We now confront one of the most profound and meaningful paradoxes of love. This is the intensified openness to love which the awareness of death gives us and, simultaneously, the increased sense of death which love brings with it. We recall that even the arrows with which Eros creates—these life-giving shafts he shoots into the cold bosom of the earth to make the arid surface spring up with luxuriant green verdure—are poisoned. Here lie the anxiety-creating elements of human love. For the shafts in Eros’ bow pierce “brutal as well as gentle hearts, to their death or to their healing in delight.”¹ Death and delight, anguish and joy, anxiety and the wonder of birth—these are the warp and woof of which the fabric of human love is woven.

It is Eros who “breaks the limbs’ strength,” who, “in all gods, in all human beings, overpowers the intelligence in the breast and all their shrewd planning.”² Thus speaks Hesiod in his Theogony. He was writing in that powerfully creative archaic period (c. 750 B.C.) when Greece was filled with the ferment which marked the birth of the city-states and the new Greek individual of self-consciousness and dignity. The “overpowering” of the rational functions is thus directly connected with the power of Eros to create. How could we be told more eloquently that the act of creating form and life out of chaos and bringing vitality to man requires a passion which transcends the intelligence and “calculated planning”: Eros “breaks the limbs’ strength…in all gods, in all human beings!” Eros destroys as he creates.³

LOVE AS THE INTIMATION OF MORTALITY

To love means to open ourselves to the negative as well as the positive—to grief, sorrow, and disappointment as well as to joy, fulfillment, and an intensity of consciousness we did not know was possible before. I shall first describe this phenomenologically, in its ideal form as a paradigm.

When we “fall” in love, as the expressive verb puts it, the world shakes and changes around us, not only in the way it looks but in our whole experience of what we are doing in the world. Generally, the shaking is consciously felt in its positive aspects—as the wonderful new heaven and earth which love with its miracle and mystery has suddenly produced. Love is the answer, we sing. Aside from the banality of such reassurances, our Western culture seems to be engaged in a romantic—albeit desperate—conspiracy to enforce the illusion that that is all there is to eros. The very strength of the effort to support that illusion betrays the presence of the repressed, opposing pole.

This opposing element is the consciousness of death. For death is always in the shadow of the delight of love. In faint adumbration there is present the dread, haunting question, Will this new relationship destroy us? When we love, we give up the center of ourselves. We are thrown from our previous state of existence into a void; and though we hope to attain a new world, a new existence, we can never be sure. Nothing looks the same, and may well never look the same again. The world is annihilated; how can we know whether it will ever be built up again? We give, and give up, our own center; how shall we know that we will get it back? We wake up to find the whole world shaking: where or when will it come to rest?

The most excruciating joy is accompanied by the consciousness of the imminence of death—and with the same intensity. And it seems that one is not possible without the other.

This experience of annihilation is an inward one and, as the myth rightly puts it, is essentially what eros does to us. It is not simply what the other person does to us. To love completely carries with it the threat of the annihilation of everything. This intensity of consciousness has something in common with the ecstasy of the mystic in his union with God: just as he can never be sure God is there, so love carries us to that intensity of consciousness in which we no longer have any guarantee of security.

This razor’s edge, this dizzy balance of anxiety and joy, has much to do with the exciting quality of love. The dread joy is not just the question of whether the love will be returned in kind. Indeed, the real dialectic is within the person himself and the anxiety is not essentially quieted if the loved one does respond. Paradoxically, the lover is sometimes more anxious when the love is returned than when not. For if one loves unrequitedly, which is even an aim in some love writing, or from a safe distance, like Dante and the whole Stylist movement in Italian literature, he can at least go on about his customary daily tasks, writing his Divine Comedy or his sonnets or novels. It is when the love is realized that eros may literally “break the limb’s strength,” as with Anthony and Cleopatra, or Paris and Helen, or Héloise and Abelard. Hence, human beings are afraid of love. And, all the saccharine books to the contrary, there is reason to be afraid.

In common human experience, this relationship between death and love is perhaps most clear to people when they have children. A man may have thought very little about death—and prided himself on his “bravery”—until he becomes a father. Then he finds in his love for his child an experience of vulnerability to death: the Cruel Imposter can at any time take away the child, the object of his love. In this sense love is an experience of greater vulnerability.

