It is the universal passivity of woman’s nature which makes her accept and assume man’s valuations of things, although these are utterly at variance with her nature. The way in which woman can be impregnated with the masculine point of view, the saturation of her innermost thoughts with a foreign element, her false recognition of morality, which cannot be called hypocrisy because it does not conceal anything anti-moral, her assumption and practise of things which in themselves are not in her realm, are all very well if the woman does not try to use her own judgment, and they succeed in keeping up the fiction of her superior morality. Complications first arise when these acquired valuations come into collision with the only inborn, genuine, and universally feminine valuation, the supreme value she sets on pairing.
Woman’s acceptance of pairing as the supreme good is quite unconscious on her part. As she has no sense of individuality she has nothing to contrast with pairing; and so, unlike man, she cannot realise its significance, or even notice the presence in herself of this instinct.
No woman knows, or ever has known, or ever will know, what she does when she enters into association with man. Femaleness is identical with pairing, and a woman would have to get outside herself in order to see and understand that she pairs. Thus it is that the deepest desire of woman, all that she means, and all that she is, remain unrecognised by her. There is nothing, then, to prevent the male negative valuation of pairing overshadowing the female positive valuation of it in the consciousness of the woman. The susceptibility of woman is so great that she can even act in opposition to what she is, to the one thing on which she really sets a positive value!
But the imposture which she enacts when she allows herself to be incorporated with man’s opinions of sexuality and shamelessness, even of the imposture itself, and when she uses the masculine standard for her actions, is such a colossal fraud that she is never conscious of it; she has acquired a second nature, without even guessing that it is not her real one; she takes herself seriously, believes she is something and that she believes in something; she is convinced of the sincerity and originality of her moralisings and opinions; the lie is as deeply rooted as that; it is organic. I cannot do better than speak of the ontological untruthfulness of woman.
Wolfram von Eschenbach says of his hero:
“... So keusch und rein
Ruht’ er bei seiner Königin,
Dass kein Genügen fänd’ darin
So manches Weib beim lieben Mann.
Dass doch so manche in Gedanken
Zur Üppigkeit will überschwanken,
Die sonst sich spröde zeigen kann!
Vor Fremden züchtig sie erscheinen,
Doch ist des Herzens tiefstes Meinen
Das Widerspiel vom äussern Schein.”
Wolfram indicates clearly enough what is at the bottom of woman’s heart, but he does not say all that is to be said. Women deceive themselves as well as others on this point. One cannot artificially suppress and supplant one’s real nature, the physical as well as the other side, without something happening. The hygienic penalty that must be paid for woman’s denial of her real nature is hysteria.
Of all the neurotic and psychic phenomena, those of hysteria are the most fascinating for psychologists; they represent a far more difficult and, therefore, a more interesting study than those observed in melancholia or in simple paranoia.
The majority of psychiatrists have a distrust of psychological analyses which it is not easy for them to shake off; every statement of pathological alteration of tissues or intoxication by certain means is for them a limine credible; it is only in psychical matters that they refuse to recognise a primary cause. But since no reason has so far been given why psychical phenomena should be of importance secondary to physical phenomena, it is quite justifiable to disregard such prejudices.
It is quite possible—there is nothing to prevent it being so—that a very great deal, perhaps everything, may depend on the proper interpretation of the “psychical mechanism” of hysteria. That this is so is proved by the fact that the few conclusions of any value with reference to hysteria so far discovered have been arrived at in this way; the investigations carried out by Pierre Janet, Oskar Vogt, and particularly by J. Breuer and S. Freud, show what I mean. All good work on hysteria will undoubtedly follow the lines these men have worked on; that is to say, by investigation of the psychological processes which led up to the disease.