True monogamy between two people whose interests are entirely implicated each with the other’s on both the conscious and the unconscious level of the erotic sphere needs a new name for which is offered the term hologamy or whole marriage—complete marriage.
The completeness implied here is that in which both conscious and unconscious affection and passion are involved. The hologamous union is the one in which both partners have allowed instinctive impulses from the unconscious to enter consciousness. Their erotic insight consists in just this admission.
A hologamous erotic union is the assurance of earthly felicity. It is utterly uncaused by egoistic-social factors, though it may yet itself be the cause of egoistic-social success. At any rate it is the most favourable condition for the development of both members of the union along egoistic-social lines. No man now imperfectly married will fail to become more successful in his life outside of the home by improving the conditions of his life within it. The most important condition has been clearly indicated. No woman, now imperfectly married, but is waiting (for that is all she can do) for the time when her husband may chance to improve his erotic technique, or learn from others how to do so.
It is tacitly assumed by both European and American society that either the erotic or the egoistic-social motives may independently and exclusively be an adequate basis for a marriage. On the contrary psychology shows that the erotic one is the only one necessary, and that the egoistic-social is never adequate, without the erotic, to constitute anything but a mildly sentimental business relation between man and woman.
§ 188
The erotic motive is not represented or meant by the ordinary expression used by married people who say, of course, they love each other, or they would not have married. Erotic means more than “inspired by love” in the sense that the uninitiated use the term love, which in common language is of very wide application including even food and clothing and all other egoistic-social expressions. Erotic not only means inspired by love in the most whole, passionate sense but implies also that the persons activated by erotic motives have at least some knowledge of the art of love, a knowledge which includes something about the unconscious factor. Otherwise love has not progressed to its higher phase of erotism, and is mostly made up of affection which is primarily egoistic-social. Love is a word that has become too debased in the minds of most people to serve as a term for what is here outlined.
If on the other hand a marriage is a hologamous one, in which the husband’s egoistic-social motives are duly subordinated to his erotic motive, then the erotic motive, freed from extraneous elements, will cause both his conscious and his unconscious passion to be centred on one woman. No other marriage deserves the name. “Marriage” is derived from the Latin word mas, male, and originally referred only to the woman. She was “manned.”
If we should say today that a woman was thoroughly manned we should be understood to mean that she had sexual relations with one or more men. To most we should not probably convey the meaning that she had been completed, as an originally defective demi-human being, by the necessary complement to fill out her being to the totality of human possibility, or that this completion involved the development in her of an absolutely new attitude toward the world which she could not attain without physical and spiritual union with one man.
This implies also that the corresponding statement should be made of the truly married man. As an originally incomplete or defective demi-human being lacking a complement, he needs to be completely womaned, for which indeed there is no appropriate word of Latin derivation. But if we should say a man was comprehensively womaned we should be understood to mean probably that he had both a wife and concubines—that his affection and egoistic-social impulses were gratified by the former and his erotic needs by the latter. Yet it is really not possible for a man to be perfectly and completely womaned except by one woman. If his counterpart is a mosaic of fifty different varicoloured fragments he cannot be said to have done anything but use a separate facet of each woman composing the mosaic, and to have left unused all her other facets. So he cannot be said to have seen any of the other facets, a lack of vision constituting a kind of anesthesia already mentioned in [§ 141].