In no sense can the so-called sacrifice made by a woman of these
egoistic-social demands be regarded as a masochistic self-sacrifice
involving any erotic factor. The erotic is not sacrificed but magnified.
The misfortune is only that in some cases the husband does not cause the
sacrifice which then is left for some other man to bring about.
Without for a moment implying that this illicit love on the woman’s
part has any more ethical value than the man’s attempted rescue, it is
impossible not to believe that the periodical abolition by the husband
of all egoistic-social inhibitions of his wife is a purification of the
erotic factor. Taking place within the marital state and effected solely
by the husband, this makes the light of love burn so much more brightly
as to illumine every other life activity.
§ 181
Jealousy is treated by Ellis in a vein apparently unaware of the
contribution made to this subject by Freud, who shows that the man is
jealous because he is either physically or psychically impotent. If the
husband either knows or thinks that he is unable to lift his wife into
the empyrean, the thought inevitably comes to him that there must be some
other man who can do it. If this thought is an unconscious one it is
manifested in every restrictive measure taken to prevent his wife from
meeting other men, for which measures he assigns not the real cause,
for he does not know it, but all sorts of reasons developing through
the unconscious mechanism of rationalization, either that she is not
attending to her duty, or neglecting him and his interests or spending
too much money, or what not. This condition of jealousy is all the more
likely to exist in the husbands who are so ignorant of love that they are
unaware that there is any such thing as the woman’s acme of pleasure in
the love episode. This form of jealousy, primarily due to the husband’s
ignorance, is all the more painful to him because he does not understand,
and all the more tragic in its irony.
It seems, too, quite probable that part of the jealousy of women is due
to a corresponding situation of their own erotic life. A woman who fails
to apperceive in consciousness the overwhelming somatic reactions which
occur at the climax of the love episode is in a condition quite analogous
to that of psychic impotence in man. If man’s jealousy, as has been shown
by psychoanalysis, is really caused by his psychic impotence, i.e., his
anesthesia, woman’s jealousy is evidently also caused by her anesthesia
which is a form of psychic impotence.
§ 182
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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