§ 192
If he need the excitements of a plurality of women, it is proof that he cannot get a normal amount of tension and relaxation from his own wife. There are those, of course, who live their married life on the theory that the physical tensions and relaxations of sex are too gross for refined marital relations, and that their wives would be shocked if they experienced them. The boy brought up with the angel-imago (or mother-imago, see [§ 195]) as his ideal of woman necessary to be the mother of his children would inevitably identify his wife with a prostitute if he succeeded in evoking the highest psychical exaltation in her erotic sphere. He has plurality ingrained in his nature from the cradle; the feminine sex is not one but at least two: angel and prostitute. Unable to conceive the two existing in one woman, in fact unwilling to conceive this, he perforce puts the mother of his own children in the angel class and would be shocked if she evinced any of the characteristics of the other class.
The irony of which is that whatever reactions the prostitute shows are her attempt to imitate what she conceives as the highest type of erotism, what her patron’s highest erotic development would call for. Whatever impulses of erotic nature she has, which are few enough in the class that practise promiscuity for pay, are so overweighted by the egoistic-social impulses of material self-advancement, that they lose whatever value they might otherwise have.
A so-called prostitute, like Victor Hugo’s Mlle. Drouet, who after promiscuity devotes herself with absolute fidelity to one man is no longer a prostitute. She has, in thus placing the erotic above the egoistic-social motive, fulfilled the highest human function except that of parenthood.
It is possible that a man of many women may think he is seeking for his final mate. Such men have been heard to express somewhat similar sentiments. “If I could,” said one roué, “effect a grand passion with some woman, she would be the only one for me.” He thought he could not gain this result from his wife, but if he were a whole man with erotic unity instead of a roué with the disassembled psyche, he could effect the grand passion quite as easily with his wife as with another woman.