The praise of the most affectionate husband or lover, wife or mistress, is insufficient to raise the neurotic's self-esteem. With all neurotics, familiarity breeds contempt and it must be from the lips of a new man or new woman that they must hear their praise sung before their feeling of inferiority is deadened and allows them to enjoy that praise.
CHAPTER XI
Is Free Love Possible?
"American Medicine" commenting upon the fact that divorces have increased twenty per cent in eight years and that, if the rate of increase continues, there will be as many divorces as marriages in thirty years from now, reaches the conclusion that "the individual has moved on far in the past two thousand years, while the institution of marriage has remained unaltered through the centuries.... The basis of marriage as it was originally conceived was entirely a racial one in which the individual counted for little; it was meant as a means of building a family and conserving it. Nothing else counted and the primitive individual exacted little else.... The modern man and woman demands in his mate more than that and it is here that the marriage institution is most defective in that it does not yield to these greater demands."
Polygamy and polyandry have been found wanting and have been abandoned. Monogamy is, at the present day, tempered by frequent infidelity and numerous divorces. Which means that it does not satisfy the needs of the human race. Shall free love offer a solution?
Man the Dissatisfied. I might as well voice here my pessimistic belief that there is no permanent solution for any human problems. The only tangible difference between man and the animals is that the animals are satisfied and man everlastingly dissatisfied. No cat was ever dissatisfied enough with the primitive feline way of catching mice to invent a mouse trap.
The animals solved their problems thousands of years ago. Unless domesticated and exposed to the exclusive influence of men, they never vary from the form of behavior of their particular species.
The only problem they have been unable to solve is how to get rid of man, the invader and parasite, and they will never cope with it.
Man's satisfaction with every new improvement is only temporary.