in crimes
of violence, is small as compared with men. In the homosexual the
conditions are to some extent reversed. Inverted men, in whom a more
or less feminine temperament is so often found, are rarely impelled to
acts of aggressive violence, though they frequently commit suicide.
Inverted women, who may retain their feminine emotionality combined
with some degree of infantile impulsiveness and masculine energy,
present a favorable soil for the seeds of passional crime, under those
conditions of jealousy and allied emotions which must so often enter
the invert's life."
=A Homosexual Tragedy.= In a recent case in Chicago a homosexual woman
shot her former roommate and then seriously wounded herself. They had
roomed together and last fall the victim broke off the life together
because the invert "was too affectionate." The victim went to her
parents' house in the South to get rid of the invert. On her return to
Chicago two months later she was bothered by the invert who insisted
that she room with her. On April 22d she received a letter from the
invert containing a bullet and a threat. Alarmed, she had the invert
arrested, but the invert was discharged on promise she would not annoy
the girl. The invert had a number of swagger sticks, one of which she
carried each day. There is no account of her masculinity of attire. She
wrote poems to her victim and made her presents including a diamond
ring and a diamond studded watch, all of which were returned. There had
been several threats of killing the victim, before the letter came, if
she ended the friendship.
=Women More Homosexual than Men.= Remembering how the mother's fetishes
affect us in the choice of a sexual mate we may expect to find more
homosexualism in woman than in man. The facts bear up our theory.
While the gross forms of homosexualism are less frequent among women,
a thousand mild forms of it are observable in the behavior of even
apparently very normal women.
The sentimental attachments of school girls for certain teachers,
the pleasure which they derive from spending nights with some friend
on whom they have a "crush," the thousand and one bodily caresses
female friends shower on each other, the curiosity they manifest about
each other's physical condition, their frequent bed room or bathroom
conferences, are manifestations of a mild homosexualism, which,
however, do not always lead to overt acts.
=Boastfulness.= Many homosexuals compensate for the scorn meted
out to them by normal individuals with a certain proud boastfulness.
"We are supermen," one hears them say when they find a sympathetic
listener, "we have reached beyond the usual, boresome, bourgeois form
of gratification. Our intellect is nauseated by woman's silliness."
And the females say in their turn: "We are super-women, we have
conquered the fear of man and we are tired of man's boorish ways."
Some of the male homosexuals who are bisexual, that is, can also be
attracted by women, pride themselves over the mentality of the women
they love. "Men have accustomed us to a higher intellectual level and
to a more intelligent form of conversation," a homosexual said to me.
This is naturally a defence mechanism. By demanding extremely high
qualification from the women, homosexuals have a ready excuse for
consorting with men exclusively.
=Famous Homosexuals.= Homosexuals are fond of mentioning all the
men famous in art and letters whose sexual life was inverted: the Greek
philosophers, poets and playwrights of the classic age, Julius Cæsar,
Alexander the Great, Michael Angelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Frederick of
Prussia, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Nietzsche, etc.
=The Nietzsche-Wagner Feud= should be rewritten from a psychiatrist's
point of view. Wagner was to young Nietzsche an attractive, heroic,
father-image. The philosopher never had any real affair of the heart
with a woman. He only indulged in very ephemeral relationships which,
by their disastrous results, drove him further away from women. (Dr.
W. H. White of Washington received the assurance while in Europe that
Nietzsche died of syphilis.) Nietzsche made himself obnoxious to Wagner
by trying to be his press agent. As Wagner, however, a shrewd business
man in his old days, objected to Nietzsche's agnosticism and to his
friendship with certain Jews, Nietzsche, disappointed in his love,
abandoned Wagner and hated him fiercely. He attacked him on every
occasion, his hatred being made the fiercer by the fact that he himself
considered himself as a greater composer, one line in Nietzsche's
letters throws a strange light upon the poor paretic's feelings.
Wagner's "feminine traits" he wrote, finally disgusted him.
=Shall Perverse Love Be Recognized?= Efforts are being made in
various directions at the present day to have homosexual love legally
recognised and given perfect equality with heterosexual love. In
Germany, a number of writers, Von Kupfer, Friedlander and others have
boldly championed that futile attempt.
A cinema film was produced last year (1921) in Berlin depicting the
plight of the homosexual who is unable to control his cravings and
falls a victim to the wiles of a blackmailer. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld
agreed to impersonate in that production the scientist who attempts to
enlighten the public as to the nature of homosexualism, so as to bring
about a modification of the statute punishing perverts.
=Man's Emancipation.= In 1900, Elizar von Kupfer called upon the men to
proclaim their "independence" from women. "The man who lives in bondage
to women," he wrote, "and who humors her whims, has lost his manhood.
Since woman is emancipating herself, why should not men follow the same
road?"
Illogically enough, Von Kupfer defends the mothers and wives, "flowers
who should not be rooted out of the garden of love." In Schopenhauer's
silly outbursts against woman, however, Von Kupfer sees "a test of
manhood revolting against man's humiliation" and he adds that "it is
only from the closest relation of man to man, adolescent to man, and
adolescent to adolescent, that government and civilisation will derive
real power."
Blüher considers homosexualism as an "essential human trait which must
be granted an outlet with certain restrictions (setting the age of
consent at fourteen and forbidding the use of violence)."
Benedikt Friedlander, in his "Renaissance des Eros Uranios" suggests
"bringing ancient and modern culture into harmony with each other by
reviving the Greek Eros and overthrowing the monopoly which woman has,
of being loved and beautiful."
Removing the legal penalties which punish overt homosexual acts is one
thing. Recognising homosexualism is an entirely different proposition.
Punishing a typhoid fever patient would be absurd, but typhoid fever
sufferers should not be allowed to remain at large without treatment.
Homosexualism is a neurotic trait which should be eradicated, if
possible, by analytic treatment. Hopeless cases, on the other hand
should be protected against their instincts by a form of confinement
which would be neither punitive nor more humiliating than the
confinement imposed upon sufferers from contagious diseases.
=Homosexualism and the War.= Homosexualism has been on the increase
since the war. Stekel reports many gruesome cases of husbands who,
until they went to the barracks and the trenches, where their
unconscious homosexualism found an unusual stimulation, were normal in
their attitude to their wives, and who returned after the armistice
absolutely inverted and unable to give or receive normal gratification.
The bobbed hair craze has many good excuses. Bobbed hair is kept tidy
more easily than long tresses and can be dried quicker after a shampoo.
At the same time, when we consider that the boyish type of women
became fashionable about the same time when short hair did, and that
soon after the war, advertising boards were covered with the praise
of devices enabling women to conceal their natural curves, we must
consider both fashions as symptomatic of an increase in homosexualism.
We might also mention another fashion detail: while dressmakers were
trying their best to obliterate their customers breasts, they would
bare entirely their backs. Anyone familiar with the symbolism and
dreams of homosexuals will understand the import of that style of
dresses.
=Is Homosexualism Necessary?= Dr. Otto Gross, without openly
countenancing homosexualism, holds that a certain proportion of it is
necessary in man's makeup for a mutual understanding of both sexes.
"We can only understand," he writes, "what we have experienced. Unless
a man has a decided feminine trend, he is not likely to understand a
woman, or to live with her harmoniously and vice versa."
A consideration of the purely physical side of love lends a slight
plausibility to that view. Unless a man can clearly imagine love's
pleasure as experienced by a woman, he may not be able to vouchsafe her
complete gratification.
The progress of civilisation certainly demands that men become less
masculine (translate: boorish) and women less feminine (meaning: silly).
We could not tolerate, however, what Friedländer called a Renaissance
of Eros Uranios, leading to the conditions which obtained in Greece
where men, while consorting with other men, were also potent with women.
No parallel can be drawn between Greek culture and modern culture.
Hellenic culture was decidedly masculine, women being solely tools of
lust, or beasts of burden, or means of proliferation. As I will show
in another chapter, one really modern woman can give to the modern
man what Demosthenes sought in three kinds of women, a prostitute, a
concubine and a wife, not to count a male mistress.
=What is Really Needed= is a better understanding of homosexualism
by the public and by the homosexuals. After which, homosexuals, no
longer despised and punished for their obsessive cravings, and no
longer proud of their condition, will be given sympathy and treatment,
voluntary or compulsory. Psychoanalysts will remove their complexes and
lead them toward a positive goal; surgeons, performing on them some
of Steinach's operations, may raise their heterosexual potency to the
point at which no doubt will obsess them any longer.
Those things will avail little, however, until parents watch their
offspring carefully to discover in them the first symptoms of a
homosexual trend and adopt ways and means to prevent the growth of the
neurosis.
We may for convenience quote Hirschfeld's description of the homosexual
child, a very superficial one, indeed, sufficient, however, to cause
the average parent to seek psychological and medical advice before it
is too late and before mental and physical habits have compromised,
perhaps hopelessly, the love life of their children.
"The homosexual boy prefers girls' games, shuns boys' games, is girlish
in disposition and behavior, if not in appearance. People often say
that he is like a girl. He is happy in the company of girls. He has a
psychic fixation on his mother. He is reserved and embarrassed before
other boys. He often becomes unduly attached to a male teacher or a
schoolmate.
"The homosexual girl prefers boys' games, does not care for sewing or
other feminine occupations, is boyish in her disposition, her motions,
often in her appearance. People call her a tomboy. She likes to romp
with boys. She is overattached to her father. She shows embarrassment
in the presence of other girls. She often falls madly in love with a
female teacher or some older woman."
CHAPTER XIX
CRUELTY AND LOVE. SADISM
In normal individuals the idea of love is inseparably associated with
tenderness, caressing gestures, words or glances, readiness on the part
of either mate to go to extremes in order to enhance the loved one's
enjoyment of the amorous relationship, or to protect him against all
dangers or suffering.
In normal individuals, love and suffering are antithetic terms, love
meaning joy and pleasure, (sexual and egotistical), suffering being
only conceivable when the craving for love is ungratified, when the
lonely lovers are parted by life, when one of them has been robbed by
death of his mate, etc.
=Algolagnists.= There are abnormal human beings, however, known
technically as algolagnists (from algos, pain, and lagneia, enjoyment),
who cannot imagine or enjoy love when it is entirely dissociated from
some form of suffering.
The active algolagnists must inflict some pain, physical or mental,
upon their mate in order to enjoy the pleasures of love to their full
extent. The passive algolagnists only attain the highest degree of
amorous satisfaction when they are submitted by their mate to painful
or humiliating treatment.
Active algolagnists are known more commonly as "sadists," an expression
created by Moreau de Tours. Krafft-Ebing, the most famous writer on
sexual perversions coined for passive algolagnists the expression
"masochists."
The word sadist is derived from the name of Marquis de Sade, a French
pervert of the eighteenth century, whose life and writings well
illustrate the form of love which is constantly associated with acts of
cruelty.
=Donatien Alphonse François de Sade= was born in Paris, June 2 1740,
the offspring of an aristocratic family of Provence. Among his
ancestors was the Laura of Petrarca's sonnets.
At fourteen, he joined a cavalry regiment. He went thru the Seven
Years War during which he witnessed the most ruthless atrocities. On
his return, at the age of twenty-seven, he married, but soon after his
marriage was arrested for some deed of cruelty committed in a house of
prostitution.
His father's death left him heir to an important government position
but his life of excesses gave him little time to attend to his duties.
At twenty-eight, he attracted much attention by a scandal in which he
played a prominent part. He lured a shopkeeper's wife, Rose Keller to a
house in the suburbs of the French capital where he used to hold revels.
Threatening the woman with a pistol, he bound her hands and feet and
whipped her to the blood.
The next morning, Rose Keller managed to free herself, jumped out of
the window and summoned help. De Sade was arrested but the affair was
soon hushed up by powerful friends at the court of Louis the Fifteenth.
That incident is characteristic of sadism in love's relations. His
victim's sufferings supplied De Sade with the artificial stimulation
which normal desire would produce in a normal man.
Soon after this, De Sade eloped to Italy with his wife's sister.
On his way to Italy, he stopped in Marseille and organized an orgy in
the course of which he gorged his guests with candy containing some
poisonous aphrodisiac drug. Two of them died.
This time, a court rendered a death sentence against the murderous
pervert, who eluded the police for a time and was finally confined in
the fortress of Vincennes for thirteen years.
It was said at the time that a woman had been found in a house where
he indulged in all sorts of debauches, unconscious and bleeding from a
hundred scalpel wounds which had severed many veins.
De Sade devoted his enforced leisure to writing. His published works
fill up ten volumes. They contain a description of the most atrocious
sexual cruelties. The author makes a childish attempt at establishing
a "satanic" morality based on the fact that "virtue is always punished
by the world and vice always rewarded." His atheism is no more than a
satanic ritual.
De Sade's literary output, which is devoid of any artistic merit and
is only of interest to the student of abnormal psychology, bears the
stamp of hopeless intellectual inferiority trying to justify itself
by representing the entire world as a combination of a brothel and a
torture chamber and mankind as a herd of blood-thirsty and sex-crazed
lunatics. A sinister autobiography and wish fulfilment.
The revolutionists of 1789 who opened the doors of all jails and insane
asylums gave De Sade his freedom on July 14. He sided politically with
his deliverers but after a while, became suspicious to them and again
spent one year in prison (1793-1794).
=What Bonaparte Thought of Him.= De Sade, who had been very liberal in
presenting free copies of his obscene novels to men prominent in the
days of the Revolution and the Terror, made the mistake of sending a
set of his works to Bonaparte.
The Corsican caused the entire edition to be suppressed and diagnosed
the author very accurately as a murderous pervert, unfit to be at
large. De Sade was committed to an insane asylum where he remained
until his death on December 2, 1814.
Sadism is a morbid phenomenon which remained mysterious until recently,
when the experimental work of physiologists like Cannon, Sherrington
and others, revealed to us the close connection existing between mental
states, muscular tensions and the secretions of ductless glands of the
body.
Adler's "individual psychology" also has thrown much light upon many
morbid actions which are simply attempts at compensation for a feeling
of inferiority. The neurotic, briefly speaking, feels inferior, that
is, afraid of some imaginary danger. He casts about for something
which can be done quickly, simply, with the least effort, and which
will restore his peace and safety by filling him, were it only
temporarily, with a sense of actual or imaginary superiority.
=Glandular Drunkenness.= Wulffen suggests an interpretation of sadism
which is ingenious but unconvincing. He considers every act of violence
as provoked by the faulty functioning of some glands.
He compares the effect of the gonadal hormones (one of the secretions
of the sex glands issuing from the interstitial cells) with that of
alcohol. Alcohol destroys the inhibitions and allows unconscious
cravings of an inacceptable sort to express themselves thru overt acts.
The drunken man loses all shame and all fear, becomes boisterous and,
at times, murderous. Likewise, Wulffen says, oversecretion of the
gonadal hormones creates a sort of sexual drunkenness in the course of
which the individual is forced into violent or cruel behavior.
This would be acceptable if all the sadists were strong healthy
specimens of manhood and womanhood. Most of them, on the contrary, show
plainly signs of glandular insufficiency.
Wulffen's thesis is not confirmed as some writers assume by a study of
the mating habits of many animals. Cocks during the act of mating peck
cruelly the back of the hen's head. Tomcats bite the necks of their
mates. Toads, at times, choke the female to death in their clinging
embrace.
In those acts of animal "cruelty" there is probably another element
to be considered. The tomcat, digging his teeth into the female cat's
neck, may not so much relieve his sadistic impulses as produce in his
mate some welcome sensation of pleasurable pain. We know how willingly
the most rebellious cats allow any one to grab them by the backs of
their necks, making no effort at freeing themselves and apparently
enjoying that partial strangulation. (Remember the aphrodisiac
influence of hanging.)
=Atavism.= Eulenburg considers that sadism is an atavistic trait. "Not
only animals," he says, "but primitive races associate mating with
violence."
The caveman is supposed to have beaten the female he captured into
insensibility before dragging her to his cave.
We do not know, however, whether it was THE caveman or SOME cavemen
who indulged in that practice, the existence of which may be merely
a subject for speculation. It goes without saying that whenever
females were carried off by victorious tribes after armed conflicts the
"wooing" of the captives must have been synonymous with violence and
rape.
Old documents offer many examples of the combination of love and
violence. There is the old legend of Griseldis in which a sadistic man
tested in the cruellest way the woman who was to be his life mate.
The epic poem Gudrun recites one of the prehistoric struggles between
male and female. The unfortunate male in this case is overpowered by
the Nordic Valkyrie who binds him with her girdle and keeps him lashed
to the wall till morning.
The modern honeymoon trip is undoubtedly a survival of the primeval
habit of carrying off the bride.
=Primitive Religions= constantly associate sadism with love. In fact
the Goddess of Love, in the Greek mythology, owed her existence to an
act of sadism. Kronos' male organ, cut off by his Zeus, fell into the
sea, fertilized it, and Aphrodite was born.
Many primitive gods demanded the sacrifice of virgins, primitive
goddesses decapitated or castrated men with whom at times they
consorted. The priests and priestesses of certain religions could only
please their gods by submitting to sexual indignities, the priestesses
of Cybelea prostituting themselves to every one, the priests castrating
themselves.
Some of those acts of violence, however, must be considered from an
entirely different point of view.
=In Primitive Races= real achievement was always associated with
violence. The "real man" was the victorious fighter and killer. Even in
Roman days, gladiator duels terminated with the death of the defeated
man, unless he were a popular ring idol whom the mob saved for further
encounters.
The robber, designated by more flattering names, of course, gained more
glory by stealing goods or gold than the merchant who, in ways more
socially acceptable, accumulated goods and gold.
