The husband who reaches his acme of erotic relaxation even before actual
contact with his love object has not in consciousness dwelt much upon the
numerous preliminaries. Methods of retardation are methods of admitting
into consciousness the different innate associations between emotions and
the touch and movement sensations constituting the first stages.
§ 162
The use of the imagination as a transformer of unconscious energy is a
comparatively modern technique and one made use of with great effect in
autosuggestion.
As a transformer of unconscious psychic energy, or possibly, better, a
re-shaper, it has sharply to be distinguished from phantasy.
Phantasy is the continuous mental activity that goes on night and
day in the mind of every man, woman and child. It consists of visual
images, auditory images, tactual, kinesthetic, thermal and a dozen other
qualities all combining with each other in the patterns by no means
fortuitous, but organized into groups, some of which have been called
complexes. This organization is the unconscious wish. The patterns
formed are unrelated to time, are unmoral and follow exclusively the
pleasure-pain principle.
Phantasy, which is entirely spontaneous, or independent of any conscious
volition on the part of the individual, is about ninety-nine per cent
submerged in the unconscious. The one per cent more or less that emerges
into the consciousness of the ordinary man of the world comes in as
day-dreaming or as dreams of the night. In these two forms it appears
in a shape least disguised, and is therefore the chief material of
psychoanalysis, which is an inventory of the contents of the unconscious
of the individual, an inventory that shows what possibilities he has of
future better adaptation to his environment. It also shows why the people
who are ill-adapted have failed to adapt themselves.
We are obliged to assume a causal connection between the phantasies of
unconscious mind and the physiological process in the body on the one
hand and on the other the broader life currents of the individual.
§ 163
Only by assuming this causal connection, which must also be a two-way
connection, can we explain any influence of mind upon body. From
innumerable instances, however, we are all absolutely sure that the mind
influences the bodily functions and that the bodily functions influence
the mind.
In no sphere of human activity is the influence of the mind on the
body more clearly demonstrable than in the erotic sphere, both in its
equatorial physical zones and in its polar intellectual zones.
This makes it absolutely incontrovertible not only that man can control
his emotions, including the erotic; but that he should, if he wishes to
be human and not merely animal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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