Love is also a reminder of our own mortality. When a friend or member of our family dies, we are vividly impressed by the fact that life is evanescent and irretrievable. But there is also a deeper sense of its meaningful possibilities and an impetus to risk ourselves in taking the leap. Some—perhaps most—human beings never know deep love until they experience, at someone’s death, the preciousness of friendship, devotion, loyalty. Abraham Maslow is profoundly right when he wonders whether we could love passionately if we knew we’d never die.

This is one of the reasons, mythologically speaking, why the love affairs among the immortal gods on Mt. Olympus are so insipid and boring. The loves of Zeus and Juno are completely uninteresting until they involve a mortal. Love has the power to change the course of history only when Zeus comes down to Leda or Io and falls in love with this mortal woman who can yearn to have a child because she knows she will not live forever. Love is not only enriched by our sense of mortality but constituted by it. Love is the cross-fertilization of mortality and immortality. This is why the daimon Eros is described as midway between gods and men and partakes of the nature of both.

I have been speaking, to some degree, in ideal terms. I am fully aware that this degree of involvement will be called neurotic by many of my colleagues. This is the day of “cool” relationships—one should never become involved to a degree which prevents his moving out at any moment! But I submit that this involvement is neurotic only if “frozen,” or fixated; only if the partners demand that they live always on this level. While none of us lives on the level I am describing for very long, it remains a kind of backdrop, an ideal situation which ought to be somewhere in the relation lending meaning to the drab and dull days which also come.⁴

The relation between death and love has an impressive history in literature. In Italian writing, there was the frequent play upon the words amore, love, with morte, death. The connection also has its biological analogies in nature. The male bee dies after inseminating the Queen. More vivid is the case of the praying mantis: the female bites off the head of the male as he copulates, and his death throes unite with his copulatory spasms to make the thrusts stronger. Inseminated, the female proceeds to eat him to store up food for the new offspring.

Freud associated this threat of death with the depletion of Eros.

My viewpoint is that, in human beings, it is not merely the depletion of eros which causes the fear of death—or, as I call it above, the experience of mortality—but that in all stages of human development the experiences of love and death are interwoven.

The relationship between death and love is surely clear in the sex act. Every kind of mythology relates the sex act itself to dying, and every therapist comes to see the relationship ever more clearly through his patients. A patient, whose problem was sexual frigidity and who had never experienced an orgasm in intercourse, told me of a dream which dramatically illustrates this sex and death theme. In her dream, she experienced herself for the first time in her own identity as a woman. Then, still in the dream, she had the strange conviction that she would have to jump into the river and drown. The dream ended in great anxiety. That night, in sexual intercourse, she had an orgasm for the first time. The capacity for surrender, for giving one’s self up, must exist in love-making if there is to be the spontaneity required for orgasm.

Something very basic had taken place in this woman’s dream—the capacity to confront death, a capacity which is a prerequisite to growth, a prerequisite to self-consciousness. I take the orgasm here as a psychophysical symbol of the capacity to abandon one’s self, to give up present security in favor of the leap toward deeper experience. It is not by accident that the orgasm often appears symbolically as death and rebirth. The myth of going under water, of being drowned and born again has been passed down through history in different religious and different cultures as the myth of baptism—the being immersed in the river to be drowned, to die, in order to be born again. This is a daring to leap into non-being with the prospect of achieving new being.

Hence, the virginal quality of every genuine love experience. It seems that each time is new; we feel convinced that nobody ever experienced this before, though in our conceit we are sure that we shall remember it forever. When I was lecturing on this theme at a university, two different young men came up to tell me privately that they understood me because they were in love, but they expressed genuine concern that the other students wouldn’t understand. Such presumption—that nobody has ever been in love but me and I never before!—is, I fear, par for the course.

Mythology, that treasure house of the revelations of man’s self-interpretation of his inner experience and his world down through the ages, has been clear and eloquent about the relationships of love to anxiety and death. We do not need to resort to Tristan and Iseult, though that is the clearest myth. Joseph Campbell points out, on the basis of the whole Aegean prehistoric mythology, that the goddess Aphrodite and her son Eros are “exactly the great cosmic mother and her son—the ever-dying, ever-living god.” All myths on the parentage of Eros point to such a background, Campbell says.

In the mythology of old Egypt, Campbell relates, the lover and the loved one are the slayer and the victim which, though on the stage they appear to be in conflict, are behind the scenes of one mind, “in the life-consuming, life-redeeming, -creating and -justifying dark mystery of love.”⁷

What a different light this throws on the human problems in love than all our glib talk about the art of loving, about love as the answer to all our needs, love as instant self-actualization, love as contentment, or love as a mail-order technique! No wonder we try to reduce eros to purely physiological sex or try to avoid the whole dilemma by playing it cool, by using sex to drug and vaccinate ourselves against the anxiety-creating effects of eros.