Civilisation has changed those things. In neurotic states, however,
we always observe a return to archaic modes of action which are more
direct. We nowadays kill off a competitor thru advertising. Instead of
levying tribute on the defeated rival, we compel him to sell out to us
at our price, etc. The neurotic kills or steals, as archaic heroes did.
=Animal Love Fights.= Also, as far as animals are concerned, the
more or less playful fights with which they prelude their mating is
not, as Wulffen suggests, due to gonadal drunkenness. On the contrary,
it is meant to produce a stronger outpouring of gonadal secretions in
both male and female, thereby increasing the energy of the male and
assuring the pregnancy of the female.
Fights preceding animal mating increase, among other things, the
secretions of the adrenal cortex which impart to all the muscles (among
them the sexual muscles) a considerable tension.
Let us bear in mind that physiological detail while interpreting the
fact that many neurotics are only potent sexually with women who resist
them. We see how a certain amount of struggle, producing perhaps slight
anger (and possibly leading to acts of violence), would strengthen the
sexual faculties of the weak neurotic and enable him to possess his
mate. From that type of neurotic, who requires glandular excitement of
the adrenal type, to the sadist, typified by the famous Marquis, and
up to the Ripper who disembowels his victims we see merely a series
of gradations in glandular insufficiency, not as Wulffen said, in
glandular hyper-secretion.
=A Neurotic Trait.= Furthermore, sadism should not be considered
as a phenomenon of purely sexual character. Sadism is merely a detail
of the neurotic make up. It is one of the neurotic short cuts whereby
an inferior individual acquires a temporary superiority.
The section foreman who takes pleasure in driving his men at a killing
pace, the detective engaged daily in the task of man hunting, the
so-called "strict" parent who beats his children, the surgeon who never
tires of performing operations, the futile reformer who is constantly
trying to deprive some one of some form of enjoyment, the jealous
husband who deprives his wife of many pleasures, the jealous wife who
relishes the thought that her husband is giving up his club or his
former associates for her sake, are sadists, some of them partly normal
and useful, some of them morbid or ridiculous.
=The Mob.= Sadism is one of the great "mob characteristics." Why do we
run to fires and to the scene of an accident? To help? No. To enjoy the
sight of some one's life or property being destroyed. If our impulses
were humane or charitable we should be relieved, nay exultant, when we
learn that the conflagration has only destroyed a curtain or a shade,
when we see the man bowled over by a taxi getting up and walking away,
little the worse for the experience.
Notice on the contrary the indignation of the average man when the fire
"does not amount to anything", when the "victim" of an accident escapes
unharmed.
=Is the Male More Cruel?= It has been said that sadism was a masculine
trait, masochism a feminine characteristic. Like the majority of
generalisations on the subject of sex differences, it is inaccurate.
Man, the hunter, is more aggressive in love, but his aggressiveness
need not include cruelty. His strength, in modern life, is put to quite
a different use, to protect the weaker female, not to overwhelm her.
Woman is supposed to be more submissive but mythology, legend and
history present to us thousands of cases in which the female of the
human species betrayed many sadistic instincts, not infrequently
associated with her love activities. Even in the animal world, while
we behold males apparently submitting the female to much suffering,
we find not a few cases, for instance in the insect world, of females
killing or even devouring their mate immediately after the love
communion.
CHAPTER XX
LOVE THAT CRAVES SUFFERING. MASOCHISM
The man whom Krafft-Ebing selected as the typical masochist, Leopold
von Sacher-Masoch, was born in Lemberg, January 27, 1836.
He was extremely frail in infancy and childhood. He compensated for
his physical inferiority thru unusual mental activity, for at the
age of nineteen he won his degree of doctor of law. At twenty he was
appointed instructor in German history at an university. At the age
of twenty-five he was the author of several books of history. He then
turned to fiction, first of the historical and then of the purely
psychological type.
A morbid tendency was observable in his very first books, a tendency
which became more and more marked and which led him to write almost
exclusively descriptions of perverse love entanglements.
He showed a decided preference for delineating cruel, mannish types of
women and incredibly weak types of men.
As in the case of Marquis de Sade, we observe here a strange
parallelism between the man's writings and his own biography.
Sacher-Masoch's first love was a woman much older than himself, Anna
von Kattowitz, who for four years humiliated, insulted and victimised
him in every possible way, finally running away with a Russian
adventurer.
Then he met Princess Bogdanoff for whom he abandoned temporarily his
professional and literary ambitions. She took him to Italy where he
was compelled to serve her as a secretary and valet. He enjoyed the
relationship, but the princess soon tired of him.
His next liaison was with Baroness Fanny Pistor, with whom he had his
picture taken once in the following position: she seated on a sofa and
clad in furs, he kneeling at her feet on the floor.
Then came Baroness Reizenstein, whom he could not love very long for
she refused to satisfy his morbid craving for physical torture and
humiliating treatment and, besides, was homosexual.
Then he became engaged to a young artist, Miss Bauerfeld, of Graz.
Soon after, however, he met an ugly, mannish hysterical person, Vanda
Dunayef, who gratified better his perverse leanings and compelled him
to break his engagement. A child was born of their union and in 1873
they were married. They traveled from town to town, apparently unable
to find peace anywhere, and she finally left him to elope with a
reporter from the Paris Figaro.
Sacher-Masoch secured a divorce and married again, this time a motherly
type of woman, Hulda Meister, retired with her to the small village of
Lindheim and died there on March 9, 1895.
A few incidents of his life describe well his perversion.
=Love of the Whip.= Once, according to Havelock Ellis, in the
course of an innocent romp in which the whole household took part,
Sacher-Masoch asked his wife to whip him. She refused. Then he
suggested the maid should do it.
His wife did not take this seriously, but he had the servant whip
him to his full enjoyment. When his wife urged that it would not be
possible to keep the maid after this, Sacher-Masoch agreed and she was
discharged.
He constantly found pleasure in placing his wife in awkward or
compromising circumstances, a pleasure she was too normal to share.
This led to much domestic unhappiness. Against her wish he persuaded
her to whip him with whips to which nails were attached. This he
claimed was a literary stimulus.
Dr. Eulenburg tells of a young woman with whom Sacher-Masoch
corresponded for a while and to whom he wrote that "his greatest joy
would be to be whipped by a woman." Later on, Sacher-Masoch met her in
Vienna and asked her to don a fur coat and to whip him. She however,
pretended to treat the matter as a joke, and dismissed him.
His numerous books of fiction present over and over again the same
theme: the domineering woman, "clad in furs," who tortures a weak
helpless man.
We behold in Sacher-Masoch a clear case of physical weakness and
glandular insufficiency. His endocrines, in particular his adrenals and
gonads, required the actual stimulation of pain (whipping) before they
could react properly to a sexual stimulus.
It is a curious coincidence that among all forms of stimulation used
to accelerate the gait of beasts of burden or draft horses, the whip
is the most commonly used the world over and that, on the other hand,
perverts of the masochist type have, the world over and at every age
of history, more frequently resorted to the whip to torture themselves
than to any other means of physical punishment.
=The Masochist is Like a Weak or Tired Horse.= Why does whipping
make a horse go faster? Not merely on account of the fear or pain which
the beast experiences, but because that fear and pain MAKE HIM STRONGER.
The adrenalin liberated by the fear-and-pain-producting stimulus
stiffens every muscle in his body and his strength is doubled.
This is why frightened animals or insane people in a panic can perform
feats of strength of which they would be absolutely incapable in a
normal state.
Masochism is much more, however, than an organic attempt at
compensating for glandular inferiority and acquiring in a morbid
way increased sexual potency. It is a neurotic expedient whereby an
inferior man or woman compensates for his or her weakness thru more
weakness.
By belittling themselves, by disparaging their own ability,
masochist lovers can take advantage of their mate, let him bear all
responsibilities.
=Shoe Fetishism.= We understand from that point of view the meaning of
the shoe fetishism which Krafft-Ebing has noticed in male masochists.
In fact Hirschfeld states that every male shoe fetish is a masochist.
To the masochist, the shoe, especially the high buttoned shoe, is
symbolical of woman's power, of her ruthless cruelty. He sees himself
trod on by that shoe, he imagines that shoe pressing on his neck,
pinning his head to the ground.
Curiously enough, long gloves seem to arouse the same ideas in the mind
of the male masochist. Both shoes and gloves are found in the dreams or
visions of neurotics, symbolizing the female organs.
A masochist wrote once: "The gloved hand of a woman, altho like her
foot, smaller and prettier than a man's, can wield the whip powerfully
over her slave whose greatest joy consists then in kissing his
mistress's shoes while submitting to that punishment."
=Craving for Humiliation.= The masochist welcomes every form
of humiliation and not infrequently derives great pride from his
"patience," "tolerance," "self-sacrifice," "martyrlike resignation" etc.
Like Sacher-Masoch himself, some men, husbands or lovers, (pimps,
cadets, etc.) have been known to enjoy the sight of their wife or
mistress in another man's arms.
Hirschfeld was consulted by a woman whose husband compelled her at
frequent intervals to have relations with a man in his own house. He
would invite a business associate for dinner and then leave his wife to
explain that he had been suddenly called out of town.
The guest and his wife would dine together. Wine would flow freely
and she would coquettishly goad the man into making advances to her.
Concealed in the next room, the husband would watch thru a peep hole
the proceedings which ended with a passionate scene.
It was only after beholding that humiliating sight that the masochistic
husband could enjoy his wife's embraces.
A man who consulted me confessed to me that he was absolutely impotent
with his own wife or with any unmarried woman. It was only with married
women that he felt perfectly virile. The thought of his mistress in
her husband's arms was the only thing that could arouse him physically.
Many neurotics of the masochistic type have dreams of being school
children punished by a masculine female teacher. Those dreams, be
they night or day dreams, are always associated with erotic thoughts.
Remember Jean Jacques Rousseau enjoying viciously the spankings which
mademoiselle Lambercier gave him when a child.
Masochists, male or female, are often very anxious to perform menial or
disgusting tasks for the person they love, thus placing themselves in a
subordinate, protected, position and at the same time, claiming a great
deal of credit for their devotion.
=Masochistic Fancies.= The male masochist, eager to place himself
in the position of safety toward his mate, not infrequently imagines
himself to be an animal and asks to be treated as such. Greek antiquity
has bequeathed to us the story of Aristotle the philosopher, allowing
a prostitute to ride on his back, whipping him like a horse, while he
would crawl about on all fours.
Medical literature contains many descriptions of establishments where
male masochists are submitted to voluntary torture thru various
appliances.
The ascetics who in the Middle Ages whipped themselves, wore hair cloth
studded with sharp nails, etc., to manifest their love to God or the
Virgin, the Russian Skooptsy who mutilate themselves to please God, are
religious examplaries of masochistic love.
The Christian ideal of suffering and renunciation as a means of
conquering everlasting happiness is also purely masochistic.
Suffering, be it physical or mental (remorse), assures to them in the
end, well-being (glandular well-being) and enables them to reach Heaven
(will-to-be-above).
=Are Women Masochistic?= I denied in the preceding chapter the
frequently heard assertion that sadism in a typically masculine trait.
I would deny quite as emphatically that masochism is peculiarly
feminine, a view held by many sadists, as an attempted justification of
their cruel perversion.
Oscar Wilde, a bisexual, stated once that of all the masculine traits
it was cruelty which women appreciated most. To his morbid mind cruelty
meant power. It is power of course which woman, disabled several times
in her life by pregnancy and lactation, seeks in the man with whom she
mates. He must be a good fighter and a good hunter, not, however,
merely to capture her and brutalise her, but on the contrary, to
protect her and feed her.
The sadist Kurnberger in his novel, "The Castle of Horrors" also bids
us believe that man's greatest victory, appreciated as such by woman,
consists in making a woman suffer, in bringing tears to her eyes, in
outtalking and outwitting her, "a victory compared to which," he says,
"Marengo and Austerlitz look like thirty cents."
And the sadistic Nietzsche puts in the mouth of an old woman in his
"Zarathustra" the following statement: "when you go to women, don't
forget to take your whip."
Other sadists remind us of the Russian woman's wail that her husband's
love must be cooling off, because he hasn't beaten her in an age.
Barring a number of exceptions, the fact remains that masochism in
women is as abnormal as masochism in men, or sadism in men or women.
=Women Who Enjoy a Beating.= There are women who enjoy unconsciously
being beaten by their husbands, much as they may resent the outrage
consciously.
They are in every case hypothyroid and hypoadrenal types in whom the
distribution of energy and the emergency production of energy are very
subnormal. Nothing but a violent stimulus, physical or mental, whipping
or insult, can make them feel strong and active.
The dreams of those women, like those of masochistic men, are often of
the nightmarish type. They suffer in their night visions all sorts of
torture. Analysis brings out the fact that every detail of those dreams
is associated with energy, achievement, etc.
De Sade's wife belonged evidently to the masochistic type. She remained
faithful to him to the end in spite of his perverse life, his prison
record and the fact that he deceived her with her own sister. Her life
of sorrow must have vouchsafed her, after all, a good many masochistic
compensations of the neurotic variety.
=Famous Women Sadists.= As against the assumption that "all" women
are masochists, we may mention many famous women sadists, several
Byzantine and Roman Empresses, Frankish queens, two Russian empresses,
the treatment meted out by women to Theroigne de Méricourt, tortured
publicly by the Jacobine women in 1793, not to mention legendary
characters like the Amazons and mythological goddesses who killed or
tortured their lovers.
Sadism and masochism in love are pathological disturbances due to a
neurotic attempt on the part of an inferior individual to dominate the
sexual partner thru violence or weakness, and to assure himself against
defeat in the sexual relationship.
=The Freudian Suggestion= that the sadist identifies himself with
the powerful and apparently, brutal father, the masochist identifying
himself with the weaker and submissive mother, applies to a too
restricted number of cases to be of positive help in understanding the
nature of those two perversions. Even when that explanation seems to
fit the case, we must, nevertheless, fall back upon the Adlerian view
of the neurotic temperament in order to understand why a child decides
to identify himself with one parent instead of the other.
CHAPTER XXI
WHAT LOVE OWES TO SADISTS AND MASOCHISTS
Love that inflicts suffering and love which craves suffering are
travesties on love, for normal love gives joy and craves joy.
Yet, it may be that a too perfect adaption, one vouchsafing constantly
to the mates the security they seek in each other's arms would soon
pall on them. They might not remain attached to each other any longer
than the animals who, in the majority of species, part as soon as they
have fulfilled their biological mission.
A perfectly normal couple might die of boredom. What makes animals,
when they have not been slightly perverted by contact with human
beings, so uninteresting, is their absolute normality.
A very slight touch of "perversion" in at least one of the mates, seems
necessary if the novelty of the relationship is not to wear off too
soon. Maybe I should not say perversion, but perverseness.
The normal husband who would die rather than hurt his life mate cannot
compete with the romantic, lover, a little mysterious, unreliable,
suspected of flirting with other women, who "keeps a woman guessing,"
pretends at times to be indifferent and has to be won over and over
again.
The normal husband whose affection is taken for granted and who always
says the proper thing at the proper time, remembers all anniversaries
and celebrates them officially, pales in comparison with a tender,
masochistic lover, whom every unkind gesture seems to wound deeply,
whose affection is tinged with a melancholy longing, who treasures
little sentimental memories which his earnestness makes at times rather
poignant.
=The Sadistic Lover= carries a woman off her feet by the daredevil
things he may indulge in when away from her. The masochist touches
deeply the motherly chord in her by the acts of kindness and devotion
he may perform for others, by his charitable or professional activities.
=The Vamp.= How much the world, especially the world of art, owes
to the slightly sadistic, "vampish" woman, who, if she is endowed
with much physical beauty sets, a little cruelly, all the males
competing for her favors. How many flaming poems of passion, what
priceless canvasses, statutes and monuments has she conjured up out of
her admirers' minds. Even the perverse female beasts of the Italian
Renaissance made love infinitely romantic.
On the other hand, what worshipful tenderness meets even the memory
of the patient Aude who silently closed her eyes and died when Roland
was brought home dead, of Solvejg, waiting with saintly resignation
for the return of the rover Peer Gynt. Of course the sadistic braggart
earns much hatred and the whimpering masochistic male much scorn. The
sadistic vamp gets shot by jealous lovers and the clinging masochistic
vine is called a pest. To the lovers who are not unbearably normal
and whose slight pituitary instability causes them to do and say the
unexpected, love owes its poetry, the love life its charm and its
inspirational power.
All other things being equal, when a slightly sadistic male, seeking
as his mate the image of a pliant mother, meets a slightly masochistic
female who seeks the image of the powerful, domineering father, there
are many chances that the match will, for a long period of time, retain
its original qualities.
The sadistic female, on the other hand soon emasculates the masochistic
male. Sadistic mates and masochistic mates land in the divorce court,
the former throwing at each other charges of cruelty, the latter, for
unfaithfulness of one or both mates, who seek in adultery relief from
the monotony of their too peaceful existence.
CHAPTER XXII
LOVE AMONG THE ARTISTS
Frequent are the divorces in the artistic world. Platitudinous
moralisers explain that fact with the stupid statement that the morals
of the stage are "loose." Like the Freudians, they always seek in sex
the origin of every disturbance in human life.
Sex in the life of an artist, however, plays an infinitely less
important part than egotism, the desire to be above.
The so-called normal man, who works, eats, sleeps, reproduces himself,
and, at his death leaves the world exactly as he found it is probably
subnormal.
He differs very little from the animals who do exactly the same things
in the same way and seem perfectly pleased with the endless repetition
of an immutable life ritual.
=Dissatisfaction= is really the element which we must consider when
we try to draw a line of cleavage between men and the animals.
Dissatisfaction breeds either neurosis or creation.
The dissatisfied person, devoid of intellectual resources, either
commits a crime or kills himself or goes off into another world thru
the door that leads into insanity.
