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Title: The Power of Sexual Surrender
Author: Robinson, Marie Nyswander
Language: English
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THE POWER OF SEXUAL SURRENDER
* * * * * *
By the same author:
THE DRUG ADDICT AS A PATIENT
* * * * * *
THE POWER OF SEXUAL SURRENDER
by
MARIE N. ROBINSON, M.D.
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-10687
Copyright © 1959 by Marie N. Robinson
All Rights Reserved
Printed in the United States of America
PREFACE
I believe that the problem of sexual frigidity in women is one of the
gravest problems of our times. Over 40 per cent of married women suffer
from it in one or another of its degrees or forms. And their suffering,
emotionally and physically, is very real indeed.
Those who are most closely related to the frigid woman--husband and
children--suffer too. This is so because frigidity is an expression
of neurosis, a disturbance of the unconscious life of the individual
destructive to personal relationships. No matter how much she may
consciously wish to, the frigid woman cannot protect her loved ones
from the effects of her problem. Thus frigidity constitutes a major
danger to the stability of marriage and to the health and happiness of
every member of the individual family.
Despite its extent and seriousness, women who suffer from frigidity
generally know very little about their problem. They do not know
its nature or its causes nor how or where to find help for it. No
adequate book for the lay reader, nor any popular magazine article
that indicates a real way out, has yet been written on this enormously
important subject. The problem has been surrounded by silence, and
this has engendered ignorance, misinformation, and has fostered
feelings of helplessness and hopelessness in the suffering individual.
I have written this book to break this unhealthy silence, to bring to
the individual woman what science knows about frigidity, to show her
that, no matter how much she may have despaired, her problem can almost
certainly be resolved.
MARIE ROBINSON, M.D.
_November 1, 1958_
_New York, N.Y._
CONTENTS
Preface 7
1 PARADISE LOST 13
SECTION I
_The Normal Woman_
2 THE NORMAL ORGASM 29
3 THE NOT IMPOSSIBLE SHE 41
SECTION II
_The Psychology of Frigidity_
4 WHAT IS FRIGIDITY? 59
5 THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN 70
6 WHY WOMEN CAN BECOME FRIGID 83
7 ANATOMY AND DESTINY 96
8 THE GROWTH OF LOVE 106
9 DANGERS ON THE ROAD TO WOMANHOOD 120
SECTION III
_The Fear of Love--Case Histories_
10 TOTAL AND PARTIAL FRIGIDITY 131
11 THE MASCULINE WOMAN 147
12 PSYCHIC FRIGIDITY 159
SECTION IV
_The Bridge to Womanhood_
13 THE POWER OF LOVE 177
14 STEPS TO FREEDOM 182
15 THE MALE SEX: A NEW HORIZON 197
16 THE NATURE OF SURRENDER 209
17 SEXUAL SURRENDER 216
18 THE ROLE OF THE MALE 233
19 THE LORE OF LOVE 246
ADDENDA I 259
ADDENDA II 262
THE POWER OF SEXUAL SURRENDER
_Chapter 1_
PARADISE LOST
Happiness between men and women has never had such a radiant outlook
as it has in this decade. Perhaps for the first time in the history of
man the two sexes find themselves in a position to explore together the
infinitely varied and rich potentialities of real love.
I am not being a blind optimist in making such a statement. In
my profession as a psychiatrist I see enough of daily misery and
destructive misunderstanding between men and women to keep a healthy
skepticism very much alive in my mind about all human relationships,
particularly those that depend for their continued existence, at least
in part, on sexual love.
I can make such a statement about the potentialities of modern love
for one reason--that women today have, beyond the shadow of any doubt,
achieved complete equality with men. Above all, this equality can be
observed as fully operative in the realm of love, sexual love. In the
past thirty-odd years, and particularly in the last ten, the taboos,
ignorance, and misunderstanding which had obscured our visions for
centuries and prevented any real knowledge of feminine sexuality have
been washed away.
We have been through a sexual revolution of major proportions. In
the course of that revolution we have learned, through science, not
hearsay, the real facts. We know now that woman has the same need for
passion, the same capacity for sexual response that man has. We know
that, down to the last detail, she is the equal and fitting companion
for all his possible raptures, can know with her entire body and mind
and can share in vivid companionship the delighted storms of sexual
love that in the recent past were considered to be exclusively his
province.
Few, however, realize how recent and how revolutionary this view of
womankind actually is. The image of Victorian woman, that sexually
frozen, emotionally withdrawn vestal virgin, has faded quickly from
our minds. It is important, for many reasons, to recall her, however,
if only briefly. She dominated our whole view of womankind up to the
beginning of the 1920’s. By taking a quick look at her we can see how
far we have come in so short a time. And we can see why the prospect
for love has, in our time, brightened so considerably.
The prevailing attitude toward woman and her sexuality throughout the
nineteenth century and up to the end of World War I was that sex,
as we understand it today, did not exist for her. This belief was
held by virtually everybody, and it is nowhere more clearly stated
than by the medical authorities of that era. Thus Acton, a leading
medical specialist in the functions of reproduction, whose views
were widely influential, wrote: “The majority of women (happily for
society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”
He also stated that people who believed differently were making “a
vile aspersion” against women. Two other doctors of the time agreed
completely (and presumably after checking their facts). Fehling held
that any appearance of sexual feeling in a young girl in love was
“pathological.” And Windschied stated that if a female showed any
innate or spontaneous sexual attributes “there is abnormality.”
These men were not crackpots. They were reputable and distinguished.