It is possible to have sexual intercourse without any particular anxiety. But by doing this in casual encounters, we shut out, by definition, our eros—that is, we relinquish passion in favor of mere sensation; we shut out our participation in the imaginative, personal significance of the act. If we can have sex without love, we assume that we escape the daimonic anxiety known throughout the ages as an inseparable part of human love. And if, further, we even use sexual activity itself as an escape from the commitments eros demands of us, we may hope to have thus gained an airtight defense against anxiety. And the motive for sex, no longer being sensual pleasure or passion, becomes displaced by the artificial one of providing identity and gaining security; and sex has been reduced to an anxiety-allaying strategy. Thus we set the stage for the development of impotence and affectlessness later on.

DEATH AND THE THE OBSESSION WITH SEX

There is another side to the relationship between death and love. The obsession with sex serves to cover up contemporary man’s fear of death. We in the twentieth century have fewer defenses against this universal fear, such as the belief in immortality which armored our ancestors, and we also lack any widely agreed-upon purpose of life. Consequently, the awareness of death is widely repressed in our day. But none of us can fail to be aware at the same time of the tremendous preoccupation with sex: in our humor, our drama, and our economic life, even down to the commercials on television. An obsession drains off anxiety from some other area and prevents the person from having to confront something distasteful. What would we have to see if we could cut through our obsession about sex? That we must die. The clamor of sex all about us drowns out the ever-waiting presence of death.

When I strive to prove my potency in order to cover up and silence my inner fears of impotence, I am engaging in a pattern as ancient as man himself. Death is the symbol of ultimate impotence and finiteness, and anxiety arising from this inescapable experience calls forth the struggle to make ourselves infinite by way of sex. Sexual activity is the most ready way to silence the inner dread of death and, through the symbol of procreation, to triumph over it.

Note that the ways we repress death and its symbolism are amazingly like the ways the Victorians repressed sex.⁸ Death is obscene, unmentionable, pornographic; if sex was nasty, death is a nasty mistake. Death is not to be talked of in front of the children, nor talked about at all if we can help it. We dress death up in grotesquely colorful caskets in the same way Victorian women camouflaged their bodies by means of voluminous dresses. We throw flowers on the casket to make death smell better. With make-believe funerals and burial ceremonies and fancy tombs we act as though the deceased had somehow not died; and we preach a psycho-religious gospel that says the less grief the better.⁹ Even our economy joins in the same promise of physical comfort, with everything arranged as though the deceased had not died.¹⁰ Protecting the children, camouflaging smell and dress, the make-believe ceremonies, ending up in the inward pretense—all of this bears a striking parallel to the Victorian’s repression of sex.

But human beings cannot block off any important biological or emotional aspect of experience without developing an equivalent amount of inner anxiety. Where there is an obsession, we can assume some equivalent repression. Where does the anxiety engendered by this repression of death and its symbols go? Into our compulsive preoccupation with sex. Repression of death equals obsession with sex. Sex is the easiest way to prove our vitality, to demonstrate we are still “young,” attractive, and virile, to prove we are not dead yet. This carries the weight of asserting our potency in ultimate form over nature. This hope has an understandable biological base in that sexuality and procreation are the only way of insuring the carrying on of our name and our genes in our children who live beyond our own death.

Contemporary concern with sexuality reaches far beyond this biological base in that sexuality and procreation are the only ways preoccupation with sexuality drugs the individual so that he does not need to admit the fact that he dies and, indeed, that death—the one experience which is inexorable—may occur at any moment. The greater our alienation from nature—alienation’s ultimate symbol being the atom bomb and radiation—the closer we actually are to death. The rape of nature in the form of the splitting of the atom is thus related to our fear of death, our guilt (which always increases fear), and our consequently redoubled need to repress the consciousness of death.¹¹ And here the mother symbol enters; we speak of mother nature. It is not a far cry from experiencing the achievement of the splitting of the atom as gaining power over the “eternal feminine.” The atom bomb sets us into conflict with the symbolic mother. This is why the construction of the bomb carries such a personal symbolic power for almost everyone. No wonder Western man shows signs of bearing—in some buried depth—a great quantity of guilt!

