Many men, indeed, are filled with embarrassment, if not dismay, in perceiving a deeper and more extended reaction in their women than they perceive in themselves. With such a power which they observe developing in their wives they do not know how to compete. The situation of a husband who finds himself developing in his wife a much richer and fuller erotism than he thinks he has himself, contains the unconscious factor of unflattering comparison. Unconsciously he does not wish to find her richer than himself because that gives him a sense of unconscious inferiority and injures his feeling of control. So the marital situation contains the unconscious wish on the husband’s part not to find in his wife an erotism greater than his own, entirely apart from any conscious idea he may have that he should not have an “oversexed” woman as a wife. CHAPTER VIII HOLOGAMY VS. PROSTITUTION § 187 Marriage, in the sense of a legal bond between two people who are bound together in no other way than that affecting the interests of the egoistic-social type, is not truly monogamous. True monogamy between two people whose interests are entirely implicated each with the other’s on both the conscious and the unconscious level of the erotic sphere needs a new name for which is offered the term hologamy or whole marriage—complete marriage. The completeness implied here is that in which both conscious and unconscious affection and passion are involved. The hologamous union is the one in which both partners have allowed instinctive impulses from the unconscious to enter consciousness. Their erotic insight consists in just this admission. A hologamous erotic union is the assurance of earthly felicity. It is utterly uncaused by egoistic-social factors, though it may yet itself be the cause of egoistic-social success. At any rate it is the most favourable condition for the development of both members of the union along egoistic-social lines. No man now imperfectly married will fail to become more successful in his life outside of the home by improving the conditions of his life within it. The most important condition has been clearly indicated. No woman, now imperfectly married, but is waiting (for that is all she can do) for the time when her husband may chance to improve his erotic technique, or learn from others how to do so. It is tacitly assumed by both European and American society that either the erotic or the egoistic-social motives may independently and exclusively be an adequate basis for a marriage. On the contrary psychology shows that the erotic one is the only one necessary, and that the egoistic-social is never adequate, without the erotic, to constitute anything but a mildly sentimental business relation between man and woman. § 188