§ 193
Some considerations on the status of prostitution are necessary in every book that attempts to discuss marital relations. Far as the poles asunder though they may be in externals, they are yet the common activity of the same man in many instances. Figures show that the married man is the main support of the prostitute. What he does to his psyche in the direction of actually splitting it by this double life has been described more or less in the following manner. It is not merely that he either lies to one woman and consorts with another and is under the psychical strain of remembering never to confuse the parts of this double drama he is enacting. It is worse than that.
It has been shown through studies of the unconscious in men that show a strong leaning toward fallen women, that they are unwittingly reënacting a jealousy drama of their own infancy in which they try to rescue from the father their own object of earliest love, their mother (cf. [§ 179]).
Furthermore, the average man’s bringing up leads him unconsciously to separate all the women in the world into two classes. This simple division is characteristic of childhood, which sees everything either black or white and does not conceive fine gradations. The two classes of women are the angel-mother type and the devil-prostitute type, and this distinction with hardly any other he maintains sometimes till the end of his life.