The stage has pictured many times the crusty old bachelor who is a ferocious woman hater. In the end he succumbs to the wiles of the ingénue, who is generally the first woman he ever associated with.
The poor devil realised too well all his life the irresistible charm of women as well as his overwhelming craving for love and the joys of the flesh. Some neurotic incest fear, or craving for selfish pleasures, or money complex, however, caused him to avoid women and to protect himself against them by a display of hostility. The first time, however, when fate forces him into close contact with temptation he has to yield.
=Deluded Martyrs.= In every social upheaval there are martyrs who sacrifice themselves for apparently very noble causes but whose unconscious reasons for their acts are much less sublime. Stupid bomb throwers who wreck a building or kill an individual, (acts most unlikely to change a social system to which they object), profess to be moved by their love for the people. Their actual motive is father hatred. Brutus and others who delivered the "people" from some "tyrant," in reality gratified an unconscious grudge and sought their own liberation from some form of authority made loathsome by infantile complexes.
The most grotesque example of it was the destruction of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 by a French mob which imagined that it was thereby freeing crowds of innocent prisoners and abolishing arbitrary death sentences. There were less than a dozen people in the fortress at that time. The mob venting its wrath on a symbol of authority pretended to be animated by a love of freedom and a desire to benefit others.
Lecture audiences often ask me whether plural love is possible. This would indicate on the part of the questioner a more or less unconscious wish to justify polygamous cravings. Plural marriages exist but I doubt whether any such thing as plural love has even been observed at any period of mankind's history.
For the most complicated examples of plural marriage, as for all the varieties of sexual complications, we must turn to Greece of the classical period. Demosthenes wrote somewhere: "We have prostitutes to give us pleasure, concubines to minister to our daily needs and wives to bear us children and to watch over our homes."