The erotic motive is not represented or meant by the ordinary expression
used by married people who say, of course, they love each other, or they
would not have married. Erotic means more than “inspired by love” in the
sense that the uninitiated use the term love, which in common language
is of very wide application including even food and clothing and all
other egoistic-social expressions. Erotic not only means inspired by love
in the most whole, passionate sense but implies also that the persons
activated by erotic motives have at least some knowledge of the art of
love, a knowledge which includes something about the unconscious factor.
Otherwise love has not progressed to its higher phase of erotism, and is
mostly made up of affection which is primarily egoistic-social. Love is a
word that has become too debased in the minds of most people to serve as
a term for what is here outlined.
If on the other hand a marriage is a hologamous one, in which the
husband’s egoistic-social motives are duly subordinated to his erotic
motive, then the erotic motive, freed from extraneous elements, will
cause both his conscious and his unconscious passion to be centred on one
woman. No other marriage deserves the name. “Marriage” is derived from
the Latin word _mas_, male, and originally referred only to the woman.
She was “manned.”
If we should say today that a woman was thoroughly manned we should be
understood to mean that she had sexual relations with one or more men.
To most we should not probably convey the meaning that she had been
completed, as an originally defective demi-human being, by the necessary
complement to fill out her being to the totality of human possibility, or
that this completion involved the development in her of an absolutely new
attitude toward the world which she could not attain without physical and
spiritual union with one man.
This implies also that the corresponding statement should be made of the
truly married man. As an originally incomplete or defective demi-human
being lacking a complement, he needs to be completely womaned, for which
indeed there is no appropriate word of Latin derivation. But if we should
say a man was comprehensively womaned we should be understood to mean
probably that he had both a wife and concubines—that his affection and
egoistic-social impulses were gratified by the former and his erotic
needs by the latter. Yet it is really not possible for a man to be
perfectly and completely womaned except by one woman. If his counterpart
is a mosaic of fifty different varicoloured fragments he cannot be said
to have done anything but use a separate facet of each woman composing
the mosaic, and to have left unused all her other facets. So he cannot be
said to have seen any of the other facets, a lack of vision constituting
a kind of anesthesia already mentioned in § 141.
§ 189
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