The drive to repress the awareness of death falls with particular weight on Western man because of his reliance on the “myth of potency.” (I use the term “myth” not in its deteriorated popular sense of “falsehood,” but in its historically accurate sense of a psychobiological pattern which gives meaning and direction to experience.) The myth of potency has played a central role in Western man’s struggle for identity since the Renaissance, and has been particularly crucial in forming his psychological and spiritual character. Western man’s preoccupation with manipulating nature, which led to such astonishing success in the physical sciences and industrialism, was extended, in the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, to human beings. I gain potency, then, by manipulating myself. But to the extent that I do this successfully, I am not genuinely potent; I am caught in an insoluble dilemma. My self is this inert hunk of living matter which submits to manipulation. Self-manipulating, like the manipulation of another, never increases potency but, on the contrary, undermines it. We always presuppose some potent person or standard behind ourselves, the manipulator. But as the system is extended, the identity of this “behind the scenes” person or standard becomes lost in an infinite regression. This control of the controllers is a real issue, confused as it may be; and is always shifted back until it becomes daimonic in the negative sense.

The myth of individual potency became particularly overemphasized for those of us in America who grew up on an actual frontier, be it an economic, social, or geographical one. On the frontier of the West, which I take for our example, it was crucial that a man be able to defend himself by the strength of his own hand, that he cultivate a rough and active type of physical strength, and that he not let tenderness or sentimental emotions slow his movement in drawing his gun. Indeed, the gun as a symbol for the penis, useful when stiff and erect, first remarked by Freud, has greater relevancy in America than in Vienna; this is one of the few specific cultural symbols which still seems cogent in spite of social change. The life and legend of Ernest Hemingway provide vivid pictures of the masculine virtues of potency carried over from the frontier—physical strength, hunting, sexual prowess (partially compensating for his real struggle with and fear of sexual impotence), and the active themes and style in his writing. But death, and the insupportable anxiety of his living on in the face of a death coming no one knows when, became too pressing a threat as he became sexually impotent in his middle sixties, and led to the ultimate act a man can make as assertion of his potency, namely taking his own life in suicide. As long as you can hang on to the virtue of individual potency, you can laugh in the face of death. But once you lose this advantage, your choice is to accept death and its gradual and often ignominious victory, or rush headlong to meet it as Hemingway did.

Sex and death have in common the fact that they are the two biological aspects of the mysterium tremendum. Mystery—defined here as a situation in which the data impinge on the problem—has its ultimate meaning in these two human experiences. Both are related to creation and destruction; and it is, therefore, scarcely surprising that in human experience, they are interwoven in such complex ways. In both, we are taken over by an event; we cannot stand outside either love or death—and, if we try to, we destroy whatever value the experience can have.

THE TRAGIC SENSE IN LOVE

I recall a discussion with a highly-respected psychotherapist colleague and friend on the significance of the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. My friend stated that the trouble with Romeo and Juliet was that they hadn’t had adequate counseling. If they had had, they would not have committed suicide. Taken aback, I protested that I didn’t think that was Shakespeare’s point at all, and that Shakespeare, as well as the other classical writers who have created and molded the literature which speaks to us age after age, is in this drama picturing how sexual love can grasp a man and woman and hurl them into heights and depths—the simultaneous presence of which we call tragic.

But my friend insisted that tragedy was a negative state and we, with our scientific enlightenment, had superseded it—or at least ought to at the earliest possible moment. I argued with him, as I do here, that to see the tragic in merely negative terms is a profound misunderstanding. Far from being a negation of life and love, the tragic is an ennobling and deepening aspect of our experience of sexuality and love. An appreciation of the tragic not only can help us avoid some egregious oversimplifications in life, but it can specifically protect us against the danger that sex and love will be banalized also in psychotherapy.

I am, of course, not using tragedy in its popular sense of “catastrophe,” but as the self-conscious, personal realization that love brings both joy and destruction. I mean in this context a fact which has been known all through man’s history but which our own age has accomplished the remarkable feat of forgetting, namely, that sexual love has the power to propel human beings into situations which can destroy not only themselves but many other people at the same time. We have only to call to mind Helen and Paris, or Tristan and Iseult, which are mythic presentations, whether based on historical personages or not, of the power of sexual love to seize man and woman and lift them up into a whirlwind which defies and destroys rational control. It is not by accident that these myths are presented over and over again in Western classic literature and passed down from generation to generation. For the stories come from a mythic depth of human experience in sexual love that is to be neglected only at the price of the impoverishment of our talk and writing about sex and love.

The tragic is an expression of a dimension of consciousness which gives richness, value, and dignity to human life. Thus the tragic not only makes possible the most humane emotions—like pity in the ancient Greek sense, sympathy for one’s fellow man, and understanding—but without it, love becomes saccharine and insipid and eros sickens into the child who never grows up.

