The Play Function of Love. Another factor which the monstrous hypocrisy of puritanism makes very difficult to discuss openly and honestly and which wrecks many promising unions is the ignorance, more common than we suspect among married couples, of what Maurice Parmelee in his "Personality and Behavior" has called the Play Function of Love, a term which has been given a broader meaning by Havelock Ellis in an article for the Medical Review of Reviews for March 1921.
The average man or woman is tragically ignorant of the mission of sex.
The average man, as Ellis writes, has two aims: "to prove that he is a man and to relieve a sexual tension.
"He too often considers himself, from traditional habits, as the active partner in love and his own pleasure as the prime motive of the sex communion.
"His wife, naturally adopts the complementary attitude, regards herself as the passive partner and her pleasure as negligible.
"She has not mastered the art of love, with the result that her whole nature remains ill-developed and unharmonized, and that she is incapable of bringing her personality (having indeed no achieved personality to bring) to bear effectively on the problems of society and the world around her."
I have described in "Sex Happiness" the tragedies which result from that form of ignorance, especially the tragedy of the unsatisfied wife, her restlessness, her gradual dislike of her mate, her curiosity as to what feelings she might experience if married to another man, when some other man seems to awaken her erotism, and then the dilemma, repression leading to neurosis, or indulgence leading into the divorce court.
Psychoanalysis to the Rescue. "In this matter," Ellis writes, "we may learn a lesson from the psychoanalysts of today without any implication that psychoanalysis is necessarily a desirable or even possible way of attaining the revelation of love. The wiser psychoanalysts insist that the process of liberating the individual from outer and inner influences that repress or deform his energies and impulses is effected by removing the inhibitions on the free play of his nature.
"It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the leading out of the individual's special tendencies.