Life would be much simpler if love among human beings were similar to love among the animals. At mating time, any animal of any species feels automatically attracted to any animal of the opposite sex belonging to the same species. Age, appearance or relationship seem of no account in the animal world. The love activities begin at a definite time of the year, have as their obvious and exclusive purpose the reproduction of the species and, after attaining their goal, end very early in the summer of the same year. An exception may be made for a few wild and domesticated animals which have several mating seasons and for a few survivals of the prehistoric fauna, like the elephants, among which the family group seems more permanent than among more "recent" biological specimens. Nor do love activities among the animals result in lasting disturbances of their psychological life. In certain varieties of fish the male never even sees the female whose eggs he fecundates. While we [Pg vi] observe at times duels to the death between two males for the possession of one female (elks or moose), animal life seems to suffer few lasting complications from the fact of such conflicts, which, like animal love, are purely seasonal.
A greater regularity of the food supply which has intensified the sex urge among human beings and removed its seasonal character, and the progress of civilization which, for economic reasons, has placed upon the union of male and female a thousand restrictions, has complicated terribly what was merely among animals a periodic biological activity.
Restrictions, however, never bring about the complete suppression of biological cravings and merely compel them to remain repressed for varying periods of time. Repressed cravings, denied a direct normal outlet, create for themselves indirect, morbid outlets.
We are little more than civilized animals who have been trained not to reveal their primal cravings at certain forbidden times and places.
The cravings are there, struggling for expression and denial of their reality does not suffice to make them unreal. It only invests them with morbidity and abnormality.
Much of the fearsome mystery which surrounds [Pg vii] sex is due to the fact that we have forgotten our origin. We have set up a goal which, like all goals worth striving for, is far ahead of the human procession and somewhere between the earth and the stars. But that goal should not cause us to forget our starting point.
It happens too often that "what we should be" blinds us to "what we really are." Hence our surprise, our puzzled expression, our painful disappointment, when one of us reveals himself suddenly as he is instead of as he should be. Hence our absurd statutes which punish the laggards on the road of evolution instead of helping them along. Hence our fears in the presence of a mystery we have made mysterious, of a danger we have made dangerous and which we make more terrifying yet by burying our heads in the sand.
To this day the study of love has been considered as the almost exclusive province of poets, playwrights, novelists, movie authors and philosophers.
Those people have reveled in love's dramatic complications which they have, whenever possible, exaggerated, for "artistic" reasons. Instead of clarifying the problem, they have beclouded it.
In anglo-saxon countries a class of neurotics countenanced by the police and the courts, the puritans, [Pg viii] have further distorted the popular misconception of love by swathing it in the morbid veils woven by their unhealthy minds.
It is high time, therefore, that the subject of love be reviewed from an impartial angle, from a purely scientific point of view.
Only one science is qualified to undertake that review, psychoanalysis, for it has effected in the last twenty years a synthesis of all the data which biology, neurology, endocrinology and other sciences have contributed to the knowledge of human psychology and of the human personality.
No scientist is satisfied with his findings unless they can be described in terms of accurate measurements, hence, repeated and checked up by any other scientist having acquired the requisite minimum of technical skill.
The basis for such a study of love was established by the great pioneer in the science of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud of Vienna.
By his masterly analysis of the sex life, to which, however, he has ascribed an undue importance, he has stripped love of many veils which made it look like a scarecrow. His successors, recognizing the importance of other factors in the love life, ego cravings, organic predispositions, etc., have in turn [Pg ix] stripped love of other veils which made it look too romantically unreal.
Thus we are gradually reaching the heart of the problem.
Love to-day is no longer animal love, nor is it as yet angelic love. We are no longer beasts, altho the primal beast still disports itself in our unconscious. Nor are we angels, arduous as our striving toward the stars may be. To determine what love should be, could be or might be, seems to be an academic waste of time and little else.
To determine, on the other hand, what love REALLY IS AT THE PRESENT DAY, what actual level it has reached, to explain some of the difficulties it encounters in trying to remain on that level, and finally to suggest to MEN AND WOMEN OF TO-DAY workable modes of adaption at that level, shall be the mission of this book.
In the coming chapters, I will show that our choice of a mate is as completely "determined" as any other biological phenomenon; that the "reasons" for that choice are compelling "habits" acquired in our childhood and infancy within the family circle; that our "standards of beauty" are memories from childhood and infancy; that in our search for a mate we are influenced as powerfully by ego and safety cravings [Pg x] as by sex cravings that the so-called "perversions" are due, at times, to wrong training, at times, to organic disabilities and at times to unrecognized safety cravings; that jealousy is, in the majority of cases, due to ego cravings, not to sex cravings; finally that no perfect adjustment of the married relation can be brought about until democracy obtains in the home, replacing the various forms of autocracy against which bullied wives and henpecked husbands have directed many ineffective, neurotic revolts.
New York City
June 1, 1922