September 3, 1927 — 10th International Psychoanalytical Congress, Innsbruck, Austria

For some time I have asked myself with growing astonishment why there has as yet been no thorough analytical exposition of the problems of marriage, although assuredly every single analyst would have a great deal to say on the subject, and although both practical and theoretical considerations are necessitating some attack on these problems: practical considerations, because every day we are confronted with matrimonial conflicts; theoretical, because there is hardly another situation in life that is so intimately and so obviously related to the Œdipus situation as is marriage.

Perhaps (I said to myself) the whole question touches us too closely to form an attractive object of scientific curiosity and ambition. But it is also possible that it is not the problems but the conflicts that touch us too closely, lie too near to some of the deepest roots of our most intimate personal experience. And there is another difficulty: Marriage is a social institution, and our approach to its problems from the psychological standpoint is necessarily hampered; at the same time the practical importance of these problems obliges us at least to try to understand what is their psychological basis.

Though for the purposes of my present paper I have selected one particular problem, we must first of all try to form a conception (though but in broad outline) of the fundamental psychical situation implied by marriage. In his Ehebuch Keyserling has recently propounded a question that is as remarkable as it is obvious. What is it, he asks, that in spite of constant matrimonial unhappiness in all ages, continues to impel human beings into marriage? In order to answer this question we are fortunately neither driven to fall back on the notion of a “natural” desire for a husband and children, nor, as Keyserling does, on metaphysical explanations; we can assert with greater precision that what drives us into matrimony is clearly neither more nor less than the expectation that we shall find in it the fulfillment of all the old desires arising out of the Œdipus situation in childhood — the desire to be a wife to the father, to have him as one’s exclusive possession, and to bear him children. In passing I may say that, knowing this, we are likely to be extremely skeptical when we hear it prophesied that the institution of marriage will soon come to an end, though we admit that at any given period the structure of society will affect the form of these undying wishes.

Hence, the initial situation in marriage is fraught with a perilously heavy load of unconscious wishes. This is more or less inevitable, for we know that there is no cure for the persistent recurrence of these desires and that neither conscious insight into the difficulties nor our experience of them in the lives of others really can help much. Now there are two reasons why this freight of unconscious wishes is dangerous. From the side of the id, the subject is threatened with disappointment not only because actually being a father or mother oneself does not in the least realize the picture left in our minds by our childish longings, but also because — as Freud says — the husband or the wife is always only a substitute. The bitterness of the disappointment depends on the one hand on the degree of fixation, and on the other, on the degree of discrepancy between the object found and the gratification achieved and the specific unconscious sexual desires.

From the other side the superego is menaced by the resuscitation of the old incest prohibition — this time in relation to the marriage partner, and the more complete the fulfillment of unconscious wishes, the greater is the danger. The revival of the incest prohibition in marriage is apparently very typical and leads mutatis mutandis to the same results as in the relation between child and parent; that is, the direct sexual aims give place to an affectionate attitude in which the sexual aim is inhibited. I know personally of only one case in which this development has not supervened, the wife remaining permanently in love with her husband as a sexual object, and in this case the woman had, at the age of twelve, enjoyed actual sexual gratification with her father.

Of course there is another reason why sexuality tends to develop on these lines in married life — the sexual tension is reduced as a result of the fulfillment of desire, and especially because it can always easily be gratified in relation to the one object. But the deeper motivation of this typical phenomenon, at any rate the rapidity of the process and particularly the degree to which it develops, are all traceable to some such repetition of the Oedipus development. Apart from accidental factors, the manner and degree in which the influence of the early situation will show itself will depend on the extent to which the incest prohibition still makes itself felt as a living force in the mind of the individual concerned. The more profound effects, though their manifestations are so different in different persons, may be described by a common formula: They lead to certain limitations or conditions, given which the subject is still able to tolerate the marriage relation, despite the incest prohibition.

