§ 188
The erotic motive is not represented or meant by the ordinary expression used by married people who say, of course, they love each other, or they would not have married. Erotic means more than “inspired by love” in the sense that the uninitiated use the term love, which in common language is of very wide application including even food and clothing and all other egoistic-social expressions. Erotic not only means inspired by love in the most whole, passionate sense but implies also that the persons activated by erotic motives have at least some knowledge of the art of love, a knowledge which includes something about the unconscious factor. Otherwise love has not progressed to its higher phase of erotism, and is mostly made up of affection which is primarily egoistic-social. Love is a word that has become too debased in the minds of most people to serve as a term for what is here outlined.
If on the other hand a marriage is a hologamous one, in which the husband’s egoistic-social motives are duly subordinated to his erotic motive, then the erotic motive, freed from extraneous elements, will cause both his conscious and his unconscious passion to be centred on one woman. No other marriage deserves the name. “Marriage” is derived from the Latin word mas, male, and originally referred only to the woman. She was “manned.”
If we should say today that a woman was thoroughly manned we should be understood to mean that she had sexual relations with one or more men. To most we should not probably convey the meaning that she had been completed, as an originally defective demi-human being, by the necessary complement to fill out her being to the totality of human possibility, or that this completion involved the development in her of an absolutely new attitude toward the world which she could not attain without physical and spiritual union with one man.
This implies also that the corresponding statement should be made of the truly married man. As an originally incomplete or defective demi-human being lacking a complement, he needs to be completely womaned, for which indeed there is no appropriate word of Latin derivation. But if we should say a man was comprehensively womaned we should be understood to mean probably that he had both a wife and concubines—that his affection and egoistic-social impulses were gratified by the former and his erotic needs by the latter. Yet it is really not possible for a man to be perfectly and completely womaned except by one woman. If his counterpart is a mosaic of fifty different varicoloured fragments he cannot be said to have done anything but use a separate facet of each woman composing the mosaic, and to have left unused all her other facets. So he cannot be said to have seen any of the other facets, a lack of vision constituting a kind of anesthesia already mentioned in [§ 141].