The dissatisfied person gifted with powers of self-expression, makes
the world in which he lives better, more beautiful or more comfortable.
That sort of achievement presupposes a certain amount of healthy
sadism, the courage to criticise, to offer suggestions, to force the
products of one's mind upon the community, to say "look at me, I am
perfect or, at least, better than you."
Every budding actor assumes unconsciously that he can delineate a rôle
better than the other histrionic lights of his time; every new novelist
must assume that he can tell a story more attractively than his readers
could picture it to themselves, etc., etc.
The artist who is willing to yield, soon relapses into the ranks of
the business men. Whoever panders to the popular taste of his time
may derive therefrom financial advantages but very little egotistical
gratification.
The real artist must know that he is right and must not be, therefore,
soft clay to be moulded by any one else's desires.
How then could the artist obtain lasting happiness from any form of
love relationship?
=The Male Artist=, if married to a submissive, masochistic wife, may
live happily with her for a time. Egotists, male or female, however,
need flattery. Familiarity breeds contempt. Flattery must come from a
constantly changing source or lose its power, as drugs do when we grow
accustomed to them.
Flattery coming from a pretty woman whose attraction has not been
weakened by daily contact will soon lead the artist husband into
forbidden paths. Unless endowed with the wisdom of the musician's wife
in "The Concert," his wife will soon be granted a divorce on the ground
of his too obvious infidelity.
Woe to the male artist who takes unto himself a female artist for his
wife. As I said in the preceding chapter, sadist plus sadist equals
divorce suit for cruelty alleged by both parties. In this type of
matrimonial castastrophy, the fault lies more frequently with the wife
than with the husband.
=Female Artists= are more unbearable than male artists. They are more
touchy, more easily offended and angered, more apt to suspect the
people in their environment of harboring veiled hostility. The reason
for that state of things is not far to seek.
Women require infinitely more flattery than men do. Not that a craving
for attention is by any means a typically feminine trait. That craving
has been forced upon them by the masculine domination.
We have made woman inferior to man politically, socially, economically,
we have, as Adler would word it, put her "below." Until we allow her
to rise to man's level, she will never feel safe and will constantly
require assurances of her superiority, at least, from the men who fancy
her looks and enjoy her company.
=The Woman Who Accomplishes Things= in this world, who, in spite
of woman's handicap in her dealings with the world, wins recognition
as a painter, sculptor, writer, singer, etc., feels, and justly so,
that she deserves more credit for her accomplishment than a man
would. Winning power in a man's world is for the woman who reaches
that aim ethically, that is, without bartering her sexual favors for
success, as difficult as it would be for a Jew to arrive in a bigoted
Christian community, for a negro to establish his prestige in a white
anglo-saxon environment.
Having reached the top after much fighting, she never feels as secure
as a man would under similar circumstances. Her ego is steadily on the
defensive and whatever interferes with her ego maximation appears to
her dangerous and hateful.
The female artist who marries a male artist will soon become jealous
of him. Every bit of publicity he receives is something which he has
stolen from her, which he should, she thinks, if he loved her enough,
have renounced in her favor.
The female artist who marries a man incapable of artistic achievement,
may be violently attracted to him sexually. Her egotism, on the other
hand, prompts her to disparage him and to scorn his judgment of
her. However much he may admire her, his praise lacks weight in her
estimation. He is not a member of the enchanted circle.
A word from "one in the know", insignificant as he may be, will bring a
smile to her lips, a flash of pleasure in her eyes, which will cut her
mate to the quick. I have observed many a time an angry tension in the
face of the business husband of some actress or singer when she would
visibly gloat over the not too disinterested praise of some trashy
professional.
=Flattery.= The artist is at the mercy of the flattery lavished on
him or her by a fellow artist and absolutely blind to the flatterer's
ulterior motives. A great musician who died recently was an easy victim
to every budding musician who would sycophantically sing his praises.
The mere statement "if I could ever hope to sing a few notes like you"
enabled any young exploiter who could approach him to negotiate a
"loan."
For the reasons I have mentioned in the preceding pages, the woman
artist is even more easily victimised, financially or sentimentally
than the male artist.
Sexual jealousy wrecks the unions of artists with non-professional
mates. Sexual jealousy and professional jealousy make the union of two
artists a very problematical expedient for the attainment of happiness.
Fortunately, very few heartbreaks result from the steady grinding of
the divorce mills in concert land, opera land or stageland.
The egotistical artist loves himself more than he could ever love
any other human being. Separation from his life mate does not mean
loneliness to him. He remains in his own company, to his mind, the best
company on earth. And furthermore his egotism tells him, and rightly so
in the majority of cases, that being as wonderful as he is, he cannot
fail to meet soon "the great love" of his life. And he will probably
embark upon another experiment with the same optimism and with the same
results.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE PERSONALITY BEHIND THE FETISHES. GLANDS
A man selects a mate because he finds in her fetishes the assurance
of safety which those fetishes portended when observed in the
appearance of his affectionate, devoted, self-sacrificing mother, whose
intelligence and wisdom he never doubted when he was, let us say, ten
or fifteen and she was thirty or thirty-five.
And likewise, a woman expects, consciously or unconsciously, that
certain physical characteristics which once indicated, when observed
in her father's appearance, power, protection, a gainful occupation,
sympathy and understanding, etc., will mean exactly the same thing when
she finds them reproduced totally or in part in a male human being of
the marriageable age.
=The Parent-Child Relationship=, involving at first boundless devotion
on the part of the strong parent to the helpless nursling, infant
and child, and later, complete submission of the growing child and
adolescent to the older and, supposedly world-wiser, parent, has very
little, if anything, in common with the relationship of mate to mate.
Sex plays no conscious part in the parent-child relationship.
It does not tinge every action and every thought of the two parties
concerned. The secret cravings or the secret repulsion it may
awaken never distort consciously the judgments passed by parents on
their children, children on their parents. Of neurotic unconscious
distortions of judgment there is a plenty. Never, however, does the
strife narrow down to this: "He or she does not satisfy me sexually,"
"he or she humiliates me sexually by being attracted to others," "he or
she is an obstacle to my complete sexual gratification with another,"
etc., sources of open hostility of the most painfully conscious kind
between mates.
The mother who satisfied our egotism became to us beautiful and
perfect. The female who employs the same means our mother did, to
win us, but who cannot arouse us sexually, never appears to us very
attractive physically or mentally.
On the other hand we are apt to disregard, temporarily at least, the
mental deficiencies of the man or woman who gives us the most complete
sexual gratification.
From this it will be easily understood that choosing a mate _solely_ on
the strength of his or her fetishes, is likely, unless the union be of
the most ephemeral kind, to lead to profound disappointment.
It behooves us then to determine accurately what every fetish means
and what sort of personality is actually to be found associated with a
certain set of physical characteristics.
For I repeat, a man's or woman's personality is to be studied, not
in their attitude to their offspring, (for the most savage beast is
transformed by the paternal or maternal instinct into a marvel of
tenderness, kindness and patience), but in their relation to the social
herd and to their sexual mate.
Until the study of the ductless glands was given the importance we
attach to it today, the word personality denoted a set of attitudes
which many psychologists considered as mainly voluntary and amenable
to "moral suasion" and other forms of pedagogical approach of the
individual. When we read the works of Freud, Jung, Adler, Ferenczi and
their disciples, we never receive an intimation of the rôle which the
endocrines may play in moulding the human personality.
=Modern Endocrinologists= on the other hand, seem as indifferent
to psychology as the psychoanalysts of yesterday were to neurology and
endocrinology. Some of them assume that the personality IS the glands
and that our glands alone shape our thinking and our actions.
Both views are narrow and unsatisfactory. The personality is made up
primarily of an _organism_ which outward influences can or cannot
influence easily. Pleasure and pain then shape that organism thru
the memories which they leave in it in the form of infinitely small
modifications of our autonomic nervous system. That system, in its
turn, develops, thru constant stimulation, certain glands or allows
them to remain undeveloped thru lack of stimulation or thru negative
stimulation.
Some of those glands may, thru mere accident of growth, have been
already overdeveloped or stunted at birth. Individuals free from
complexes, however, may easily reestablish the balance of cravings
and social inhibitions which threatens at times to be upset by an
overdeveloped or underdeveloped gland. Complex-ridden individuals on
the other hand, use their glandular inferiority unconsciously as a
scapegoat for absurd or morbid behavior.
=Reciprocal Influence.= We cannot say, therefore, that our behavior
is _dictated_ by our glands, but it is influenced by them and
reciprocally, our behavior influences our glands. As I said in a
previous chapter, hyperthyroidism creates fear, but fear may also
create hyperthyroidism. Overdevelopment of the sexual apparatus creates
a predisposition to sexual overactivity, but sexual thoughts also have
a tendency to provoke unusual sexual activity.
There is one thing, however, for which the secretions of our ductless
glands are mainly responsible, and which is most important to consider
in a study of fetishes. They determine the shape, color and consistency
of many parts of our body, such as complexion, hair, teeth, skeletal
frame and growth.
A glance at a human body enables one to determine as accurately as an
autopsy would, the size of a person's thyroid, adrenals, etc.
As the development of those glands corresponds to the social and sexual
behavior of the individual, a review of the various bodily fetishes
from the endocrinological point of view will be helpful to the average
reader.
In order not to use too many technical terms we shall consider only
four of the endocrine glands, the pituitary, the thyroid, the adrenals
and the gonads.
=The Pituitary Gland= is a small body, the size of a pea, located
in the Turkish saddle (sella turcica), at the base of the brain and
closely behind the root of the nose. Some have called it a brain within
the brain with a miniature skull of its own within the skull.
The pituitary regulates the rhythms of the body, from the bony growth
of the skeleton to the rate of the heart and respiration, from the
periods of sleep and waking time to the periods of menstruation.
If a part of the pituitary of a dog is removed, the animal becomes
sleepy, fat, perverse in its sex cravings; puppies cease to grow when
submitted to such an operation; autopsy of many human dwarfs has
shown that their pituitary was undeveloped. People whose pituitary is
insufficient in its action have a tendency to lose their hair, have
a very dry skin, a dull mentality, sometimes suffer from epilepsy
and crave sugar in large quantities. They are generally obese, the
fat accumulating on the lower abdomen and the feet and ankles. Louis
Berman in his excellent book on the endocrines "Glands regulating the
Personality," presents as a perfect likeness of the "hypopituitary
type" the Fat Boy of the Pickwick Papers whose emloyment with Mr.
Wardle consisted in alternate sleeping and eating.
I will quote from Berman's book a description of the opposite type, the
individual in whom the pituitary gland is too active.
"If the overaction begins in childhood or adolescence, that is, before
puberty, there results a great elongation of the bones, so that a giant
is the consequence.... If the overaction happens after puberty, when
the long bones have set and can not grow longer, a peculiar, diffuse
enlargement of the individual occurs, especially of his hands and feet
and head. The nose, ears, lips and eyes get larger and coarser. All
those people are rather big and tall to begin with, heavy jawed, burly,
with overhanging eyebrows and an aggressive manner. Rabelais' most
famous character, Gargantua, belongs to the group. We recruit more drum
majors than prime ministers from among those people."
The pituitary has a strong influence on sexual activities. Young
animals whose pituitary has been surgically damaged will not be able to
reproduce themselves when reaching adulthood. Feeding pituitary glands
to hens on the other hand, causes them to lay thirty per cent more eggs
than they would naturally.
=The Thyroid= is a transformer of energy. It is a large reddish
mass located in front and on both sides of the trachea, consisting of
two lobes connected by a bridge of the same tissue.
The thyroid activates the fires of the body. An active thyroid means
life at "concert pitch." A sluggish thyroid means a slow, negative
existence.
To a poor thyroid correspond a pasty complexion, watery eyes with heavy
lids, a depressed pug nose, large ears, thin hair, scanty eyebrows and
eyelashes, short, brittle nails, irregular, bad teeth, broad, pudgy
hands and feet, generally cold.
With an overactive thyroid we observe a high color, sleeplessness,
restlessness, a tendency to lose weight, emotionalism, profuse
perspiration, bright, large eyes, good white teeth.
=The Adrenal Glands= are about the size of a bean and located on top of
the kidneys. They secrete adrenin which, when poured into the blood,
causes muscular tension, accelerates the heart beats and the breathing
rate, dilates the pupil and produces fear or anger according to the
relative size of the core (medulla) or envelop (cortex) of the adrenals.
In timid animals (and women) the cortex is thin, in courageous animals
(and men) the cortex is rather thick. According to the thickness of
your cortex you shall, in an emergency, resort to either fight or
flight.
A man with a thin cortex looks feminine, a woman with a thick cortex
looks mannish.
The adrenals control the color of the skin, the growth of hair, the
size of the canine teeth and the color of the teeth. To good adrenals
correspond an olive complexion, much hair on the body, rather yellowish
teeth and strong canines. The bearded lady of the circus is a woman
with overdeveloped adrenals and a thick cortex.
Weak adrenals go with cold extremities, a hairless body, poor canines,
lack of ambition, discouragement, fatigability, etc.
=The Gonads or Sex Glands=, testes in man, ovaries in woman,
affect thru the secretions of their interstitial cells, the pitch of
the voice, the growth of pubic hair, the size of the breasts, the
distribution of fat.
Good gonads mean masculine looking men and feminine looking women.
Poor gonads mean feminine looking men, hairless and with overdeveloped
breasts, talking in a high-pitched voice, with a tendency to obesity
and laziness (eunuchs); scrawny looking women who may later in
life grow abnormally fat, with, in their youth, flat chests, scanty
menstruation, etc.
Healthy gonads also retard senility. Gonads whose interstitial cells
have been rehabilitated by the Steinach operation bring a new youth to
the organism, mentally and physically.
Other glands, the thymus, pancreas, parathyroid, pineal body also
play an important part in shaping the human body and with it the
personality. The limits of this book do not allow me, however, to
discuss them even superficially.
CHAPTER XXIV
GLANDULAR PERSONALITIES
I stated in the preceding chapter that to every degree of glandular
development there corresponds a certain set of physical characteristics
which, in the love life, may be transformed into fetishes, (beautiful
features, laymen call them), which are necessary to arouse sexual
desire in one's mate, but which are not necessarily attractive to any
one else.
Those physical characteristics are, in turn, the tangible evidence of
the presence of certain mental attitudes and predispositions.
Individuals seeking in the love union, not merely a passing
gratification of their erotism, but a lifelong arrangement, gratifying
both the physical and the mental aspects of the organism, should be
trained to recognise the presence or absence of characteristics which
would make such an arrangement a lasting pleasure or a lasting torture.
For instance, the woman who falls in love with a man because her
fetishism requires a short, round, plump, man, with a good head of
hair but hairless limbs, must not expect him to ever grow into a
fighter, a good provider or even a companion of placid moods.
A man of that type is capricious, unstable, unresisting, and prefers
the gentler arts to any form of competitive struggle.
Likewise a man who picks out a woman for his mate because she has
pretty, doll-like features, is "cute" and slight, has a soft skin,
white and pink, must not expect to live peacefully with her on a farm,
or even on Main Street or in a distant suburb.
That type of woman grows easily emotional, is constantly in search of
new excitement and new pleasures. It is only at forty that she will
become more settled (and rotund), retaining, however, a certain jollity
of disposition.
=The Olive Skinned Dark Haired Type=, and the freckled, red haired
are very much alike. Both have a low forehead, hair is plentiful all
over the body, thick and coarse. Their canines are long and sharp.
Men and women of that type are good fighters, more easily angered
than scared; they are generally successful, with a tendency to
slave-driving. In the face of great difficulties, of painful
disappointment, however, they are prone to turn embittered and cranky.
People of this type who show large birth marks are likely to be
imbalanced and irritable. They may at times give the impression of
being weak and lazy, altho their minds may be extremely active.
=The Tall Type=, with strong frame, firm muscles, generous hands and
feet, a thick skin, oval face, head flattened at the sides, thick
eyebrows, prominent eyes, placed rather wide apart, large nose, square
chin, large upper middle incisors, heavy joints, hairy legs and arms,
is characterised by intelligence and self-control. At times that type
has a tendency to be a little calculating if not sordid.
=The Lean Type= with clean-cut features, thick hair, thick, long
eyebrows, big, keen eyes, sometimes slightly protruding, well developed
white teeth and a very masculine or very feminine mouth, according
to sex, is active, restless, a live wire, emotional and likely to be
easily prostrated by an unexpected defeat. Men and women of that type
have a tendency to be sleepless and to do too much planning at night
instead of resting peacefully.
=The Short, Obese, Sallow Type=, with a high forehead, scanty eyebrows,
deep set, narrow eyes, irregular teeth that decay early, with poor
circulation, cold and blue hands and feet, is rather "animal" and lacks
self-control.
=The Slender Type=, with narrow waist line, rounded limbs, long
chest, (which in women may carry poorly developed breasts), very white,
hairless skin, delicate features, silky hair, childish teeth, flat
feet, knock-knees, may be at times very brilliant, but is generally
queer, eccentric, irresponsible, perverse, dishonest. That type is
observed in many petty thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, suicides.
Those are the most striking physical types. They present hundreds of
shadings and combinations.
=Environment.= The last mentioned type, if reared and kept in a
comfortable environment, among people of slightly lax behavior, of
artistic inclinations, exposed to none of life's onslaughts, may do
very well, and be considered by his associates as sensitive, gentle and
likeable. It is the pressure of social and economic conditions which
cause him to seek safety in theft (quick acquisition of wealth), drug
stupor, (escape from reality, perversion, escape from biological duties
connected with a normal sex life), or suicide, (return to the fetal
stage and escape from life).
Those people are children who can only thrive in the nursery.
