Monogamy is not perfect if there is anesthesia on either side. Anesthesia
prevents complete union. Only the mates who are completely directed each
to other are fully married, and marriage means not partial but complete
union. All degrees of fragmentary attachment are defective monogamy and
so not monogamy at all, but unconscious polygamy.
Furthermore, that portion of the ego which is not attached to one’s
mate exhibits a tendency to attach itself to some other one’s actual or
potential mate, simply because attachment is a case of tension fixed to
relax on a definite object, and if the legally sanctioned object has been
detached, if the tensions natural to either sex are, by some complex,
detached from that object, they tend of themselves to seek relaxation
from some other person. If a man is completely satisfied with his wife he
will not only seek no other woman, but will be dangerously attracted by
no other, and _vice versa_.
So we can suppose a possible scale on which a husband’s union with his
wife, not hologamous, is measured in units from 1 to 100 such that we
might say a man was sixty-five per cent married to his wife, while yet
she might be a hundred per cent married to him. This gives 10,000 degrees
of non-hologamous marital union, M 1 — W 100 representing a man with
only slight interest in his wife who is herself quite devoted to him.
This man’s other ninety-nine per cent of libido might be directed to any
number of other women. If it were directed toward one other woman he
would undoubtedly be happier if he divorced and remarried. But it is the
thesis of this book that M 1 — W 100 is an impossibility.
A division of libido as disproportionate as this would not imply much
split in the man’s libido. He would thus be ninety-nine per cent devoted
to his paramour and only one per cent to his wife. His paramour would
be his _de facto_ wife. But if his ninety-nine per cent of libido were
directed toward ninety-nine other women he would be called a personality
of maximum diffusion.
§ 190
Now the personality in perfect health tends toward the preservation of
unity. The man whose love life should include one hundred women would be
unable to devote more than one per cent of his libido to one woman. He
would be as far from being a unit as, on the supposed scale, he could
get. He would be not one personality but a knocked-down pile of parts
waiting for a skilled mechanic to assemble.
There are different types of men, those who tend more, and those who tend
less, to preserve their own unity of personality.
In general the progress from infancy to adulthood is a progress from
partial synthesis to complete synthesis, so that the type of man
whose synthesis is incomplete is an infantile and dissociated type of
personality; or better than dissociated, he might be called dissipated,
disjointed, dismembered, disassembled.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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