The management of the children is really an egoistic-social affair, in which some men are much better able to plan, and execute plans than are most women. The management of very young children in the home is something that no paterfamilias can afford to leave entirely to women. This is by all odds the most important part of the child’s life.
It does not mean that the banker or politician should spend hour after hour in the nursery, though, indeed, he should know pretty well what goes on there. The nature of the personal contacts the child gets in the nursery is a determining factor in many cases, in the way in which he will later behave in his marital existence. In the nursery, meaning by that any locality where the child spends most of his playtime and sleeping time, he gets the experiences from which later he may develop neuroses, phobias, and other emotional disorders. He forms there usually his mother-imago, for even if he belongs to the class of children who never see their own mothers except on the rarest occasions, he will form his mother ideal from his hired nurse, or from any other woman with whom he comes into close contact.
Here then, the egoistic-social trends of the parents play an important rôle in determining the erotic life of the child. The egoistic-social pressure exerted on one or both parents withdraws them from their children, and partly or wholly orphans them. Many a child’s father is no more personal than a checking bank.
Not only, therefore, does the absorption of the parents by egoistic-social trends diminish the chances of their own erotic development as husband and wife, a development that takes time, energy and imagination, but it deprives their children of the proper environment in which to develop the germs of future wholesome erotism.
Parents and children should spend a certain amount of time in each other’s company during which they do nothing but love each other all around and have a jolly good time together. It is just as important for the parents to banish egoistic-social claims for short periods and actually loaf and fool around with the children as it is for the children to have a taste of adult idling company. Such, for example, is a real picnic or camping trip or ocean voyage, or any situation that brings parents and children together.
§ 205
It is important, too, for every woman to keep clearly separated in her mind and in her action the two levels, egoistic-social and erotic. Only then is she in a satisfactory position to become a wife in a higher sense than that in which most women are wives, and her becoming a mother need interfere in no way with her remaining a wife to her husband.
It is therefore to the advantage of man to realize that, however much he may value his wife’s clear intuition in egoistic-social matters, he is to be sure about their utter exclusion from matters purely erotic. A man can never fall in love with a conventionally so-called unattractive woman solely because she has a good business head. If any man should think so, he would find, on closer analysis, that, if he was really in love, his motive was truly erotic. If he cannot find any really erotic factor in his attitude toward her, his union with her can never be a complete marriage.
He has confused the two levels. He cannot love her because she can manage a library or a bond broker’s office or an insurance agency, any more than he can love her really because she knows how to make fudge. He may be attracted by the fudge. He is undoubtedly attracted unconsciously by other factors truly erotic in her character. Otherwise he would be more prudent to marry the fudge rather than the girl.
Similarly if the woman thinks she attracts by her business or culinary ability she is confusing levels. There are some women who unfortunately, because erroneously, believe they have little or no erotic attraction. Plain in face, not well formed, possibly under-weight, complexions not clear, they think that by sedulously following egoistic-social trends they can make an appeal to other people and particularly to men. They fail to see that these trends have hardly anything to do with love, that, once they love, their form improves, that the homeliest face, once lighted by the fire of love, has a beauty all its own, pure and irresistible.