Something similar takes place in the hysterical “consciousness of guilt,” which has already been spoken about. The absolute shrew never feels herself really in the wrong; the woman who is slightly hysterical only feels so in the presence of men; the woman who is thoroughly hysterical feels it in the presence of the particular man who dominates her. One cannot prove the existence of a sense of guilt in woman by the mortifications to which “devotees” and “penitents” subject themselves. It is these extreme cases of self-discipline which make one suspicious. Doing penance proves, in most cases, that the doer has not overcome his fault, that the sense of guilt has not really entered consciousness; it appears really to be much rather an attempt to force repentance from the outside, to make up for not really feeling it.
The difference between the conviction of guilt in hysterical women and in men, and the origin of the self-reproaches of the former, are of some importance. When the hysterical woman realises that she has done or thought something immoral, she tries to rectify it by some code which she seeks to obey and to substitute in her mind in place of the immoral thought. She does not really get rid of the thought which is too deeply rooted in her nature; she does not really face it, try to understand it, and so purge herself of it. She simply, from point to point, case by case, tries to adhere to the moral code without ever transforming herself, reforming her idea. The moral character in the woman is elaborated bit by bit; in the male right conduct comes from moral character. The vow remodels the whole man; the change takes place in the only possible way, from within outwards, and leads to a real morality which is not only a justification by works. The morality of the woman is merely superficial and is not real morality.
The current opinion that woman is religious is equally erroneous. Female mysticism, when it is anything more than mere superstition, is either thinly veiled sexuality (the identification of the Deity and the lover has been frequently discussed, as, for instance, in Maupassant’s “Bel-Ami,” or in Hauptmann’s “Hannele’s Himmelfahrt”) as in numberless spiritualists and theosophists, or it is a mere passive and unconscious acceptance of man’s religious views which are clung to the more firmly because of woman’s natural disinclination for them. The lover is readily transformed into a Saviour; very readily (as is well known to be the case with many nuns) the Saviour becomes the lover. All the great women visionaries known to history were hysterical; the most famous, Santa Teresa, was not misnamed “the patron saint of hysteria.” At any rate, if woman’s religiousness were genuine, and if it proceeded from her own nature, she would have done something great in the religious world; but she never has done anything of any importance. I should like to put shortly what I take to be the difference between the masculine and feminine creeds; man’s religion consists in a supreme belief in himself, woman’s in a supreme belief in other people.
There is left to consider the self-respect which is often described as being so highly developed in the hysterical. That it is only man’s self-respect which has been so thoroughly forced into woman, is clear from its nature and the way it shows itself, as Vogt, who extended and verified experiments first made by Freud, discovered from self-respect under hypnotism. The extraneous masculine will creates by its influence a “self-respecting” subject in the hypnotised woman by inducing a limitation of the field of the unhypnotised state. Apart from suggestion, in the ordinary life of the hysterical it is only the man with whom they are “impregnated” who is respected in them. Any knowledge of human nature which women have comes from their absorption of the right sort of man. In the paroxysms of hysteria this artificial self-respect disappears with the revolt of oppressed nature.
This is quite parallel to the clairvoyance of hysterical mediums, which is undoubted, but has as little to do with “occult” spiritism as the ordinary hypnotic phenomena. Just as Vogt’s patients made strenuous efforts to observe themselves carefully under the powerful will of the suggestor, the clairvoyante, under the influence of the dominating voice of the man who is imposing his will on her, is capable of telepathic performances, and at his command can, blindfolded, read communications held by people unknown to her at a great distance away; this I saw happen at München under circumstances which precluded any chance of fraud.
In woman there are not strong passions opposed to the desire for the good and true as is the case with man. The masculine will has more power over woman than over the man himself; it can realise something in women which, in his own case, has to encounter too many obstacles. He himself has to battle with an anti-moral and anti-logical opposition in himself. The masculine will can obtain such power over woman’s mind that he makes her, in a sense, clairvoyant, and breaks down her limitations of mentality.
Thus it comes about that woman is more telepathic than man, can appear more innocent, and can accomplish more as a “seer,” and it is only when she becomes a medium, i.e., the object, that she realises in herself most easily and surely the masculine will for the good and true. Wala can be made to understand, but not until Dotan subdues her. She meets him half-way, for her one desire is to be conquered.
The subject of hysteria, so far as the purposes of this book are concerned, is now exhausted.
The women who are uniformly quoted as proofs of female morality are always of the hysterical type, and it is the very observance of morality, in doing things according to the moral law as if this moral law were a law of their personality instead of being only an acquired habit, that the unreality, the immorality of this morality is shown.
The hysterical diathesis is an absurd imitation of the masculine mind, a parody of free will which woman parades at the very moment when she is most under a masculine influence.
Woman is not a free agent; she is altogether subject to her desire to be under man’s influence, herself and all others: she is under the sway of the phallus, and irretrievably succumbs to her destiny, even if it leads to actively developed sexuality. At the most a woman can reach an indistinct feeling of her un-freedom, a cloudy idea of the possibility of controlling her destiny—manifestly only a flickering spark of the free, intelligible subject, the scanty remains of inherited maleness in her, which, by contrast, gives her even this slight comprehension. It is also impossible for a woman to have a clear idea of her destiny, or of the forces within her: it is only he who is free who can discern fate, because he is not chained by necessity; part of his personality, at least, places him in the position of spectator and a combatant outside his own fate and makes him so far superior to it. One of the most conclusive proofs of human freedom is contained in the fact that man has been able to create the idea of causality. Women consider themselves most free when they are most bound; and they are not troubled by the passions, because they are simply the embodiment of them. It is only a man who can talk of the “dira necessitas” within him; it is only he could have created the idea of destiny, because it is only he who, in addition to the empirical, conditioned existence, possesses a free, intelligible ego.
As I have shown, woman can reach no more than a vague half-consciousness of the fact that she is a conditioned being, and so she is unable to overcome the sexuality that binds her. Hysteria is the only attempt on her part to overcome it, and, as I have shown, it is not a genuine attempt. The hysteria itself is what the hysterical woman tries to resist, and the falsity of this effort against slavery is the measure of its hopelessness. The most notable examples of the sex (I have in mind Hebbel’s Judith and Wagner’s Kundry) may feel that is because they wish it that servitude is a necessity for them, but this realisation does not give them power to resist it; at the last moment they will kiss the man who ravishes them, and succumb with pleasure to those whom they have been resisting violently. It is as if woman were under a curse. At times she feels the weight of it, but she never flees from it. Her shrieks and ravings are not really genuine, and she succumbs to her fate at the moment when it has seemed most repulsive to her.
After a long analysis, then, it has been found that there is no exception to the complete absence in women of any true, inalienable relation to worth. Even what is covered by such current terms as “womanly love,” “womanly virtue,” “womanly devoutness,” “womanly modesty,” has failed to invalidate my conclusions. I have maintained my ground in face of the strongest opposition, even including that which comes from
