If fear in soldiers could produce pathological symptoms both mental and physical, curable by psychiatry, might not some of this apparent feeble-mindedness be a hysteria resulting from shock? Most case histories showed early sex experience treated, especially when pregnancy resulted, with utmost scorn, contempt and condemnation. Surely the world offers to these little unmarried mothers as menacing a front as was faced by the soldiers in France. For girls passing through Juvenile Hall in Los Angeles, right environment is provided where they receive friendly care and encouragement. As a psychologist said of the soldiers, “Morale is pumped into them.” The fact that they have shown during pregnancy an advance in intelligence quotient amounting in some cases to ten points demands a reconsideration of opinion till further data give scientific basis for judgment.
In the introduction to Kammerer’s study of “The Unmarried Mother”, Doctor Healy questions whether such a constructive act as bringing a child into the world should ever be classed as a crime. Life, legal or illegal, must be respected.
One grows to love the incorrigible girl. She has many fine qualities. A protective officer was escorting to a State institution a girl thought too bad for a House of the Good Shepherd. A train wreck occurred and she thought, “Here is where my girl escapes me.” On the contrary, the “incorrigible” turned to and helped as many as possible of those injured. The biologist tells us it is just this superabundant vitality that is necessary for the evolution of higher types.
In the autumn of 1919 at the International Conference of Women Physicians held in New York under the auspices of the National Y. W. C. A. for discussion of the physical, mental and social health of women, many valuable contributions were made to our problem. The relation between sex shock and nervous disease was plainly given by the psychoanalysts, and their theory of retarded emotion and fixation of infantile affection explained varied phases of behavior. Most encouraging of all was Freud’s hypothesis of sublimation.
Those who, in Freud’s teaching of the danger of sex repression to mental health, find merely sanction for license miss the point of his wonderful message. This theory that life force, libido, creative energy, follows the Law of Conservation true of Physical force—that as motion may become heat, light or electricity, so this inner power may be transmuted from procreative effort to creative work of hand and brain—would seem to explain much of the modern success in the rehabilitation of the young prostitute. This transmutation of sex force into art and religion had been noted in the past by Jacob Boehme and James Hinton. Myers hinted it in a line of poetry, “Forge and transform my passion into power”, but it remained for Freud to bring it to common understanding. James Hinton, the English surgeon, said just after our Civil War, “Prostitution will pass as has slavery when it becomes too great a burden for humanity to carry.” That time has come and prostitution must pass. Prostitution and promiscuity will be eliminated not by force but through sublimation.
Further analysis of this hypothesis of sublimation shows that life energy or libido may be manifested physically, psychically, socially, spiritually:
Physically in motion, eating, drinking and in sex acts;
Psychically in art, science, literature, anything which uses one’s wits;
Socially in service to others;
Spiritually in meditating upon Infinite Power or seeking one’s relation to The Whole.