Physicians and druggists dispensing aphrodisiacs can testify to the prevalence of large families in the homes of almost impotent men.
The man who can fulfill his sexual duties once a year for fifteen years and foils his mate's attempts at contraception, is quite able to raise a very large family and to pass among his associates for a very virile man. The sight of his numerous progeny silences any scepticism as to his sexual vitality.
Some of the most astonishing vagaries in the choice of a mate are traceable to purely egotistical cravings. Neurotic women married to a superior man may refuse to express any sexual joy in his arms. They remain frigid in his company and then give themselves to some rather inferior individual to whom they feel superior and in whose arms they show the most complete abandon. The medical and lay press very often relates cases of fine looking and apparently normal women who marry idiots or morons. Their sense of inferiority and their fear of ego-defeat makes them seek inferior mates unlikely to dominate them in any respect. Some young women conceal their morbid desire to mate with a degenerate under a philanthropic mask. They pretend, when marrying a drunkard or a thief, that their aim is to regenerate him.
And so do some young men with an inferiority complex explain to their family and friends that they have married a menial or a prostitute to reclaim her.
War Prisoners. German newspapers mentioned several times during the war that war prisoners were treated too cordially by the women, many of whom had affairs with the defeated enemies. In several cities, it became necessary for the military authorities to issue proclamations on the subject, berating the offenders for their "shameless behavior." The same facts were observed in France and in Italy altho they were given less prominence in the American newspapers.
Why was it that those women idolised men they were supposed to hate as enemies and accorded sexual favors to them? Why was it that they did not enjoy more completely the victory of the males of their race and jeer at the defeated foes? Those women were neurotics who, unable to enjoy the embraces of victorious, superior males, felt themselves superior in the arms of defeated and humiliated men.
Neurotic Motherliness. A patient of mine who had always shown herself rebellious in her attitude to her sexually potent lover, became all tenderness and submissiveness one day when sickness almost cut off his potency.
"I never loved him as much as I did yesterday," she told me, "for I felt then that I could really mother him." Which translated into honest parlance meant, to use Adler's vocabulary, that on that occasion he was "below" and she was "above."
When Ego and Sex do not Conflict, a combination of the two gives results which stamp human love as distinctly superior to animal sexuality. Just as higher egotism has created cooperation, which eliminates individual fights and establishes in their place group fighting, healthy egotism added to sex has introduced cooperation and altruism into love. The egotistical desire to please and dominate the female thru vigorous caresses has thrown into the shade the primitive cavemanlike ways. Man no longer strikes the female unconscious in order to satisfy his sex cravings on her prostrate body. His aim is rather to satisfy his mate first. This of course carries sexuality far away from its primal aims. Love's byplays, in many cases, replace love's specific functions, the road from sensuality to sterility being a short one. When the goal of sterility is attained, we see sex willingly relinquishing its biological aims to egotism. In the plays of sex and ego as in the conflicts between the two urges, ego is more frequently victorious than sex.