In no sense can the so-called sacrifice made by a woman of these egoistic-social demands be regarded as a masochistic self-sacrifice involving any erotic factor. The erotic is not sacrificed but magnified. The misfortune is only that in some cases the husband does not cause the sacrifice which then is left for some other man to bring about.
Without for a moment implying that this illicit love on the woman’s part has any more ethical value than the man’s attempted rescue, it is impossible not to believe that the periodical abolition by the husband of all egoistic-social inhibitions of his wife is a purification of the erotic factor. Taking place within the marital state and effected solely by the husband, this makes the light of love burn so much more brightly as to illumine every other life activity.
§ 181
Jealousy is treated by Ellis in a vein apparently unaware of the contribution made to this subject by Freud, who shows that the man is jealous because he is either physically or psychically impotent. If the husband either knows or thinks that he is unable to lift his wife into the empyrean, the thought inevitably comes to him that there must be some other man who can do it. If this thought is an unconscious one it is manifested in every restrictive measure taken to prevent his wife from meeting other men, for which measures he assigns not the real cause, for he does not know it, but all sorts of reasons developing through the unconscious mechanism of rationalization, either that she is not attending to her duty, or neglecting him and his interests or spending too much money, or what not. This condition of jealousy is all the more likely to exist in the husbands who are so ignorant of love that they are unaware that there is any such thing as the woman’s acme of pleasure in the love episode. This form of jealousy, primarily due to the husband’s ignorance, is all the more painful to him because he does not understand, and all the more tragic in its irony.
It seems, too, quite probable that part of the jealousy of women is due to a corresponding situation of their own erotic life. A woman who fails to apperceive in consciousness the overwhelming somatic reactions which occur at the climax of the love episode is in a condition quite analogous to that of psychic impotence in man. If man’s jealousy, as has been shown by psychoanalysis, is really caused by his psychic impotence, i.e., his anesthesia, woman’s jealousy is evidently also caused by her anesthesia which is a form of psychic impotence.
§ 182
The case cited by Ellis (that of Mrs. Samuel Pepys, as recounted in the famous diary) contains only the man’s side. Possibly if the lady’s side were known it would be found that she was herself deficient in love and that she dreaded her husband’s possibly finding a woman who could react toward him in a more complete and satisfactory way than she could herself, this entirely apart from the question whether or not it should be the duty of the man to evoke such a response. She would feel unhappy and all the more conscious if she knew it was his duty and that he had fled from her to others where perhaps the task would be easier.
It is also insignificant that Pepys himself records: “I must here remark that I have lain with my moher (wife) as a husband more times since this falling out than in, I believe, twelve months before, and with more pleasure to her than in all the time of our marriage before.” This cannot be adduced as a proof that the jealousy aroused in the wife was the cause of any improvement in the marital relations of the Pepyses, but that his noting an increase in her pleasure simply indicates that because of his own lack of imagination he had not been playing the husband’s part for the preceding twelvemonth as he should have. His own imagination was probably stirred by “Deb’s” propinquity; as it would not have been had his erotic life with his wife been on the high passional level it should. This is the only reason why a little jealousy is supposed to whet the edge of love. If Pepys had been grounded in true love instead of a small-minded man, flinging notes to his wife’s maid, advising her to help him out in the lie he told his wife, he would not have failed so to control his wife’s erotic emotions that she would have outshone any other woman in attractiveness.
§ 183
Furthermore Ellis admits, and quotes his authorities to show, that jealousy is “an emotion which is at its maximum among animals, among savages, among children, in the senile, in the degenerate, and very specially in chronic alcoholics.” He notes that the supreme artists and masters of the human heart, who have most consummately represented the tragedy of jealousy, clearly recognized that it is either atavistic or pathological. Shakespeare made his Othello a barbarian, and Tolstoy made the Pozdnischeff of his Kreutzer Sonata a lunatic. But the jealous person is above all (at least psychically) impotent and projects, on the most likely object, his own desires, which he cannot fulfill for himself.