The too young wife and the too young husband may at first smile when
hotel clerks, shopkeepers, chauffeurs, etc., allude to their aged
mate as "your father" or "your mother." After a while, a feeling
of embarrassment will get the best of their sense of humor. Shame
and humiliation will soon set in when those mistakes are repeated
frequently. When the ego is wounded by love complications, unless the
individual is a pronounced masochist, love fares very badly.
It turns into hatred for the mate causing the humiliating remarks, as
unconscious incest ideas gradually break into consciousness and provoke
protective measures, critical attitudes, disgust, etc.
In one case which came under my observation, the community's criticisms
worked as effectively as psychoanalytic treatment would have.
=Having Her Fixation-Fling.= A young woman married to a man of her age,
but discontented and frigid, had a passing liaison with an elderly
man, which exposed her to many jeers on the part of her associates who
suspected it.
She was very intelligent and well acquainted with psychoanalytical
literature and only consulted me to make sure of her correct diagnosis
of her own case.
She did the proper thing under the circumstances, confessed a part of
the truth to her husband, went away with him for a while and has been
happy with him ever since. She had had her "fixation fling" as she
called it, had sown her neurotic wild oats and ridden herself of a
morbid element which may never bother her again.
This sort of solution, however, is one which is neither scientific nor
safe, for the person affected by a fixation of that morbid sort is at
the mercy of a recurrence of it, should life's problems compel him to
seek once more the line of exaggerated safety and regression to the
childish level of conduct.
=Physical Results.= If matches between the young and old were
successful physically and otherwise, they would be extremely beneficial
to the older mate. Normal sexual stimulation, far from driving the aged
to an early grave, as old time puritans have taught us, is probably the
most potent factor of rejuvenation.
The Steinach operation which enables the hormone-producing cells of the
gonads to overdevelop at the expense of the seminiferous cells, seems,
when successful, to confer new youth upon the entire organism.
Lorand, Stekel, Hufeland and others hold that sexual activity in the
old, when it is possible, is conducive to longevity.
Lorand mentions many interesting cases in which remarriage at
incredibly advanced ages seemed in no way to curtail one's life span.
Thomas Parré, who died at 162, was arrested for assault at 102 and
married again at 120. The Dane Drackenberg, who died at 150, married at
111 a woman of 60, became a widower at 130, and tried to woo a young
peasant girl who, however, refused to accept him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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