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In the ideal state of emotional balance there should be approximately equally friendly feelings toward both sexes. Such a state of affairs would seem comparable to the answer a well-brought-up child would give to the question, “Whom do you love better, mother or father?”—“I love both the same.” Although we know that there is a slight prevalence of love for the parent of the opposite sex, this reply is fundamentally the healthiest. It seems that there is a functional relationship between the attitude to one sex and that to the other, as in mathematics a valid equation must balance as to its total entropy. Many of the disturbances of married life can be explained in this way. The frustration of the highly sublimated homosexual strivings disturbs the relationship to the wife, even to all women. This frustration need not, and usually does not, concern a relationship to a specific male, but rather a generalized attitude such as social ambition or desire for recognition. In most cases it is not consciously felt as a sense of frustration, and its homosexual quality is not recognized. Amongst the many disturbances of this heterosexual balance there is a particular one with which we will deal here. It constitutes an important although unrecognized factor in many conflicts between the sexes.
When a man comes home dissatisfied from his office and makes a scene with his wife over some trifling domestic matter such as a late dinner, the banal explanation is that he lets out his anger on his wife. This is acceptable only as conscious rationalization. The deeper unconscious psychological source, however, is that the emotional disturbance with his employer or his colleagues had left him with a feeling of profound and agitated dissatisfaction. This loss of selfesteem has upset the delicate balance of the individual's relationship to both sexes. His hostility toward his wife has as its basic purpose an unconscious attempt to restore the lost balance.
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