But the reader may raise an objection. Whatever the classical meaning of tragedy may be, are not the so-called tragic presentations in today’s art, on the stage or in the pages of the novel, a portrayal of meaninglessness? Is not what we see in O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh the lack of the greatness and dignity in man, and is not Waiting for Godot a presentation of emptiness?

To this, I would make a double response. First, in presenting the ostensible lack of the greatness in man and his actions, or the lack of meaning, these works are doing infinitely more. They are confronting exactly what is tragic in our day, namely the complete confusion, banality, ambiguity, and vacuum of ethical standards and the consequent inability to act or, in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the paralyzing fear of one’s own tenderness. True, what we see in The Iceman Cometh is that greatness has fled from man, but this already presupposes a greatness, a dignity, a meaning. No one would ever think of reminding a Greek audience that it means something when Orestes kills his mother. But Willy Loman’s wife in Death of a Salesman pleads, “Attention must be paid,” and she was entirely right. It does mean something if a man is destroyed even if he is only a traveling salesman. (Nowadays, we would perhaps have to explain to an audience why Orestes’ killing his mother is so meaningful: for we are the generation which has learned that such killing is not at all a problem requiring a terrible struggle with the Furies and later a trial concerning guilt, responsibility, and forgiveness, but an acted-out, psychological, counter-Oedipal mechanism which temporarily got out of hand!) In my judgment, the best of the novels and dramas and paintings in our day are those which present to us the tremendous meaning in the fact of meaninglessness. The most tragic thing of all, in the long run, is the ultimate attitude, “It doesn’t matter.” The ultimately tragic condition in a negative sense is the apathy, the adamant, rigid “cool,” which refuses to admit the genuinely tragic.

But I would also ask, in rebuttal, Do not these works we are citing profoundly reveal what is wrong with love and will in our day? Take the contradiction in acting so vividly portrayed in Waiting for Godot. Didi says, “Let us go,” and the stage direction in the play states, “They do not move.” There could be no more telling vignette of modern man’s problem with will, his inability to make significant acts. They wait for Godot: but in this waiting there is expectation: the waiting itself implies hope and belief. And they wait together. Or take the rabid denial of love in the savage in-fighting of the married couples in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. This presentation of the inability to come to terms with whatever love and tenderness they do have shows more vividly and convincingly than reams of research what modern man’s problem in love is.

THE TRAGIC AND SEPARATION

There is another source of the tragic aspect of love. This is the fact that we are created as male and female, which leads to perpetual yearning for each other, a thirst for completion which is doomed to be temporary. This is another source of joy and disappointment, ecstasy and despair.

I need to introduce here a difficult concept—ontology. The term literally means the “science of being.” But that definition is not very helpful, especially since we post-nineteenth-century Americans are not accustomed to ontological thinking. I shall never forget Paul Tillich describing to a class his shock when, as a student of philosophy, he was confronted with the question, “Why is there something and not nothing?” This is the question which puts one on the ontological level. Why is there such a thing as sex? And why not no-sex; why don’t we propogate the way the paramicium and earthworm do, by lopping off part of ourselves for the new being? We cannot take the easy road here with the answer “evolution”—it just developed that way. Nor can we use the likewise easy answer “divine purpose”—there is some teleological “reason” we are made this way. Both of these answers—though in opposite ways—beg the question. No, we must ask the ontological question directly, examining the being of the thing at hand—in this case, sex—to find a convincing answer. If “sex is the human counterpart of the cosmic process,” we obviously cannot come to a conclusion on the basis of how boys and girls wear their hair in this decade. Ontology seeks to discover the basic structures of existence—the structures which are given to everyone at every moment.

The existence of maleness and femaleness, seen ontologically, is one expression of this fundamental polarity of all reality. The smallest molecular particle gets its dynamic movement from the fact that it consists of a negative and positive charge, with tension—and therefore movement—between them. Using this analogy of the molecular particles of matter and energy, Alfred North Whitehead and Paul Tillich both believe that reality has the ontological character of negative-positive polarity. Whitehead and the many contemporary thinkers for whom his work has become important see reality not as consisting of substances in fixed states but as a process of dynamic movement between polarities. This is why Whitehead could develop a process philosophy. Indeed, it could be argued that all of reality has a male-female character—surely Hegel’s theory of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis can be seen in this light. Paul Tillich points out that “it is well known to the students of Hegel that he started in his early fragments as a philosopher of love, and it can be said without exaggeration that Hegel’s dialectical scheme is an abstraction from his concrete intuition into the nature of love as separation and reunion.”¹²

