§ 185
A careful distinction needs here to be made between the sex activity that is really erotic—that of two perfectly mated lovers—and that which does not rise above the hyposomatic (physical) level. This latter invariably, except in the most unintelligent and spiritually undeveloped of humans, contains a conflict which may or may not enter consciousness. There is in people highly civilized according to puritanical ideals always a conscious conflict between the physical expression of love and their traditional ideas that the body is base and ignoble and the soul is a thing separate from the body and superior to it.
Psychoanalytic research into the unconscious shows that there in the levels below, and inaccessible to consciousness, the conflicts that like a perpetual tug of war are uselessly consuming large amounts of psychic energy are also, in that shunting of energy from its natural destination to other termini which may be practically any of the organs of the body, causing a derangement that if long continued easily becomes a functional disease.
The conflict that is conscious also produces a physiological derangement that may become a disorder. So in either case, whether the conflict be conscious or unconscious, the physiological processes are more or less disturbed.
If, as sometimes happens, a man’s inhibitions are too great, he is absolutely unable even to begin to have a love episode. If they are less great, he may be able to begin it but not to continue it. If there is any inhibition at all his part in the love episode is affected by just that amount of psychic energy that represents the force of his inhibition.
The conflict that is expressed in physical derangement, disorder, malaise or any other unpleasant result is almost always a mental conflict that can be resolved by mental means better than by physical.
In sex activity that is truly erotic there is no conflict in the man and none in the woman. It may be said that sex activity never becomes truly erotic until these conflicts have subsided.
But in the unhappy marriage a part of the conflict on the husband’s part comes from his unconscious realization that he has not assumed the truly masculine rôle.