As we know, such limitations may make themselves felt already in the type of husband or wife chosen. It may be that the woman selected as wife must in no way recall the mother; in race or social origin, intellectual calibre or appearance she must present a certain contrast to the mother. This helps to explain why marriages prompted by prudence or contracted through the intervention of a third party tend to turn out relatively better than genuine love matches. Though the similarity of the marriage situation to the desires arising out of the Oedipus complex automatically produces a repetition of the subject’s early attitude and development, nevertheless this is less if the unconscious expectations have not all from the outset attached themselves to the future husband or wife. Moreover, when we take into account the unconscious tendency to protect marriage from the more violent forms of disaster, we can perceive that there was a certain psychological wisdom in the institution of an intermediary to arrange marriages, such as obtains among the Eastern Jews.

Within wedlock itself we see how such conditions as these may be created by all the psychic institutions in our minds. In regard to the id, there are genital inhibitions of all sorts, ranging from a simple sexual reserve toward the partner, which rules out variations in forepleasure or coitus, to complete impotence or frigidity. Further, we see on the part of the ego, attempts at reassurance or justification that may take very varied forms. One of these amounts to a kind of denial of the marriage, and frequently manifests itself in women as a merely external recognition of the fact of their being married, without any inner appreciation of it, accompanied by an inner feeling of being constantly amazed at it, by a tendency to sign their maiden names, behave in a girlish fashion, and so forth.

But impelled by the inner necessity to justify marriage to the conscience, the ego often adopts the opposite attitude toward wedlock, laying upon it an exaggerated stress, or more precisely, stressing in an exaggerated manner the love felt to husband or wife. One might coin the phrase “justification by love,” and see an analogy in the more lenient verdicts passed by the tribunal of the law on criminals actuated by love. In his paper on a case of female homosexuality, Freud says that there is nothing about which our consciousness can be so incomplete or false as about the degrees of affection or dislike we feel for another human being. This is quite especially true of marriage, it being often the case that the degree of love felt is overestimated. I have long asked myself how we are to explain this. That one is liable to an illusion of this sort where the relation is a fleeting one is really not very surprising, but one would suppose that in marriage not only the permanence of the relation but also the more frequent gratification of sexual desire would be calculated to do away with sexual overestimation and the illusions bound up with it. The most obvious answer would be that people very naturally endeavor to account to themselves for the great demands on the psychic life involved in marriage by conceiving that they are due to a strong emotion, and therefore to hold tenaciously to the idea of such an emotion, even after it has ceased to be a living force. Nevertheless, it must be admitted that this explanation is rather superficial; it probably springs from the need for synthesis with which we are familiar in the ego and to which we may well ascribe a falsification of the facts for the sake of demonstrating a single-minded attitude in a relation so important in life.

Once again, the relation to the Oedipus complex provides a very much deeper explanation. For we see that the commandment and the vow to love and cleave to husband or wife with which one enters into matrimony are regarded by the unconscious as a renewal of the fourth commandment. Hence, not to love the partner in marriage becomes as great a sin to the unconscious as the failure to fulfill that commandment in relation to the parents, and in this respect also — the suppression of hate and the exaggeration of love — the earlier experiences are compulsorily repeated with exactness in every detail. I now think that in many cases we do not correctly appreciate this phenomenon unless we assume that love itself can be one of the conditions necessary to lend the semblance of justification to a relation prohibited by the superego. Naturally, then, the retention of love, or the illusion of it, serves an important economic function, and that is why it is so obstinately striven after.

Finally, we will not be surprised to find that suffering (as in a neurotic symptom) is one of the conditions under which marriage can hold its own against a very strong incest prohibition. Affliction may take on such manifold forms for this purpose that one cannot hope to do them justice in a short sketch. I will therefore only suggest a few of them. There are, for instance, conditions in the domestic or professional life of some people, which are engineered by unconscious arrangement, so that the subject is overworked or has to make undue sacrifices “for the sake of the family,” which he or she regards as a burden. Or again, it is a matter of frequent observation that after marriage, people sacrifice a considerable part of their personal development, whether in the sphere of their professional life or in that of character or intellect. Finally, we must include the countless cases in which one partner becomes a slave to the demands of the other and endures this painful position willingly, probably through the conscious enjoyment of a strong sense of responsibility.