Even as infant mortality depends solely upon the family income, the
death rate being five times as high in poor as in wealthy families, the
stability and social charm of almost any glandular type depends upon
the social pressure that type has to bear.
Almost any type is bearable, if not lovable, in a comfortable
environment requiring little planning and no fighting.
One of the details of the social pressure is, of course, the attempts
at repression or modification to which a personality may be subjected
by the life mate. The fault lies in this case, not so much with the
type in itself, however inferior it may be, as with the incurable
optimist who attempts the impossible task of changing a human
personality.
In other words, it might be said, that in an environment which exerts
no pressure on the individual, that is, where there is abundance of
wealth and comfort, one can select a mate with bad fetishes, that is,
indicative of weakness, while those less favored financially must lay
greater stress on fetishes denoting strength and fighting ability.
=What Teeth Indicate.= Fraenkel and Kaplan have pointed to the teeth as
indicators of the general glandular condition of the individual and of
his probable mental and physical powers. Good middle incisors indicate
good thyroid and pituitary, hence strength and balance.
Good lateral incisors indicate sexual power; good canines indicate
strong adrenals, hence good fighting ability.
Lack of any of those teeth, or their stunted growth, gives naturally,
the contrary indication as to make up and character.
One must not forget either that certain fetishes are superficial and
likely to disappear early in life. Blondes may turn into brunettes;
sveltness may yield to invading obesity, altho this last change is to
be blamed more on the individual's stupidity than upon his glandular
condition; a white skin may become yellow, etc.
Preference should, therefore, be given, when in doubt, to more durable
fetishes, stature, strength, general appearance, attitude, which are
less likely to change with the years.
=Matrimonial Engineers.= Here is a new field for educators; there
may grow from this very new knowledge a new profession, that of the
matrimonial engineer, who will diagnose the chances of happiness two
human beings may have, if they decide to associate their destinies.
Much has to be studied and experimented upon before any one can
consider himself qualified to pass final judgments upon the decisions
to which love leads couples.
"However" as Berman writes, "the fact remains that, though we are only
upon the first rungs of the ladder, we are on the ladder. We possess a
new way of looking upon humanity, a fresh transforming light upon these
strange phenomena, ourselves. Of the ugly achievements of that dreadful
century, the nineteenth, the most illuminating was the discovery of
itself as the ape-parvenu. Yes, we are all animals now, it said to
itself, and set its teeth in the cut-throat game of survival. But there
was no understanding in that evil motto of a disillusioned heart. The
ape-parvenu, desperately lonely and secretive, has still to understand
itself....
"Personality embraces much more than merely the psychic attributes. It
is not the least important of the lessons of endocrine analysis that
here is no soul, and no body either. Rather a soul-body or body-soul,
or the patterns of the living flame. The closer tracking of the
internal secretions leads us into the secrets of the living flame, why
it lives and how it lives, the strange diversities of its coloring and
music and the odd variations in its energy, vitality and longevity.
Why it flickers, why it flares and glares, spurts, flutters, burns hard
or soft, orange-blue or yellow."
CHAPTER XXV
LOVE AND MOTHER LOVE
Is the perfect mother a perfect wife? Is the perfect mother, in every
case, the result of mental perfection and ethical superiority? Or is
there a hidden strife between love and motherhood? Is mother love
always the enchanting image presented to us by poets and intimidated
sons? Or is it an alloy of higher qualities, biological necessity and
egotistical neurotic cravings?
I do not intend to settle all those problems within the limits of a
short chapter, but rather to point out some of the morbid components of
mother love which a psychoanalyst detects in his women patients, and
which, exaggerated in the neurotic, exist to a slight degree in every
woman.
=Sex Cravings and Motherhood Cravings= are so closely related that few
psychologists have ever dreamt of dissociating them for the purpose of
study. The average moralist, who prefers cheap popularity to scientific
accuracy, excuses the existence of sex cravings only on one condition,
that they become absolutely subservient to motherhood cravings.
The birth control agitation which is making such rapid headway at the
present day, on the other hand, means, in part, that while motherhood
may be the consequence of unregulated sex activities, it is not, for
all women, their conscious motive.
Why is it that some women with an erotic disposition and a voluptuous
physique, fear pregnancy while other women, apparently indifferent to
men, crave motherhood?
Physiology does not give us a very satisfactory answer to this
question. Endocrinologists tell us that sex cravings are determined
by the ovaries and motherhood cravings by the posterior part of the
pituitary gland, but this leaves us exactly where we were when we
started out.
=Pregnancy and Health.= All physiologists will agree with the statement
that in a normal, complex free woman, a type which unfortunately,
the complexity of our civilization does not allow us to behold very
frequently, pregnancy is accompanied by an unusual activity of all
the organism, imparting to the female a sense of great power and,
consequently, of well-being, mental and physical. The adrenals work
at high pressure to produce the muscular tone necessary in gestation.
The thyroid is called upon to transform more and more of the electric
current produced by the brain cells. New glands of a temporary nature
develop in the woman's body, regulating her life functions more
accurately and imparting to her a feeling of dreamy happiness and
relaxation.
After delivery, another part of her body enters into activity, her
mammary glands, so closely related to the genitals that any stimulation
of either region finds a strong echo in the other. Many are the women
in whom lactation produces intensely erotic feelings affording them at
times full gratification.
=Fear of Pregnancy.= Unfortunately, civilisation has surrounded
motherhood with so many complications, social, ethical, financial,
sentimental, etc., that in very few women, indeed, is that biological
process an unmixed pleasure, dissociated from all pain and anxiety.
Vomiting, which expresses the female's disgust for her condition, or
her mate or the offspring; cramplike tensions, expressing her worries
about her appearance, her anxious thought of financial or social
consequences; anxiety states, affecting the adrenals, which discolor
her face (pregnancy mask), make pregnancy hideous in many cases.
Even the process of parturition seems to have become more painful and
dangerous with advancing civilisation.
Any one who has seen, for instance, Mexican women barely interrupting
their labor in the fields to give birth to a child, and resuming their
tasks an hour later, must realise that autosuggestion has much to do
with the physical disability of the civilised woman in child bed.
In spite of the complexities of modern life, the female organism which
is not affected by fear complexes, must expect a pleasure premium from
pregnancy, lactation and other duties of motherhood. This would supply
us with an organic basis for the mother's attachment to her offspring
which is observable almost in every animal species.
That a number of women may be found who hate their children owing to
the suffering to which unwelcome motherhood and difficult parturition
have subjected them, is easily understandable. In fact we face a
vicious circle. The unwelcome pregnancy will be an unpleasant one,
followed almost unavoidably by painful delivery, etc.
=When Mother Love is Lacking= or when a mother hates a very young
child, the psychologist must look for morbid unconscious influences
which analysis should remove as soon as possible.
Stekel, the Viennese analyst, tells of a woman who was very fond of
three of her daughters but, for some mysterious reason, detested the
fourth one. Analysis revealed that she imagined she saw every one of
her husband's faults reproduced and magnified in the unfortunate child.
She also imagined that she loved her husband very deeply.
The year when the unloved child was conceived, however, she had fallen
in love with another man, a young poet. She remained "technically
faithful" to her husband, altho, when in his arms, it was always the
poet to whom she was giving herself.
She hoped sentimentally that the forthcoming child would look like
her platonic lover but the little girl reproduced with striking
faithfulness her father's features.
Unwilling to accept her dislike of her husband, the romantic mother had
transferred it to the child who served as a scapegoat in various ways.
=Frigid Wives.= We often observe a great craving for motherhood in
frigid wives.
Let us not rehash on this occasion the poetical and silly statement
that the frigid woman is one whose love has been spiritualised and can
only find an outlet thru her children.
The frigid woman is a cripple or a neurotic. Either she was born with
poorly developed genitals or she was made abnormal by the unconscious
fear of yielding to man's domination, or by a morbid sense of sin due
to asceticism, or by painful or humiliating sex experiences before or
after marriage.
Her craving for motherhood is not infrequently the hypocritical
expression of her desire for intercourse, which her puritan training
would otherwise make lewd and sinful. It is, at times, a desire for
the superiority which age and bodily size will give her over infants,
helpless and inarticulate.
This is why, in a good many cases, a perfect mother makes a detestable
wife. Unable to dominate her husband she craves children whom she can
dominate with a minimum of bodily strength and mental effort, and she
devotes all her time and care to them.
When the children grow up and develop independent personalities, the
neurotic mother often loses her interest in them. How many times have
we heard women (and men) remark that children should remain "babies,"
that young children are far more lovable than adolescents, etc.
=Mother and Father Love= differ in several respects.
Fathers look upon their children, especially their sons, as a visible
proof of their virile power. In their sons they see their own image,
the more attractive to them as they are more egotistical.
The weak, infirm or unsuccessful son, however, receives little love at
the hands of his father. He is not a credit to his progenitor.
No mother, on the other hand, seems to neglect a cripple or idiotic
child. Be it male or female, it is a human being which she can dominate
easily. The more neurotic she is, the more she will idolise the
ill-favored child.
=Mothers Always Adore Their Sons=, young and old, for they behold
in them males whom they can easily dominate.
And fathers love their daughters, young or old, for similar reasons.
The relations of aging mothers and growing daughters, however, are
almost invariably tinged with a certain hostility, overt or concealed,
according to the women's habits, training, manners, etc.
=Girls at the Flapper Stage= who resent the attraction which their
mothers still wield over younger men, constantly remind them of their
age and bid them to behave in a way more in keeping with their mature
years.
The flapper's mother on the other hand, who sees her daughter gradually
monopolising the attention of men callers, reminds the girl with
monotonous regularity that she is only a child and bids her to behave
as befits her tender years.
The mother resents her daughter's fresh beauty, the daughter, her
mother's experience in dealing with males.
Both watch each other closely, protecting each other's modesty and
virtue and trying to make each other's life as uninteresting and
uneventful as possible.
The girl becomes an ethical critic on her mother's smoking or gowns.
The mother blossoms into a puritan who allows her daughter no freedom
and seems to have entirely forgotten her own girlhood years.
The strife lasts until the daughter is old enough to have her own
circle of friends and no longer needs a chaperone. After which mother
and daughter, if matched intellectually, may once more become friends.
=Repressed Hatred.= I have treated a number of neurotic mothers who
seemed to be obsessed by their adoration of their children. That
exaggerated tenderness was, as I mentioned in another chapter, a cover
for death wishes directed toward those children.
Some never allowed knives to be left in evidence in the house, some did
not dare to carry their children in their arms on the stairs, while
boarding trains, or while near open windows.
One never dared to administer a medicine to her little girl "for fear
of making a mistake and poisoning her." One did not dare to bathe her
child for fear of drowning him "accidentally" in the tub.
Neurotic women who do not wish to become mothers and rebel against
motherhood, (which some of them consider as a symbol of woman's
inferior role), often compensate for their lack of love by an almost
criminal indulgence and weakness toward their children.
Unable to give them genuine love, they pretend to idolise them and are
apparently unable to deny any of their wishes. This, in last analysis,
is simply a total indifference to the little ones' welfare. That type
of mother spoils her children and makes them unfit to face life and its
emergencies.
Her extravagant adulation, her outbursts of artificial tenderness,
however, do not always deceive the children themselves who feel
automatically, thru nervous and muscular imitation, the tensions of
their mother's body. The little son of the woman who was obsessed
by the fear of drowning him (and who compensated for her murderous
cravings by showering the wildest caresses upon him), could not be
prevailed upon to ever go near the water until her obsessions, of
which, he, of course, had no conscious knowledge, had been removed by
psychoanalytic treatment.
Neurotic mother love trains children for a neurotic life.
CHAPTER XXVI
SHOULD WINTER MATE WITH SPRING?
This is the poetical way in which many newspaper editors have been
introducing to their readers accounts of two recent incidents which,
at the time of writing (this chapter), keep headline writers busy. One
of the news items is the idyll of an heiress, still in her teens, who
has made up her mind to marry a man of fifty or thereabout. The other
is the heartbreak of a seventy year old husband, deserted by his twenty
year old wife.
The mating of winter and spring is a daily occurrence, both seasons
being divided up about equally between the two sexes. The two unnatural
matches which I mentioned above, however, stand in a class by
themselves.
Many a young idler, gifted with good looks, has managed to play on
the erotic feelings of some woman in her dotage and to annex a goodly
portion of her wealth. Many an attractive girl, seeking the line of
least effort, has been known to prefer a union with a silly old man to
the daily struggle for existence.
=Disinterested Brides.= In the two cases under discussion, on the other
hand, no suspicion of sordidness could be cast on the bride-that-was or
on the bride-to-be.
Both are wealthy, one of them immensely so. The bridegroom to be is, if
not a poor man, at least in very modest circumstances.
A genuine love match in both cases. But the genuineness of love did
not prevent a catastrophe in one case and will probably bring about a
catastrophe in the other case as well.
In both cases, the men are probably normal and yielding to the very
natural attraction of youth combined with beauty and refinement.
Both women, however, are abnormal, altho one of them, the runaway wife,
may have regained her normality and awakened from her absurd dream.
Both are, or were, the victims of a fixation of the most acute type, on
the father image indicating a morbid neurotic disposition.
Such unions can hardly ever hold out any promise of lasting happiness.
=The Case of Wagner.= There is, of course, the famous example of Wagner
who, at fifty-seven carried off the beautiful wife of Hans von Bülow,
almost thirty years his junior, and lived happily with her until his
death. But Wagner was at the time a marvelous example of physical and
mental activity, energy and creative power. In no way, barring his
facial appearance, could he suggest age or decay to his young wife. He
remained to the last a romantic figure.
The glamor, however, which may surround a successful composer with a
picturesque past, is not likely to dazzle in any way the bride of a
riding master or of a New England manufacturer.
=A Parent Fixation=, as I explained in the chapters on the Family
Romance and on Incest, is the more acute as it drives its victim to
seek a closer duplicate of the parent type.
The man who seeks a woman for his mate because his mother was a woman
is influenced by the most normal and biologically valuable of mother
fixations. The race would come to an end but for that form of fixation.
The son of a blonde mother who cannot love a woman unless she is also
a blonde, is less normal and less free in his choice of a mate than
the preceding type. He is inhibited by childhood memories, but then,
education and civilisation are little more than inhibitions caused by
childhood memories. That type simply marries in "his set" and can lead
an otherwise very normal life.
He, however, who is irresistibly attracted by a woman exactly like his
mother, not only as far as appearance, but also as far as age goes,
is a childish, regressive neurotic, seeking the safety of childhood
conditions and obsessed at times by unconscious incestuous cravings.
=The Rock of Physical Incompatibility= is often one on which such
adventures are shipwrecked. A very young woman, ignorant of the sex
life and its problems, unable to realise its meaning before marriage,
may develop immediately after her union to an elderly man a very
passionate temperament.
Either she will repress her cravings for physical love, which her too
mature mate is unable to gratify, and she will develop anxiety states
or hysteria.
Or she will be too healthy to repress her desires, and her
disappointment may change her love into scorn, especially when
conversation with other women or a clever suitor opens her eyes to what
is lacking in her life.
A separation, sometimes complicated by the usual triangle situation,
may become unavoidable.
There are cases in which both mates are frankly neurotic and were drawn
together as invalids and weak-minded often are, by the similarity of
their predicament.
=The Plight of Two Neurotics.= Both of them may, as I observed it
once, seek safety in a mock-incestuous relationship, the older mate,
seeking safety in a union with an immature human being, the younger
mate in a union with the parent image. In one case which I have in
mind, the husband, fifty-five years old, had been several times on the
verge of exposure for unlawful "liberties" he took with very young
girls. The wife, a few days after her father's death, married the old
man who had been her father's associate and who had tried to seduce her
when she was barely ten.
She visited me when a new scandal in which her husband became
implicated caused her to leave him. She was considerably "mixed up"
for, while young men had begun to attract her, she felt extremely
self-conscious in their presence and could only enjoy herself in the
company of elderly men who, in turn, reminded her too much of the
nightmare thru which she had lived for two years.
A pious Catholic, she solved the conflict prematurely, before I had
time to bring insight into her mind, by fleeing from all sorts of men
and into a convent.
Other cases have a less tragic history: A young woman of twenty-eight
who had never been happy with her husband, (thirty), took advantage of
the numberless opportunities war work and war drives gave to women, to
become faithless to her husband. She had four short-lived affairs with
men twice her age, then "broke down" when her husband secured a divorce
for adultery. Analysis gave her insight into her father fixation which
was not very deep and might never have driven her into overt acts but
for the unusual conditions in which she found herself.
She is now happily remarried to a man of her age.
=What the Community Says.= Mates whose ages are out of proportion,
are often thrown into deep discord by the pressure of the community's
criticism. They might thrive on a desert island or on a farm or, as in
the case of an explorer I knew, when surrounded almost continuously by
an "inferior" race whose opinion they can easily disregard.
The community's smiles or open disapproval, on the other hand, are a
heavy burden, especially for the more neurotic mate, who is likely to
feel very self-conscious in everything he or she does.
The too young wife and the too young husband may at first smile when
hotel clerks, shopkeepers, chauffeurs, etc., allude to their aged
mate as "your father" or "your mother." After a while, a feeling
of embarrassment will get the best of their sense of humor. Shame
and humiliation will soon set in when those mistakes are repeated
frequently. When the ego is wounded by love complications, unless the
individual is a pronounced masochist, love fares very badly.
It turns into hatred for the mate causing the humiliating remarks, as
unconscious incest ideas gradually break into consciousness and provoke
protective measures, critical attitudes, disgust, etc.
In one case which came under my observation, the community's criticisms
worked as effectively as psychoanalytic treatment would have.
=Having Her Fixation-Fling.= A young woman married to a man of her age,
but discontented and frigid, had a passing liaison with an elderly
man, which exposed her to many jeers on the part of her associates who
suspected it.
