§ 157
Many of these third persons are the wives of ignorant husbands who have hallucinated the fusion which they have never made. The husband fancies, perhaps, that the fusion can be effected by the wife; that all he needs to do is to submit himself to the wife as dispenser of delights and that by merely having him she will glow and burn with the heat necessary to fuse their two souls and make them a whole instead of fragments. Delusion! Hallucination!
The child says to a stick, “This is a horse.” The child husband says to himself, “This is my wife,” whether he knows it to be a fact or not. And curiously enough the child knows he is only fancying; but the man, in thousands of instances, does not know it.
This unconscious, and therefore almost irresistible, tendency on the part of men to believe the existence of what they wish is the main obstacle to man’s control of the erotic situation. Based on biological necessity, which in the merely instinctive acts of animals secures the sexual reaction on the part of the female, the unconscious phantasy still persists in the human animal, the phantasy that the erotic acme of the man causes that of the woman every time. But it is a phantasy in the majority of civilized marriages and tragically enough it may be the only flaw in some where congeniality and affection are flawless.
The bridegroom has this definite task before him to know his wife, for he can never know her before marriage. His knowing is a process of perception, the failure to perceive being a form of anesthesia in himself. Adam knew his wife—the only good he brought out of Paradise and fully compensating for the loss of Paradise.
When he knows his bride he will know exactly how much resistance he has to overcome in order to develop her. She cannot tell him anything in words, for no woman can know. Not even the most experienced woman sexually can put into words exactly what unconscious resistance she may have to even a virgin-pure man.
The bride’s resistance is just as real a force as is the gravity in a pile of stones. At the bottom of that pile of stones his bride’s soul waits and he has to remove them one by one; actions which take as concrete an amount of psychic energy as if they could be measured in foot-pounds or kilowatt hours.