This complete lack, on the woman’s part, of any ability whatsoever to secure erotic control over man leads her to try, unconsciously, of course, to compensate, for her inability in this region, by securing egoistic-social control over man. This she succeeds in doing every time she meets a man who has not yet developed from a mental autoerotism, in which he thinks that she has pleasures to bestow upon him and that he has to get them from her, with or without payment of egoistic-social services.
It thus appears that woman not only has no exclusively erotic control, which by the nature of things belongs entirely to man where he has developed sufficiently to assume it, but also she invariably confuses the two types of control, getting a vicarious satisfaction from different forms of egoistic-social control, and missing, in a great number of instances, the deep biological and organic satisfactions from the exercise of control over her by the man.
A hazy notion that happiness is her prerogative at least in the first months of her marriage leads many a woman to believe even to the extent of a virtual hallucination that she is happy, i.e., that she is erotically controlled by her husband.
A love episode in which this control has not been secured by her husband, or in which he may not even have tried to secure it leaves her in a state of psychical conflict. She consciously knows she ought to be supremely happy, unconsciously she feels blankly unhappy; and if, as so many women are, she is without erotic insight, she fancies that her husband has slighted her in some purely egoistic-social action.
Woman’s negative control in the erotic sphere results in the complete depersonalization of her body.
§ 136
Unconsciously as well as consciously she wishes to find all pleasure in her honeymoon, and so strong is that wish that she is impelled to believe that all the several experiences of it are pleasurable. They must be pleasurable or she must admit that at the start even, she is not happily married. This is the state of mind of those who enter the married state with the most disingenuous sincerity. Those who marry with any initial conflict, such as feelings of guilt for any previous illicit sexual adventures, are more unfortunate.
Those whose wishes for happiness are so strong as to interpose a rose-coloured glass between their eyes and their actual experiences are deceiving only their conscious selves. One cannot deceive the unconscious.
Unconsciously they are disappointed in the lack of rapport between their own emotional erotic situation and their husbands’. They are in the position of a starving man looking through a plate-glass window, at a restaurant full of merry feasters.