This was the “scientific” view of the matter, and it was shared
by most people, men and women alike. It throws into clear relief
the potentialities of the present. Woman’s new and revolutionary
self-awareness, her knowledge gained in the past thirty-odd years that
without guilt or inhibition she may function in an atmosphere of total
equality with men and eager acceptance by them, makes the past seem
like a nightmare. It is as though man and woman had emerged from a
long, long journey through a dreary jungle full of fear and shame to
the verge of a paradisal valley where they actually may live, as in the
fairy tales, happily ever after.
But now we come to the tragic flaw in this picture. For, though the
possibilities lie before them, millions of women find they must stay on
the verge of, never enter, the paradisal valley. They find themselves,
in an age where true womanhood is highly valued, sexually frigid.
What does sexual frigidity mean? I shall explain the matter in greater
detail later, of course, but I can give a preliminary, working
definition now. Sexual frigidity is the inability to enjoy physical
love to the limits of its potentiality. The frigid woman is, to a
greater or lesser degree, blocked in her sensual capacities. Generally
she cannot experience orgasm. If she has one at all it is weak and
unsatisfying. Many frigid women, however, not only do not have any
orgasm but may also lack the capacity to feel even the beginnings of
sexual excitement. To some the sexual act is painful.
The frigid woman has learned to fear physical love, to run from it, and
this fear has profound repercussions on her relationships with men. The
reasons for her fear are hidden from her, are locked in her unconscious
mind. Consciously she may wish, above all things, to achieve real
closeness with her husband, to give and receive the greatest of all
mutual joys between man and woman, sexual gratification. But she
has not the capacity to receive this joy. It is beyond her will and
control. It is as if she had a million dollars and could not spend a
cent of it; as if she were surrounded by the finest foods and must
starve. The very fact of the new equality she has won makes her problem
even more humiliating, bitterer, more frustrating.
In my fifteen years as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I have treated
many, many women who have come to me in despair because of their
partial or total inability to enjoy the sexual part of their marriage
and because of the repercussions from this inability. I and hundreds
of other psychiatrists have been fortunate in helping many of them to
overcome their difficulties. We have found that before a woman can be
expected to take full responsibility for reaching true sexual maturity
she must really know all about herself, her sex and her problem. Then
and only then has she the material in hand to start growing up, in all
pleasure, to her full feminine stature.
If a woman is willing to work in all seriousness with a psychiatrist
there is little question that she can be helped to overcome her sexual
difficulty. The information she receives, the insights she obtains into
the conditions which have kept her from experiencing real love can
sweep away her ignorance, her misunderstandings, her irrational fears.
Her experience with the psychiatrist may help her husband, too, for
with his wife’s consent the therapist will often see him for periodic
discussions. These talks help him to understand her problem, to see
deeply into the nature of his wife and therefore of all womankind.
This knowledge allows the husband to be of direct help in effecting
his wife’s release from the immobilizing grip of her frigidity. It
helps him to be patient where he might have been irritable, tender when
he might have been importunate; it keeps him from the major error of
believing that he is to blame for her underlying condition and thus
complicating the relationship by becoming defensive, as one unjustly
accused would become--indeed, _should_.
The question then arises as to whether the kind of information a woman
and her husband may receive during her therapy can also be helpful in
book form.
I have given much thought to this question and have had many
consultations with my psychiatric colleagues about it. We have come to
the positive conclusion that a book on this subject can be of direct
benefit to all women suffering from sexual frigidity.
I will go even further and say that the facts about frigidity that I
present here--its origins, its causes, and its cures--_must_ be known
by every woman with a sexual problem if she wishes to be cured.
Frigidity is always rooted in incomplete knowledge gained in childhood
and adolescence. We are not, as I have pointed out, far from the
Victorian age. Any woman of thirty or more had, in all probability,
parents who were reared in the traditions of Victorianism, which denied
the sexuality of woman, connived with every available force to deny it,
repress it, stop it at its source. These efforts were extraordinarily
successful. And, too, any woman now in her twenties probably had
parents who were deeply affected by the equally mindless and vicious
protest against Victorianism which characterized this country from,
roughly, 1920 to 1930--the period we now call the Roaring Twenties or
the Jazz Age.
This era, too, was full of destructive misinformation about sex and
love. A program of sexual promiscuity for women was openly advocated
and found far too many adherents in the younger generation after World
War I. The moral climate created in the Jazz Age was alien to the very
nature of truly feminine love. It led to serious sexual conflicts in
millions of individuals, and these conflicts were duly visited on their
offspring.
This book then, I firmly believe, can help the individual to undo the
early harm caused by improper upbringing. I have tried to design it
in such a manner that a woman who reads it completely may achieve a
deep understanding of frigidity, an understanding that can lead to a
profound inner change, a complete reversal of those attitudes that are
always at the root of frigidity.
I have designed it, too, to be read by the husband of the woman who
suffers from frigidity. It goes without saying that the success of his
marriage is dependent on the resolution of her problem. He can help
greatly to ensure this resolution by fully informing himself of the
nature of the problem and by discovering the most helpful role he can
play during her recovery.
But the problem of frigidity does not concern only the married. Thus I
have also aimed this book at those young people who are about to enter
their first love experience. We have found that this first experience
can be of vast importance for the further emotional growth of the
individual and of the relationship upon which she has embarked. Young
women who find they have problems in the sexual sphere may be spared
years of misery if they are given a real understanding of the matter in
the beginning. Many of my patients, had they been given an insight into
the nature of their difficulties at the start, might have avoided the
inevitable and innumerable poor choices and often disastrous decisions
which are so characteristic of the woman suffering from a sexual
problem.
