Masochism, the tendency to gain pleasure from the pain another inflicts on oneself, is a natural phenomenon at a certain stage of pre-synthetic childish erotic development; and, in all normally developed persons, is outgrown. Indeed, a woman,—and _a fortiori_, a man, who retains any great masochistic element in his love life—is, in that respect alone, a child and not an adult, and incapable of adult love until that tendency is removed. But it persists more frequently in women, and constitutes a part of the sexual inhibition already referred to. It is a tendency about which all young husbands should be warned in advance. They are not to allow their wives for an instant to have any reason to infer that the wife’s marital “duty” is to sacrifice herself or any part of herself to the physical or mental pleasure of her husband. The eradication of this idea can be begun by the man long before engagement, in spheres of activity quite far from the sexual, and should be steadily and consistently carried on. He should never ask her to do anything “for him,” especially not anything to which she may have expressed any unwillingness, not to say repugnance, herself. He should see to it that he gets his pleasure from the knowledge that what he does is most likely to be gratifying to her. This is, of course, the attitude of the real man. A girl should be instructed enough not to be impressed by the mental autoerotism of “lounge lizards” who are feeding their own erotic phantasies by sight and touch of her. They are more than likely to become mentally autoerotic husbands. While on the topic of masochism it is necessary to warn all young women that in no sense is self-sacrifice the object of a healthy marriage. The self-sacrifice which is so lauded in theologies is a sacrifice of egoistic impulse gratification. In the face of a great erotic exaltation there can be no such thing as a thought of sacrifice. No woman really in love can perceive anything but gain in really erotic action, for if she knows herself she realizes that her strongest impulses are those of Eros. § 178 Any conflict in her psyche is between the erotic and the egoistic-social impulses. The only inhibitions against the erotic impulses, as everywhere, appear to be the egoistic-social ones, though it has been pointed out that even the erotic instinct itself contains an innate antithesis that might cause a conflict even were the egoistic-social influences minimized or even removed. One suspects that in the woman these unconscious doubts must come primarily from not having been completely controlled, so completely in the erotic sphere that no egoistic-social impulses are for the time perceptible. A woman of a highly refined nature whose husband’s erotic control is not forceful enough thus to expunge totally all egoistic-social impulses for the time being, will have a certain number of them not disposed of.