Strangely enough this division of women into two classes, while it is made by most men in their unconscious, evokes opposite reactions in two types of men, some of whom are found by the psychoanalysts as “more potent” with the prostitute type, while others are more potent with their wives. Yet these men are not wholly potent to the extent of carrying out the love episode to a conclusion perfectly satisfactory to their wives, and in the illicit relation they are still more precipitant.
It seems, however, most probable that the illicit woman has the effect on them of producing an overvaluation of some particular factor in the nature of a fetish which has lost its overplus of emotional value in the case of the wife. As has been already pointed out, this overvaluation of one or another factor in the total situation of the episode has an accelerating effect in the episode with the less familiar woman, an effect which, because of habit, has become less in the episode with the wife.
Another element in the situation is that with the woman of the prostitute type the man is concerned in no degree with any reaction on her part, whereas with his wife he may, in some cases, feel a certain dim sense of responsibility. Added to which the professional prostitute frequently pretends to be controlled, while the average wife does not.
It happens that this unimaginative paucity of merely twofold division of women unfortunately involves almost without exception the unconscious assumption that his sexual gratification is the function of the prostitute and is both absent from and not supplied by the woman of the angel type, from which stratum of society he naturally selects his wife. No wonder then that many men consider their wives “oversexed” if they show any great passion. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” This type of man who rigidly demands that his wife shall be an angel (as, when an infant, he thought that his mother was) makes, or tries to make out of her a sexless worker or butterfly while he goes to the prostitute weed for the satisfaction of his imperative sexual needs. He is unable to act as if his wife had exactly the same human body as himself, the same or homologous glands and identical sexual needs with himself, the denial of which is the cause of much if not most of the nervousness of women and accountable for a good part of their ill health and weakness.
§ 195
The boy of five or less has no means of knowing that his mother has any sexual needs, jealous though he may be of his father. The same boy when a man of thirty, if he keep the same childish viewpoint that women of the angel type are as angelically sexless as his mother was to him, will, unless he picks out a woman of the other type for a wife, which is, of course, exceedingly rare, never be wholly free from inhibitions against the full development of the true love episode with his wife. Regarding the prostitute as of another caste, he thus avoids with her alone the inhibitions caused by his childish separation of all women into two diametrically opposed castes.
It is obvious that this early-formed association of mother (and of course, later, wife) with absence of sexual interests or even instincts may in some men be a large factor in causing the repression of the majority of the components of the love episode. One component, however, alone, is impossible for the man to repress, though he may later find to his supreme satisfaction that he can control it and retard it; namely, the final relaxation of all his erotic tension.
If he continues love episodes with his wife and has a fixed but unconscious idea that with a wife all varieties of preliminary love actions, in brief, every component but the one to him absolutely essential component of dropping his burden of erotic tension,—which by the way he might just as well drop elsewhere—are actions more appropriate in a brothel than in a home, he will tend more and more to avoid with his wife all but the essential, as he virtually conceives it.
§ 196
It is admitted by all students of married life that not less passion but more is needed, and the precipitant husband undoubtedly needs more. For him the love episode’s passion is concentrated into the climax of it. It has no beginning, no middle, and no end, for it rarely if ever gives the full satisfaction that is gained by the husband who really takes care of his wife’s erotic responses. For the ignorant husband, who is emotionally about five years old, the love episode is featureless and crude like a five-year-old child’s drawing of a man on a slate. It has no proportions, a head, rectangular body and two straight lines for legs and quadrangular sinkers for feet and asterisk hands.