The rearrangement of values is the transition from a frame of mind in which the satisfactions are via the “passive” route to those via the active route. This rearrangement need never, for any biological reason, take place in a woman who is properly mated. If she be married but not mated by a male individual who has not made the above-mentioned transition, she will herself tend toward getting her satisfaction via the “active” or “male” route. In other words, rather than have nothing, she deludes herself into thinking she has something by getting a cheapened substitute, by becoming husband to her husband, who in turn becomes wife.
No man can be said to be successful as a husband who has not made this transition. No man is exempt from the necessity of the transition from this type of physical autoerotism to allerotism, simply because he was once an infant, and until he makes this transition he is, no matter what his age in years, still an infant. It has been undeniably proved by psychoanalysis and experienced by people in innumerable forms that no woman can be dominated by an infantile man.
Therefore every man is either the one or the other; either an adult man or an infantile man. He can by taking thought, and after reading books like the present, learn to which class he belongs. If he belongs in the infantile class he has been dominated by the “mother imago” or “angel imago,”[14] and if this be a fixation it will require a deep analysis by an expert before he can come to a realization of his true status; but it is unlikely that nine out of ten who read this book will require more than the advice offered in the following chapters. Or it will require a good orientation and suggestive treatment from a well equipped erotologist.
No wife can be a thoroughly happy one whose husband is in the infantile class, and who thus needs her “playmate.” (See [§ 12].) Such women are truly in a tragic situation. The infantile (autoerotic) behaviour of such a man in the fragmentary (never complete) love episodes leaves the woman nervous, “on edge,” with an unconscious conflict in her psyche that tends to undermine her health, and to make her an insuperable mystery to her husband, who himself suffers through his own ignorance. He knows, if he knows anything, only that something is amiss, but blinded by his own egotism can never believe that the cause lies solely in him, no matter how blameless he may be, from one point of view, on account of his ignorance.
§ 28
To return then to the proposition with which we started: If the man believes that the woman can by her action evoke his erotic acme, she can. He should know and believe that she cannot; unless he knows she is going to arrive at her erotic acme at the same time he does. But no man can ever be absolutely sure of that, particularly if his egoistic-social impulses are inordinately active and she has few if any such activities, comparatively, and more leisure to follow erotic impulses.
The autoerotic condition in a man is the cause of his haste in the love episode, as his attention is so primarily centered on his own sensations that he excludes the possibility of his observation of his wife’s reactions in the most intimate of marital relations. If the husband is hasty, he is ipso facto mentally autoerotic. His haste is caused by his mental autoerotism. In blunt language he loves himself more than his wife. He may love the results she produces in his feelings. What he needs is to learn how to love more, to be more passionate, to go deeper into the nature of erotism, into the study of the woman, his wife, and her individuality, particularly her unconscious reactions to him.
The thought, “I can control the most elusive thing in the universe—a woman’s erotism,” is the most triumphant thought that can occur to a man, except possibly the thought, “And I know how to continue to control it.” It is almost equivalent and is analogous in many respects to an ability to overcome gravitation and propel oneself at will through the air at any desired speed.