§ 192
If he need the excitements of a plurality of women, it is proof that he cannot get a normal amount of tension and relaxation from his own wife. There are those, of course, who live their married life on the theory that the physical tensions and relaxations of sex are too gross for refined marital relations, and that their wives would be shocked if they experienced them. The boy brought up with the angel-imago (or mother-imago, see [§ 195]) as his ideal of woman necessary to be the mother of his children would inevitably identify his wife with a prostitute if he succeeded in evoking the highest psychical exaltation in her erotic sphere. He has plurality ingrained in his nature from the cradle; the feminine sex is not one but at least two: angel and prostitute. Unable to conceive the two existing in one woman, in fact unwilling to conceive this, he perforce puts the mother of his own children in the angel class and would be shocked if she evinced any of the characteristics of the other class.
The irony of which is that whatever reactions the prostitute shows are her attempt to imitate what she conceives as the highest type of erotism, what her patron’s highest erotic development would call for. Whatever impulses of erotic nature she has, which are few enough in the class that practise promiscuity for pay, are so overweighted by the egoistic-social impulses of material self-advancement, that they lose whatever value they might otherwise have.
A so-called prostitute, like Victor Hugo’s Mlle. Drouet, who after promiscuity devotes herself with absolute fidelity to one man is no longer a prostitute. She has, in thus placing the erotic above the egoistic-social motive, fulfilled the highest human function except that of parenthood.
It is possible that a man of many women may think he is seeking for his final mate. Such men have been heard to express somewhat similar sentiments. “If I could,” said one roué, “effect a grand passion with some woman, she would be the only one for me.” He thought he could not gain this result from his wife, but if he were a whole man with erotic unity instead of a roué with the disassembled psyche, he could effect the grand passion quite as easily with his wife as with another woman.
§ 193
Some considerations on the status of prostitution are necessary in every book that attempts to discuss marital relations. Far as the poles asunder though they may be in externals, they are yet the common activity of the same man in many instances. Figures show that the married man is the main support of the prostitute. What he does to his psyche in the direction of actually splitting it by this double life has been described more or less in the following manner. It is not merely that he either lies to one woman and consorts with another and is under the psychical strain of remembering never to confuse the parts of this double drama he is enacting. It is worse than that.
It has been shown through studies of the unconscious in men that show a strong leaning toward fallen women, that they are unwittingly reënacting a jealousy drama of their own infancy in which they try to rescue from the father their own object of earliest love, their mother (cf. [§ 179]).
Furthermore, the average man’s bringing up leads him unconsciously to separate all the women in the world into two classes. This simple division is characteristic of childhood, which sees everything either black or white and does not conceive fine gradations. The two classes of women are the angel-mother type and the devil-prostitute type, and this distinction with hardly any other he maintains sometimes till the end of his life.