Since I have designed this book to answer the needs of a specific
audience I should like to ask you to read it through and not skip
around trying to find the material that seems to apply directly to
you or to someone close to you. For, if you follow me as I go, you
will see that frigidity is not a single, simple, local symptom. It is
a complicated and profound problem involving many factors and having
profound consequences. One _can_ grasp the nature of this problem,
understand it, and cure it. To do so, however, you must have very
specific and complete knowledge of it in all its complexity. It may
take all your powers to master this complexity. To do so, however, will
be more than merely worth while. It can be the first great step toward
real love, upon whose threshold you have tarried already far too long.
Before we advance into the subject itself, I should like to dispose of
a few widely held and thoroughly incorrect notions about frigidity. I
do this to clear away some of the underbrush which can impede those of
you who are seriously seeking a resolution of the problem.
In the first place, let us look at this problem of a woman’s sexual
“responsibility,” as it has been recently called. Much has been written
about it and much of what I have read is pure nonsense, based on a
sort of mechanical conception of what love is and of what the act of
love means. I fear that such books encourage women who have deeply
rooted sexual difficulties to approach the problem from the wrong
direction and before they properly understand the real nature of
their difficulties. Such an approach leads them to attempt abortive
“solutions” which can only further discourage and disillusion them.
The basic error here is in trying to make the individual woman
“responsible” without giving her any real information about her
condition.
The fact is that no woman who suffers from frigidity consciously
desires to. Nor can she be, for a single second, held accountable for
the fact that the problem developed. The word “blame” cannot by any
stretch of the imagination be used in connection with her problem. I
strongly urge you to let that point sink deeply into your heart and
mind.
How could it possibly be that you had any responsibility in the matter?
This problem always develops in childhood or even infancy. It is partly
a product of early family and historical influences over which you had
not the slightest control, and it is partly a matter of the biological
heritage of all women everywhere. And you certainly can’t be held
responsible for that.
Here is the attitude I have found most helpful to take toward this
matter of sexual responsibility: You are not responsible for having
developed a difficulty; you are not responsible for the existence of
your frigidity any more than the stutterer is responsible for his
stutter. However, once you realize it is a problem, that it is having
repercussions on you and those dear to you, you are responsible for
finding out everything you can about the problem and then, on the basis
of this information, taking whatever action is necessary.
I have already mentioned another important misconception about
frigidity and should like to go into it a bit further now. I have
said that it is highly unlikely that the husband of a frigid woman is
responsible for her frigidity problem. I can’t emphasize that enough.
Of course if he is impotent, was when his wife married him and has
continued to be, she might have a case. But true sexual impotency in
the male is quite rare. Even, however, if he were truly impotent, the
fact remains that this particular woman did marry him--we have found
that when a woman marries an inadequate man she has done so because
she, all unknown to herself, was deeply afraid of true male virility.
In saying the husband is rarely if ever to blame for a frigidity
problem I am running counter to a vast body of information that has
been published; in the 1930’s in particular, book after book appeared,
each showing conclusively that a happily married sexual life depended
on the male’s skill in arousing the woman. In such books the husband
was instructed to manipulate or caress her for X minutes in Y number of
erotic zones. By then, presumably, she would have reached such a state
of excitement that true sexual satisfaction could not possibly fail
her. Any failure of a woman to respond adequately in the marital bed
was always supposed to be due to faulty technique on the husband’s part.
This is simply not true. Caressing or manipulating the genitalia or
secondary erotic zones of certain types of frigid women would only
result in exacerbated nerves or in a condition of inwardly screaming
protest. In other types, caressing might give temporary satisfaction
but in the long run could really be harmful from the psychological
standpoint, deepen or encourage immature methods of gratification.
In short, while a husband, through tenderness and understanding,
may help a woman face the true nature of her problem, he is never
responsible for the _existence_ of her frigidity and cannot, through
any mechanical means, get her over it.
I might add that neither can any man other than her husband.
Another misconception about frigidity: Women who suffer from a greater
or lesser degree of frigidity often come to believe that there is
something wrong with them glandularly. Through a misunderstanding of
something they’ve read or heard, they get the idea that somewhere,
somehow, there is a drug that will cure them. A gynecologist I know
tells me that he has at least three women a week ask him to give
them hormones to step up their sexual responses. On the basis of his
statement I have checked with several other gynecologists and also with
five obstetricians. They all tell me that the request for hormonal
injections from women is a daily constant.
Let me say here that frigidity is rarely a problem of glandular
malfunction. Much work has now been done in this area and, unless your
case is relatively unusual, you may rest assured that your problem is
basically a personal and psychological one.
How can I be so certain of that last statement? Because real frigidity
reacts to psychological treatment; it can generally be cured in a
psychiatrist’s office without the use of any drugs whatsoever.
If you reply: “Well, perhaps the mind has caused a glandular shutdown
in women with a frigidity problem,” we would answer: “Even if that
were true the mind would still be the ‘cause,’ and a real cure can be
effected only by getting at the cause.”
A far more serious misunderstanding of the nature of true feminine
sexuality and of the nature of frigidity is shown by the following
case, told to me by a psychiatric colleague.
A pretty young woman came to him stating that she had been unable to
have sexual satisfaction in intercourse. She had told her physician
of her problem two years previously. He had examined her and told her
that her clitoris was too far from her vagina. He informed her that
this biological fact made it impossible for her husband to contact the
clitoris with his penis during intercourse and that this was causing
her frigidity. The physician advised an operation which would bring the
clitoris and the vagina closer together, thus allowing the penis to
contact the clitoris during intercourse.
