FOOTNOTES
[1] One of the questions of a questionnaire submitted to prominent neurologists, and published in Mental Hygiene (Oct., 1920) was the following: “Do you consider that absolute continence is always to be insisted upon, or may it be taught that under certain conditions intercourse in the unmarried is harmless or beneficial?”
To this question A. A. Brill of New York gave the following answer: “Years ago I encouraged intercourse in some neurotics who were constantly worrying about sex. I soon found out that it had not benefited them. The same factors which produced the original conflicts continued to disturb them. Now I remove their conflicts by analysis, and then they need no advice. I have known a number of cases who have successfully abstained from two to three years following analysis.”
[2] Used in technical sense explained in [§ 141].
[3] Berman: The Glands Regulating Personality, N. Y., 1921, p. 96.
[4] Erotism is defined in the dictionaries as a medical word meaning “abnormal sexual desire.” But that is simply because the doctors got hold of it first. There is no Greek word erotism nor yet eroticism, but “erotism” has resulted from being the common element in autoerotism and allerotism and being shorter than eroticism was adopted by the present writer to name the highest type of the combination of body and soul mating. He never suspected till he looked up the word that it had a bad sense in the minds of others. (See also [p. 82].)
[5] As will appear in the following chapters (especially [§ 43]), egoistic-social impulses or instincts are those which include the trends toward self-maintenance and self-magnification—practically all impulses that are not truly erotic.
[6] The “playmate” is a new term for an old thing, which does not, however, imply that present conditions are exactly the same as those of Sheridan’s day who, in The School for Scandal, makes Lady Teazle say: “You know I admit you as a lover no farther than fashion sanctions,” to which Joseph Surface replies: “True—a mere Platonic cicisbeo, what every wife is entitled to.” And the Century Dictionary defines cicisbeo as “In Italy, since the 17th century, the name given to a professed gallant and attendant of a married woman; one who dangles about women,” and shows that the word is derived from chiche, little, and beau.
“Tame cats” and “house friends” are also names given today, by these discontented women, to the persons who engage in this form of cicisbeism.
[7] Havelock Ellis, who coined the word autoerotism, defines it as follows (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. I, page 161): “By ‘autoerotism’ I mean the phenomena of spontaneous sexual emotion generated in the absence of an external stimulus proceeding, directly or indirectly, from another person.” The present writer calls autoerotic those husbands who, in the love episode, secure their own erotic acme, in which their sexual, if not their erotic, tension is relaxed; but either do not know or do not care whether their wives reach a corresponding relaxation. The opposite of autoerotism is allerotism, where the husband places on the wife’s erotic relaxation a value at least equal to that which he places on his own.