as a tolerance for excitation. Too little excitation is boredom, depression, or death (“bored to death”). Too much excitation overwhelms the organism, flooding its ego boundaries and wiping out the sense of self. The feeling is one of estrangement and is akin to insanity. Character can be seen as the way we handle excitement, ensuring that it is neither too little nor too much.
As children we learned very early that being quiet and good earned us some love. If we were too active and too noisy, we were disapproved of or punished. Our parents couldn't stand our liveliness. It was too much for them. It drove them crazy. We had to suppress it to survive. Now, our potential for aliveness is too much for our structures. We can't stand it. When we are overexcited we become jittery, nervous and frightened. The therapeutic task here is to expand slowly the person's capacity to tolerate excitation or aliveness.
Summarizing, we can say that once a pattern of behavior is structured in the body it becomes self-perpetuating. It determines how we act, and we must act according to character. Necessarily, then, every effort we make to overcome our character is part of our character and only result's in reinforcing its structure. I see this all the time in my office. The compulsive individual compulsively tries to effect a change but only ends by becoming more compulsive. The masochistic individual submits to therapy as he does in all other life situations, and so therapy changes nothing. Even his gestures of rebellion lead to his being more submissive. This has to be understood and accepted before change is possible.
The Fate of Love
We saw in the previous section that much of our behavior is determined by our character structure. We think we choose freely, but it can often be shown that there is a seeming fate at work in our choices. Especially in such important matters as love or marriage, fate seems to play a very large role. People are drawn to each other by inscrutable forces that have some relation to their personalities and character. My wife and I come from different backgrounds and different parts of the country. That we met may be pure chance, but that we married and have stayed married for more than thirty-five years is not due to chance. Our personalities harmonize and our character structures dovetail. Though we vibrate on the same wavelength, we are opposites in many ways. However, we didn't know this when we got married. We acted on our feelings, which is how fate operates. Looking back, we can say that it was fate that drew us together and kept us together. But our marriage could easily have failed. We came close to breaking up many times. Opposite characters clash as often as they complement each other. We had to face our neurotic characters so that we could see and understand how we hurt each other despite our conscious desire not to do so. If one is blind as Oedipus was, one cannot avoid the tragedy of losing one's love.
Like every modern man, I made every effort to avoid marrying my mother. That was one of the forces that drew me to a woman who came from a different “place.” And my wife is in very many respects different from my mother. As a child I had resolved my oedipal conflict in such a way that I could not have married any woman who was like my mother. Consciously I had to see my wife as “not my mother” while unconsciously I treated her as if she was my mother and almost destroyed my marriage. Only by recognizing this fact did it become possible for me to respond differently to her.
No more than others could I avoid the fate inherent in the oedipal situation. I have come to recognize that my wife and my mother have certain qualities in common. Aside from their being women, both admire men who are competent, capable, and successful, and both have a strong sense of pride. I am aware that this sense of pride in a woman exercises a strong attraction upon me. Thus, it was the qualities that my wife shares with my mother as well as those that are different that drew me to her so strongly. And, therefore, on one level I did marry my mother.
If, as I believe, we are all destined to marry our mothers, why should this be a prophecy of doom? People often say that getting married is a fatal step, but don't they really mean that it is a fateful one? Which word one uses could depend on the kind of mother one had. If she was a source of joy, pleasure, and satisfaction, one could ask no more than to have a wife who would be like her in every way. If the experience with one's mother was painful and frustrating, one would want to marry a woman who is her opposite. Actually, most mothers are not all good or all bad. Generally there is both pain and pleasure in the relationship, although one or the other may predominate. However, an infant cannot accept that the person who gives him pleasure is also the one who causes him pain. We know that the infant splits the image of his mother into two figures, the “good” mother and the “bad” mother. Although these images become fused later, the initial split persists in the person's unconscious mind.
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