The woman, in all good faith and with a laudable desire to be a
good wife, had gone through with this grotesque surgical procedure.
After the operation, when she was able to have intercourse again,
it had apparently worked. For two months she had had orgasms during
intercourse. Then slowly but surely her ability to respond disappeared.
Within three months she had become totally frigid.
Nothing could be more mistaken than such an approach to the solution
of a sexual problem in a woman. In the first place, surgery performed
on the genitalia of a woman who is already sexually disturbed can
cause profound shock to her psychologically, deepen her disturbance
immeasurably--such was the case with this woman, my colleague told me.
Second, the fact that the clitoris and not the vagina is responsive
is a form of frigidity in itself. Even if this maddeningly ridiculous
operation had worked in the manner the physician had hoped, it would
only have perpetuated a situation that was in itself, psychologically
speaking, pathological.
The psychiatrist did not have an easy time with this patient. The
traumatic experience caused by the operation and its failure had
taken a toll, and it took several months for her to recover from the
psychological effects. But she was a determined young woman.
When she became convinced that the solution of her problem lay in
discovering the hidden misunderstandings about sexuality that had
occurred earlier in her life, she set about this task with a will. In
a relatively short time, through insight and understanding, by getting
the entire picture of frigidity and its meaning, she began to undo the
Gordian knot that even the surgeon’s keen knife could not cut. At the
root of her problem lay a totally hidden fear of pregnancy which she
was able to face and dispense with. Today she has two children and,
according to my colleague, is not only sexually normal but very happy
in her marriage.
Let me make myself absolutely clear, even at the risk of repeating
myself. Frigidity is in the vast majority of cases, essentially a
psychological problem. The _only_ way it can be approached with any
hope of resolving it is through the mind, by understanding it. Anybody
who tells you differently is, to put it plainly and simply, wrong. And,
if you have a real frigidity problem and try to ascribe other than
psychological reasons for it (such as that your husband is the cause
of it), you are doing your cause (that of getting over the problem) a
grave disservice.
When I say that the problem of frigidity is a psychological one
I am not overstating the case; I am, to simplify matters, rather
understating it. The greatest contribution of psychiatry in the past
sixty years has been the discovery of the central importance of
sexuality in the development of the individual.
Dr. Therese Benedek in her classic work, _Psychosexual Functions in
Women_, states the whole matter succinctly when she says: “ … The
sexual drive … is the axis around which the organization of the
personality takes place.”
When all goes well in the development of the young girl, both her
personality and her sexual passions will flower, she will achieve
a beautiful and integrated maturity. But if, as so often happens,
thwarting or blighting experiences take place, the development of her
personality and her sexuality will be frozen at their sources, and
maturity will remain a never-never land whose very existence she will
come to doubt.
If she wishes to resume her growth she must be fearless, she must find
out and face the events that blocked her growth, the misunderstandings
and ignorance that prevent her from reaping the rewards of true
womanhood. She must insist, deep within herself, on achieving that
true and passional relatedness with her man for which there is neither
simulacrum nor substitute in woman’s journey through life.
The bridge to emotional and sexual maturity is built of many
facts--hard, scientific facts. Master these facts, gain information on
this subject, and you can pass from a land of bitter deprivation to the
richness that is your due, your heritage. It is waiting for you on the
other side of your fear.
SECTION I
_The Normal Woman_
_Chapter 2_
THE NORMAL ORGASM
The first thing I am going to do on this, so to speak, journey with you
is to give you a view of your destination. I am going to describe an
orgasm to you. I am going to describe it in detail.
We occasionally do this in psychiatry when dealing with a frigidity
problem, and sometimes it has astonishing results. I have seen women
who, after hearing for the first time a complete description from an
authoritative and objective person of what to expect of themselves in
the act of love, almost immediately win through to the sensual goal
they had been deprived of.
On one occasion a patient of mine, who over a period of months had
worked through a rather severe frigidity problem, detailed to her
younger sister the wonderful sexual experience she was now able to
have. The younger sister had been married only two months and had not
once reached sexual climax. She had seriously contemplated consulting
a psychiatrist about her “problem.” The very night her older sister
described true orgasm to her she was able to achieve her own first
complete satisfaction with her husband.
However, my chief motive in approaching the subject of frigidity
by describing the normal orgasm is not to try to bring about a
sudden or miraculous cure. In cases where such a sudden release of
mature sexuality is achieved and thaw comes like a sudden spring,
the frigidity problem is generally, even though it may appear to be
deep-seated, a superficial one, lightly rooted in the personality.
The real reason I start with the orgasm is that a picture of the normal
is an absolute necessity if you are to understand deviations from it
with any real clarity. It is a truism that in order to understand
illness in the body it is first necessary to understand health. Every
doctor knows this and so do his teachers, for in medical school he
first learns, through classes in anatomy and physiology, the structure
and functions of the healthy body.
I think you will understand frigidity more thoroughly if we pursue the
same technique here, first describing the genital anatomy of woman and
from there proceeding to a description of the normal orgasm, what it
is, where it is located, its function in the healthy man and woman, and
other pertinent material.
Despite the wide dissemination of sexual information in our time, many
women often show an astonishing ignorance of their own genital region
and of the character and meaning of sexual response, including orgasm.
