Monogamy is not perfect if there is anesthesia on either side. Anesthesia prevents complete union. Only the mates who are completely directed each to other are fully married, and marriage means not partial but complete union. All degrees of fragmentary attachment are defective monogamy and so not monogamy at all, but unconscious polygamy.
Furthermore, that portion of the ego which is not attached to one’s mate exhibits a tendency to attach itself to some other one’s actual or potential mate, simply because attachment is a case of tension fixed to relax on a definite object, and if the legally sanctioned object has been detached, if the tensions natural to either sex are, by some complex, detached from that object, they tend of themselves to seek relaxation from some other person. If a man is completely satisfied with his wife he will not only seek no other woman, but will be dangerously attracted by no other, and vice versa.
So we can suppose a possible scale on which a husband’s union with his wife, not hologamous, is measured in units from 1 to 100 such that we might say a man was sixty-five per cent married to his wife, while yet she might be a hundred per cent married to him. This gives 10,000 degrees of non-hologamous marital union, M 1 — W 100 representing a man with only slight interest in his wife who is herself quite devoted to him. This man’s other ninety-nine per cent of libido might be directed to any number of other women. If it were directed toward one other woman he would undoubtedly be happier if he divorced and remarried. But it is the thesis of this book that M 1 — W 100 is an impossibility.
A division of libido as disproportionate as this would not imply much split in the man’s libido. He would thus be ninety-nine per cent devoted to his paramour and only one per cent to his wife. His paramour would be his de facto wife. But if his ninety-nine per cent of libido were directed toward ninety-nine other women he would be called a personality of maximum diffusion.
§ 190
Now the personality in perfect health tends toward the preservation of unity. The man whose love life should include one hundred women would be unable to devote more than one per cent of his libido to one woman. He would be as far from being a unit as, on the supposed scale, he could get. He would be not one personality but a knocked-down pile of parts waiting for a skilled mechanic to assemble.
There are different types of men, those who tend more, and those who tend less, to preserve their own unity of personality.
In general the progress from infancy to adulthood is a progress from partial synthesis to complete synthesis, so that the type of man whose synthesis is incomplete is an infantile and dissociated type of personality; or better than dissociated, he might be called dissipated, disjointed, dismembered, disassembled.
Unfortunately, the infantile condition can completely satisfy, consciously, the infant of adult size. This makes it difficult to approach him, makes him difficult of access. If one present him with a fully developed adult woman, he immediately recoils much farther into his youth which he regards as a fine quality. Because of the uncomfortable nature of the comparison he unconsciously sees his inferiority and unconsciously compensates for it, by getting (in the only way he can) the feeling of satisfaction that comes via mental autoerotism whenever it fails to be obtained from the outside world.