In married couples where the man does not know or cannot learn the erotic principles, the surface wrangling based on the perpetual unconscious test continues, involving more and more of the couple’s egoistic-social activities, until finally it becomes so acute that nothing can prevent an open rupture.
In other couples where the man’s reactions satisfactorily answer the woman’s first tacit interrogation, the dramatic testing automatically stops.
Woman’s tendency to dissemble thus includes not merely verbal lies but also all forms of her behaviour toward her husband. Of course, if her erotic nature is entirely engaged she will have (for example) no possible motive to spend his money above what is needed for pleasing him through her developing her own personality in every way, or in acting in any capacity whatever that would in an egoistic-social sense be to his detriment, for through the perfect love episode she so strongly identifies herself with him that all his interests, even the egoistic-social, are superlatively hers, quite in contrast with the wife whose love impulses have been ungratified.
The wife with the ungratified love impulse reacting unconsciously, as described above, with irritated but unsatisfied desires, unconsciously reasons to herself on the talion plan because she has not risen from that to total identification. The irritated but unsatisfied wife, still on the “eye for eye” level of reaction, unconsciously says to herself: “If I cannot get something out of him one way, I will another, to pay for all he is getting out of me. If I cannot make him give me a real love episode I will make him give me other things. I will buy what I want and send him the bill. He shall give me money if he cannot give love. Love is what I want but I must have something.” This is unspoken, but still it exists.
§ 153
A man cannot feel what isn’t there without phantasying up to the point of hallucination. But what isn’t there is simply what he hasn’t put there in the way of response to appropriate action on his own part. He cannot put it there if he is mentally autoerotic. ([§ 112]).
He must know in advance what to expect, and what is the necessary expression of woman’s erotic feelings. If he does not, he is doomed to surprise of an unpleasant character; for he will either be disappointed when he finds that his wife’s reactions are not up to his narrowly limited pattern or he will be embarrassed by a too great gush of feeling on her part and an arousal of passion so tremendous that he does not know how to handle it.
This embarrassment is related to a certain type of mild disgust or aversion felt by men to whom some women make advances not considered truly feminine by the men. This does not refer to the brazen self-assertiveness of the prostitute which is by most men clearly recognized as egoistic-social. It refers to a truly erotic abandon sometimes seen in a woman who absolutely throws herself upon the man that has inspired her fancy. This attitude makes impossible for some men the satisfaction of victory or conquest.
This too great abandon on the woman’s part evokes in such a man the thought either that she is sexually more potent than he (an erotic reaction in no way connected with egoistic-social impulses); or that her own environment has been such as to bring out this expression in her. If she has been brought up in a family where love needs are frankly recognized, their wholesomeness will make her much more responsive, at once, to her husband’s love.