How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
255/400
236 (canvas 256)
The image contains the following text:
physical energy, you will have the tendency to masturbate,
because you have excluded the possibility of normal
sexual contacts. Nature by its emergency devices, the
nocturnal emission or the automatic orgasm, may help
you deplete this store of sexual material. But it is more
probable that you will help nature along by fantastic
imagination of sexual situations in which you have all the
satisfaction of a sexual conquest and none of the risk
attendant thereon. The harm of masturbation is never a
physical one : it is solely a psychological and a social
one. Masturbation is an anti-social sexual device. Its
worst possible consequence is that you will become so
satisfied with this thoroughly safe method of solving the
sexual problem, that you will never afterwards trust
yourself to risk a genuine solution in the main arenas
of love.
Because manifestations of sex are thoroughly, and
sometimes brutally and unthinkingly, suppressed by
parents, especially those with a patriarchal cast to their
world-philosophy, those who have practised masturbation
for a long time sometimes develop a feeling of guilt and
remorse. This is based sometimes on their fear of the
superior power of their authoritarian parents, but more
often on the unconscious realization that masturbation is
a kind of sexual cheating, in which all the subjective sense
of power and virility is retained, while none of the normal
risks of sexual congress are assumed. The necessity of
merging one’s ego with the ego of the beloved for the
purpose of the establishment of a “ we ” relation is
obviated in masturbation. A sense of guilt or remorse
is sometimes built up by unhappy neurotics as a general
excuse for their lack of social cooperation. One of my
patients, referred to in a previous chapter, when urged
to go out and do a day’s work, answered in shocked and
wounded surprise : “ But, doctor ! I’ve been a
masturbator all my life. How can you expect me to
work ? ”
Masturbation is neither a sin, nor a crime, nor an
effective excuse for being a “ lame duck ” all one’s life.