With regard to such marriages as these, one often asks oneself in amazement — what can be the reason that they are not dissolved, but are often, on the contrary, so stable? But reflection shows, as I have indicated, that it is just the fulfillment of the condition of affliction that guarantees the permanence of such unions.

Having arrived at this point, we realize that there is by no means a clear dividing line between these cases and those others in which marriage is purchased at the price of a neurosis. Into the latter, however, I do not wish to enter, because in this paper I wish principally to discuss only those situations that may be described as normal.

It seems almost superfluous to mention that in this survey I am doing a certain violence to the real facts, not only because every one of the conditions I have described may be otherwise determined, but also because in order to present them clearly, I have taken each one separately, whereas in reality they are generally intermingled. To give you an instance: We can perceive something of all these conditions, particularly in highly estimable women in whom a fundamentally maternal attitude is by no means uncommon — an attitude that alone seems to make marriage possible for them. It is as though they said: In my relations with my husband I must not play the part of the wife and mistress, but only that of the mother, with all that this implies of loving care and responsibility. Such an attitude is in one way a good safeguard for a marriage, but it is based on a limitation of love, and the inner life of husband and wife may be rendered arid by it.

Whatever in the individual case may be the outcome of this dilemma between too much and too little fulfillment, in all the cases where it is especially acute, these two factors — disillusionment and the incest prohibition—with all their consequences of secret hostility to husband or wife, will alienate the other partner and drive him or her involuntarily to seek for new love objects. This is the basic situation that gives rise to the problem of monogamy.

There are other channels open to the libido thus liberated — sublimation, repression, the regressive cathexis of former objects, and the outlet through children — but with these we will not concern ourselves today.

The possibility that other human beings may become the objects of our love is, we must admit, always there. For the impressions of our childhood and their secondary elaborations are so multifarious that normally they do in fact admit of the choice of widely differing objects.

Now this impulse to seek after fresh objects may (again, in quite normal people) acquire a great impetus from unconscious sources. For although marriage does represent a fulfillment of infantile desires, these can be fulfilled only insofar as the subject’s development enables him or her to effect a real identification with the role of father or mother. Whenever the outcome of the Oedipus complex departs from this fictive norm, we find the same phenomenon: The person in question is clinging in some fundamental points to the role of child in the triad of mother, father, and child. When this is the case, the desires arising out of this instinctual attitude cannot be directly gratified through marriage.

These conditions of love carried over from childhood are familiar to us from Freud’s works. I need therefore only recall them to your memory in order to show how the inner meaning of marriage prevents their fulfillment. For the child the love object is indissolubly connected with the idea of something forbidden; yet love for husband or wife is not merely permitted — there looms beyond this the portentous idea of conjugal duty. Rivalry (the condition of there being an injured third party concerned) is excluded by the very nature of monogamous marriage; indeed, monopoly is a privilege accorded by law. Again (and here we are genetically on a different level, for the above conditions have their origin in the Oedipus situation itself, whereas those I am about to mention may be traced to fixation to special situations in which the Oedipus conflict has terminated) there may be a compulsion repeatedly to demonstrate potency or erotic attraction, because of genital uncertainty and a corresponding weakness in the structure of the narcissism. Or where there is an unconscious tendency to homosexuality, there is the compulsion to seek for an object of the same sex as the subject. From the standpoint of the woman this may be achieved by a circuitous route; either the husband may be driven into relations with other women, or the wife herself may seek for relations in which another woman plays a part. Above all — and from the practical point of view, this is probably the most important thing — where a dissociation in the love life persists, the subject will be compelled to center tender feelings on objects other than those of sensual desires.

We can easily see that the retention of any of these infantile conditions is unfavorable to the principle of monogamy; rather, it must inevitably drive the husband or wife to seek other love objects.

These polygamous desires, then, come into conflict with the partner’s demand for a monogamous relation and with the ideal of faithfulness that we have set up for ourselves in our own minds.