She was very intelligent and well acquainted with psychoanalytical
literature and only consulted me to make sure of her correct diagnosis
of her own case.
She did the proper thing under the circumstances, confessed a part of
the truth to her husband, went away with him for a while and has been
happy with him ever since. She had had her "fixation fling" as she
called it, had sown her neurotic wild oats and ridden herself of a
morbid element which may never bother her again.
This sort of solution, however, is one which is neither scientific nor
safe, for the person affected by a fixation of that morbid sort is at
the mercy of a recurrence of it, should life's problems compel him to
seek once more the line of exaggerated safety and regression to the
childish level of conduct.
=Physical Results.= If matches between the young and old were
successful physically and otherwise, they would be extremely beneficial
to the older mate. Normal sexual stimulation, far from driving the aged
to an early grave, as old time puritans have taught us, is probably the
most potent factor of rejuvenation.
The Steinach operation which enables the hormone-producing cells of the
gonads to overdevelop at the expense of the seminiferous cells, seems,
when successful, to confer new youth upon the entire organism.
Lorand, Stekel, Hufeland and others hold that sexual activity in the
old, when it is possible, is conducive to longevity.
Lorand mentions many interesting cases in which remarriage at
incredibly advanced ages seemed in no way to curtail one's life span.
Thomas Parré, who died at 162, was arrested for assault at 102 and
married again at 120. The Dane Drackenberg, who died at 150, married at
111 a woman of 60, became a widower at 130, and tried to woo a young
peasant girl who, however, refused to accept him.
Peter Albrecht, who died at 123, married again at 80 and had seven
children. Gurgon Duglas, who died at 120, married at 85 and had 8
children, the youngest one being born when the father was 103. Baron
Baravicion dès Capelles died at 104, having had four wives, the last
one whom he married when 80.
Lorand adds that, according to his observations, old people with an
erotic temperament have a better chance of survival than "cold blooded"
ones.
Hufeland says that married people live much longer than the unmarried
and that no bachelor was ever known to reach a ripe age.
The sudden bloom and general appearance of rejuvenation of old maids
finally finding a mate, of widows who remarry and of neglected wives
who give themselves to a potent lover, is a good physiological argument
why winter should try to seek the violent stimulation of a union with
spring.
=The Fate of the Younger Mate.= The younger mate, however, can
hardly hope to escape unscathed when going thru such an experience.
The old are benefited because their muscles, nerves, glands, etc.,
imitate the attitudes and behavior of the younger mate's organs and
become accordingly younger.
The same process of imitation is at work in the younger mate and the
damage done to him or her is naturally great, altho not always obvious
at first.
His or her younger organism, less experience-laden, and hence more
elastic and more responsive, adapts itself more quickly to the ways of
old age than old age adapts itself to the ways of youth.
Even in cases when the gratification seems to be mutual, the damage
done to the younger mate reveals itself thru neurotic disturbances.
A man of thirty-five consulted for anxiety states, nightmares,
"nervous" gastric troubles, etc.
He had been living since his twentieth year with a woman twenty years
his senior, in fact, a friend and schoolmate of his mother's.
He called her Mama and she called him Sonny. While, according to his
statements, their sexual life was absolutely normal and satisfying, the
repressed incest-fear lurking in his unconscious betrayed itself thru a
nightmare which disturbed his sleep with alarming frequency:
"I am at the foot of marble stairs. A female figure is standing at the
top, a relative, perhaps my mother. She extends her hand to me to help
me up the stairs, but that hand is so weak that it cannot hold me and
then I am frightened by a powerful male figure, a man in authority,
perhaps my father, coming toward me from the side."
Altho the man was physically satisfied, the split in his unconscious
made him very irritable, restless and an unpleasant companion for his
"mama" to whom he made endless scenes for trifling reasons.
=King David.= In Biblical days when King David grew old,[2] his
ministers besought themselves of the following remedy: they found a
young virgin and "let her lie in his bosom" in the hope that the dying
man might be revived by her contact. Even that availed nothing.
In our days, however, we have come to prize human life and happiness
more highly and young virgins shall not be sacrificed, being the new
generation and the future, to the welfare of some modern King David who
is the past.
The young women in our midst, virgins or others, whom a morbid
obsession draws to the bosom of some King David must be saved from the
winter chill that awaits them. Modern psychology holds the key opening
for them the door to freedom and normal love.
CHAPTER XXVII
NEGATIVE LOVE
The only form of love which is positive is complete love, which
gratifies both the physical and the mental aspects of the organism
and which, besides, is human and, hence, recognises and admits the
relativity of all things human.
Any form of love which excludes either the physical or the mental
relationship of male and female, is incomplete and, therefore, abnormal.
All the puritanical rant to the contrary notwithstanding, platonic
love and prostitution are on the same biological level, as morbid and
unnatural one as the other.
Prostitution only gratifies the body more or less completely and
starves the mind, causing the mental aspect of the love craving to
become stunted or perverse.
Platonic love gratifies the intellect more or less completely,
rather less than more, for it offers few egotistical rewards, but it
starves the body and leads it into adopting morbid forms of craving
gratification.
=A Clean Life.= Many a patient has declared proudly to me that he led
a "clean life." A few days later, after losing his selfconsciousness
in my presence, he would gradually confess to a terrible "struggle"
against his "animal" instincts. Which meant, that at irregular
intervals, self-gratification would give him, in a morbid day dream,
the woman whose love he craved; or a pollution dream would allow
him, in the unconsciousness and ethical irresponsibility of sleep,
to make up for his privations by indulging in imaginary promiscuous
cohabitation.
This is in too many cases, the seamy side of a platonic love affair,
when one or both of the mates is not naturally unsexed but unsexes
himself thru what he or she calls will-power and which analysis reveals
to be conscious or unconscious fear.
This is the meaning of love plus continence. In the majority of cases
its damage stops there. In a few cases, however, especially when the
sex cravings of one of the mates have been so successfully repressed
that they are no longer experienced consciously, symbolical nightmares
of the most exhausting kind, hysterical disturbances during the
waking hours, compulsions and obsessions of all sorts, reveal to the
psychoanalyst that lava is boiling under the apparently extinct cone of
a safe volcano.
The platonic individual, like the puritan, is either oversexed or
undersexed.
The oversexed must surround themselves with protective measures lest
their violent cravings may lead them into socially punishable acts. The
simplest neurotic expedient is to utter a complete denial, whenever
possible a public one, of the existence of sexual cravings, and then to
be forced by one's statements into living up to an absurd self-imposed
standard.
=Utterances and Conduct.= This at times results in most grotesque
conflicts between utterance and conduct. We see for instance the
much married Mrs. Eddy who as the witty Theodore Schroeder remarked,
had many more husbands than children, stating that the pleasures of
the flesh "are always wrong unless the physiologic factor can be
excluded from consciousness" (a rather cryptic sentence) and also that
"generation rests on no sexual basis."
Thy hysteric whose volcanic outbursts supply her with a morbid sexual
relief for which she rejects all responsibility, for she is unconscious
at the time is generally in her private and public life a woman of
great repressions and perfect behavior, likely to sneer at every
mention of a sex urge.
In other cases, platonic love is an attempt at creating an artificial
value thru destroying a natural, biological human function.
=Oracles and Prophecies.= In ancient times it was observed that
people deprived of any sexual gratification made at times mysterious
utterances which were considered as an emanation of some divine
intelligence.
Those utterances were nothing but hysterical ravings, accepted as
oracles, prophecies, etc.
Our praise of continence, practiced even when it is unnecessary, (as in
the case of lawfully married mates), is, after all, a survival of such
superstitious beliefs based on misunderstood morbid phenomena.
Modern science, especially the new science of endocrinology, has shown
that to every display of sexual activity corresponds an outpouring of
hormonic secretions which benefits the entire system.
=Can We Save Our Vital Force?= Once upon a time it was assumed that
continence enabled people to save their "vital force," to preserve the
"resources of their body."
We know now that the gonads produce two secretions, one which would
pass out of the body in any event, and one which flows directly in the
blood and is the only one which can benefit the organism.
The various puritanical theories as to the great value of continence
had been shaken many times by evidence from the biography of all the
great writers, artists, philosophers, inventors and other men and women
who have left the world much enriched by their creative labor and at
the same time indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh.
=Sublimation.= Endocrinology strikes now the last blow at those
theories, one of which by the way, was Freud's romantic hypothesis of
the "sublimation."
Freud believed that sexual energy could be diverted towards social ends
of greater value and non-sexual in character. This is scientifically
absurd, as it disregards the dualism of glandular secretions. The
outward secretions cannot be "saved" and the inner secretions which are
beyond our control flow directly into the blood stream.
I have shown in another book, "Sex Happiness" that the platonic man
is either the victim of his ignorance of sex matters and of ascetic
superstitions which modern physiology can no longer countenance, or a
physiologically deficient individual.
The heroes of Beresford's "God's Counterpoint" and of May Sinclair's
"The Romantic" whom I analised in "Sex Happiness" correspond to the
first and the second of those types, respectively.
=The Sexless.= There are men and women, of course, of the hypogonadal
type, undersexed or sexless, who are capable of deep affection for a
person of the opposite sex. That such an affection never culminates
in complete physical communion is easily understood. Sexual failures
discourage the weaker friend from risking any more experiments likely
to result in humiliation.
The sexless man is practically a woman, and like certain homosexuals,
treats women as members of his own sex. He may make a pleasant,
delicate, safe companion, but no woman should allow herself to care for
him.
=Frigid Women= who never experience any thrill in their husband's
embrace and hence consider the physical communion as an indecent
act forgivable in a husband only, as it is a part of the marriage
arrangement, may love a man very deeply and yet never feel the urge to
surrender their body to him.
Here again we have to deal with ignorance or neurosis or both.
The frigid woman, as I explained elsewhere is generally a neurotic,
(perhaps made so by unpleasant first sexual experiences and her mate's
failure to awaken her normal erotism), who is afraid of life, of its
biological duties, of responsibility, of submission to a man's will,
etc., and burdened with some unconscious incest fixation on her father,
or homosexual fixation on her mother, etc.
Her platonic attitude in love is due to numberless unconscious fears
which are a strong bulwark against temptation.
=Ideal Love.= Another form of negativism in love which receives no
little amount of praise at the hands of the romantically silly and of
the ill-informed, is the quest of the ideal love.
We meet men and women, sometimes of mature years, who tell us with a
great deal of pride that they never married because they could not find
the "right mate."
I will not deny that in rare cases this may be considered a perfectly
valid reason, pointing to no morbid disposition on the part of the
unwillingly single person. Marriage might have implied mating with a
member of an erotically indifferent race, African or Asiatic; isolation
in a remote farming community where a refined woman could only select
a mate from among primitive laborers, or in mining regions like some
Alaska camps, where the only women available at times are prostitutes.
Barring such "legitimate" exceptions, which to my mind, imply however,
a suspicious indifference to securing a mate, the seeker for an ideal
mate is almost always neurotic.
=Protective Measures.= By setting his goal very high, he is
protected against the danger of finding a mate and assuming life's
responsibilities, increased as they would be by normal sexual
activities.
This is done in various ways, thru exaggerated social expectations, or
thru unreasonable economic demands, or through morbid criticism of the
possible mate.
A working girl may set her heart on marrying none but a Prince Charming
who could by no chance whatsoever be attracted by her appearance or her
manners, unless he himself were a neurotic seeking safety in a union
with a socially inferior mate (students marrying waitresses, etc.).
Newspapers publish enough news of such matches to supply the neurotic
woman with a reasonable rationalisation of her fear of matrimony.
Some poor, unattractive young man may likewise decide never to marry
unless he may secure as his bride a woman whom her social position
makes unattainable. Here again, unions of heiresses with menials supply
the rationalisation.
Some unattractive women may make such financial demands on the man
seeking their affection that no one will have the courage to tempt them
away from their single-blessedness.
=Lovers of the Absolute.= There are individuals of a much more
pathological type still, who refuse to recognise and accept the
relativity of all things human, who seek absolute beauty, perfection,
intelligence, understanding, sympathy in their future mate and who grow
discouraged and depressed when they unavoidably discover flaws in every
companion of the opposite sex.
In certain cases that obsession of the perfect detail is a symptom of
insanity.
Cartoonists have often amused themselves and us by representing famous
men and women with their features so distorted that their distant
likeness to some animal is emphasized.
I have observed the same distortion in neurotics to whom that delusion
brought no humorous enjoyment but on the contrary deep suffering.
=A Troublesome Patient.= One of my patients a handsome young man of
twenty-six, had had very ephemeral affairs with several women and left
them abruptly when he suddenly discovered in their features a likeness
to certain animals, pigs, dogs, monkeys, etc. After which he could
never be prevailed upon to see them again.
One morning he called on me, announcing coolly that he had decided to
shoot me. I invited him to sit down and discuss his plans more fully
before carrying them out, and also to mention some of his reasons for
that somewhat radical decision.
He explained to me, with his right hand annoyingly buried in his
coat pocket, that he had been in love for a few weeks, with a very
attractive girl. Recently, he had noticed something in her profile
which distantly resembled a pig's snout. The night before, while he
was in her company, he suddenly saw her head transformed into a pig's
head. He fled from her rooms in terror and disgust and, attributing his
"clear insight into her true nature" to my psychoanalytic teachings,
had decided to save others from my baneful influence by killing me.
As is usually the case with maniacs, a quiet conversation cast doubts
in his mind. I told him that I did not approve of his plans which
might, however, be excellent, but that, as I was really a biased
adviser in that matter, he should discuss them with an impartial third
party. He then decided to call on Dr. Everett Dean Martin who advised
him to take a rest cure and escorted him to Bellevue Hospital.
The poor boy's transfer to the State Asylum has put an end to his
search for the ideal love. That search was a disguised flight from
women and love, his delusion was an effective measure of protection
against temptation.
Nothing but the absolute could satisfy him in a woman. Relativity was
abhorrent to him.
Every seeker for the ideal love has gone a few steps along the road
which led my poor patient into the house of the living dead.
=Higher Aspirations.= Neurotics of that type are plausible for they
compensate for their fear and their inferiority with a pride based upon
"higher aspirations," "greater delicacy of feelings," "an aristocratic
nature" or the tell-tale statement that "their mother's beautiful
character," "their father's noble nature" makes every man or woman
appear very inferior in their eyes.
Proud of certain characteristics of theirs which they cannot help
having, they childishly display an egotism and selfishness which makes
them at times very ridiculous, for it says indirectly: "Nobody is
quite good enough for me."
When the search for ideal love results in nervous states due to
egotistical starvation, psychoanalysis can help greatly by giving the
neurotic insight into the fear of life or the parent-fixation which is
at the bottom of his romantic aspirations.
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE NEW WOMAN AND LOVE
How will love fare at the hands of the new woman? The old forms of
love will naturally be as unbearable to her as the steel corsets of a
forgotten generation. Yet the problem is not so very pressing, for the
truly new woman is still an almost insignificant factor, numerically
speaking, in every community.
Even in the professions and trades of a distinctly masculine character
which woman has recently invaded, we meet constantly the mock-modern
person, who under a veneer of modernity, still harbors all the
superstitions, and exhibits all the mannerisms of the "old fashioned"
woman.
Being old-fashioned in love, as in every other activity of life,
presents a great temptation to the lazy, the unintelligent, the
neurotic.
It is an excuse for all sorts of unethical forms of conduct, for
failure or inactivity, and yet carries with itself a deceptive air of
mock refinement and distinction.
The woman who boasts of being old fashioned can misbehave and retain
for years her husband's or her environment's confidence in her purity.
Being old fashioned, she is assumed by all to be a little "simple" and
"silly" at times, but unlikely to ever cross certain boundaries. At the
same time, she can pass cruel judgments on all the trangressors who
have not been as shrewd or lucky as she.
As a basis for a discussion of the extent to which love will affect the
modern woman and modern woman affect love, I shall select the picture
drawn by George Bernard Shaw in McCall's Magazine for October 1920 of
the woman of the new generation.
"=What Women Had to Do Recently=," Shaw writes, "was not to repudiate
their femininity but to assert its social value, not to ape masculinity
but to demonstrate its insufficiency. This was the point of my play
Candida in which it is made quite plain that the husband's masculine
career would go to pieces without the wife's feminine activity.
"As refinement was supposed to be proper to women and roughness proper
to men fifty years ago, the great increase in companionship between
men and women during that period was bound either to refine the
men or roughen the women. It has done both. The feminine refinement
which was only silliness disguised by affection has gone; and women
are hardier and healthier, and the stock sizes of their clothes are
larger in consequence. The masculine vigor that was only boorishness,
slovenliness and neglect of person and clothes has fled before feminine
criticism.
"=But the Generalisation That Women are Refined and Men Rough by
Nature= is a superficial one, holding good only when, as often happens,
the man's occupation is rougher than the woman's. The natural woman
cannot afford to be as fastidious as the natural man; if she shirked
all the unpleasantness that he escapes, the race would perish. As a
matter of fact, there are coarse women and coarse men, refined women
and refined men; and there is no reason to suppose that the proportions
differ in the two sexes.
"=There is, However, a Rebellion against Nature= in the matter of
the very unequal share of the burden of reproduction which falls to
men and women in civilized communities. I say civilized communities
advisedly, because the extremely artificial life of the modern lady
has the effect of making her natural functions pathological. Whether
the rebellion has been going on ever since ladies were invented I do
not know, because history is silent on the subject, as it is on so
many specifically feminine subjects. But I can testify that among
women brought up amid the feminist movement of the second half of the
nineteenth century there was a revolt against maternity which went
deeper than that revolt against excessive maternity which has led
to birth control. These more thoroughgoing rebels objected to the
whole process, from the occasional event itself to the more permanent
conditions it imposes. It is easy to dismiss this as monstrous and
silly, but the modern conception of creative evolution forbids us to
dismiss any development as impossible if it becomes the subject of an
aspiration.