In sexual intercourse, we directly and intimately experience this polar rhythm. The sex act is the most powerful enactment of relatedness imaginable, for it is the drama of approach and entrance and full union, then partial separation (as though the lovers could not believe it were true and yearned to look at each other), then a complete reunion again. It cannot be an accident of nature that in sex we thus enact the sacrament of intimacy and withdrawal, union and distance, separating ourselves and giving ourselves in full union again. For this eternally repeated participation in each other, the touch and the withdrawal, is present even in the hesitant beginnings of acquaintanceship and is the essence of courtship in birds and animals as well as men and women. In the rhythm of participation in a union in a dual being and the eventual separation into individual autonomy are contained the two necessary poles of human existence itself, shown in their fullness in sexual intercourse.

It is likely that these differences underlie the myths, rising spontaneously in many different cultures, of sex being a reunion with the other half of one’s self. The most famous of these is given by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium—the myth of the androgyne. But the crucial point is made in the counterpart of this myth in the Upanishads when it relates regarding man on his creation, “But he felt no delight. Therefore a man who is lonely feels no delight.” Thereupon “was created the wife to fill the void.”¹³

But we do not need to go to the myths to appreciate the value of the polarity. I once spent a week on Mt. Athos, a little country in northern Greece extending 12 miles down into the Aegean Sea and populated only by monks living in fifteen or twenty monasteries. No woman, supposedly, had stepped off the boat at Athos since the twelfth century. But the monks themselves had taken on the gestures, the ways of talking, walking, and carrying themselves of women. I would find myself thinking, as I saw a monk walking away from me down the village street, that there was a woman. The same was true of another very different masculine group, the Foreign Legion, the soldiers of which would dance with each other on the decks of the French ship in the Mediterranean. The incidence of homosexuality is not the point here and, in any case, does not explain this phenomenon. I propose, rather, that when there are no women present, there is no accent on acting male and vice versa; we become more masculine when there are women around, and they more feminine. The two sexes have the function of accentuating the characteristics of the opposite one.

It is the common experience of all of us that when you put a bunch of men together—as in the army, fraternities, or a monastery—you may be able to get them to devote themselves single-mindedly to the task at hand. But there is a curious lack of vitality in other realms. We see a deadening, a lack of variety of response; and they will accept authoritarian procedures without any tendency to rebel. But introduce a woman, as in the Garden of Eden, and consciousness sharpens, a moral sense develops, and even rebellion begins to sprout. In a genuine sense, sexes seem to ignite each other, offering a vitality and power—and even better ideas.

By virtue of the fact of two sexes, reproduction can produce greater diversity. The polarity of male and female, the intermingling and combining of genes, gives infinitely increased variety; originality and new combinations of possibilities emerge. It is only the lowest forms of nature, such as paramecia, which reproduce by offshoots from the same organism (although George Bernard Shaw, in one of his acerbic warnings to the human race, predicted that this is the fate to which the human race may succumb if we continue to place efficiency above all else!). In studies of sections of America where persons grow taller than in other areas, it is believed that one of the causes is the intermingling with a new group of people migrating into the area and intermarrying with the previous stock. It is also well-known that while incest is not biologically harmful, the intermarrying of brother and sister and members of the same family is nevertheless prohibited in almost every society because of social impoverishment, the loss of differentiation which would block the development of the race.

We are fitted for this rhythmic process by the differing masculine and feminine musculature, so the Dutch psychologist Butendijk concludes. He points out that in bones and muscles, the male is built essentially on straight lines, approaching right angles—the better to thrust, to strike by poking, punching, and other assertive aspects of the male’s role. The woman is built on curves and rounded lines—the better to open herself, to carry and nurse the offspring, to give and receive the peculiarly feminine kind of pleasure. The thrusting mechanism of the penis is present already in the little boy, who makes motions of wishing to poke his penis into things. The little girl has her counterpart, the desire to harmonize, to conserve, to inform things not by overpowering, head-on attacks, but by approaching in a curve. Our society associates the masculine virtues with action and the feminine with passivity—which, below the obvious level, is as wrong as it is misleading. It is as accurate (though it also has the error of all generalizations) to say that women are for preserving the arts of peace as that men are for the arts of war. Actually, both masculine and feminine are active and passive in their own way.

