A technique of the love episode has been described and advocated under several names (Karezza, Male Continence, Dr. Zugassent’s Discovery, etc.) which consists in that degree of virile control whereby, while the erotic acme may be produced in the wife, the husband reserves his. There is no doubt whatever that this technique is of greatest possible advantage to the wife, if she herself reaches the acme. Opinions differ as to its possible harm for the husband. It was the principle which the Oneida Community (organized in 1847 and discontinued as a eugenic experiment in 1879) followed for the 30 years of its existence with no observable injury to the men. It is also spontaneously discovered and sporadically used by married couples at the present day independently of the propaganda in its favour, conducted by a woman writer who has published the book Karezza.[19]
There is also no doubt whatever that only a comparatively few men are willing, and some fewer are quite unable to control themselves to this degree necessary to postpone their own erotic acme until a future time. The ability to do this is the most potent factor possible in producing that superiority of virile over feminine power which forms the greatest fusing medium between the two partners.
§ 101
Indeed, it may be confidently asserted that the accomplishment of this erotic tour de force on the part of the husband (during which he may observe the greatest possible effect that man can have upon woman) gives the husband a sense of exaltation that could not be paralleled, a feeling of power that produces in him a keenness and penetrating sense of satisfaction that he has never before felt. After an experience of this kind, he is fully alive, as he never was before, to the possibilities of erotic ecstasy emanating from the preliminaries and every several and separate phase of the love episode as responded to by his wife.
This entire reconstruction of the love episode not only throws into strong light the value of the preliminary and intermediary phases of the love episode, but it puts, in the husband’s mind, so much value on the first and second acts of the play that the actual occurrence of his own erotic acme has then a much lessened importance.
If he can so transform his wife, as he sees her transformed before his very eyes, and perceives in every sense quality of consciousness, and if he can thus express his love any time he wishes, his former hurried, perfunctory and mechanical sexuality appears to him as a dried leaf as compared to the full-blown rose of his present triumph. He recognizes that he has stepped from one level of existence to a higher plane of life, and that he is human in a new and enlarged sense.
§ 102
Kisses may stale but the occasional practice of this reserve on the husband’s part in the love episode will never stale, but will compare to the recharging of an exhausted battery, to the filling of a vessel drained, to the incoming tide. It is a far greater stimulant to happiness of all kinds than anything else discovered by mankind.
That this is rare and exceedingly hard to get, and that it involves self-control on the part of the husband and abandonment of self-control on the part of the wife, makes it like one of those elements in the erotic situation mentioned by Freud as having been necessarily injected into it by man, whenever he found love too easy and too free.
“It is easy to prove that the psychical value of the need for love sinks, as soon as its satisfaction is made easy. An obstruction is needed to drive the libido upward, and where the natural obstructions to satisfaction do not apply, men have at all times conventionally inserted them, in order to be able to enjoy love. This is true of individuals as well as of nations. In times when the satisfaction of love found no difficulties, as occasionally during the fall of ancient civilizations, love became worthless and life empty, and there was necessary a strong reactionary influence to restore the indispensable emotional values.”[20]