Lipton’s Journal/January 31, 1955/335
Jealousy. But what a mountain is to be uncovered here. The key is that degraded expressions, as I keep saying, express in perverted form, the true nature of man’s needs. So, simply, jealousy is the degraded expression of the deep desire for the brotherhood of man. If jealous emotions give us pleasure—as is true for most bisexuals—it is not because one is expressing one’s “latent homosexuality” which is the vulgar condemnation analysts generally put upon it, but because, as a practical matter, it is the only way one can feel “close” to another man. (We can feel close to other women by fucking them.)
I remember that once with a girl I loved considerably, I got into an orgy (a quartet) and when she came while the other man was making love to her, I came too just watching—actually receiving the experience. I was horrified, horrified at her, at myself; I loathed the other man. But that was obviously defense against “taking.” I could not admit the other man into brotherhood. But from deep in me, although fundamentally I’m still quite incapable of doing this with Adele,[1] I suspect that there is great joy in giving one’s mate to another man—there is genuine brotherhood at the heart of it.
Which is why Reich[2] with his incredible instincts and courage was so right about The Sexual Revolution. One cannot have a libertarian egalitarian society until one has the orgy accepted as a genuine part of life. For note, the orgy as I have said before, is the repetition of the family situation—but our first sense of brotherhood is given us by the family, and indeed in the socialized bastardized sense the brotherhood of man is given social sanction within the limits of the family—my mother for example is completely selfless within family limits, she would literally die for one of us. That is why she has so much life: she has gotten away with expressing her H all her life under cover of the S; it is why I will always love her, for in that sense she is truly good. The orgy is a reflection of the family, but the family is the first primal shock “in human language,” that is, conceptually, to the infant. It is the first understanding that the I is the We, the first apperception of the brotherhood of man, the communion of all souls.
notes
- ↑ Adele Morales (1925 – 2015), who he married in April 1954, was Mailer’s second wife. The mother of his daughters Danielle (b. 1957), and Elizabeth Anne (b. 1959), she separated from Mailer in early 1961 a few months after he stabbed her with a penknife, just missing her heart. He pled guilty to felonious assault and was given a suspended sentence. They divorced in 1962.
- ↑ An Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked with Freud, Reich (1897-1957), and was the author of many clinical works, including The Function of the Orgasm (1942). He fled to the U.S. when the Nazis came to power. His eccentric and controversial theory of orgone energy, and the phone-booth size orgone accumulators he invented, got him into legal trouble and he was sent to federal prison where he died. Mailer was influenced by Reich’s ideas about sexual repression and character armor, and built his own orgone box.