The Project Gutenberg eBook of Psychoanalysis and Love, by André Tridon.

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."

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 [Pg vi] 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 [Pg vii] 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, [Pg viii] 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 [Pg ix] stripped love of other veils which made it look too romantically unreal.

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 [Pg x] 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.

PSYCHOANALYSIS
AND LOVE

CHAPTER I
The Head and the Heart

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[Pg 2] 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."

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 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 [Pg 7] 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[Pg 11] 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[Pg 12] 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."

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.

"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[Pg 14] 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[Pg 15] 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[Pg 16] 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[Pg 18] 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.[Pg 19] 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[Pg 20] "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[Pg 22] 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 child[Pg 23]hood 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[Pg 24] 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[Pg 25] 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[Pg 26] enjoyed greatly the company of any woman, he felt more at ease with small brunettes.

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[Pg 27] 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 in[Pg 28]dividual, 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[Pg 30] 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.

A male child may become overattached to his[Pg 31] 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[Pg 32] 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[Pg 33] 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[Pg 34] 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[Pg 36] 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[Pg 37] 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[Pg 38] 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[Pg 39] 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[Pg 40] 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.

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[Pg 43] 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 in[Pg 44]cest, 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[Pg 45] "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[Pg 46] 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[Pg 47] 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[Pg 50] 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[Pg 51] 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[Pg 52] 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[Pg 53] 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[Pg 54] 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[Pg 55] 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.

Odors can be, not only fetishes but very often[Pg 59] 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[Pg 60] 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[Pg 61] 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[Pg 62] 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 up[Pg 63]ward 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[Pg 64] 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[Pg 66] 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[Pg 67] 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[Pg 68] 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[Pg 69] 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[Pg 70] 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[Pg 71] 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.[Pg 72] 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 Worried Wife. One woman I analysed was[Pg 74] 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[Pg 75] 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[Pg 76] 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 per[Pg 77]formances, 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[Pg 78] 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.

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[Pg 79] 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[Pg 81] 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 sys[Pg 82]tem 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[Pg 84] 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[Pg 85] 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 un[Pg 86]conscious 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[Pg 87] 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,[Pg 88] 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[Pg 90] 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."

"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[Pg 93] 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[Pg 94] 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[Pg 96] 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.

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,[Pg 97] 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 bride[Pg 98]groom, 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 inter[Pg 100]pose 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 neu[Pg 101]rotic 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.

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[Pg 103] 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[Pg 105] 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[Pg 106] 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.

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[Pg 107] 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,[Pg 108] 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.[Pg 109] 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[Pg 110] 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[Pg 113] 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 unsophisti[Pg 114]cated 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[Pg 115] 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[Pg 116] 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,[Pg 117] 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 pro[Pg 118]ducts 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[Pg 120] 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[Pg 121] 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[Pg 123] 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[Pg 124] their village to satisfy their natural needs, and then hide behind bushes or trees.

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[Pg 125] 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 aphro[Pg 126]disiac 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[Pg 127] 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[Pg 128] 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[Pg 130] 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[Pg 131] 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.[Pg 132] 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."

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[Pg 134] 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[Pg 135] 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[Pg 136] 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[Pg 138] 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 ba[Pg 139]bies, 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[Pg 140] 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[Pg 141] 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[Pg 142] 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 dis[Pg 143]regarded, 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 prece[Pg 145]dent. 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.

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 [Pg 146] 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[Pg 148] 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.

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 hetero[Pg 151]sexual 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[Pg 152] 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[Pg 153] 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[Pg 154] 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,[Pg 156] 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.

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[Pg 158] 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[Pg 159] 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[Pg 160] 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 transves[Pg 161]tites 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[Pg 162] 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[Pg 163] 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[Pg 164] 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.

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[Pg 165] 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[Pg 166] 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[Pg 167] 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[Pg 168] 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[Pg 169] 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[Pg 170] 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[Pg 171] 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[Pg 173] 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.

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[Pg 175] 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[Pg 177] 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.

"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[Pg 178] 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[Pg 179] 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 gratifica[Pg 180]tion. 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[Pg 181] 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[Pg 182] 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[Pg 183] 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[Pg 184] 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.

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[Pg 186] 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,[Pg 189] 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.

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[Pg 191] 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[Pg 192] 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.[Pg 193] 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 sub[Pg 195]ject 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 cas[Pg 196]trated 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[Pg 197] 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[Pg 198] 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[Pg 199] 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[Pg 201] 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.

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.

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[Pg 203] 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[Pg 204] 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 infre[Pg 206]quently 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[Pg 207] 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,[Pg 209] 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 hypoad[Pg 210]renal 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 mytholo[Pg 211]gical 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.[Pg 213] 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[Pg 214] 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[Pg 217] 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[Pg 218] 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 offen[Pg 219]ded 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[Pg 220] 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[Pg 221] 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. Separa[Pg 222]tion 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[Pg 224] 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.

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, tem[Pg 225]porarily 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[Pg 226] 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[Pg 227] 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[Pg 228] 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 Pick[Pg 229]wick 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[Pg 231] 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[Pg 232] 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,[Pg 234] 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,[Pg 235] 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 circula[Pg 236]tion, 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).

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[Pg 238] 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 be[Pg 239]fore 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,[Pg 240] 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 exis[Pg 242]tence 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[Pg 243] 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 ad[Pg 244]renals, 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[Pg 245] 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.

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[Pg 246] 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[Pg 247] should remain "babies," that young children are far more lovable than adolescents, etc.

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.

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 at[Pg 248]traction 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.

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[Pg 252] 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.

The Case of Wagner. There is, of course, the famous example of Wagner who, at fifty-seven[Pg 253] 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[Pg 254] 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 prema[Pg 256]turely, 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.

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[Pg 257] 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[Pg 258] 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[Pg 260] 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[Pg 264] 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, re[Pg 265]veal to the psychoanalyst that lava is boiling under the apparently extinct cone of a safe volcano.

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[Pg 266] 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[Pg 267] 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"[Pg 268] 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.

The frigid woman, as I explained elsewhere is[Pg 269] 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[Pg 270] 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[Pg 271] 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.

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[Pg 272] 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 ad[Pg 273]viser 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[Pg 274] 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[Pg 276] 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 mak[Pg 278]ing 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[Pg 279] 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 con[Pg 280]quered 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,[Pg 281] 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[Pg 283] 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 her[Pg 284]self 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[Pg 285] 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 posi[Pg 286]tive 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[Pg 287] 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[Pg 288] 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[Pg 289] 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 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[Pg 290] 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.

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[Pg 293] 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[Pg 294] 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[Pg 295] 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[Pg 297] 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[Pg 298] 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[Pg 299] 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 [Pg 300] 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,[Pg 302] 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[Pg 304] 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[Pg 305] 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[Pg 306] 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[Pg 307] 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"[Pg 308] 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[Pg 309] them in the blood serum of cows, sheep, pigs or rabbits.

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[Pg 311] 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. [Pg 313] 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 [Pg 314] 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,[Pg 316] 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 crav[Pg 317]ings 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[Pg 319] 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[Pg 320] 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, as Ellis writes, has two aims:[Pg 322] "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 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."

Footnotes

[1] See Mary Sinclair's "The Life and Death of Harriet Freau."

[2] Kings. I, 1-2.

[3] Birth Control Review, April 1922.

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

[Pg 330]

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

[Pg 331]

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

[Pg 332]

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

[Pg 333]

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

[Pg 334]

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

[Pg 335]

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.

[Pg 336]

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

[Pg 337]

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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