I do not intend to settle all those problems within the limits of a short chapter, but rather to point out some of the morbid components of mother love which a psychoanalyst detects in his women patients, and which, exaggerated in the neurotic, exist to a slight degree in every woman.
Sex Cravings and Motherhood Cravings are so closely related that few psychologists have ever dreamt of dissociating them for the purpose of study. The average moralist, who prefers cheap popularity to scientific accuracy, excuses the existence of sex cravings only on one condition, that they become absolutely subservient to motherhood cravings.
The birth control agitation which is making such rapid headway at the present day, on the other hand, means, in part, that while motherhood may be the consequence of unregulated sex activities, it is not, for all women, their conscious motive.
Why is it that some women with an erotic disposition and a voluptuous physique, fear pregnancy while other women, apparently indifferent to men, crave motherhood?
Physiology does not give us a very satisfactory answer to this question. Endocrinologists tell us that sex cravings are determined by the ovaries and motherhood cravings by the posterior part of the pituitary gland, but this leaves us exactly where we were when we started out.
Pregnancy and Health. All physiologists will agree with the statement that in a normal, complex free woman, a type which unfortunately, the complexity of our civilization does not allow us to behold very frequently, pregnancy is accompanied by an unusual activity of all the organism, imparting to the female a sense of great power and, consequently, of well-being, mental and physical. The adrenals work at high pressure to produce the muscular tone necessary in gestation. The thyroid is called upon to transform more and more of the electric current produced by the brain cells. New glands of a temporary nature develop in the woman's body, regulating her life functions more accurately and imparting to her a feeling of dreamy happiness and relaxation.
After delivery, another part of her body enters into activity, her mammary glands, so closely related to the genitals that any stimulation of either region finds a strong echo in the other. Many are the women in whom lactation produces intensely erotic feelings affording them at times full gratification.
Fear of Pregnancy. Unfortunately, civilisation has surrounded motherhood with so many complications, social, ethical, financial, sentimental, etc., that in very few women, indeed, is that biological process an unmixed pleasure, dissociated from all pain and anxiety.
Vomiting, which expresses the female's disgust for her condition, or her mate or the offspring; cramplike tensions, expressing her worries about her appearance, her anxious thought of financial or social consequences; anxiety states, affecting the adrenals, which discolor her face (pregnancy mask), make pregnancy hideous in many cases.
Even the process of parturition seems to have become more painful and dangerous with advancing civilisation.