Let us begin by considering the first of these two claims, for obviously a claim for someone else to make a renunciation is a more primitive phenomenon than imposing a renunciation upon ourselves. The origin of this claim, broadly speaking, is clear; plainly it is a revival of the infantile wish to monopolize the father or mother. Now this claim to monopolize is by no means peculiar to married life (as we should expect, seeing that its source lies within every one of us); on the contrary, it is of the essence of every full love relation. Of course, in wedlock as well. as in other relations, it may be a claim made purely out of love, but in its origin it is so indissolubly connected with destructive tendencies and hostility to the object that often nothing is left of the love that makes the claim but a screen behind which these hostile tendencies fulfil themselves.

In analysis this desire for monopoly reveals itself first of all as a derivative of the oral phase, when it takes the form of the desire to incorporate the object in order to have sole possession of it. Often, even to ordinary observation, it betrays its origin in the greed of possession that not only grudges the partner any other erotic experience, but is also jealous of his or her friends, work, or interests. These manifestations confirm the expectation derived from our theoretical knowledge, namely, that in this possessiveness, as in every orally-conditioned attitude, there is an admixture of ambivalence. Sometimes we have the impression that men have not only actually succeeded in enforcing the naïve and complete demand for monogamous fidelity upon their wives more energetically than women have upon their husbands, but that the instinct to claim monopoly is stronger in men, and there are important conscious reasons for this — e.g., men wish to make sure of their fatherhood — but it may well be that precisely the oral origin of the demand gives it a stronger impetus in the male, for when his mother suckled him he experienced at any rate a partial incorporation of the love object, whereas the girl cannot go back to any corresponding experience in her relation to her father.

Further destructive elements are closely welded with this desire in another connection. In earlier days the claim to monopolize the love of father or mother met with frustration and disappointment, and the result was a reaction of hate and jealousy. Hence there lurks always behind this demand a certain hatred, which can generally be detected by the manner in which the claim is enforced, and which often breaks out if the old disappointment is repeated.

Now the early frustration wounded not only our object love but also our self-regard in its tenderest spot, and we know that here every human being carries a narcissistic scar. For this reason it is largely our pride that later demands a monogamous relation and demands it with an imperiousness proportionate to the sensitiveness of the scar left by the early disappointment. In patriarchal society, where the claim to exclusive possession is made above all by the man, this narcissistic factor is plainly manifested in the ridicule attaching to the “cuckold.” Here, again, the claim is not made out of love; it is a question of prestige. In a society dominated by males, it is especially bound to become more and more a matter of prestige (for as a rule men think more of their status with their fellows than of love).

Finally, the demand for monogamy is closely bound up with anal-sadistic instinctual elements, and it is these, which together with the narcissistic elements, impart a peculiar character to the claim for monogamy in marriage. For in contrast to free love-relations, in marriage questions of possession are in a twofold manner intimately connected with its historical significance. The fact that marriage as such represents an economic partnership is of less importance than the view according to which woman was regarded as a chattel of man. Hence, without any special individual stressing of anal characteristics, these elements come into force in wedlock and convert the claim of love into an anal-sadistic demand for possession. Elements of this origin are to be seen in their crudest form in the old penal judgments on unfaithful wives, but in marriage today they still often betray themselves in the means employed to enforce the claim: a more or less affectionate compulsion and an ever wakeful suspicion calculated to torment the partner — both familiar to us from analyses of the obsessional neurosis.

Thus the sources from which the ideal of monogamy derives its strength seem to be sufficiently primitive. In spite of this so-to-speak humble origin, it has grown to be an imperious ideal, and here it shares, as we know, the evolution of other ideals in which elementary instinctual impulses rejected by consciousness find their fulfillment. In this instance what contributes to the process is the fact that the fulfillment of certain of our most powerful repressed wishes represents at the same time a valuable achievement in various social and cultural respects. As [Sándor] Rado has shown in his paper “An Anxious Mother,” this ideal-formation enables the ego to restrain its critical function, which would otherwise teach it that this claim to permanent monopoly, while understandable as a wish, as a demand is not only difficult to enforce but also unjustifiable; and further, that it represents the fulfillment of narcissistic and sadistic impulses far more than it indicates the wishes of genuine love. As Rado puts it, the formation of this ideal provides the ego with a “narcissistic insurance,” under cover of which it is free to give play to all these instincts that it would otherwise condemn, and at the same time is raised in its own estimation through the sense that the claim it advances is right and ideal.

