§ 152
Possibly this is the place to say that if the young husband shows surprise or, worse, irritation at any of the, to him, seemingly bizarre acts of his new wife, he is providing her with exactly the reaction which her careful and thorough unconscious is looking for, finding which it says to itself: “Well, if I find many of these defects, farewell! I’ll attach myself to some other man.”
Whereas consciously she is triumphant in her power over him to make him anything from miserable to blissful.
This unconscious tendency to test the husband, based on the biological necessity of choosing a mate at least slightly stronger spiritually, psychically, mentally than herself, determines much of the actions of a maid with a man.
In married couples where the man is properly schooled in love, this wrangling on a low level does not take place except at its minimum at the outset. Frequently the woman immediately senses, unconsciously, that the man whose attentions she is receiving is of the stronger type necessary to compel her emotional submission.
This theory admits the possibility of perfect marriage between the lowest and highest types of intellect (which is an egoistic-social expression, not erotic) with proportionally happy results.
It also shows how every married couple can reinstate themselves in the most satisfactory mutual relation, even if they have already started on the wrong path.
If the husband realizes that he is only being tested, and by a sympathetic examiner who really wants him to pass the test, and that it requires only a little thinking on his own part to make him erotically a fully followed husband instead of a led one, he will certainly give the necessary time to visualizing the pattern his actions will have to take thereafter in order to make him successful.
In married couples where the man does not know or cannot learn the erotic principles, the surface wrangling based on the perpetual unconscious test continues, involving more and more of the couple’s egoistic-social activities, until finally it becomes so acute that nothing can prevent an open rupture.
In other couples where the man’s reactions satisfactorily answer the woman’s first tacit interrogation, the dramatic testing automatically stops.
Woman’s tendency to dissemble thus includes not merely verbal lies but also all forms of her behaviour toward her husband. Of course, if her erotic nature is entirely engaged she will have (for example) no possible motive to spend his money above what is needed for pleasing him through her developing her own personality in every way, or in acting in any capacity whatever that would in an egoistic-social sense be to his detriment, for through the perfect love episode she so strongly identifies herself with him that all his interests, even the egoistic-social, are superlatively hers, quite in contrast with the wife whose love impulses have been ungratified.
The wife with the ungratified love impulse reacting unconsciously, as described above, with irritated but unsatisfied desires, unconsciously reasons to herself on the talion plan because she has not risen from that to total identification. The irritated but unsatisfied wife, still on the “eye for eye” level of reaction, unconsciously says to herself: “If I cannot get something out of him one way, I will another, to pay for all he is getting out of me. If I cannot make him give me a real love episode I will make him give me other things. I will buy what I want and send him the bill. He shall give me money if he cannot give love. Love is what I want but I must have something.” This is unspoken, but still it exists.