I have had patients who did not know that they possessed a clitoris,
others who made no distinction between their urethra and their vagina;
some have not known of the existence of the uterus as a separate organ,
and some, in confusion about their uniquely feminine secretions, have
believed that women can have a seminal ejaculation as men do. Perhaps
most of the readers of this book will have no such misinformation, but
nevertheless I feel it is wise to review the simple facts pertaining to
the feminine genitalia.
Before making a detailed description of woman’s sexual apparatus, I
should like to make a preliminary observation which can help you to
understand the sexual nature of woman. It is this: that while women
are capable of having true sexual gratification in the same sense and
with the same intensity as men, they have one important difference
in their responses. The man, when he is aroused, feels the sexual
desire directly in his genitals. A woman’s first sexual sensations
are not usually genital but are felt over her entire body, on her
skin surfaces, everywhere; _this_ is followed by sexual excitation
in her genitals, and this is an important fact for both men and
women to understand. Ignorance of this fact has given rise to many
misunderstandings between the sexes, for of course it makes the
woman somewhat slower in reaching the moment when she is ready for
intercourse than the man is. It _must_ be taken into consideration by
both parties to an act of love.
A woman’s genital apparatus is both internal and external. The external
genitalia are called the vulva when they are referred to all together.
The most obvious part of the vulva is the part we called the major (or
sometimes outer) lips, which enfold the rest of the genitalia. If these
lips are parted we see two smaller lips; these are called the minor
lips and have a very high degree of sexual responsiveness. Even in
books for laymen the Latin words are often used for these two organs:
_labia majoris_ and _labia minoris_, which mean, simply enough, the
major lips and the minor lips.
The labia majoris also contain within their folds the rest of the
external genital structure of woman. Here we find the clitoris, the
vestibule, and the urethra, or opening to the bladder.
The clitoris is by far the most important and most widely misunderstood
part of the external genitalia. It lies immediately above the top fold
of the labia minoris and is a little piece of tissue slightly less
thick than a pencil. This organ is enormously important to the whole
psychological and sexual development of the individual woman. It is
often called the “homologue of the male penis,” and this simply means
that in the embryo the cells which form the penis in the male are the
same cells which form the clitoris in the female. Thus the two organs
have the same cellular derivation.
The clitoris, like the male penis, is made up of erectile tissue, and
when a woman is sexually excited it becomes erect in the same manner
that the penis does. It also has a head and a foreskin covering it,
and the head of the clitoris, at least in children and adolescents,
is generally extremely sensitive to stimulation. In the fully mature
female this sensitivity often diminishes, giving way to the vagina as
the primary source of the greatest sexual pleasure. However, many women
who become fully mature sexually maintain much of the original sexual
responsiveness of the clitoris.
The remainder of the external genitalia is contained within the
vestibule. This is the entrance proper to the vagina and is very
susceptible to sexual excitation. The vestibule lies between the minor
lips and is directly beneath the clitoris. It contains the hymen, the
urethral opening, and the openings of the glands of Bartholin.
The hymen is generally referred to as the maidenhead. It is a thin
membrane which partly covers the entrance to the vagina. There is no
direct sexual sensation on the hymen, and sometimes pain is experienced
when it is perforated, usually during the first intercourse, although
the hymen can be broken by an accident in childhood, through the
insertion of surgical instruments, etc. Because of the pain associated
with its perforation and the stories that a young girl often hears
about this pain, it can be a source of much anxiety to her and
condition her attitude toward sex in general.
The glands of Bartholin are of great importance to the act of love.
These glands discharge a thin colorless mucus in sexual excitation,
and this lubricates the vaginal opening and canal during intercourse.
The amount of secretion varies greatly with each individual. Sexual
frigidity often affects these glands adversely, causing the secretions
to be inadequate or nonexistent. However, the amount of secretion will
also vary rather dramatically at times in the individual who has no
basic sexual blocking, and therefore the glands of Bartholin cannot be
taken as a final criterion of sexual adequacy or inadequacy.
And now we come to the most important part of a woman’s anatomical
sexual equipment: the vagina. This is a passageway of some three to
three and a half inches which extends from the vestibule on the outside
of the cervix, which is the bottom end of the uterus. The vagina is,
of course, the canal which accepts the penis, and it may interest you
to know that in Latin the word literally means “a sheath for a sword.”
The sexual act in its purest form expresses the essential passivity
associated with women and the aggressiveness of the male, the actor and
the acted upon. The Romans understood this basic difference at least
linguistically.
It may have surprised you to learn of the relatively short length of
the vagina. The tissue of its walls are extremely elastic, however, and
not only can it contain a penis of virtually any thickness or length,
but it can stretch enough to allow the newborn infant to pass through
it. The penis presses against the cervical end of the uterus, which may
be forced upward until the penis gains full entrance. Contact with the
soft tissue of the cervix is a source of great pleasure for the male,
and the pressure can be an equal pleasure for the woman.
The vaginal walls are lined with a soft skin, not unlike mucous
membrane, but it does not secrete as mucous tissue will. A secretion
is, however, released from the cervix, and this also helps to lubricate
the vaginal canal during intercourse.
I have said that the vagina is the most important part of a woman’s
sexual equipment. This is so because it is within the vagina that the
orgasm of the truly mature woman takes place. Upon it and within it she
receives the greatest sensual pleasure that it is possible for a woman
to experience.
And this brings us to the subject of orgasm. I think you will
understand it more fully if I describe it in the context of the sexual
experience as a whole.
The sexual instinct in both men and women is marvelously complex. When
it is unencumbered by neurosis it gives color, shape, brightness,
charm, vividness, and direction to the entire personality, and the
mechanisms by which it operates encompass both body and mind.