The fact that these characteristics have been exaggerated grossly and unfairly in our society is no reason for forgetting the real differences. It is true that the so-called masculine virtues in the nineteenth century were such that a man, to prove his potency, had to conquer not only nature but himself and all the women who came within his path. And a sterotype was made of the female as gentle and sweet-smelling, unable to take care of herself, unable to survive hearing profanity, and ready to swoon at the slightest excuse. As a reaction to this came the movement to wipe away the distinctions; no longer was vive la difference the rallying cry but “everybody feels the same” and both sexes were to react the same way to the same things. But we found, to our horror, that we had thrown out the delight-giving differences along with the unfair suppression.

For in our egalitarian crusade, we overlooked the fact which Dr. Helena Deutsch has pointed out, that the woman has a vaginal “drawing in” response which may actually give her more pleasure than experiencing the apocalyptic orgasm. Language mirrors these differences: there is in English the word “invaginate” for the drawing in response, and we have no counterpart for the male. The closest parallels are the various forms of “phallic,” which refer essentially to thrusting, asserting, conquering behavior, and which may or may not have a hostile connotation. The male experiences not only the assertive response but also a response to this being drawn in; and while the woman’s orgasm is complex and diffuse, the male has a built-in neurological and physiological mechanism which trips off the orgasm and, when excited beyond a certain point, becomes impossible to withhold.

A final ontological fact we observe in sexuality is simple and elemental. This is that sexual intercourse is procreative; it can make a new being, a baby. This fact creates profound changes in the female’s body and life for at least nine months whether the male stays or leaves; and, except in pathological cases, it makes a radical difference to the female for a much longer time than that. The primitive words of an Abyssinian noblewoman put this excellently:

It is argued, by Karen Homey for one, that the fact that women can bear children and men cannot sets up the jealousy in men which makes them strive so hard, struggling to prove their creativity in cultural activities and building civilizations. Often in psychoanalysis, this jealousy erupts in men with personal humilation and despair. One South American patient cried out from the couch again and again that he could never forgive his mother that she bore him and he had to suck at her breasts—and he firmly believed every man carried within him that same angry envy. The archetypal roots of this conflict go infinitely deeper than the modern age or our “western” problems and are lodged in the roots of man’s history and existence itself.

But the opposite side of the matter is as pressing. When I said in an earlier chapter that the “new sophisticate is afraid of his procreative powers,” I meant it literally in the sense that his anxiety arises from his profound ambivalence about his power to create another human being. A patient of mine experienced periodic impotence each month at the time of his wife’s fertility, despite the fact that consciously both he and his wife wished to have a baby. It turned out in his fantasies, however, that he did not wish to father a child which could be his rival for her affection but wished himself to remain her baby as well as her husband.

This ambivalence is present in Freud’s term “castration,” the original fear to which he believed all anxiety can be traced. For castration does not mean what Freud and most people take it to mean, a cutting off of the male member—the term for that is “mutilation.” Castration, rather, refers to the severing of the testicles, becoming a eunuch; it consists of the loss of the power to procreate. The eunuchs in the Sultan’s court were able to have erections and perform intercourse; but they could not father a baby. The line of blood was kept clear, despite peccadillos in the harem. I think Freud here was wiser than he seemed to be aware of, for this anxiety about procreative power—birth control notwithstanding—is truly fundamental.

CONTRACEPTIVES AND THE TRAGIC

We take as our illustration a young woman of thirty who came to consult with me some years ago and was my patient for a brief period. A graduate of one of the best New England girls’ colleges, she had grown up in a well-to-do suburb, was intelligent and attractive, and seemed in every way a typically nice girl. In college, she had absorbed what had then been, in the mid-40’s, the generally accepted belief in togetherness and the family, and had chosen as her goal to get married on graduation and immediately raise a large family. She had admirably lived up to her plan by marrying her boy friend from a neighboring college on commencement day, and then had five children, spaced one every two years just as she had planned.

But when she came to me at the age of thirty, she revealed that she was “in love” and having an affair with a garage mechanic, with whom, for the first time in her life, she was experiencing strong passion. She reported that she now knew that she had never loved her husband but had contempt for him. By the time she considered psychotherapy (on the urging of friends), she had gone home with her five children to live with her parents in the suburbs—a curious and pathetic denouement to what had once been such brave plans.

