He thinks, in other words, that he has passions that should be called base, and that he can gratify these desires with one type of woman. That their baseness is only a matter of the autoerotic mode in which he gratifies them has perhaps never occurred to him. Nor has he ever known that no passion can rightly be called base if gratified allerotically, which is the opposite of autoerotically. For allerotism is the passionate love not of self but of another. No one could be called in any sense unethical who gratified his own desires only through the gratified desires of another. But that is not the state of the well-to-do young man with a clandestine “love” affair. The hardest thing for this young man to see is the fact, which is quite patent to the unconscious both of the young woman and of himself, the simple fact that his interest in her is merely autoerotic. Some indeed will say that they are fully aware that they are keeping up secret relations with women for purely selfish reasons. They see that, in their day life, business is business and one has to sell and buy; and they wrongly suppose that the selling and buying of women’s bodies is no worse than business. The woman gets well paid for her services. Indeed they may, if they have read him, quote Ellis, who contrasts the reward of the average wife and the average _demimondaine_, and says that the prostitute is much better paid than the wife, and does far less for the economic reward she gets. But the young man who thinks for a moment that there is anything really erotic in the relations between himself and the young woman whom he disdains to make his wife, knows no more of erotism than a butterfly does of the depths of the ocean. His case is simply that of an undeveloped embryo. His autoerotic love is a wasted gonad that has never met the cell with which alone it could completely fuse and grow into an individual of its appropriate species. Not all sexual acts are erotic. Many are no more truly erotic than smoking a pipe or chewing gum. The man who for egoistic-social reasons refuses to confine his love to a woman he has married or intends to marry, and thereby removes all chance of the vivifying effects of true erotism being caused in his extra-marital life by the depth of his marital love, is starting in the wrong direction every time. He has left undeveloped the truly erotic part of himself, which, thus banished into the unconscious, will nevertheless, through its indirect manifestations, completely warp his sex life. He will have no love life whatever. In spite of its frequent occurrence in men in general, sex life without love life is a monstrosity. Erotism, then, may be defined as the highest expression of sex, from which all autoerotic impulses have been removed, or in which they have been so much subordinated that they play an almost negligible part. § 50