In our days, however, we have come to prize human life and happiness
more highly and young virgins shall not be sacrificed, being the new
generation and the future, to the welfare of some modern King David who
is the past.
The young women in our midst, virgins or others, whom a morbid
obsession draws to the bosom of some King David must be saved from the
winter chill that awaits them. Modern psychology holds the key opening
for them the door to freedom and normal love.
CHAPTER XXVII
NEGATIVE LOVE
The only form of love which is positive is complete love, which
gratifies both the physical and the mental aspects of the organism
and which, besides, is human and, hence, recognises and admits the
relativity of all things human.
Any form of love which excludes either the physical or the mental
relationship of male and female, is incomplete and, therefore, abnormal.
All the puritanical rant to the contrary notwithstanding, platonic
love and prostitution are on the same biological level, as morbid and
unnatural one as the other.
Prostitution only gratifies the body more or less completely and
starves the mind, causing the mental aspect of the love craving to
become stunted or perverse.
Platonic love gratifies the intellect more or less completely,
rather less than more, for it offers few egotistical rewards, but it
starves the body and leads it into adopting morbid forms of craving
gratification.
=A Clean Life.= Many a patient has declared proudly to me that he led
a "clean life." A few days later, after losing his selfconsciousness
in my presence, he would gradually confess to a terrible "struggle"
against his "animal" instincts. Which meant, that at irregular
intervals, self-gratification would give him, in a morbid day dream,
the woman whose love he craved; or a pollution dream would allow
him, in the unconsciousness and ethical irresponsibility of sleep,
to make up for his privations by indulging in imaginary promiscuous
cohabitation.
This is in too many cases, the seamy side of a platonic love affair,
when one or both of the mates is not naturally unsexed but unsexes
himself thru what he or she calls will-power and which analysis reveals
to be conscious or unconscious fear.
This is the meaning of love plus continence. In the majority of cases
its damage stops there. In a few cases, however, especially when the
sex cravings of one of the mates have been so successfully repressed
that they are no longer experienced consciously, symbolical nightmares
of the most exhausting kind, hysterical disturbances during the
waking hours, compulsions and obsessions of all sorts, reveal to the
psychoanalyst that lava is boiling under the apparently extinct cone of
a safe volcano.
The platonic individual, like the puritan, is either oversexed or
undersexed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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