"There is no limit to the truth of the old saying that where there is a
will there is a way, and though for the moment a refusal to accept the
existing conditions of reproduction would mean race suicide, the rebels
against nature may be the pioneers of evolutionary changes which may
finally dispose of the less pleasant incidents of nutrition, and make
reproduction a process external to the parents in its more burdensome
phases, as it now is in many existent species."
=The Entrance of Woman into Commercial Life= has trained her no longer
to expect something for nothing (exchangeable) and to realize that a
bargain, to be satisfactory, an agreement, to be lasting, must be based
on mutual advantages to both parties.
Love, with the old fashioned, began with a struggle of wits between the
sexes, the man trying to conquer without granting any advantages to the
defeated, woman trying to wear out her opponent and make him yield more
and more advantages before she finally "paid up."
On one side, fear of financial burdens, at the other end, fear of
desertion and pregnancy, suspicion and cruelty.
The sex struggle with its disgusting features of hypocrisy, pretence,
duplicity, misrepresentation, denial of biological facts, etc., has
yielded to an agreement, much as the robber system of past ages has
been replaced by commercial transactions which leave no hatred and no
desire for vengeance in their wake.
=Was It a Sacrifice?= The old-fashioned woman, wife or mistress,
assuming the position of the conquered and defeated, claimed infinite
privileges as an offset to what she has "given up," "sacrificed,"
"yielded." She humiliated her conqueror by pretending that
his body or his caresses were not the equal of hers, and that she only
submitted to his desire, without much pleasure, compelled by his "low
instincts."
The modern woman, conversant with the facts of sex, and no longer
having to create an artificial value for her body based on disregard
of biological facts, since her activities, mental and physical, now
command a definite price on the market place, seeks a partner with whom
she will exchange caresses leading, as she recognises without silly
shame, to mutual gratification.
=The Pursuit.= The old-fashioned woman, who always assumed the
passive role in life and who, supposedly indifferent to the pleasures
of the flesh, ran away, actually or figuratively, from the brutal
pursuer, played a preposterous dual part in the pre-love skirmishes.
Who has never encountered the woman who wears in a public place some
dress which reveals a great deal of her bust, and yet who pretends to
be offended if some man stares at what she has exposed in order to
attract his stare?
The modern woman whose worth is determined, not by the male's
eroticism in her presence, but by her accomplishments, can afford to be
frank, honest, if not, at times, aggressive, in the love search.
=The Passing of Respectable Prostitution.= The old-fashioned woman,
having created the artificial value of womanhood as such, indulged in
a mild, genteel form of prostitution, which, having no consequences
likely to impose a burden on the community, (pregnancy, childbirth)
never was criticised very severely. She sold her company for meals,
theatre tickets, comfortable transportation, flowers, trinkets. Now and
then, developing a streak of fairness and honesty, she would grant the
man she exploited small privileges of a superficial kind. But the real
old-fashioned girl was of the absolutely sordid type, who could allow a
more or less repellent suitor to spend considerable sums to amuse her
but would express genuine indignation at the thought that the man could
be as sordid as she was, and expect some caresses in return.
The modern woman, made independent financially by her non-sexual
activities, can remove from her love all taint of even mild
commercialism, returning favors in kind, or accepting presents, no
longer as a bribe, but as a token of affection on the part of a man she
loves.
=The Abettor of Ethical Sins.= The old fashioned wife was in many more
cases than superficial thinking would cause us to imagine, a more
dangerous corrupter of public and private morality than the prostitute.
Numerically the wife predominates. The prostitute constitutes a very
small minority of the population of large cities and does not thrive in
small town, villages or farming communities.
Louis Berman, who is generally very indifferent to psychology, makes a
very valuable remark in his book on glands: "Consider," he writes, "the
unimportance of a collective purpose to the woman whose career is the
mate and then the mate's career."
Which means that the woman who takes up wifehood as a profession has
no social morality. Her husband is her oyster and the world must in
turn be her husband's oyster. She knows only one thing: that she must
support her mate in anything he does so long as his activities, be they
even immoral or criminal, provide food and shelter for her and her
children. She cares not what he does as long as he "succeeds."
She founds her estimate of success upon visible accomplishment. Getting
"theirs," to her is preferable to getting "there." She, in short, is
a foe to the world, as the world is the foe her mate has set out to
capture and rob.
She willingly sells his ethics to buy success and, at the same time,
is loud in her denunciation of public, self-confessed prostitutes. She
would not prostitute herself but she lightheartedly prostitutes her
mate.
The modern woman can in an emergency help her husband financially and
thus enable him to follow the dictates of social ethics. She will
thereby earn deeper love and respect from him than by any willingness
to stand by him in crooked deals.
=Health Versus Sickness.= To the old fashioned wife, weakness and
sickness were invaluable assets. Sickness excused laziness and
capriciousness. Sickness was a bait for petting and at the same time,
a protection against unwelcome physical intimacies. Her menstruation
became a mysterious, offensive, painful process which debarred her from
many careers she never thought of entering, saved her from duties she
was only too glad to shirk. Undismayed by the sight of professional
women, singers, actresses, dancers, divers, etc., who not only never
seemed disabled by the "dreaded" period but also held a distinct
fascination to males "in spite" of their lack of neurotic femininity,
she prided herself in living up to Michelet's asinine description of
woman, "an invalid twelve times unclean."
The modern woman seeking accomplishment of the positive type, scorns
the negative superiority which sickness and invalidism assure to
neurotics. She has acquired a more scientific knowledge of sex matters
and the superstitious fears surrounding menstruation no longer affect
her.
From my own clinical experience, I am compelled to agree heartily with
Dr. Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury, who in their very fine
and practical book "Outwitting our Nerves" state that "ninety-five
out of a hundred cases of painful menstruation are caused by fear and
expectation of pain."
=The Passing of the Doll.= The modern woman, active, self reliant,
honest and healthy, will force out of existence a type which has lent
much picturesque charm to social gatherings and to pictorial art, the
doll type of woman, prettiness incarnate, of rose leaf charm, unfit for
any biological function except the mild lovemaking, not so much of a
husband, as of a lover. Tuberculous poets and composers of the Musset
and Chopin type, affected pictorial artists like Helleu, will deplore
her disappearance. Man, put at his ease by the modern woman, who does
not require constant protection, mental and physical, will find the
doll "too much trouble."
Only the very stupid and unmanly man will cultivate her for she will
not throw his physical shortcomings into too striking relief and it
will not require any mental exertion on his part to converse with her.
=The Passing of the Flirt.= The flirt is doomed. The flirt is a
rather unintelligent woman with a mild prostitution complex. She has
been trained from infancy to consider a woman's career as successful
when the woman fastens to herself a breadwinner whom she holds by his
physical desire of her body. Having never acquired any market value
outside of the sexual field, she must constantly test her powers and
reassure herself by leading all sorts and conditions of men, for whom
she may never experience even the slightest fancy, into consequential
overt acts revealing that she has awakened their eroticism.
Anyone will do, provided she reads in his eyes the verdict: I am still
attractive.
The terror of growing old is not so overwhelming to the modern woman
who has acquired a non-sexual market value. She tests herself thru
positive accomplishment, leadership, principally, and does not need to
keep her eye constantly on the sex thermometer.
=Modesty, Old and New.= Knowledge which dispels physical ghosts
and a positive self-valuation based on accomplishment will cause the
modern woman to discard the old fashioned modesty which was supposed to
be her greatest attraction, and which husbands, while being obviously
attracted by immodest women, encouraged in their wives as a bulwark
against the advances of other men.
Havelock Ellis in his "Impressions and Comments" contrasts cleverly
thru two striking illustrations the old-fashioned type, worshipping
at the altar of false modesty, and the modern type, who is no longer
ashamed of her body or her sex:
"In one of my books I had occasion to mention the case, communicated
to me, of a woman in Italy who preferred to perish in the flames,
when the house was on fire, rather than shock her modesty by coming
out of it without her clothes. So far as it has been within my power
I have always sought to place bombs beneath the world in which that
woman lived, so that it might altogether go up in flames. I read of
a troop ship torpedoed in the Mediterranean and almost immediately
sunk within sight of land. A nurse was still on deck. She proceeded
to strip, saying to the men about her: 'Excuse me, boys, I must save
the Tommies.' She swam around and saved a dozen of them. That woman
belongs to my world. Now and again I have come across the like, sweet
and feminine and daring women who have done things as brave as that,
and even much braver because more complexly difficult and always I feel
my heart swinging like a censer before them, going up in a perpetual
fragrance of love and adoration.
"I dream of a world in which the spirits of women are flames stronger
than fire, a world in which modesty has become courage and yet remains
modesty, a world in which women are as unlike men as ever they were
in the world I sought to destroy, a world in which women shine with a
loveliness of self-revelation as enchanting as ever the old legends
told, and yet a world which would immeasurably transcend the old world
in the self sacrificing passion of human service."
Thus far I have presented the silver lining of what some timid persons
call the cloud of modernism in love.
To be perfectly fair and honest, I must now mention the cloud itself,
altho, like all clouds, it will soon blow away or resolve itself into
a few drops of water, tears, perhaps, also of a temporary nature.
=The Unadapted Woman.= The sudden rise of women in certain fields
of activity has left quite a number of them unpleasantly unadapted.
Certain positions, well filled by women, and which pay rather high
salaries, demand but a modicum of intellectual development, little
culture or manners.
The women who fill them, and who generally come from the working class,
financially well off, accustomed to expensive clothes and to respectful
treatment on the part of their coworkers or employers, are loath to
enter a married relationship or even a liaison, with men of their
social set, that is, having the same culture or lack of culture, for
those men are financially lower and lack certain manners which they
expect to find in their environment.
A husband of the working class type could not, in case of pregnancy,
give such a woman the comfort which she now craves. Motherhood would
deprive her, temporarily at least, from an income which nothing could
replace.
Nor could she become subservient to a husband after being very
independent and having become slightly snobbish on account of the
attentions she has received from men financially superior to her.
Some of those women whom I have known, and whose profession I shall
not mention to avoid references of an odious character, sought mates,
legitimate or illegitimate, out of their class, taking for husbands or
lovers unsuccessful professional men in need of help.
The results of those matches were anything but encouraging.
The male prostitutes who accepted such arrangements, either showed
plainly their scorn of their unintellectual mate or left her as soon as
success in their chosen field made them independent of their working
class wife or mistress.
=The Proud Husband.= Many men drawing even small salaries, are
absolutely unwilling to marry a woman engaged in a gainful occupation.
This is due either to hidden jealousy, some men imagining that daily
contact with other men is bound to jeopardise a woman's morals, or to
silly pride and panicky fear of "what THEY will say." I have heard many
donkeys telling me that they do not wish "people" to think that they
cannot support their wives.
The cloud hovering over the modern woman and which may, at times, cast
a shadow on her love life, will be blown away as soon as culture
spreads to all social classes of the population owing to the increase
and systematisation of leisure, and as soon as the old fashioned male
has been consigned to his last resting place or analised out of his
foolish neurotic notions.
CHAPTER XXIX
BIRTH CONTROL
Modern love, as I have endeavored to show in the preceding chapters is
infinitely more complex than love was in the past. When woman was meant
to obey and serve, when feudalism or any other rigid caste system set
clear-cut boundaries to each individual's range of development, there
was less unrest among women just as there was less unrest among slaves.
And both the mediaeval slave and the mediaeval women were probably
absolute bores.
Unrest is growth and complexity is the obvious evidence of growth.
Love stirrings among the amoebae are probably similar to those
experienced by human beings. Nature probably puts a premium of pleasure
on the cleavage of the unicellular animal which reproduces itself by
dividing itself in two, by issuing forth another cell, as it does on
the human male when his gonads liberate spermatozoa.
But the amoeba's love feelings are extremely simple and lead to
no complication for they imply no enduring companionship, no
responsibilities to a mate nor to the "offspring."
=What We Expect of the Modern Woman.= The modern woman who is expected
to be, not merely a sexual mate but a social and intellectual mate as
well, a companion in our athletic diversions, a comrade-at-arms in the
world's battles, and many other things, can no longer allow chance to
interrupt her developmental strivings, to handicap her in the friendly
race she is running with the mate of her choice for intellectual
accomplishment by unexpected, unwelcome, inconvenient pregnancy and
child bearing.
Every child claims two years of its mother's life and it seems
reasonable that the mother should have something to say as to what
number that chapter will bear in her biography.
As only the very weak-minded or very hypocritical offer as a remedy for
frequent pregnancy male continence, we shall not even consider for one
minute such an absurd, abnormal, biologically immoral solution.
=The Only Solution.= The only other solution which has ever been
proposed is a system of sexual enlightenment which will enable a
woman to prevent pregnancy until such time when she feels that she can
in justice to herself and to her offspring bear a child, and will,
further, enable her to have an abortion performed when, in spite of all
contraceptive measures, pregnancy has begun.
This solution has been adopted by the entire civilised world, and in
fact, I might say that the degree of civilisation of a race or nation
can be accurately gauged by the number of individuals within that race
or nation practicing birth control.
With very few exceptions, a large family betokens stupidity, poverty
and ignorance. It is the poor, the stupid and the ignorant who are
burdened with children and, in turn, that burden keeps them stupid,
poor and ignorant. A vicious circle which seems hard to break.
=The Human Milch Cow.= Many a time when beholding some miserable
female from the slums wrecked by repeated childbearing, dwarfed in
mind, deformed in body, I have felt that sexual relations between her
and her mate had probably reached the level at which they could only by
an unusual stretch of one's imagination, be even distantly connected
with love. To her and to her mate, every embrace, except after the
onset of pregnancy, meant added suffering, added expense, further
physical degradation and decay.
Since the "nice" people, however, know the remedy and apply it, why
bother any longer? Because, while normally intelligent men and women
know how to avoid pregnancy and to whom to turn when an accident
happens, the greatest uncertainty about contraception obsesses their
minds and panicky fears bring about many catastrophes when the
unwelcome fruit must be removed from the mother's body.
Thousands of men and woman, enlightened in the mysteries of
contraception by some one who is little less ignorant than themselves,
are chilled in their enjoyment of lawful love by the thought of
possible danger.
Many women accept their husbands caresses in fear and trembling and
many, imagining that there is a close connection between orgasm and
pregnancy succeed in making themselves frigid, which leads to neurotic
disturbances in the wife and unhappiness for both mates. Many husbands
never dare to "let themselves go" unless it be in the arms of a
prostitute who is "wise" and can "take care of herself." Many a woman
has deceived her husband because a wise "man of the world" assured her
that she ran no risk of pregnancy in his arms.
=The Nightmare of Abortion.= And, if in spite of all, an
"accident" happens, what is the mental state of the woman who calls
at the "unethical" practitioner's office? While such an operation
practiced with a modicum of skill may be harmless, the dread fear of
possible consequences is quite able to kill the woman.
Fear may bring forth any morbid symptom, from an embolus to violent
suppuration.
Fear, on the other hand, on which the advocates of suppressive measures
rely, hardly ever leads anyone to continence or prevents any one from
resorting to abortion.
Legal obstacles to contraceptive education attain only one result. They
make married love risky and unpleasant, kill many a young woman and, in
the case of neurotic mothers, allow one morbid generation to bring into
this world another morbid generation.
=The Plight of the Neurotic Woman.= Many neurotic women imagine that
they hate their husbands and rationalise that hatred by bringing up
many absurd, imaginary charges against them. To them their husbands
symbolise pregnancy.
Many neurotic mothers, who did not wish to bear another child, often
compensate for their lack of real love for the unwelcome child by an
absurd, exaggerated tenderness which spoils the child or develops
morbid fears (the fear they might hurt or kill the child, fear as to
the child's health or welfare) which wreck the child's mental balance
and not infrequently land the mother in a sanatarium.
A neurotic woman I treated was obsessed by the fear that she might
some day kill her husband and children. Several years ago she had had
an abortion performed by a midwife whom she did not trust. Septic
poisoning set in and she hovered between life and death for several
months. A great fear of death drove her into reading many religious
books. She came to the conclusion that she had committed a murder.
But her husband, having impregnated her, was more guilty than she,
for he was the cause of it all. Hence, her insane logic added, he and
she would be better off dead than leading a sinful life. She should,
therefore, kill him and kill herself. Furthermore, her children being
the offspring of murderers, must be themselves tainted with criminal
tendencies and should also be saved from a life of crime. When she was
brought to me she had attempted to kill the entire family by turning
on the gas faucets all over the house about two o'clock in the morning.
The lawmakers who prevented that woman from having an operation
performed legally, (which would remove the fear of crime) safely, by a
reputable practitioner, (which would remove the fear of consequences),
openly, (which would remove the fear of social ostracism), would
have been responsible for the death of several people, had she not
accidentally awakened her husband by upsetting a chair on her way back
to her bed.
There are thousands of neurotics, suffering from a feeling of
inferiority, who are unfit to become mothers until their morbidity has
been cured by psychotherapy, and who, if allowed to bear children, will
train a new generation to behave in a negative, neurotic, socially
baneful way.
=The Children of Neurotic Mothers=, in whom the fear and hatred of
sex and love is rampant, will some day become prostitutes or puritans,
both of them degrading love equally.
I cannot follow Freud when he states that every neurosis has its root
in a failure of the love life, but some of the artificial obstacles
created by a stupid puritanical civilisation between man and the
full realisation of his sexual goal have not infrequently wrecked a
life which, neurotically oriented as it was, might have gone on, in a
socially tolerable way, for years and perhaps until the individual's
death.
