§ 31
Psychoanalysis has among other striking paradoxes this one most applicable here. The person who says he cannot do a thing is consciously saying, “I cannot,” but unconsciously saying, “I do not wish to.”
Any reply that can be made by any man who says he cannot learn to control his own erotic emotions and therefore is unable to control his wife’s is excusing himself, on the ground that he will not be censured by others if he is really unable. He may be laughed at, or commiserated for his incapacities, but he cannot, so he thinks, be held responsible for them.
But if there is one important and valuable advance made by modern psychology it is that the unconscious, which says, “I do not wish to,” causing the conscious man to say, “I cannot”—this unconscious can be trained, reëducated, reshaped, repatterned. It may take more than a month. The final emergence of action, based on the re-patterned unconscious, may be sudden. But it can be done.
Those who say, “I cannot do it” are in their ignorance simply saying, “I do not wish to do it.”
They would wish to do it if they had in their minds—in the hypersomatic portion of their personalities—an adequately vivid picture of exactly what it is desired to do.
It would be impossible to put into a book a detailed pattern of marital behaviour on the part of husbands, particularly hyposomatic details. But it is hoped that the book will give as clear an exposition of the hypersomatic lineaments of the marital pattern as will be required to make any man that reads it at least willing to change his own love pattern for one that has in it infinitely more satisfaction and triumph, containing as it does the only means whereby a single demi-human atom may completely unite with another and form an entirely new whole.