Considerations of the matter of control lead to the conclusion that it is possible only by means of the imagination, and because imagination is only the reawakening with possible recombination of images of past experiences, we are again confronted with the problem of explaining how the experience to be imaged in advance and looked for and waited for may be presented both to the men who have and to those who have not had sex experience.
As one cannot control anything except according to a pattern, the pattern of controlled action must be in the mind of any who intend to achieve control.
The method then, by which the husband is to achieve control of his own, and thus over his wife’s erotic reactions, is simply observation. He absolutely requires fully to note the effect that what he does has on his wife. If he succeeds in averting his gaze, figuratively, from himself to his partner, he will find that his own reactions take on a lessened value in his eyes. His own reaction, one of ecstatic pleasure is, in comparison with his wife’s, highly concentrated on one detail of the love episode. This is, of course, the most important one in animals and would be in humans, if humans were animals, but the fact that they are not and that erotic values have developed in humans that do not exist in animals, makes the man’s erotic acme take on a much smaller significance and value.
Most husbands go through the love episode as if they were animals, merely procreating progeny, while yet starting from no such purpose. The purpose is, of course, in so many men solely the purpose to gratify themselves and not anyone else, that, of course, any deliberate thought of ways and means of gratifying any other, does not occur to them.
Many men, indeed, are filled with embarrassment, if not dismay, in perceiving a deeper and more extended reaction in their women than they perceive in themselves. With such a power which they observe developing in their wives they do not know how to compete. The situation of a husband who finds himself developing in his wife a much richer and fuller erotism than he thinks he has himself, contains the unconscious factor of unflattering comparison. Unconsciously he does not wish to find her richer than himself because that gives him a sense of unconscious inferiority and injures his feeling of control. So the marital situation contains the unconscious wish on the husband’s part not to find in his wife an erotism greater than his own, entirely apart from any conscious idea he may have that he should not have an “oversexed” woman as a wife.
CHAPTER VIII
HOLOGAMY VS. PROSTITUTION
§ 187
Marriage, in the sense of a legal bond between two people who are bound together in no other way than that affecting the interests of the egoistic-social type, is not truly monogamous.