The unconscious inference of a man’s reaching the erotic acme is that his wife has done the same in the erotic episode or surely will when he does. This feeling is so strong as to make almost everyone take the sign for the thing signified. The thing signified is the woman’s utter surrender. It is signified by the sign, which is the man’s losing or letting go his own control. Prior to the wife’s erotic acme there is no time during the love episode when the husband’s loss of control will not affect his wife’s unconscious adversely. She will surely though unconsciously resent his throwing down his burden of tension before he has torn hers from her, because his own tenseness is his only instrument wherewith to operate on hers. His desire lapses with his relaxation. Her relaxation cannot take place if he loses his tenseness before she does, even if it be only one second before. Men would make happy marriage certain if they should universally grasp this idea; namely, that their letting themselves go entirely without the prior or simultaneous erotic acme on the part of their wives, is putting themselves on the same level as the animals without, however, being in the animal environment. To that level the wives cannot sink; yet the husbands allow themselves to do so almost without exception. Because of centuries of repression their wives are not able to respond to the erotic situation as rapidly as they do themselves, and yet the husbands act as if they responded fully. This type of behaviour is practically equivalent to producing a hallucination in themselves. To use a term from pathological psychology, every husband who does not secure his wife’s erotic acme before or with his own, actually _hallucinates_, for his own benefit, that reaction on her part. He is exactly like a man walking along a level sidewalk and making as if to step upstairs each step he takes and thinking he is climbing—in so far, just crazy, that is all. It would be much better in some ways for a husband of this type to renounce love episodes forever, for such actions form no part of a real one; they are as productive as half a pair of scissors without the other half. This solitary vice in a husband (masturbatio per vaginam) always comes from his hallucinating the effects he should produce instead of producing them. He is alone with his wife in his sexual (not love) episodes because she is practically not there. He may never have thought of the question as to where she may have been. She may have been mentally in the arms of another man. “With another person and yet alone!” is a terrible thought.