Desire can be set off in a woman either in response to a touch or by
some act, sight, or thought which she has been exposed to. One of the
chief things to which a woman responds is a cumulative tenderness
expressed in words or in acts.
Whatever the stimulus, however, the brain receives the signal and,
through the nervous system, sends out preparatory reactions throughout
the body. The response of men to stimuli perceived by the brain as
sexual is amazingly fast; some men arrive at full sexual preparedness
for intercourse within three seconds--that is, their penis becomes
fully erect and ready to enter the vagina within that time. Women
react, on the whole, somewhat more slowly, though full preparation for
intercourse, under the best of conditions, is often only a matter of a
few more seconds than the man’s.
As the sexual excitement increases, tremendous changes go on throughout
the body, changes that might frighten you if they occurred under other
circumstances.
The pulse rate goes up astonishingly. There are records of its reaching
150 and more as the individual approaches and then reaches the sexual
climax. Such pulse rates generally occur, in health, only in athletes
who are performing prodigious tasks of speed or endurance.
The blood pressure, too, goes up precipitately. In a matter of a few
seconds it can rise well over 100 points. Breathing also becomes much
deeper and swifter. With the approach of orgasm the breathing becomes
interrupted; inspiration comes in forced gasps and expiration occurs
with a heavy collapse of the lungs. It is as though the sexually
excited person had been in a race.
As the sexual act continues there is a general shortage of oxygen
throughout the body, which accounts for the unusual breathing. This
gives rise to a tortured expression on the face, as if the person
were undergoing severe pain. This fact has been observed by Kinsey in
his famous study of female sexuality, and I quote here an interesting
paragraph on the phenomenon:
“ … Prostitutes who attempt to deceive (jive) their patrons, or
unresponsive wives who similarly attempt to make their husbands believe
that they are enjoying coitus, fall into an error because they assume
that an erotically aroused person should look happy and pleased and
should smile and become increasingly alert as he or she approaches the
culmination of the act. On the contrary, an individual who is really
responding is as incapable of looking happy as the individual who is
being tortured.”
Within seconds after sexual arousal the blood supply in the veins and
arteries lying close to the skin increases, causing the body to become
flushed and the temperature to rise slightly. Certain areas of the body
are engorged with this blood, become swollen and erect, notably the
penis of the man, which swells, often to twice its size. In women, this
also happens to the clitoris, which becomes firm, and to the nipples
of both sexes. The firmness of these organs increases as the sexual
climax approaches.
Muscles throughout the body begin to tense at the onset of sexual
excitement, and this tension increases as the excitement grows.
Certain glands and tissues also increase their secretions as the
sexual act commences and moves closer to completion. The salivary
glands and the nasal mucosa flow freely, and it is this latter fact
which causes, in conjunction with the engorgement of the surface blood
vessels, the characteristic nasal stuffiness so many people notice
after intercourse. In some women the secretions of the glands of
Bartholin and the mucus from the cervix of the uterus become amazingly
copious as sexual excitement rises, and particularly during orgasm
itself. This profuse flow may have given rise to the widely held and
entirely mistaken idea I have mentioned--that in orgasm women have an
ejaculation similar to the male’s. There is no such ejaculation--nor
indeed any female organ that could make one possible.
One of the most amazing aspects of sexual intercourse is the fact
that all five senses become extremely dulled as the act increases in
intensity. The ability to feel hot and cold, to feel pain, or to hear
sounds becomes almost nonexistent. The eyes take on a characteristic
trance-like stare, and vision becomes constricted. The entire mind and
body are concentrated fully on the mounting sexual feeling and exclude
all else. In orgasm itself the anesthesia of the senses is almost
total. Indeed many people experience a temporary loss of consciousness
for a matter of seconds. Some, according to Kinsey’s findings, remain
unconscious for two or more minutes.
This last fact brings us to our examination of the experience of orgasm
itself. If you are to understand frigidity in women it is of tremendous
importance to grasp the nature of orgasm and what it means physically
and psychologically. The importance of such understanding is due, of
course, to the fact that orgasm, of the type described here, is the
very thing the frigid woman is unable to have. In fact, its absence
from her experience is the usual definition of frigidity. Certain
kinds of frigid women may experience one, two, or all of the physical
and psychological reactions described above, which normally would
terminate with orgasm. But the final experience eludes them; at the
vital juncture the body, despite an agonizing need to come to a climax,
refuses to respond; it draws back, goes dead.
Orgasm is the physiological response which brings sexual intercourse
to its natural and beautiful termination. It is preceded by a very
dramatic increase in all of the phenomena noted above. In the moment
just preceding orgasm, muscular tension suddenly rises to the point
where, if the sexual instinct were not in operation, it would become
physically unendurable. The pelvic motions of the man and the movement
of the penis back and forth within the vagina increase in speed and
in intensity of thrust. The woman’s pelvic movements also increase,
and her whole body attempts with every move to heighten the exquisite
sensations she is experiencing within her vagina. According to many
women with whom I have discussed this experience, the greatest pleasure
is caused by the sensation of fullness within the vagina and the
pressure and friction upon its posterior surface.
At the moment of greatest muscular tension all sensations seem to take
one further rise upward. The woman tenses beyond the point where, it
seems, it would be possible to maintain such tension for a moment
longer. And indeed it is not possible, and now her whole body suddenly
plunges into a series of muscular spasms. These spasms take place
within the vagina itself, shaking the body with waves of pleasure. They
are felt simultaneously throughout the body: in the torso, face, arms,
and legs--down to the very soles of the feet.