She and I were not able to do much effective therapy because she felt the love with the garage mechanic to be “sacred” and she did not wish to go into it. When I happened to see her some years later, she seemed a faded middle-aged woman working dutifully to support her children. This daughter of upper middle-class suburbia had gotten herself into a situation which was as little susceptible of solution, if not less so, than the old-time prototype of the “lost girl” who has a child out of wedlock. The reason was certainly not lack of information or lack of planning and responsibility. A modern, intelligent woman, my patient with her five children seemed in many ways as trapped as her forebears in Victorian times before the emancipation of women and the invention of contraceptives.

I cite this case to illustrate that the mere capacity for family planning is not an obviation of the tragic. The psychological meaning of contraception is the expanding of the realm of personal responsibility and commitment. But far from being easier, this personal relationship may have to carry more weight and may, therefore, be harder.

Since contraception allays anxiety about pregnancy in a given act of intercourse, it seems to be used in our culture as a symbol that we have left behind us once and for all the tragic aspect of sexual love. Now I am certainly in favor of contraceptives and the planning of procreation—a point so obvious it ought not need to be made. But this almost universally accepted principle of birth control should not blind us to the fact that contraception, great boon to sexuality it is, does not change one whit the basic issue about which we are talking. Although it frees the individual from the immediate biological enchainment of pregnancy, it may well increase his psychological ambivalence.

The tragic dimension of sex and love is just as prevalent as it always was, even with contraception, but is raised out of the automatic, biological realm to the psychological realm. This is where tragedy should be anyway; it is not the biological facts of life itself, such as death and procreation, that give the tragic dimension, but how we as human beings relate to these inescapable necessities of human fate. The tragic is always a psychological and spiritual issue.

There is also the dilemma of personal responsibility which comes from the freedom to choose to have a baby or not. It has been possible to plan babies for the last four decades, and though we have acted upon that power, we have never accepted the psychological and personal responsibility for it. Our blithe evasion of that issue comes out in the guilt we feel as a whole society toward our children. We do everything for them, we cater to their development and their whims, we count it a sign of our broadmindedness and virtue that we give in to them on every moral issue (and now on marijuana) so that the poor children have an impossible time trying to find something about these always-giving-in parents against which they can revolt. When they go away, we say, “Have a good time,” and we get worried if they don’t have a good time and worried if they have too good a time. And all the while we are secretly envious of them and their youth and resentful at how good they have it as compared with how hard we had it. Through all of this treating our young like little royalty, heirs apparent to heaven knows what, we are the maids-in-waiting, chauffeurs, cooks, nurses, bottomless money-bags, home teachers, camp leaders—until it is no wonder our children stand up and scream, “For heaven’s sake, leave us alone!” And that is the biggest threat of all to us—for we are filled with some nameless, pervasive guilt about our children and can’t let go. And the guilt we are expiating is not about some specific thing we did or didn’t do in rearing them; it is about the basic fact of having children in the first place. For no longer does “God” decide we are to have children; we do. And who has even begun to comprehend the meaning of that tremendous fact?

Or imagine the couples—and, with the need for population control, there will perforce be many—who will plan to have only one baby: consider the tremendous psychic weight this poor infant will have to carry. As we see in our therapy, particularly with professional people who have had their one child, there is great temptation to overprotect the infant. When he calls, the parents run; when he whimpers, they are abashed; when he is sick, they are guilty; when he doesn’t sleep, they look as though they are going to have nervous breakdowns. The infant becomes a little dictator by virtue of the situation he is born into, and couldn’t be anything else if he wanted to. And there is, of course, the always complicating and contradictory fact that all this attention actually amounts to a considerable curtailing of the child’s freedom, and he must, like a prince born into a royal family, carry a weight for which children were never made.

Contraception, like all devices and machines, can increase our range of freedom and choice. But the new freedom and power thus given to us also increases our ambivalence and anxiety, an ambivalence which now expresses itself in the banalization of sex and love. As the girls who, in these days of the pill, are promiscuous say, according to Dr. Seymour Halleck, director of psychiatry in the student health service at the University of Wisconsin, “It’s just too much trouble to say no.”¹⁵ To make something banal, to undercut its significance, to say it “doesn’t matter,” is the method par excellence of avoiding anxiety. Is not the upshot of the situation that contraception is misused to serve a detached, in-discriminate, here-today-and-gone-tomorrow attitude toward sexuality? Surely an act which carries as much power as the sexual act, and power in the critical area of passing on one’s name and species, cannot be taken as banal and insignificant except by doing violence to our natures, if not to “nature” itself.

With contraception, sex can become, at least in some instances, a purely personal relationship. And the challenge this presents to us is no less than finding the meaning of this personal relationship.