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Many men may object that they themselves did not choose a spouse on such an anaclitic basis, but Freud argues that a man often turns his wife into a mother figure as time goes on. As different from his own mother as she may have seemed at the outset, in the space of a few months, years, or even decades, he ineluctably seems to cast her ever more in the role of mother – especially if she has become the mother of his children – and to view her as he viewed his own mother. (In my thirty years of analytic practice, the absolutely most common slip of the tongue I have heard made by men involves saying “mother” when they consciously meant to say “wife”; saying “sister” instead of “wife” would probably come in second.) Thus, even a man who selected a woman whom he believed to be as unlike his mother as could be, and who found his partner sexually exciting for several or even numerous years, sooner or later begins to feel about his wife much the way he felt about his mother. Although perhaps initially thinking of his partner as not a terribly “good girl,” if not altogether a “bad girl,” he gradually begins to act toward her as though she were some kind of untouchable figure.
Should he, nevertheless, attempt to make love to her – perhaps out of a feeling of duty or nostalgia – he is likely to discover that he cannot achieve or maintain an erection with her without fantasizing about other women, looking at porn prior to or even during the sexual act, or taking “performance-enhancing” medications. He may seek to blame this on his advancing age or some physical condition, and the medical establishment – eager to sell him drugs – encourages him to believe this. In general, however, he has no problem achieving and maintaining erections during his dreams at night (during REM sleep), nor has he any such problem when looking at pornography or seducing a woman he does not love. In other words, his impotence – or “erectile dysfunction,” as people prefer to call it nowadays to make it sound more antiseptic, no doubt, even if physicians inadvertently alighted upon a medicalized euphemism whose abbreviation, ED, points with poetic justice to oEDipus – is all in his head, he having mentally transformed the woman who shares his bed into his mommy.
He can feel love for her, but not sexual desire. Love and desire seem to operate on different planes for him, planes that are worlds apart.
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