These spasms, which shake the entire body and converge upon the vagina,
represent and define true orgasm. At this moment the woman’s head is
thrown back and her pelvis tips upward in an attempt to obtain as
much penetration from the penis as is possible. The spasms continue
for several seconds in most women, though the time varies with every
individual, and in some women they may continue though with decreasing
intensity, for a minute or even more.
Many women can repeat this performance two or more times before
their partner has his orgasm. The pathway, neurologically and
psychologically, has been set for orgasm and, if her partner continues
she can respond. I have had women report that the last orgasm is
sometimes more intense and satisfying than the first.
If the woman is satisfied by her orgasmic experience she will discharge
the neurological and muscular tension developed in the sexual build-up.
When satisfaction has been achieved, her strenuous movements cease
and within a short period blood pressure, pulse, glandular secretion,
muscular tension, and all the other gross physical changes which
characterize sexual excitement return to normal, or even to subnormal,
limits.
There have been detailed studies made of the physical reactions of both
men and women during intercourse. I think it is important to realize
that in almost every detail, including orgasm, these reactions and the
subjective experience of pleasure parallel each other in the sexes. The
major differences are that the woman is slightly slower to respond at
the outset than the man, and the orgasm of the man is characterized by
the ejaculation of sperm into the vagina.
Full sexual satisfaction is followed by a state of utter calm. The
body feels absolutely quiescent. Psychologically the person feels
completely satisfied, at peace with the world and all things in it. The
woman in particular feels extremely loving toward the partner who has
given her so much joy, such a transport of ecstasy. Often she wishes to
hold him close for a while, to linger tenderly in the now subdued glow
of their passion.
As you can see from this description, orgasm is a tremendous
experience. There is no physiological or psychological experience that
parallels its sweeping intensity or its excruciating pleasure. It is
unique.
There are many who take a mystical view of this ecstatic coupling of
man and woman in love. They think of it as a symbol of a lost unity
between the sexes that strives to reassert itself in the act of love.
Others see in it a foretaste of heaven, the carnal representation of
endless spiritual delights for mankind. Many who are able to experience
orgasm in intercourse find it difficult not to ascribe some purposive
intent on the part of the Creator; the experience is that profound.
The individual perceives orgasm as a reward equal to none. It puts the
sacrifices and compromises necessary to an enduring marriage into their
proper perspectives, makes the constant giving done by the woman seem
not only worth while but highly desirable. It is the strongest link in
the unbreakable bond between two who love.
Do you recall Tennessee Williams’ play _A Streetcar Named Desire_?
In one of its most famous passages the frigid (and promiscuous)
older woman attempts to break up the marriage of her younger sister,
appealing to a spurious pride of class, pointing out that the younger
woman has married beneath her, married a beer-drinking, poker-playing
common day laborer. The younger woman is almost convinced that she
should act on the false values of her sister. After all, these values
had been inculcated in both women by the same parents and they went
deep. The young girl’s husband saves her, however; he simply reminds
her of the pinwheels she sees, of the high music of the bells she
hears when they embrace in love. It is enough. She returns to him
without a word. The bond of their wonderful sexual life is unbreakable,
far stronger than the powerful and subtle assault the envious and
destructive sister can make upon the marriage.
The ability to have a full orgasm is, in most cases, the hallmark
of the psychologically mature woman. It is the sign that she has
successfully weathered the storms of childhood and youth and come,
unscathed, into full womanhood, with all that it implies.
_Chapter 3_
THE NOT IMPOSSIBLE SHE
What _is_ the mature woman? Who is she? What are her characteristics?
Her personality? Her role in life?
It is of vital importance to an understanding of the frigid woman to
answer these questions, for again, only by understanding what health
is, can we truly grasp the meaning of any departure from it.
There have been great arguments about what the word “normal” means.
Millions of words have been written about it. I fear that most of them
have only clouded the issue. Odd definitions of normalcy have led
millions of women down very odd and unhappy paths. You will recall, for
example, that Victorianism elevated frigidity to the position of the
norm for all womankind--with disastrous results.
At the start of my practice I encountered another strange and tragic
view of the normal that has had a powerful influence on American women.
This view, which we will encounter in more detail when the feminist
movement is discussed later, still has wide repercussions and is
intimately bound with the subject of frigidity and divorce.
In my introduction to it a lovely woman of forty came to consult
me. She was deeply disturbed and could hardly speak, she wept so.
Somehow I felt at once that there was a deep rage behind those
tears. I recognized her name when she was able to get it out; she
was a successful lawyer whose name many would still recognize in all
probability.
In her thirty-ninth year she had fallen in love for the first time with
a fine man, another successful lawyer. Her dormant sexuality and true
femininity had been awakened completely in her since their marriage
a year before, and they both now wanted children badly. However, a
physical examination had indicated (as unhappily it so often seems to
do for women who postpone their first pregnancy for too long), that she
would have to have a hysterectomy, for she had developed a tumor in the
wall of her uterus.
She felt cruelly deprived, and I saw her for several sessions. During
these periods she told me of her background. Her father had died
when she was an infant and her mother had been a militant leader of
the movement for women’s “rights.” The whole emphasis in her early
upbringing had been on achievement in the male world, and in the male
sense of the word. She had been taught to be competitive with men, to
look upon them as basically inimical to women. Women were portrayed as
an exploited and badly put upon minority class. Marriage, childbearing,
and love were traps that placed one in the hands of the enemy, man,
whose chief desire was to enslave woman. Her mother had profoundly
inculcated in her the belief that women were to work in the market
place at all cost, to be aggressive, to take love (à la Russe) where
they found it, and to be tied down by nothing, no one; no more, as her
mother put it, than a man is.
