Psychoanalysis also shows the close connection of this deficient masculinity with jealousy on the one hand, and with paranoia on the other. Also it has been shown that morbid jealousy in woman has sometimes the same cause. “The root of this jealousy is a non-conscious homosexuality. She is jealous of her woman friend, because she herself is in love with the friend. She puts herself in the rôle of the man.”[27]
From these considerations it will be evident that the man or woman with the unconscious homosexual trend cannot be a true mate until the trend is redirected. The obverse of this is also quite suggestive, although not necessarily operative in all instances; namely, that, if the passion for his wife cools, it may be because he has, or has developed, in himself a homosexual tendency of which he is unconscious.
§ 185
A careful distinction needs here to be made between the sex activity that is really erotic—that of two perfectly mated lovers—and that which does not rise above the hyposomatic (physical) level. This latter invariably, except in the most unintelligent and spiritually undeveloped of humans, contains a conflict which may or may not enter consciousness. There is in people highly civilized according to puritanical ideals always a conscious conflict between the physical expression of love and their traditional ideas that the body is base and ignoble and the soul is a thing separate from the body and superior to it.
Psychoanalytic research into the unconscious shows that there in the levels below, and inaccessible to consciousness, the conflicts that like a perpetual tug of war are uselessly consuming large amounts of psychic energy are also, in that shunting of energy from its natural destination to other termini which may be practically any of the organs of the body, causing a derangement that if long continued easily becomes a functional disease.
The conflict that is conscious also produces a physiological derangement that may become a disorder. So in either case, whether the conflict be conscious or unconscious, the physiological processes are more or less disturbed.
If, as sometimes happens, a man’s inhibitions are too great, he is absolutely unable even to begin to have a love episode. If they are less great, he may be able to begin it but not to continue it. If there is any inhibition at all his part in the love episode is affected by just that amount of psychic energy that represents the force of his inhibition.
The conflict that is expressed in physical derangement, disorder, malaise or any other unpleasant result is almost always a mental conflict that can be resolved by mental means better than by physical.