There are thousands of neurotics, suffering from a feeling of
inferiority, who are unfit to become mothers until their morbidity has
been cured by psychotherapy, and who, if allowed to bear children, will
train a new generation to behave in a negative, neurotic, socially
baneful way.
=The Children of Neurotic Mothers=, in whom the fear and hatred of
sex and love is rampant, will some day become prostitutes or puritans,
both of them degrading love equally.
I cannot follow Freud when he states that every neurosis has its root
in a failure of the love life, but some of the artificial obstacles
created by a stupid puritanical civilisation between man and the
full realisation of his sexual goal have not infrequently wrecked a
life which, neurotically oriented as it was, might have gone on, in a
socially tolerable way, for years and perhaps until the individual's
death.
Difficulties due to the use of improper or misunderstood contraceptive
appliances, the terrors of pregnancy, actual or expected, the fear
of abortion, the sufferings following abortion in a complex-ridden
organism, have too often upset a balance which at best was precarious.
=Birth Control and Indulgence.= Certain critics of birth control
attack it on the ground that it would lead to "overindulgence" of the
sex relationship. Those people are generally unprepossessing, worn,
individuals who are trying to compensate for their sexual weakness by
making a virtue out of an unavoidable inferiority. Their opposition to
what they call "overindulgence" (one thing which nature hardly ever
allows, barring rare morbid cases of priapism) is grotesque in the case
of married couples.
More unions are wrecked by underindulgence due to fear, ignorance of
the mates or inhibitions on the part of one or both, than to indulgence
of the normal kind.
Anything which prevents or discourages the normal exchange of sexual
caresses between those legally entitled to each others enjoyment is
pernicious, antisocial and antibiological for, as Grace Potter writes:
"Mating has to do with other creation than that of new human beings. It
has to do with every kind of creation--a new state, a poem, a picture,
a great bridge, a happier world. Mating is concerned with repeopling
the world but also with regeneration of the individual, opening his
capacities to growth. Who shall say that the one is not as important
as the other? If the second were not as important as the first there
would have been hardly any advance in human culture. Of all the errors
incident to the development of human beings, in their struggle to
attain a consciousness that makes them more than animals, none has had
wider ill-effects than our misuse of love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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