§ 160
The anesthesia of the husband and the failure to come up to the constant test are both increased by man’s ignorance of the fundamental biological nature of the woman.
The only remedy for it, which will improve the conditions of marriage and reduce to the minimum infidelity of wives and of husbands as well, is the husband’s deeper knowledge of the feminine element. This knowledge, which should be an essential part of a man’s education, cannot be entirely given him by another, but must be the result of his own observation.
It is obvious that the intimate adaptations required of each marriage are absolutely individual. While all women and all men are actuated by similar unconscious motives, the specific working out of these motives results in an interplay of forces which is different in each individual marriage. There are over a thousand types of this intimate interplay of personalities within the marital state; also the types change in special cases from time to time. It is easy to see, therefore, that the minutiæ or marital living have endless combinations of possibilities, concerning which the husband would do well to become as well informed as possible.
§ 161
The hasty husband takes his own motions and his own erotic acme, which are but parts, for the whole. He takes the most physical aspect for the love episode. Naming the part for the whole is a sort of metonymy, which is a figure of speech and not literal truth. The hasty husband is in this sense unconsciously a liar. He cannot tell the truth because he cannot know it. If we say that this fragmentary performance of his is taken by him to be logically or intellectually like the whole, we must say that he rates low in discrimination. He ought to know that the fragment is no more like the whole thing than a hand is like the body.
Giving the physical side of the love episode too great a value is like connecting it too closely with the imagination, or with that part of the imagination that is bound up with the emotions. The factor in the sex life of most of the animal-like humans, that is, most closely connected with the strongest emotions, is the acme. In true human love, then, the strongest emotions are reassociated with other elements of the love episode than the acme. And the acme is the greatest desideratum only from the unconscious or instinctive point of view.
The imagination, the power of visualizing (and other forms of representations as well) then involves the power to affect, or to effect changes in the somatic reactions of the husband that render possible the prolongation of a sex act, and its transformation, into a love episode. The imagination of organic sensations in himself, in the normal husband, retards the progress of the love episode for the benefit of the wife. The hasty husband lacks just this imagination and the love episode is hurried through in the manner of an animal sex act.
The husband who reaches his acme of erotic relaxation even before actual contact with his love object has not in consciousness dwelt much upon the numerous preliminaries. Methods of retardation are methods of admitting into consciousness the different innate associations between emotions and the touch and movement sensations constituting the first stages.