“After she has had sexual experiences,” Kisch maintains, “a woman’s sexual emotions are just as powerful as man’s, though she has more motives than a man for controlling them.” (Ellis, Psychology of Sex, Vol. III, p. 202.)
Her motives for controlling them, which here means annihilating them or repressing them, are egoistic-social ones (see [§ 43]) just as man’s; but in man-made society these motives are stronger in the woman than in the man, because man has placed more repression on her sex impulses than on his own.
In placing more repression on hers than on his, he has not, however, given anywhere near a full expression to his own erotic instincts. Because of the dominance of egoistic-social impulses in modern civilization his erotism does not permit the expression of such fundamental strata of his unconscious as are stirred in woman, whose more flexible erotism is aroused to a pitch that he finds it difficult because of his egoistic-social interests to ascend.
As is maintained steadfastly in this book, he has repressed his own, but hers still more. In so doing he has lowered the moral, spiritual and psychical status of marriage, which should, if they two are to become one flesh, accept the entire body as well as the whole soul each of the other. In repressing what he has deemed the physical side of love man has put on himself a quite unnecessary burden. With the natural desire to control, which constitutes masculinity, he has, in his thinking, blunderingly made annihilation an equivalent of control.
This placing of more repression on her erotism than on his is due to the fact that his own is so quickly satisfied in comparison with hers. He acts en masse as if it would take so much of his time, now devoted to egoistic-social ends, to equal, in erotic expression, her greater capabilities.
§ 38
The most striking fact of most emotions, except those of love, is the facility with which they are reassociated with ideas different from those with which they first occurred.
The love emotions appear to be the least easily transferred, as indeed they are the least easily stirred to their depths. This is said advisedly on the well grounded observation that most people who say they love do not love fully, and deeply. The more deeply they love, the more their passion instills itself into every fibre of their being and the more slowly they are able to change their love object.
But ordinary emotions, other than the erotic, are readily and almost universally shifted from one object to another. Indeed, it may be asserted that there is no innate content of any of the emotions except love. Love innately requires an object of the opposite sex.
To illustrate the reassociability of the other emotions it is necessary only to recall what things one has liked or feared years ago and compare them with the present likes or fears.