§ 154
Fate is inscrutable and mysterious. Dame Fortune is a mother-imago. The husband who does not understand his wife is a child who does not understand his mother. According to her fancy she may give or not give what he wants her to bestow upon him. Children comparatively early learn to manage their mothers, but the man who has failed to learn how to control his wife erotically has not advanced even as far as these children.
Such men are the ones who profess to revere the mystery in the feminine nature. They are simply a case of arrested emotional development. There should be no mystery in marriage. There is plenty of room for passion and romance without demanding that there shall be in it any mystery whatever. The inscrutability of the mysterious expression on the face of the Mona Lisa was the expression of Leonardo’s extreme infantility, the erotic childishness of a man who never really loved a woman as a man should.
Man’s projection of mystery upon woman is his infantile attitude toward her expressing his unconscious desire not to give but to receive.
What constitutes the husband’s complete erotic control is the removal of all mystery, his full perception of all the factors in the erotic situation. One of these is the actual fact as to whether or not his wife has in the love episode reached the erotic acme.
He frequently thinks, if he is one of the numerous men without insight, that she has; when as a fact she has not.
It is sublimely stupid for a doctor to tell the wife to pretend that she has reached the erotic acme in every love episode, and to say that no man can tell whether or not she has reached that degree of exaltation; so she might as well deceive him in order to keep the marital peace. Such men as follow this advice have not the remotest resemblance to human men, nor do they deserve to retain the love of their wives even if they have once gained it. One can tell whether a person is unconscious or not, or if she sleeps or not. A real husband can tell whether or not his wife has reached the erotic acme.