§ 27
It is not to be overlooked that the satisfaction derived from the effect of one’s own action may be due to an unconscious magnifying of these effects. Those who have a slight degree of discriminative ability will think that their acts and the results of their acts are fine, whether they are or not, and may remain in the same illusion throughout their lives. They may never become disillusioned. I may continue to believe that the effects produced on my readers are deep and far-reaching whether they are or not. But if I were content to read books and listen to lectures and felt no desire to write and to influence others or to persuade them to see things as I see them I should derive all my satisfactions via the route of passive experiences.
There is a fundamental difference, then, between the essentially masculine and the essentially feminine type of character, according as the individual gets his satisfactions—the relaxations of his tensions of desire—via the route of feelings caused in him by the action of others or via the route of feelings caused in him by the true and illusionless perception that he has produced effects in other persons or in other things.
The rearrangement of values is the transition from a frame of mind in which the satisfactions are via the “passive” route to those via the active route. This rearrangement need never, for any biological reason, take place in a woman who is properly mated. If she be married but not mated by a male individual who has not made the above-mentioned transition, she will herself tend toward getting her satisfaction via the “active” or “male” route. In other words, rather than have nothing, she deludes herself into thinking she has something by getting a cheapened substitute, by becoming husband to her husband, who in turn becomes wife.
No man can be said to be successful as a husband who has not made this transition. No man is exempt from the necessity of the transition from this type of physical autoerotism to allerotism, simply because he was once an infant, and until he makes this transition he is, no matter what his age in years, still an infant. It has been undeniably proved by psychoanalysis and experienced by people in innumerable forms that no woman can be dominated by an infantile man.
Therefore every man is either the one or the other; either an adult man or an infantile man. He can by taking thought, and after reading books like the present, learn to which class he belongs. If he belongs in the infantile class he has been dominated by the “mother imago” or “angel imago,”[14] and if this be a fixation it will require a deep analysis by an expert before he can come to a realization of his true status; but it is unlikely that nine out of ten who read this book will require more than the advice offered in the following chapters. Or it will require a good orientation and suggestive treatment from a well equipped erotologist.
No wife can be a thoroughly happy one whose husband is in the infantile class, and who thus needs her “playmate.” (See [§ 12].) Such women are truly in a tragic situation. The infantile (autoerotic) behaviour of such a man in the fragmentary (never complete) love episodes leaves the woman nervous, “on edge,” with an unconscious conflict in her psyche that tends to undermine her health, and to make her an insuperable mystery to her husband, who himself suffers through his own ignorance. He knows, if he knows anything, only that something is amiss, but blinded by his own egotism can never believe that the cause lies solely in him, no matter how blameless he may be, from one point of view, on account of his ignorance.