Читать книгу A Plea for Monogamy - Wilfrid Lay - Страница 9

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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]

Now fully admitting that the mental and physical troubles of these patients, and all others who suffer from ills of psychic origin, arise from the repression of the sexual instinct, it still shows a far too great tendency on the part of their advisers to temporize and compromise with facts, if they give this advice. For, while a conflict between two forces, one or both of which were in the unconscious, is more satisfactorily and successfully carried on if the two forces are brought out into the open light of consciousness, the conflict still remains, and is only shifted to another field where it may go on as before, and with unabated fierceness.

The conflict between the individual and society is just as great whether a man takes it out in himself through a neurosis or gives up the neurosis and takes a prostitute or a regular mistress, neither of which has the sanction of society. In the case of many neurotics the cure is worse than the disease simply because the social pressure becomes clearer to the individual if he actually does, even in secret, the things he had before only unconsciously wished. For him the conflict not only is not resolved but is worse, for if like the majority of neurotics he is of a more sensitive type than the average person the contrast between his actions and the implicit demands of his environment will be all the greater. He will be doing in reality the very thing he unconsciously desired but feared to do.

And yet not the same thing after all. For unless the mistress is of that rare and extraordinary type of Mlle. Drouet who supplied for Victor Hugo what he would have much preferred to get from his wife, had she been spiritually able to give it, there will be, for the unfortunately advised neurotic, another conflict not on an ethical but on an intellectual and spiritual plane.

The advice for such people can only be to get married; or, if that is beyond the bounds of possibility, which is seldom the case, the suggestion to adopt a moderate autoerotism has been made by some physicians in good standing as an acceptable substitute at least for the neurotic of either sex. It frees them, at any rate, from the feeling that they are injuring anyone else, either directly or indirectly.

An emphatic reiteration is here appropriate concerning the harmlessness of the physical forms of autoerotism as practised, at some times in their lives, by almost nine-tenths of humanity of both sexes, especially civilized humanity, where a taboo is placed on other normal heterosexual practices. The autoerotism mentioned (in sections 21-25 on mutuality) is purely a psychical intellectual or mental autoerotism entirely apart from the physical. Its results are, in the long run, far worse. (See note, p. 24.)

Grete Meisel-Hess, in The Sexual Crisis, speaking of the men who are sexual compulsion neurotics and whom she describes as male counterparts of the demi-vierges, says (page 155): “They are unable to surmount the ultimate obstacle between I and Thou. They are unable to complete their work, incompetent to possess a woman utterly. The amatory intimacies are never fully consummated. They get through the preliminaries of love and the first preludes; but that which comes afterward, the most beautiful and also the most difficult part, remains unenjoyed, unmastered, unconsummated. I am not referring here to what is ordinarily termed impotence. This sentimental impotence has nothing to do with mere physical weakness, but is far more disastrous, since it forever bars those affected with it from an entry into the deepest experiences of love. It is only the strong in soul who are capable of love in its completeness.”

The physical autoerotic acts, far from having the results of producing physical and mental weakness (as has been unscientifically stated and slavishly repeated for two centuries), are nature’s way of developing the reproductive apparatus for strictly human use. The injuries supposed to result are now scientifically proven to be the result caused by the fear of harm, and the shame inspired in young people by stupidly ignorant elders.

The autoerotic mental attitude described in this section is a peculiarity of men who through lack of enlightenment have not yet outgrown a tendency to remain, in their psychic reactions, infantile or puerile. But there is no proof that the inevitably autoerotic attitude of the young need persist for a moment after they have grasped the idea of the difference between autoerotism and a real object love that contains the growing element of perfect mutuality. And yet many men unnecessarily get the idea fixed in their minds that autoerotic practices have weakened them physically or have produced a mental habit of mind that cannot be broken. From one point of view it is the easiest thing in the world to present the proofs of the utter harmlessness of the autoerotic practices and the utter groundlessness of the fears which make almost every man, that is human, lack the confidence which will give him the necessary control over his own, and incidentally over his wife’s, erotism. (See note, p. 14.)