§ 194
Strangely enough this division of women into two classes, while it is made by most men in their unconscious, evokes opposite reactions in two types of men, some of whom are found by the psychoanalysts as “more potent” with the prostitute type, while others are more potent with their wives. Yet these men are not wholly potent to the extent of carrying out the love episode to a conclusion perfectly satisfactory to their wives, and in the illicit relation they are still more precipitant.
It seems, however, most probable that the illicit woman has the effect on them of producing an overvaluation of some particular factor in the nature of a fetish which has lost its overplus of emotional value in the case of the wife. As has been already pointed out, this overvaluation of one or another factor in the total situation of the episode has an accelerating effect in the episode with the less familiar woman, an effect which, because of habit, has become less in the episode with the wife.
Another element in the situation is that with the woman of the prostitute type the man is concerned in no degree with any reaction on her part, whereas with his wife he may, in some cases, feel a certain dim sense of responsibility. Added to which the professional prostitute frequently pretends to be controlled, while the average wife does not.
It happens that this unimaginative paucity of merely twofold division of women unfortunately involves almost without exception the unconscious assumption that his sexual gratification is the function of the prostitute and is both absent from and not supplied by the woman of the angel type, from which stratum of society he naturally selects his wife. No wonder then that many men consider their wives “oversexed” if they show any great passion. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” This type of man who rigidly demands that his wife shall be an angel (as, when an infant, he thought that his mother was) makes, or tries to make out of her a sexless worker or butterfly while he goes to the prostitute weed for the satisfaction of his imperative sexual needs. He is unable to act as if his wife had exactly the same human body as himself, the same or homologous glands and identical sexual needs with himself, the denial of which is the cause of much if not most of the nervousness of women and accountable for a good part of their ill health and weakness.