CHAPTER XXVII
Negative Love
The only form of love which is positive is complete love, which gratifies both the physical and the mental aspects of the organism and which, besides, is human and, hence, recognises and admits the relativity of all things human.
Any form of love which excludes either the physical or the mental relationship of male and female, is incomplete and, therefore, abnormal.
All the puritanical rant to the contrary notwithstanding, platonic love and prostitution are on the same biological level, as morbid and unnatural one as the other.
Prostitution only gratifies the body more or less completely and starves the mind, causing the mental aspect of the love craving to become stunted or perverse.
Platonic love gratifies the intellect more or less completely, rather less than more, for it offers few egotistical rewards, but it starves the body and leads it into adopting morbid forms of craving gratification.
A Clean Life. Many a patient has declared proudly to me that he led a "clean life." A few days later, after losing his selfconsciousness in my presence, he would gradually confess to a terrible "struggle" against his "animal" instincts. Which meant, that at irregular intervals, self-gratification would give him, in a morbid day dream, the woman whose love he craved; or a pollution dream would allow him, in the unconsciousness and ethical irresponsibility of sleep, to make up for his privations by indulging in imaginary promiscuous cohabitation.
This is in too many cases, the seamy side of a platonic love affair, when one or both of the mates is not naturally unsexed but unsexes himself thru what he or she calls will-power and which analysis reveals to be conscious or unconscious fear.