In man
'love' from the biological standpoint is also an amalgamation of two
needs; when the tender need to protect and foster and serve is lacking the
emotion is not quite perfect. Heine's expression, 'With my mantle I
protect you from the storm,' has always seemed to me very characteristic."
Sometimes the sexual impulse may undergo a complete transformation in this
direction. "I believe there is really a tendency in women," a lady writes
in a letter, "to allow maternal feeling to take the place of sexual
feeling. Very often a woman's feeling for her husband becomes this (though
he may be twenty years older than herself); sometimes it does not,
remaining purely sex feeling. Sometimes it is for some other man she has
this curious self-obliterating maternal feeling. It is not necessarily
connected with sex intercourse. A prostitute, who has relations with
dozens of men, may have it for some feeble drunken fool, who perhaps goes
after other women. I once saw the change from sex feeling to mother
feeling, as I call it, come almost suddenly over a woman after she had
lived about four years with a man who was unfaithful to her. Then, when
all real sex feeling, the hatred of the woman he followed, the desire he
should give her love and tenderness, had all gone, came the other feeling,
and she said to me, 'You don't understand at all; he's only my little
baby; nothing he does can make any difference to me now.
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