CHAPTER XXIII
The Personality Behind The Fetishes. Glands
A man selects a mate because he finds in her fetishes the assurance of safety which those fetishes portended when observed in the appearance of his affectionate, devoted, self-sacrificing mother, whose intelligence and wisdom he never doubted when he was, let us say, ten or fifteen and she was thirty or thirty-five.
And likewise, a woman expects, consciously or unconsciously, that certain physical characteristics which once indicated, when observed in her father's appearance, power, protection, a gainful occupation, sympathy and understanding, etc., will mean exactly the same thing when she finds them reproduced totally or in part in a male human being of the marriageable age.
The Parent-Child Relationship, involving at first boundless devotion on the part of the strong parent to the helpless nursling, infant and child, and later, complete submission of the growing child and adolescent to the older and, supposedly world-wiser, parent, has very little, if anything, in common with the relationship of mate to mate.
Sex plays no conscious part in the parent-child relationship.
It does not tinge every action and every thought of the two parties concerned. The secret cravings or the secret repulsion it may awaken never distort consciously the judgments passed by parents on their children, children on their parents. Of neurotic unconscious distortions of judgment there is a plenty. Never, however, does the strife narrow down to this: "He or she does not satisfy me sexually," "he or she humiliates me sexually by being attracted to others," "he or she is an obstacle to my complete sexual gratification with another," etc., sources of open hostility of the most painfully conscious kind between mates.
The mother who satisfied our egotism became to us beautiful and perfect. The female who employs the same means our mother did, to win us, but who cannot arouse us sexually, never appears to us very attractive physically or mentally.
On the other hand we are apt to disregard, temporarily at least, the mental deficiencies of the man or woman who gives us the most complete sexual gratification.