The Decline of Marriage Due To Psychosexual Motivations

There are significant psychosexual reasons for marriage’s decline. Our collective resistance to psychodynamic thinking and to the importance of group-mind dynamics obscures these more fundamental causes. Psychohistory illuminates the changes that have taken place in the psychodynamic nature of Western marriage.

The initial and primary conflict of the Jewish and Christian group-minds was with the pagan mindset, which had dominated all major groups for thousands of years. The pagan mindset is active-oedipal (very similar to the competitive mindset of four-year-old boys), like that of pagan gods, kings, and heroes. All are competi-tive-aggressive and competitive-sexual, as are four-year-old boys and all higher mammals. The Jewish and Christian god criminalized pagan sexual (and other) practices. Unlike pagan gods, the monotheistic god could read our conscious minds. Guilt—the fear of their terrible punishment—made us repress those fantasies and impulses. Monogamous marriage supported that repression by

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greatly limiting sexual expression. The Christian Era was our collective latent-oedipal stage (period of psychosexual development)—i.e., its mindset was very similar to that of preadolescent boys. It was sexually repressed; highly sublimated; focused on male activities (athletics, etc.) and focused away from women.

We are the only animals to have emerged from active-oedipal to latent-oedipal development, and thereby into ongoing psychosexual development. In emerging, we broke the pagan cycle of destruction, decadence, waste, and ruin; and our sublimation of the repressed libido led to ongoing progress. We are only recently emerging from “latency”: an asexual period during which sexual fantasies, feelings, and interests are heavily repressed and sublimated. It also led to sexual frustration and to much neurosis.

Many early Christian sects probably became extinct through the celibacy inspired by latent-oedipal principles. Although Jews and Christians condemned sexual pleasure as “lust,” they found ways to procreate. Celibacy was idealized and the most righteous people—Christ, his parents (the “Virgin” Mary and Joseph), his disciples, and Church monks and nuns—were asexual. The flawed populace was enjoined to reproduce but only under very special circumstances. Burdened by Original Sin and sexual guilt, they had to avoid lust and mate only with the goal of procreation under special dispensation from god. A couple could be sexual only through monogamous marriage.

The new groups benefited collectively from the sexual deprivation of their individuals. Frustrated sexual energies were invested in group goals, and those groups became in material ways more successful than the others. Their individuals benefited secondarily from group success. Sexual libido focused on the ongoing material, scientific, artistic, political, and social progress that has characterized the Christian Era.

Thus, the fundamental psychosexual reason that marriage is failing today is the same reason that youngsters, who avoided sex during the latent-oedipal period of preadolescence, mature into young adults who crave sex. Christian Era preadolescent innocence is similarly evolving into the sexual imperatives of early maturity. Sexual pleasure—initially present in oedipal four-year-olds—is

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evolving into its mature forms as our groups are themselves becoming increasingly adult.

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