CHAPTER VIII
Ego and Sex
If the course of love was regulated solely by sexual factors its study would be a comparatively simple matter. Sexual cravings find themselves, however, in conflict with many other manifestations of the life force. For the sexual libido is not the life force as certain psychoanalysts believe. It is only one of the manifestations of the electric stream produced in the brain and seeking an outlet.
In fact, sex is only a temporary manifestation of the life force, late to appear, early to disappear. Embryonic life begins several months before sex becomes observable in the fetus. Actual extrauterine life is in full swing before sex is ripe, that is, capable of fulfilling its biological destiny. Life continues sometimes many years after sex has ceased to serve its reproductive purpose.
The most powerful urge to which sex has to adapt itself in the life of the human animal is the ego urge, the craving for food and power, the selfish urge par excellence. At times, sex and ego work in perfect accord as they should, considering the close relationship of the nervous divisions carrying power to them.
Neurotic Complications, however, due to the necessary repressions of modern civilisation, throw them too often into conflict.
We might say that there is a natural source of conflict between them, for the ego urge is selfish, aiming as it does at the conservation of the individual and its personal upbuilding, while the sex urge, whose aim is to assure the continuance of the species, is altruistic.
By altruistic I mean that one human being must, before finding the complete gratification of his sex urge, join his body to that of another human being of the opposite sex, whose sex urge he helps gratify, the result of that cooperation being the creation of a third human being.
From this we may see clearly how the neurotic temperament, unusually self-centered, is likely to exacerbate whatever conflicts may exist between ego and sex.
Even in the so called normal human being, that is, the human being who in spite of life's repressions, manages to live at peace with his environment and himself, the will-to-power, the desire for possession and domination expresses itself constantly in what is generally considered as typically sexual manifestations of love.
Do not lovers say that they "possess" each other. Was not the Biblical God power before he became creation? In the beginning there was the Word, that is the expression, the utterance of the divine ego.