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[Pg 264] 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, re[Pg 265]veal 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.
The oversexed must surround themselves with protective measures lest their violent cravings may lead them into socially punishable acts. The simplest neurotic expedient is to utter a complete denial, whenever possible a public one, of the existence of sexual cravings, and then to be forced by one's statements into living up to an absurd self-imposed standard.
Utterances and Conduct. This at times results in most grotesque conflicts between utterance and conduct. We see for instance the much married Mrs. Eddy who as the witty Theodore Schroeder remarked, had many more husbands than children, stating that the pleasures of the flesh "are always wrong unless the physiologic factor can be excluded from consciousness" (a rather cryptic sentence) and also that "generation rests on no sexual basis."
Thy hysteric whose volcanic outbursts supply her with a morbid sexual relief for which she rejects all responsibility, for she is unconscious at the time is generally in her private and public life a woman[Pg 266] of great repressions and perfect behavior, likely to sneer at every mention of a sex urge.
In other cases, platonic love is an attempt at creating an artificial value thru destroying a natural, biological human function.
Oracles and Prophecies. In ancient times it was observed that people deprived of any sexual gratification made at times mysterious utterances which were considered as an emanation of some divine intelligence.
Those utterances were nothing but hysterical ravings, accepted as oracles, prophecies, etc.
Our praise of continence, practiced even when it is unnecessary, (as in the case of lawfully married mates), is, after all, a survival of such superstitious beliefs based on misunderstood morbid phenomena.
Modern science, especially the new science of endocrinology, has shown that to every display of sexual activity corresponds an outpouring of hormonic secretions which benefits the entire system.
Can We Save Our Vital Force? Once upon a time it was assumed that continence enabled people to save their "vital force," to preserve the "resources of their body."
We know now that the gonads produce two secretions, one which would pass out of the body in[Pg 267] any event, and one which flows directly in the blood and is the only one which can benefit the organism.
The various puritanical theories as to the great value of continence had been shaken many times by evidence from the biography of all the great writers, artists, philosophers, inventors and other men and women who have left the world much enriched by their creative labor and at the same time indulged freely in the pleasures of the flesh.
Sublimation. Endocrinology strikes now the last blow at those theories, one of which by the way, was Freud's romantic hypothesis of the "sublimation."
Freud believed that sexual energy could be diverted towards social ends of greater value and non-sexual in character. This is scientifically absurd, as it disregards the dualism of glandular secretions. The outward secretions cannot be "saved" and the inner secretions which are beyond our control flow directly into the blood stream.
I have shown in another book, "Sex Happiness" that the platonic man is either the victim of his ignorance of sex matters and of ascetic superstitions which modern physiology can no longer countenance, or a physiologically deficient individual.
The heroes of Beresford's "God's Counterpoint"[Pg 268] and of May Sinclair's "The Romantic" whom I analised in "Sex Happiness" correspond to the first and the second of those types, respectively.
The Sexless. There are men and women, of course, of the hypogonadal type, undersexed or sexless, who are capable of deep affection for a person of the opposite sex. That such an affection never culminates in complete physical communion is easily understood. Sexual failures discourage the weaker friend from risking any more experiments likely to result in humiliation.
The sexless man is practically a woman, and like certain homosexuals, treats women as members of his own sex. He may make a pleasant, delicate, safe companion, but no woman should allow herself to care for him.
Frigid Women who never experience any thrill in their husband's embrace and hence consider the............