Psychology of sex - Total No. of Records in System :: 2032

PSYCHOLOGY OF SEXwith the issues involved. Nor can it even be said that anyrevolutionary change has hereby taken place.It has longbeen customary in certain serious eventualities to enjoinabstinence from procreation for the future. It is only onestep further to utter this injunctionat the outset of marriage.It is well known that neuropathic persons tend tobe attracted to each other. This is part of a general tendencyof people to be attracted to their like, now knownto prevail over the attraction to opposites, which was onceis moreimagined to be the rule; homogamy, that is to say,prevalent than heterogamy. The craving for opposite qualitiesis confined to the sphere of the secondary sexualcharacters, a very masculine man being attracted to a veryfeminine woman and vice versa, but it fails, as a generalrule, to extend beyond that sphere.This fact has a bearing on the advice we may be calledupon to give to neuropathic persons who contemplatemarriage. Sensitive, intelligent, refined, as such a personoften is, the neuropath finds an answering sympathy in afellow neuropath, while the healthy normal person mayseem irritatingly dull and insipid. In the same way thenormal person finds the morbid and capricious temperamentof the neuropath uncomfortable and unattractive.It is, therefore, somewhat futile to adopt the commonadvice furnished by the text-books that the neuropathshould marry, if at all, a robustly normal person, withsound heredity. The advice is not even theoretically correctwhen we bear Mendelian conditions in mind. Butit is unpractical because it overlooks the fact that theaffinity between the normal and the morbid isnot strongand that the chances of such a union proving satisfactoryare not large. These chances are not considerable even inthe case of two pronounced neuropathic people whomarry each other, and such people may well be advised[286]