Of course, the fact that these demands are sanctioned by law is of enormous importance. In proposals for reform that spring from the realization of the dangers to which marriage is exposed because of just this compulsion, special exception is commonly taken to this latter point. Nevertheless, this legal sanction is probably simply the outward and visible expression of the value that this demand has in the minds of human beings. And when we realize upon what a deeply rooted instinctual basis the claim to monopoly takes its stand, we also see that if the present ideal justification for it were taken from humanity, we would at all costs in some way or other find a fresh one. Moreover, so long as society attaches importance to monogamy, it has from the point of view of psychic economics an interest in permitting the gratification of the elementary instincts that underlie the demand, in order to compensate for the restriction of instinct it imposes.

The demand for monogamy, while it has this general basis, may in individual cases be reinforced from various quarters. Sometimes one of its constituent elements may play an overwhelmingly great part in the instinctual economy, or all those factors that we recognize as motive forces in jealousy in general may contribute. In fact we might describe the demand for monogamy as an insurance against the torments of jealousy.

Just like jealousy, it may on the other hand be repressed through the weight of feelings of guilt, which whisper that we have no right to the exclusive possession of the father. Or again, it may be submerged under other instinctual aims, as in the well-known manifestations of latent homosexuality.

Further, as I said, polygamous desires come into collision with our own ideal of faithfulness. Unlike the claim to monogamy in others, our own attitude toward fidelity has no direct prototype in our infantile experience. Its content represents a restriction of instinct; hence it is obviously nothing elementary, but is, even in its earliest beginnings, an instinctual transformation.

As a rule we have more opportunity with women than with men of studying this demand for monogamy, and we ask ourselves why this should be so. The question for us is not whether (as is so frequently asserted) men have naturally a more polygamous disposition; for one thing, we know so little with certainty on questions of natural disposition. But apart from that, this assertion is so obviously simply a tendentious confabulation in favor of the man. I think, however, that we are justified in asking what can be the psychological factors that make faithfulness in actual life so much rarer in men than in women.

This question admits of more than one answer, for it cannot be separated from historical and social factors. For instance, we may consider how far woman’s greater faithfulness might be secondarily conditioned by the fact that men have enforced their demand for monogamy more effectively in every way. Here I am thinking not only of the economic dependence of women, nor of the draconic punishments decreed for feminine unfaithfulness; there are other more complicated factors in the question, which Freud has made plain in “The Taboo of Virginity” — mainly, the demand made by men that a woman enter matrimony as a virgin, in order to ensure some measure of “sexual thraldom” in her.

From the analytical standpoint two questions suggest themselves in connection with this problem. The first is this: Seeing that the possibility of conception makes coitus physiologically a more momentous matter for women than for men, is it not to be expected that this fact will have some psychological representation? Personally, I should be surprised if it were not so. We know so little on this subject that so far we have never been able to isolate a special reproductive instinct, but have always only succeeded in seeing it beneath its psychical superstructure. We know that the dissociation between “spiritual” and sensual love, which has so strong a bearing on the possibility of faithfulness, is predominantly — indeed, almost specifically — a masculine characteristic. Might it not be that here we have that for which we are looking — the psychic correlative to the biological differences between the sexes?

The second question arises out of the following reflection. The difference in the outcome of the Oedipus complex in men and in women might be formulated thus: The boy makes a more radical renunciation of the primal love object for the sake of his genital pride, whereas the girl remains more strongly fixated to the person of the father, but can obviously do so only on condition that she abandons to a greater extent her sexual role. The question then would be whether we have not evidence in later life of this difference between the sexes in the woman’s fundamentally greater genital inhibition and whether it is not precisely this that makes faithfulness easier for her, just as it is far more common to meet with frigidity than with impotence, both of which are manifestations of genital inhibition.

Thus we have arrived at one of the factors that we should be inclined to regard quite generally as an essential condition of faithfulness, namely, genital inhibition. Nevertheless, we have only to look at the tendency to unfaithfulness characteristic of frigid women or men of feeble potency to realize that, while it is perhaps not incorrect thus to formulate the condition of faithfulness, yet a more precise statement is certainly necessary.