Difficulties due to the use of improper or misunderstood contraceptive
appliances, the terrors of pregnancy, actual or expected, the fear
of abortion, the sufferings following abortion in a complex-ridden
organism, have too often upset a balance which at best was precarious.
=Birth Control and Indulgence.= Certain critics of birth control
attack it on the ground that it would lead to "overindulgence" of the
sex relationship. Those people are generally unprepossessing, worn,
individuals who are trying to compensate for their sexual weakness by
making a virtue out of an unavoidable inferiority. Their opposition to
what they call "overindulgence" (one thing which nature hardly ever
allows, barring rare morbid cases of priapism) is grotesque in the case
of married couples.
More unions are wrecked by underindulgence due to fear, ignorance of
the mates or inhibitions on the part of one or both, than to indulgence
of the normal kind.
Anything which prevents or discourages the normal exchange of sexual
caresses between those legally entitled to each others enjoyment is
pernicious, antisocial and antibiological for, as Grace Potter writes:
"Mating has to do with other creation than that of new human beings. It
has to do with every kind of creation--a new state, a poem, a picture,
a great bridge, a happier world. Mating is concerned with repeopling
the world but also with regeneration of the individual, opening his
capacities to growth. Who shall say that the one is not as important
as the other? If the second were not as important as the first there
would have been hardly any advance in human culture. Of all the errors
incident to the development of human beings, in their struggle to
attain a consciousness that makes them more than animals, none has had
wider ill-effects than our misuse of love.
"There are two equally unfortunate attitudes toward love which perhaps
grow out of each other. The one is the puritan attitude and the other
is the vulgar one. The puritan attitude is that sex impulses are
somehow vile and so, altho they give pleasure, must be denied. The
vulgar attitude takes it for granted that sex impulses are vile but as
they are pleasant are to be accepted. The one tends to deny physical
values to love. This is suppression. The other tends to deny tender
values to love. That is suppression also. They have neither one known
love. And finally the puritan becomes incapable of tenderness and the
vulgar becomes equally incapable of physical expression. It is not a
beautiful picture.
"The healthy attitude is this: The sex impulse is not degrading any
more than any other impulse is. It is a force as gravity is a force.
Those human beings achieve beauty and harmony who correlate sexual
impulses harmoniously with all their other impulses."[3]
"In spite of the age-long teachings that sex life in itself is
unclean," Margaret Sanger writes in "Woman and the New Race," the
world has been moving to a realization that A GREAT LOVE BETWEEN A MAN
AND A WOMAN IS A HOLY THING freighted with great responsibilities for
spiritual growth. The fear of unwanted children removed, the assurance
that she will have a sufficient amount of time in which to develop
her love life to its greatest beauty, with its comradeship in many
fields--these will lift woman by the very soaring quality of her
innermost self to spiritual heights that few have attained. Then the
coming of the eagerly desired children will but enrich life in all its
avenues, rather than enslave and impoverish it as do unwanted ones
to-day.
"What healthier grounds for the growth of sound morals could possibly
exist than the ample spiritual life of the woman just depicted? Free
to follow the feminine spirit, which dwells in the sanctuary of her
nature, she will, in her daily life, give expression to that high
idealism which is the fruit of that spirit when it is unhampered and
unviolated.
"The love for her mate will flower in beauty of deeds that are pure
because they are the natural expression of her physical, mental and
spiritual being. The love for desired children will come to blossom in
a spirituality that is high because it is free to reach the heights.
"=The Moral Force of Woman's Nature Will be Unchained=, and of its own
dynamic power will uplift her to a plane unimagined by those holding
fast to the old standards of church morality. Love is the greatest
force of the universe; freed of its bonds of submission and unwanted
progeny, it will formulate and compel of its own nature observance to
standards of purity far beyond the highest conception of the average
moralist."
=The Passing of the Double Standard.= "Birth Control in
philosophy and practice," Margaret Sanger writes in "THE PIVOT
OF CIVILIZATION," is the destroyer of the dualism in the
old sex code. It denies that the only purpose of sexual activity
is procreation; it also denies that sex should be reduced to the
level of sensual lust or that woman should permit herself to be the
instrument of its satisfaction. In increasing and differentiating her
love demands, woman must elevate sex into another sphere, whereby
it may subserve and enhance the possibility of individual and human
expression. Man will gain in this no less than woman; for in the
age-old enslavement of woman he has enslaved himself; and in the
liberation of womankind, all of humanity will experience the joys of a
newer and fuller freedom."
CHAPTER XXX
THE PASSING OF HUSBAND WORSHIP
While thousands of healthy people, men and women, rejoice over the fact
that woman of the modern type is coming to the fore, there are many
"calamity howlers," male and female, who bid us pause and consider the
direful consequences which they fear (that is, hope), this new stage in
the development of mankind will bring to the world.
Dr. Arabella Kenealy in "Feminism and Sex Extinction" forebodes the
passing of whatever is masculine in the male. Her arguments are not
very logical but they are interesting. She believes that "two fates
await woman unless she rids herself of contempt for functions and
duties purely hers, feminism and feministicism. She is handicapped
every month for two or three days by weakness or pain. The craze to do
men's work will result in man's emasculation.
"The desire to figure in legislation far from stiffening the manly
caliber of weak men will still further enervate them. Members
of either sex are not capable of doing their best work while in
association. Sex rivalries are excited. Sex ascendency is created.
Man inherits from his mother some of woman's apprehension, foresight
and altruism as required to present woman's bent and viewpoint. More
of it would be superfluous. The numerical preponderance of women must
ultimately swamp masculine initiative in state affairs unless the
political functions of the sexes are separated."
Why the process should be more baneful for men than it has been for
women who, for countless generations have been decidedly "swamped in
state affairs" is not very evident.
=Is Man's Virility Declining?= An editorial writer in the New York
Medical Journal also foresees degeneration ahead unless the male
retains his mastery: "The yielding by man to the other sex of masculine
essential rights and obligations is a symptom of declining virility,
physical and mental."
Another medical writer sounds a different alarm: "Overworked woman
may impair the constitutional vigor of man, while she works with
him. She is kept up by nervous excitement, by strong tea or drugs.
In short, woman is fussy. In a stress of work she will work on with
crimson cheeks and growing irritation, while man will put on his hat
and calmly resort to the nearest lunch room. Women by their eternal
high pressure as heads of departments are making nervous wrecks of
themselves."
Finally there comes Havelock Ellis, usually less panicky, who thinks
he has noticed a distinct degeneration in the young man of today.
"These weak-chinned, neurotic young men are no match at all for the
heavy-jawed resolute young women feminist methods are creating. The
yielding to women of masculine rights is a symptom of declining
virility. Equality in all things yielded, pride in himself, in his
work, gone, he will descend to the state of the decadent savage who
keeps as many wives to work for him as their work for him enables him
to keep."
=There is Undue Pessimism in All Those Warnings.= Woman has not become
brutish as some writers claim, nor has man become effeminate. Woman
has simply gained a clearer knowledge of her latent powers and the war
has provided her with a touchstone for her physical resistance and
endurance.
The work woman had to do during the war, which she had never suspected
she could do, for until then it had been considered as man's work, has
not "masculinised" her but it has rid many "delicate flowers" of their
morbid belief in the fragile character of their constitution.
Male man is not in danger of passing out of existence but one variety
of man is doomed, the type which has always wished to mate with the two
types of women which, in the preceding chapter, I declared doomed, the
doll and the flirt.
=The Wise Husband.= That almost extinct species is the type of husband
who speakes of HIS wife, who knows "women" and what is "good" for
them, the home Jehovah, all-knowing and all-powerful, who must be
served and obeyed, who, on his return from work must find his wife
ready to entertain him if so he wishes, or to plunge back into the
depths of the kitchen if his mood so requires, the husband who knows
that he is the aim and goal of his wife's existence.
A ridiculous old man, abandoned by his too young wife, made to the
reporters a statement betraying sadly the infinite conceit of that
type: "She will return to me because I love her so."
A most unprepossessing man was bewailing in my office the fact that his
wife had grown sexually indifferent to him. I advised him not to compel
her to have intercourse with him against her will, especially as he
was diseased. He naïvely remarked: "But she is my wife."
That type of husband, in other words, considers a wife as a chattel,
to be submitted to any sort of legal indignity because she is "only a
female." He may force motherhood upon her to demonstrate his doubtful
virility or to protect his jealous egotism. He would accept with
enthusiasm Goldschmidt's theories which I presented for what they were
worth in the chapter on Virginity, and according to which, woman is
soft wax and characterless, waiting to be shaped into a personality by
her husband's caresses.
Scientific investigators of a more reliable type than Goldschmidt and
who avoid drawing "yellow" conclusions from their labors, have supplied
the reading world with facts which should cause the Jehovah husband to
fear for his lofty position.
=Is the Male Indispensable?= Jacques Loeb and others have demonstrated
that as far as the physical results of love, the continuance of the
race, is concerned, the male may not be absolutely indispensable.
Loeb had shown that almost anything which causes the protoplasm of the
egg to separate itself from its membrane is sufficient to introduce
"life" into that curious organism which until then only holds
possibilities of life.
Nature, in order to produce one individual demands two principles, one
male and one female principle. She must have one egg which is modified
by some product of the male organism, pollen or sperm.
=Modern Scientists Have Beaten Nature at Her Own Game= of
creation; they have taken one egg, the female principle and proceeded
to fertilise that egg without any male product whatsoever.
The experiment has only been made on low forms of animal life, sea
urchins and the like, but the egg of the sea urchin is not different in
any essential respect from the egg of the human species.
By taking unfecundated eggs and placing them for two minutes in a
mixture of sea water and acetic, or butyric, or valerianic acid, then
placing them back in sea water and twenty minutes later, immersing
them for about an hour in hypertonic sea water or sugar solution, and
finally returning them to sea water, Loeb was able to bring to life
young larvæ. A French scientist, Delage, repeating the same experiments
managed to keep those larvæ alive until the time of their sexual
maturity.
Loeb also succeeded in fertilising eggs by placing them in the blood
serum of cows, sheep, pigs or rabbits.
Mathews has fertilised some by shaking them gently for a period of time.
=Twins To Order.= Loeb and others have gone further even than that
and produced not only single individuals but twins, triplets, etc.
The secrets of nature's laboratory are being revealed more and more
clearly from day to day.
The conceited fathers who imagine that the bringing into life of twins
is a symptom of their powerful virility must learn that a mere chemical
phenomenon called _osmosis_ is responsible for the over-fertility of
some wives.
Remove from sea water sea urchin's eggs and place them for fifteen
minutes or so in ordinary water. The density of water being lower than
that of sea water, the eggs will absorb a great deal of water and burst
open. A drop of protoplasm will come out at the break in the membrane.
Replace the exploded egg into sea water and two larvæ will hatch out of
it. Separate the two portions of the exploded egg and the twins will be
as healthy as tho they had been allowed to grow for a while in Siamese
style.
By repeating the experiment, Loeb has produced not only twins but
triplets and quadruplets, all normal and growing out of the same egg
which was only meant originally to produce one urchin.
One can understand how a variation in the pressure of the liquids
surrounding the human egg may lead to the same result.
While scientists have created living beings by using the female
principles as a basis, they have not thus far attained any results by
experimenting with the male principle alone.
=The Mother is the Race= apparently and the stubbornness of man
in claiming and fighting for the principle of masculine superiority
is apparently due to his obscure feeling that after all he is not
indispensable.
The more vociferous the claim, the weaker generally the basis for that
claim. In certain forms of insanity, the more the organism is destroyed
by disease the more extravagant the statements are which the insane man
makes about himself, claiming power, wealth, health, youth, beauty, etc.
At least one animal species, the bees, have placed the male on that
footing. The male bee represents a convenient and pleasant means of
bringing about the fecundation of the eggs. After his chemical part
has been played, however, no one takes him seriously and his official
existence ends. Certain spiders and other insects consider the male in
the same light, some of them killing and eating the male as soon as his
fecundating activities have come to an end.
The feminine domination, if it should ever implant itself into our
world would undoubtedly lead to the absurdities, the exaggerations and
the repressions which are the result of our man made civilisation.
=Matriarchal Communities of the Past= in which the woman was the
head of the family and probably of the state and matriarchial groups of
Tibet have not left visible tokens of their worth as a family system.
As they preceded the present family system however, it may be that
all traces of their achievements have been obliterated by time. The
Tibetan experiment may have been blighted by unfavorable geographical
conditions and rendered as barren as the Mongolian patriarchal
experiments in a neighboring part of the world.
Man as a means of fecundation is not likely to be discarded by normal
women but his prestige is likely to decrease as the secret of his
mysterious power becomes better known.
The passing of the smug, self satisfied Jehovah husband, a neurotic in
every case, is in sight and his passing will facilitate the adaptation
of some of the inadapted women I mentioned in the preceding chapter,
some of whom fail to find love, and some of whom do not dare to seek it.
=The Successful Modern Woman is Rather Conceited.= Some of the things I
said about female artists applies in a great measure to the woman who
in business or in a profession has managed to make her mark.
After struggling years for a certain object which she has at last
attained, she is naturally loath to surrender her personality to the
average husband of the self-styled masculine type.
She at times resorts to homosexualism in an effort to retain her
independence and yet satisfy her love cravings without submitting to a
domination which she feels to be unjustified.
=The Terrors of The Climateric.= The passing of the Jehovah husband
will also ease a process of woman's (and man's) life which has to this
day held countless terrors to the uninitiated, the climacteric.
To the old-fashioned and the gullible woman, the change of life meant
the end of life as a female. The stupid man, who is constantly
endeavoring to subdue his mate thru disparagement and kills speedily
her youth, her enthusiasm and her hopes by repeating constantly the
trashy "At your age, my dear," is in a great measure responsible for
transforming that harmless phenomenon into a painful crisis, mental and
physical.
The crisis of the "Dangerous Age," to use Karin Michaelis's expression,
is generally due to the clash of a weak masochistic female with a weak
and sadistic male, a clash in which, owing to age and the staleness of
the mates, affection has no redeeming, consoling physical features.
=The Masculine Man is in No Danger of Passing Away= and he will for
ever be as attractive to woman as the feminine woman is to him.
As Shaw said, what has been killed in men by the growth of feminism is
"not masculinity but boorishness," a characteristic, not of the strong
but of the weak, who is trying to compensate for his weakness and to
conceal it. What has been killed in woman is not feminine sweetness but
overfeminine silliness which woman used as a deceptive weapon against
the domineering male.
In a world which grants equal opportunities to men and women, no
husband will be able to justify or excuse his treatment of a woman
by saying "She is my wife." He will have to remain her lover in order
to hold her. No wife will be able to make the home hideous and, at
the same time, brandish over her husband's head the certificate of
enslavement called a marriage license. She will have, in order to
compete with the free women whose personality will impose itself upon
her environment, to remain his mistress.
Every step ahead which the world takes fortunately proves a new step
which love takes in the direction of completeness and freedom from
sordidness and ugliness.
CHAPTER XXXI
PERFECT MATRIMONIAL ADJUSTMENTS
While marriage, regardless of whatever form it may assume, has always
been mentioned in this book as unavoidably related to love, we must
not blink the fact that marriage and love are two absolutely different
things forced into frequent association by social and economic
necessity.
Love is an involuntary and compulsory craving which draws a male and a
female into the closest possible union for the purpose of mutual sexual
gratification, generally followed by conception and reproduction.
=Marriage a Compromise.= Marriage on the other hand is merely a
compromise between the positive individual cravings which demand the
most complete and frequent gratification of the love urge, regardless
of its consequences, and the negative feeling which causes the
community to shirk all possible responsibilities incurred by the
individual, among others, the support of pregnant or lactating females
and of helpless infants.
Unless the community owns mother and child and can exploit their labor
or receive their cash value (slavery system), it demands that their
owner, the impregnator of the woman and procreator of the child, supply
food and shelter for both.
Marriage is also a compromise between two individual cravings which may
not be synchronised, as the male's desire for the female may subside
before her desire for him does, or reciprocally.
Through the institution of marriage the community protects itself
against new burdens directly by penalties (sentences against wife
deserters or those who abandon children) and indirectly by protecting
the mates against their own cravings for whose duration they are not
responsible (laws against bigamy or adultery, etc.).
=Considering the Artificial Character of the Marriage Union=, and
at the same time the psychological importance of its durability as far
as the mental health of the off-spring is concerned, one of the most
pressing duties of the community (and one which it never performs),
should be to devise all the possible ways and means whereby the sex
cravings of both mates could be helped to retain their freshness and
strength as long as possible.
=Attractiveness an Asset.= The first thought which should be forced
into the minds of modern men and women is that attractiveness is a
positive asset not only to woman but to man. In classic Greece, a
man could not be merely good, he had to be beautiful too. By "good"
the Greek meant "fit" but in the compound word which implied both
qualities, _kalos_, beauty came first.
Cravings being awakened and kept alive by certain fetishes, the
individual should be trained to recognize his and his mate's fetishism
and to make all possible efforts to retain, if necessary by artificial
means, the fetishes which lead to the awakening of erotism between him
and his mate.
=The Average Man or Woman of Forty is a Sorry Sight.= Yet a
little intelligence would compel them to retain or regain the physical
idiosyncrasies they exhibited at the time of their marriage.
Too many women consider it sinful to devote much time to their physical
appearance and the care of their body. In a man, any attempt to make
himself attractive is considered in stupid middle-class circles as a
stigma of effeminacy.
The "pretty" man has always been despised by men and women, and
endocrinology has confirmed their judgment by revealing to us that he
is a glandular weakling. Between the pretty man and the attractive man,
however, there is a far cry.
