It must be admitted, however, as has been indicated above, that the woman’s erotic development progresses, and that in some cases it takes months and even years for it to reach its full expansion. In the meantime the hasty, anesthetic husband has lost his grip and, unconsciously unwilling to grow up with his wife, remains at his selfish, animal level.
Incidentally, too, he holds his wife there; for it must be remembered that the wife’s erotic development, on which depends not merely her contentment, but the stark possibility of her becoming more than a gynecoid female, is absolutely nil, if it be not developed by her husband. This is unequivocally a one-way process. All the latent love and beauty of being and action on the woman’s part are dependent solely on the ability of her husband to unfold her.
§ 139
It may be argued that the woman’s erotic acme is conditioned by the prior or simultaneous emergence of the man’s. But this argument is the working out of a defence mechanism coming from the unconscious of the man. He makes this statement not because it is true but because, from an autoerotic phantasy, he wishes it were true.
The statement, too, may be sincerely made by the woman, but, if it is, it is because she has heard him make it or correctly inferred from his unconscious actions its tacit existence in his mind. It is shown in another place that there is always in the man’s unconscious a phantasy that his part in the love episode will produce his wife’s erotic acme at once and without effort on his part. This phantasy amounts in some cases to an hallucination.
§ 140
It was said above that you cannot control what you cannot see or touch or otherwise perceive. To what you cannot see, you are blind; to what you cannot hear, you are deaf; to what you cannot smell you are—but there is no English word for that, so we have had to take a Greek word—anosmic. Similarly if you could not taste, touch, feel, you would be insensible. There are many more forms of insensibility than merely being knocked out in a fight. The insensibility to the penultimate one of the various phases of the love episode has been called in a woman anesthesia. In the love episode of the hasty husband there are innumerable reactions of his wife to which he is insensible, anesthetic; but which would be a revelation of supreme joy to him if he could but see them; therefore it is better that the love episodes should take place in the light rather than in the dark.
Yet not alone the visually perceptible reactions. For there are reactions of every variety. If you have ever used a blow pipe on a piece of copper, and observed the iridescence which soon comes, you will realize the same beauties in every sense preceding the complete annealing of your wife by the heat of passion you engender in her. If you have ever watched the iridescence of a spraying fountain in the sun, you will see the same effect in the emotions of your wife when the relaxation of tension has broken up her being into fine particles that float slowly down and refract the light rays of your love. And the beauty and calm of the rainbow after a summer storm is nothing to that of the mental state of a woman after the downpour of her erotic passion.
All these are features to which the anesthetic man is insensible. Although the similes used are visual, there is not a sense quality that cannot be thrilled by the perception of the woman’s reactions. And although the similes rather hint at the finale than at the preliminaries they all refer to the effect produced on the woman by the activities of the man. The kinesthetic sense of the husband must be developed. He is much wiser if he will give these sensations some appreciative study. It will help to give him control by taking his mind off the burden of tension he has to carry himself, and enable him to acquire over his wife that domination in the exclusively erotic sphere which is essential not only to his wife’s happiness but to his own.