We advance a little further when we observe that people whose faithfulness is of an obsessional character often conceal a sense of sexual guilt behind conventional prohibitions.⁴ All that is forbidden by convention — and this includes all sexual relations unsanctioned by marriage — becomes loaded with the whole burden of unconscious prohibitions, and this is what gives such convention its great moral weight. As we should expect, this difficulty is met with in these people who can only feel free to marry under certain conditions.

Now these feelings of guilt are experienced especially in relation to the husband or wife. The partner not only assumes for the unconscious the role of the parent whom the child coveted and loved, but further, the old dread of prohibitions and punishments may revive and be referred to him or her. In particular the old feelings of guilt on account of onanism now become reactivated, and so under pressure of the fourth commandment, create the same guilt-laden atmosphere of an exaggerated sense of duty, or else a reaction of irritability. Or in other cases, the atmosphere is one of insincerity, or else there is an anxiety reaction of dread of concealing anything at all from the partner. I am inclined to suppose that unfaithfulness and onanism are more directly connected than simply by way of the sense of guilt. It is true that originally in onanism the sexual wishes relating to the parents found physical expression. But as a rule, in the masturbation fantasies the parents are replaced by other objects at a very early age; hence these fantasies represent, as well as the primal wishes, the child’s first unfaithfulness to the parents. The same applies to early erotic experiences with brothers and sisters, playmates, servants, and so on. Just as onanism represents the first unfaithfulness in the sphere of fantasy, it is represented in that of reality by these experiences. And in analysis we find that people who have retained a specially lively sense of guilt on account of these early incidents, whether fantasies or real, for that very reason shun with peculiar anxiety any unfaithfulness in wedlock, for this would signify a repetition of the old guilt.

Frequently it is this remnant of the old fixation that repeats itself in persons whose faithfulness is, as it were, obsessional, in spite of their vehement polygamous desires.

But faithfulness may also have a quite different psychological basis, which may either coexist in the same people with that which we have just been discussing or be entirely independent. The people in question, for one or other of the reasons I have mentioned, are especially sensitive about their claim to exclusive possession of the partner and also, in reaction, they make the same demand upon themselves. Consciously, it may seem to them only that they should themselves fulfill the claims that they make upon others, but in such cases the deeper reason lies in fantasies of omnipotence, according to which one’s own renunciation of other relations is like a magic gesture compelling the partner likewise to renounce.

We have now seen what motives are at the back of the demand for monogamy and with what forces it comes into conflict. To use a simile from physical life, we might call these opposing impulses the centrifugal and the centripetal forces in matrimony, and we should have to say that here we have a trial of strength in which the opponents are equally matched. For both derive their motive power from the most elementary and direct desires arising from the Oedipus complex. It is inevitable that both sets of impulses should be mobilized in married life, though with every possible variation in the degree of their activity. This helps us to understand why it never has been and never will be possible to find any principle that will solve these conflicts of married life. Even in individual cases, although we can see tolerably clearly what motives are at work, it is only when we look back in the light of analytical experience that we can perceive which results have actually ensued from behavior of one sort or another.

In short, we observe that the elements of hate can find an outlet not only when the principle of monogamy is violated but when it is observed, and may vent themselves in very different ways; that the feelings of hate are directed against the partner in one form or another, and that on both sides they are at work to undermine the foundation upon which married life should be built up — the tender attachment between husband and wife. We must leave it to the moralist to decide what is then the right course.

Nevertheless, the insight thus gained does not leave us entirely helpless in the face of such matrimonial conflicts. The discovery of the unconscious sources that feed them may so weaken not only the ideal of monogamy but also the polygamous tendencies, that it may become possible for the conflicts to be fought out. And the knowledge we have acquired helps us in yet another way. When we see the conflicts in the married life of two people, we often involuntarily tend to think that the only solution is that they should separate. The deeper our understanding of the inevitability of these and other conflicts in every marriage, the more profound will be our conviction that our attitude toward such unchecked personal impressions must be one of complete reserve, and the greater will be our ability to control them in reality.

Source: International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, Vol. IX (1928), pp. 318–331.