While the American movies, generally speaking, are catering to the
weak-minded and the unimaginative, they have, in their search for a
bait where-with to catch audiences, rendered mankind a signal service
by starring the kind of man which would have passed muster in ancient
Greece, beautiful and fit.
=Athletic, if not Acrobatic, Movie Idols= present to the female part
of the audience a complex of physical qualities which women will
gradually demand from their mates. It is regrettable that women
should not attend prize fights in large numbers, for the sight of the
godlike participants in those affrays would force them to institute
enlightening comparisons between professional fighters and the average
male.
Besides retaining or regaining their fetishes, human beings should make
a special effort not to let those fetishes lose their power.
=The Worst Foe of Married Happiness.= Balzac in his "Physiology of
Marriage" says that the married have to wage a constant fight with a
monster which devours everything: Habit. Every stimulus, as we know,
pleasant or unpleasant, loses its power when applied continuously or
too frequently.
It is only for the first minute or so that the ice cold shower causes
our naked skin to tingle with excitement. As soon as the reaction sets
in and the capillaries fill with red blood, the pleasant sensation of
the water needles becomes dulled.
After holding our hand for a minute in hot water, we no longer
realise the high temperature of the liquid and in order to continue
to experience the feeling of heat we must continually raise the
temperature of the water.
And likewise we may grow so accustomed to one source of erotic
stimulation that we become indifferent to it.
=Friendship May Survive the Death of Sexual Love=, provided the sex
desire has died in both mates at the same time. When desire dies off in
the wife first and is not replaced by aversion, the situation may be
very simple for she can still satisfy her more ardent mate and derive
some gratification therefrom.
When the man's desire dies first, on the other hand, there may arise
unpleasant complications. A man may be impotent with a woman whom he
loves tenderly but no longer desires sexually and yet be potent with
some other woman to whom he is not completely "accustomed."
Jealousy on the part of the wife may then prevent the advent of the
platonic friendship which is not uncommon between old married mates,
altho Montaigne denies the possibility of its existence.
Modern mates, conscious of that danger, have now and then devised ways
and means to combat Balzac's monster.
Not so long ago a well-known woman writer announced that she was
planning to marry a certain man with whom, however, she did not intend
to live day after day. The experiment has many chances of success if
jealousy does not complicate the situation.
I suggested to reporters last summer, when two famous artists parted
company, that their union might have been of longer duration if one of
them had lived at the Plaza while the other was stopping at the St.
Regis.
=Married People Should Separate for Periods of Variable Duration= in
order that a fresh stimulation may emanate from their fetishes when
they meet again. By leading more individual lives and having separate
sets of friends, they would, besides, bring to each other a new sort
of mental pabulum and stimulation day after day. Conversation becomes
futile and unnecessary between a husband and wife who always pay and
receive calls together, attend the same spectacles and hence always see
the same side of life. Now and then we read of couples who separate
and a few years later remarry. Those few years spent apart from each
other mean for both new experiences which enrich their mind and their
conversation and make them again interesting to each other.
=The Play Function of Love.= Another factor which the monstrous
hypocrisy of puritanism makes very difficult to discuss openly and
honestly and which wrecks many promising unions is the ignorance, more
common than we suspect among married couples, of what Maurice Parmelee
in his "Personality and Behavior" has called the Play Function of Love,
a term which has been given a broader meaning by Havelock Ellis in an
article for the _Medical Review of Reviews_ for March 1921.
The average man or woman is tragically ignorant of the mission of sex.
The average man, as Ellis writes, has two aims: "to prove that he is a
man and to relieve a sexual tension.
"He too often considers himself, from traditional habits, as the active
partner in love and his own pleasure as the prime motive of the sex
communion.
"His wife, naturally adopts the complementary attitude, regards herself
as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible.
"She has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her
whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonized, and that she
is incapable of bringing her personality (having indeed no achieved
personality to bring) to bear effectively on the problems of society
and the world around her."
I have described in "Sex Happiness" the tragedies which result from
that form of ignorance, especially the tragedy of the unsatisfied wife,
her restlessness, her gradual dislike of her mate, her curiosity as to
what feelings she might experience if married to another man, when some
other man seems to awaken her erotism, and then the dilemma, repression
leading to neurosis, or indulgence leading into the divorce court.
=Psychoanalysis to the Rescue.= "In this matter," Ellis writes,
"we may learn a lesson from the psychoanalysts of today without
any implication that psychoanalysis is necessarily a desirable or
even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser
psychoanalysts insist that the process of liberating the individual
from outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and
impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free play of
his nature.
"It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the suppression
of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound rules and
maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the leading out
of the individual's special tendencies.
"It removes inhibitions, even inhibitions that were placed upon the
individual, or that he consciously or unconsciously placed upon
himself, with the best moral intentions, and by so doing it allows a
larger and freer and more natively spontaneous morality to come into
play.
"It has this influence above all in the sphere of sex, where such
inhibitions have been most powerfully laid on the native impulses,
where the natural tendencies have been most surrounded by taboos and
terrors, most tinged with artificial stains of impurity and degradation
derived from alien and antiquated traditions.
"Thus the therapeutical experience of the psychoanalysts reinforce
the lessons we learn from physiology and psychology and the intimate
experiences of life."
=Wounded Egotism.= Love in marriage is endangered from another quarter:
The greatest foe of sexual desire, as I have stated several times in
this book, is wounded egotism.
A perfect matrimonial adjustment does not mean the modification of
either mate's personality. We have seen in the chapters on glands that
the normal personality is practically inadaptable, that is, nothing
short of serious sickness or a surgical operation can transform an
active person into a sluggish one and vice versa.
It is only the neurotic personality which can be adapted by the removal
of certain unconscious fears which prevent it from attaining social and
biological balance and happiness.
All psychoanalysis does in such cases is to teach the patient to accept
everything which is biologically normal in his personality.
We must then have an absolute respect for personality in ourselves
and others. We must find a socially acceptable outlet for all our
idiosyncrasies, a difficult, but never impossible task.
Lack of an outlet means a neurotic disturbance. The so-called
adaptable people are those who succeed in repressing temporarily their
cravings and denying their existence, a result which they attain at
the cost of much suffering to themselves and, indirectly, to their
environment.
=Democracy in the Home= is the prerequisite of every perfect
matrimonial adjustment.
The autocratic government of the home by a male bully of a female nag
leads to either a revolution (divorce) or to the destruction of human
material after a bitter strife, (neurotic ailments).
The bullied wife and the henpecked husband fill the offices of
neurologists, gynaecologists, psychoanalysts and sexologists. This is
the way in which the wounded ego of the defeated mate avenges itself.
The defeated mate becomes sexually disabled.
The results of maladjustment of the mates are strikingly summed up by
Kempf in his monumental work "Psychopathology":
"Upon marriage a subtle if not overt struggle occurs between the mates
for the dominant position in the contract. The big, aggressive wife
and the timid, little husband attest to the importance of organic
superiority in the adjustment, but the average marriage does not show
such organic differences. The sadistic or masochistic husband and the
masochistic or sadistic wife will certainly adjust to please their
reciprocating cravings, no matter what influence this may have upon
their children, and a sadistic wife and sadistic husband, although both
are cruel in their pleasures, will divorce each other on the charge
of the other being cruel; but it is the commonplace adjustment which
interests us most, because it is most predominant.
"Nature places an unerring punishment upon the woman, who, by
incessantly using every whim, scheme or artifice, finally succeeds
in dominating her husband. By forcing him to submit to her thousand
and one demands and coercions, within a few years, he unconsciously
becomes a submissive type and loses his sexual potency with her as the
love-object. If he does not have secret love interests which stimulate
him to strive for power, he finally loses his initiative and sexual
potency completely and must live always at a commonplace level, the
servant of more virile men: the counterpart of the subdued impotent
males of the animal herd.
"His more aggressive, selfish mate, if periodically heterosexually
erotic, will become neurotic if her moral restraints are insurpassable,
or seek a new mate whom she will again attempt to subdue. Never is she
able to realise that her selfishness makes her sexually unattractive.
The psychopathologist meets many such women whose husbands have evaded
domination by secretly depending upon the affections of another more
suitably adjusted woman."
In "The New Horizon in Love and Life," Mrs. Havelock Ellis writes "It
is more than probable that the evolved relationship of the future will
be monogamy--but a monogamy wider and more beautiful than the present
caricature of it, as the sea is wider and more delicious than a duck
pond.
"The lifelong, faithful love of one man for one woman is the exception
and not the rule. The law of affinity being as subtle and as
indefinable as the law of gravitation, we may, by and by, find it worth
while to give it its complete opportunity in those realms where it can
manifest itself most potently. We are on the wrong bridge if we imagine
that laxity is the easiest way to freedom. The bridge which will bear
us must be strong enough to support us while experiments are tried.
"What is the gospel in this matter of sexual emancipation for men
and women in the new world where love has actually come of age? It
is surely the complete economic independence of women. While man
is economically free and woman still a slave, either physically,
financially or spiritually, mankind as a whole must act as if
blindness, maimness and deafness constituted health.
"The complete independence of husband and wife is the gospel of the new
era of marriage. This is the actual matter which philosophers, parents,
philanthropists and pioneers so often ignore when teaching the new
ideals of morality. When a woman is kept by a man she is not a free
individuality either as child, wife or mistress. Imagine for a moment
a man kept by a woman as women are kept by men and a sense of humor
illuminates the absurdity of the situation between any class of evolved
human beings."
As a clever patient of mine whom I regret I cannot mention by name said
one day: "married happiness, to be lasting, requires more than sexual
cooperation of both mates, it must resolve itself into cooperative
egotism."
[Footnote 1: See Mary Sinclair's "The Life and Death of Harriet Freau."]
[Footnote 2: Kings. I, 1-2.]
[Footnote 3: Birth Control Review, April 1922.]
THE END
INDEX
Abortion, 295
Active homosexuals, 167
Adler, 32, 41, 71, 115, 130, 132, 141, 142, 170, 192, 211, 225
Adrenals, 230
Adrenin, 6
Algolagnists, 188
Androgynes, 160
Animal love fights, 196
"Animal" types, 87
Antifetishes, 24, 25
Aphrodite, 195
Aristotle, 207
Atavism, 194
Attractiveness, 317
Auditory sensations, 57
Baby talk, 57
Balzac, 318
Basogas, 43
Bees in love, 52, 53
Beresford, 267
Berman, Dr. Louis, 228
Bernhardt, Sarah, 100
Bloch, Iwan, 88
Blood relations, 47
Bonaparte, 192
Bored wives, 89
Boredom, 212
Bottle-fed men, 20
Bovary, Madame, 91
Brain, cells, 16
function of the, 7
operations on a dog's, 13
Breast-fed men, 20
Brothers and sisters, 78
Brutus, 82
Business women, 279
Cæsar, 180
Calf love, 54
Cannon, 10
Chicago Vice Report, 108
Childish behavior, 158
Choice, meaning of, 11, 12
Cigar smoking, 59
Clean lives, 264
Climacteric, 312
Community's criticism, 256
Contraception, 294
Conversation, 321
Cooperative egotism, 328
Copepods, behavior of, 15
Craig's Birds, 40
Crile, 63
Cybela, 196
Dark Types, 234
Darwin, 45
Death dreams, 75
Death wishes, 73, 74
Delage, 308
Deluded martyrs, 81
Delusional jealousy, 147
Democracy in the home, 325
Demosthenes, 83
Descartes, 162
Displacement upward, 6
Dissatisfied people, 216
Divorces in the art world, 221
Doll type, 284
Don Juan, 92, 94, 139
Double standard, 302
Ductless glands, 225
Duncan, Isadora, 100
Economic exhibitionism, 69
Eddy, Mary Baker, 265
Effeminacy, 317
Ego rampant, 139
Electrical exchanges, 60, 63
Ellis, Havelock, 88, 177, 286, 305, 321
Ellis, Mrs. Havelock, 327
Endocrinologists, 226
Environment, 236
Erotropism, 4
Ethical prostitution, 113
Eulenburg, Albert, 162, 194
Fatherhood cravings, 69
Fear of accidents, 76
Fear of woman, 114
Female artists, 218
Feminine refinement, 277
Ferenczi, 148 sqq.
Fetishes, list of, 19, 20
feminine, 21
masculine, 21
non-physical, 24, 25
Fiji Islands, 42
First Night, the right of the, 68
Fixation, parent, 30, 31, sqq.
Flappers, 247, 248
Flattery, 218, 219, 220
Flirt, the, 285
Foot Fetishism, 18, 22
symbolism, 24
Forel 134
Frazer, 44
Freud, 23, 24, 31, 42, 49, 62, 140, 164, 165, 211, 225, 267, 297
Friedlander, Benedikt, 183
Friendship, 319
Frigid wives, 245
Frink, 137
Galvanotropism, 4
Genesis, 43
Gerontophilia, 24
Getting even, 90
Glands, 34
Glandular drunkenness, 193
Glandular insufficiency, 203
Glove fetishism, 205
Goldschmidt, Jules, 116
Gonads, 231
Greek Gods, 156
Griseldis, 195
Gross, Dr. Otto, 184
Habit, 310
Hair Fetishism, 17, 26, 27
Heart, physiology of the, 5
Heredity, 34
Hirschfeld, Magnus, 158, 186
Hirth, George, 88, 89
Holding hands, 60
Homosexual tragedies, 179
Husbands and lovers, 141
Ideal Love, 269
Identification mania, 35, 36
Imitation, 33
Immodest modesty, 127
Impotence, 26
Inbreeding, 44
Incest fear, 42
Independent women, 281
Infidelity, 85
Institution children, 101
Jack the Ripper, 197
Jealousy and impotence, 137
Jesus, 67
Jung, 32, 33, 225
Kempf, 173, 325
Kenealy, Dr. Arabella, 303
King David, 261
Kiss, 60, 61
Krafft-Ebing, 162
Kronos, 195
Lean types, 235
Leonardo da Vinci, 180
Lesbian Love, 156
Loeb, Jacques, 307 sqq.
Lombroso, 105
Lorand, 259
Love, a compulsion, 10
Lover, the successful, 52
the unsuccessful, 53
Lovers of the absolute, 271
Male artists, 218
Male lovers, 156
Male prostitutes, 109
Marriage, a compromise, 315
Masculine protest, 130
Masked Sadism, 154
Masoch, Leopold von Sacher, 200 sqq.
Masochistic husbands, 206
Matriarchal communities, 311
Matrimonial Engineers, 238
Messalina, 94
Metatropism, 161
Michael Angelo, 176
Michaelis, Karin, 313
Michelet, 284
Milch cows, 293
Milk, 59
Mind, seat of the, 6, 7
Mobs, 198
Moreau de Tours, 189
Movie Idols, 318
Movies, 57
Naked male dancers, 123
Narcism, 167
Negative Love, 176
Negro Haters, 79
Nerve memory, 8
Nerves, 50
Neurotic frigidity, 70
Neurotic Life Plan, 33
Neurotic motherliness, 71
Neurotic mothers, 249, 296
Nietzsche, 180
Nurses, 39
Obscene talkers, 132
Obsessions, 27
Oedipus Complex, 30
Old fashioned women, 275
Oracles, 266
Organism, unity of, 49, 50, 51
Paranoiacs, 147
Parent-Child Relationship, 223
Parmelee, Maurice, 321
Passive homosexuals, 167
Perfect Mothers, 246
Personality, 239
Personality, respect for the, 324
Perverse birds, 164
Phototropism, 3
Physical incompatibility, 254
Pimps, 109
Pituitary, 228
Plato, 155
Platonic love, 63
Play function of love, 321
Plural love, 84
Polyandry, 84
Potter, Grace, 299
Preferences, 39
Pregnancy and Health, 242
Priapism, 84
Primal horde, 45
Primitive races, 42
Prize fights, 318
Prohibition, 81
Projection, 153
Proud husbands, 289
Psychoanalysis, 322
Puritanical males, 129
Rebellion against nature, 277
Reformers, 80
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 207
Rules for husbands, 134
Sade, Marquis de, 189 sqq.
Sadistic lovers, 213
Sadistic mates, 215
Sadzer, 166
Safety devices, 170
Safety symbols, 97
Sallow Type, 235
Sanger, Margaret, 300 sqq.
Sapho, 155
Savages, modesty among, 123
Schneider, Kurt, 105
Schopenhauer, 182
Schroeder, Theodore, 265
Sea urchins, 308
Self love, 67
Sensuality, 107
Sexless jealousy, 140
Sexless persons, 208
Sexual Libido, 65
Shaw, G. B., 276 sqq.
Shoe fetishism, 18, 22, 205
symbolism, 24
Sight, 56
Sinclair, May, 268
Skooptsy, 208
Slender types, 236
Smell, 58
Social pressure, 237
Socrates, 155
Sour grapes, 77
Steinach, 163 sqq.
Stekel, Wilhelm, 128, 160, 170, 183
Sublimation, 267
Suggestive draperies, 125
Suttee custom, 142
Syphilophobiacs, 80
Tall types, 235
Taste, 59
Teeth, 237
Telegony, 116
Test of love, 75
Third sex, 158 sqq.
Thyroid, 230
Touch, 60
Transvestites, 159
Triplets, 310
Twins, 309
Type, parent, 39
Ultrafeminine, 93
Unadapted women, 288
Uniform fetishism, 25
Vamps, 213
Varietism, 84
Vital Force, 266
Vomiting, in pregnancy, 243
Von Kupfer, 181, 182
Wagner, 252
Walker, Dr. Mary, 160
War prisoners, 70
Whipping, 202
Wifehood, a profession, 282
Wilde, Oscar, 180
Will-to-be-the-first, 115
Winckelman, 176
Wise husbands, 306
Women Sadists, 210
Women who enjoy a beating, 209
Wounded egotism, 324
Wulffen, 193
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