If every wife should give serious thought to exactly how much degradation the prostitute has been considered to save her from, she would realize that what the prostitute guards her from could be transmuted by the proper attitude on the husband’s part from a crassly physical into a highly spiritual thing. And she would move heaven and earth to induce her husband to study the fine art of love in so thorough a manner that there could be no doubt of the happy issue of their mutual love life.
Critics of marriage as it exists today have amply demonstrated that it shields more immorality, in some cases, than even prostitution itself; and it is a fact that this immorality comes from a lack of spiritual rapport between husband and wife, that can be effected primarily, if not solely, by the husband.
§ 5
While this book assumes that the marital relation is one in which an emotional control is necessary to be exercised by the husband over the wife, it does not assume for a moment but rather denies that the husband should exert any control whatever over the activities of the wife, especially in spheres other than the strictly conjugal.
On the contrary, a husband domineers in small every-day matters only when, and because, he feels unconsciously that he is failing, or is beginning to fail, to dominate in the great and important sphere of woman’s emotional life.
For the health and happiness of them both, this sphere should be the love emotions; at any rate, only the constructive or anabolic emotions. A husband who rightly dominates need not and will not trouble to domineer. If the wife is as profoundly moved erotically by marriage as she should be this deep emotion will impel her to develop her personality to the utmost for the advantage of her husband and, a fortiori, of herself.
It should always be borne in mind by both husband and wife that the love impulse is uniformly to take precedence over the ego (social) impulse, a precedence that, however, in our present competitive society it is very difficult to give. But it is worth every thought that can be devoted to it; to refine the pattern, to ennoble the picture, of marital life.
§ 6
A common misapprehension that psychoanalysis leads to promiscuity in sexual relations needs emphatic correction. The reasoning wrested out of psychoanalytical findings runs somewhat as follows: Most modern ills and notably neurotic disturbances, mild and severe, are the result of the repression brought to bear on the sex instinct by modern civilized life. Therefore, in order to avoid or cure these multitudinous ills, the individual whose natural instincts have been repressed, must dig them up, with great toil and at great expense of time and money, and give them free play in spite of the prohibitions of society. Indeed, in this country, psychoanalysts, of the first rank in other respects, have been said to recommend both men and women patients to make what arrangements they could to indulge in sexual intercourse, even if unmarried.[1]