Such a definition of the normal had, of course, made her fearful of
a real or deep or enduring relationship with a man. For years she
sedulously avoided men entirely. Gradually, through her grown-up
experiences, she learned of other values, but by the time the right
man came along it was too late to have children.
I was right that her tears had been tears of rage. They were directed
at her mother’s authoritarian but totally mistaken view of the feminine
role in life and were, to my mind, justified. When she had sufficiently
vented her righteous anger, but not until then, we were able to move on
to more practical matters. Her marriage was a happy one, and finally
she adopted two children. With some of her values revised she made a
wonderful mother for them. I visited this family only recently, and
it seems to be one of the happiest and healthiest, psychologically
speaking, I have ever seen.
Most women who have been reared with such ideas of what is normal
are not so fortunate, however. They cling to their defensive and
self-destructive values to the end, which is often bitter.
And there are, still, passionately convinced and often eloquent
purveyors of these ideas. After reading the brilliant best seller,
_The Second Sex_, by Simone de Beauvoir, the French authoress, I was
saddened to see such clarity and brilliance in the service of such a
mistaken cause. Her tacit conclusions seem to be that woman’s historic
role of wife and mother are degrading to our sex, have kept woman from
her true destiny. As she describes what that true destiny is, however,
her clarity departs, and the role and function of this woman of the
future become more than merely vague. Their foggy contours remind me of
the glamorous-sounding but totally evanescent and mist-enshrouded goals
that many of the frigid and lonely women I treat have when they first
come for help.
There is _no_ vagueness about the goals, functions, and needs of the
normal woman. Science in recent years has thrown a bright light on
her, and that is why we can be certain of many fundamental details
about her. She is a mature, fully functioning woman, a woman who
has realized the better part of her potentialities, who knows how to
achieve and handle love and happiness, who has won through to a fully
satisfying mental and sexual life.
I very frequently draw a word portrait of such a woman for patients
who come to consult me about their sexual problem. It often makes them
angry, and they deeply resent some of the characteristics of this
idealized woman. They call her all sorts of names: “a victim of the
male,” “an impossible ideal.” One eloquent younger woman called her “a
faceless tramp,” and I have heard older women, brought up under a more
inhibited code than exists now, call her “a shameless hussy.”
And yet despite the hostility that my portrait is often greeted with
there is soon other evidence in my troubled listeners that they have
been touched deeply by the idea that such a picture of womanhood might
conceivably be a possibility for them. “Do you really think I could
ever get to be anything like that?” The yearning question, phrased in
any number of wistful ways, will inevitably come, despite the obvious
hostility, the bristling defenses, the fact that the speaker is scared
blue of sex and motherhood and all they mean.
You see, women want to find themselves, desperately want to. And in
this portrait they get a hint, often the first they have ever had, of
what to aim for, of the real potential inside themselves.
I call this subject of my sketch “idealized,” and she is. But I want to
emphasize that she is not a personal idle daydream of my own, based on
airy nothingness; very much the contrary. Her characteristics are based
on exact and thoroughly checked psychological and biological facts,
facts upon which the leading scientists in this field are in general
agreement. And she is a composite based on observations of women I
have known, and not always clinically. If you stop to think as you read
about her, you may realize that you have known such women too.
What, then, is she like? First of all to give us a frame for our
portrait so that we can see what we _do_ know more clearly, let me
state what we cannot know about her; what, in fact, is irrelevant.
We don’t know what she looks like. She may be tall or short,
red-haired, blond, or brunette. She may have large breasts and round
hips and sloping shoulders, or she may be small-breasted (or even
flat-chested), have wide shoulders and narrow hips. She may have a
career or not have a career, be more intelligent and better educated
than her husband or less intelligent and less well educated. She may
have children or be unable to have children. She may be rich or poor,
come from the “400” or from the slums. She may be a bit shy or quite at
ease socially. She may be athletic or totally unathletic. These things
we don’t know about her and, for our purposes, they do not matter.
Here are some of the things we do know.
In the first place, she is very much “at home” in the world. Deep
inside herself she feels profoundly secure, safe, both with herself and
with her husband. She is very, very glad to be a woman, with all the
duties, responsibilities, and joys it entails. She can’t imagine what
it would be like to be a man and has no interest in imagining it as a
possible role for herself. She feels that the very existence of her
husband makes the world safe for her.
This feeling may seem unrealistic, in view of the very clear
insecurities in the world today. As you will discover, however, it is
based on a far deeper understanding of reality, on a far deeper reality
than the one reflected in the alarums published in the daily newspaper.
This sense of reality almost invariably leads her to select a husband
who is good for her, often near perfect, in fact. He might not be
perfect for another woman, nor perfect in any ultimate sense, but he
is near perfect for _her_. He loves her and intends to go on loving
her. He may be a carpenter or an architect, a lawyer, a dock hand, or a
poet, but he, with her, is passionate and loyal, a good companion and
a good father for her children. She has an infallible sense about this
matter, and though she may have had an adolescent or college crush on a
no-gooder, she simply never will marry him.
Of course marrying a good husband adds to her sense of “at-homeness”
in the world. Related to this feeling in her, to her sense of
security, seeming almost to spring from it, indeed, is a profound
delight in giving to those she loves. Psychiatrists, who consider this
characteristic the hallmark, the _sine qua non_, of the truly feminine
character, have a name for it: they call it “essential feminine
altruism.”
As you will see, it too has its roots in woman’s biology, is, on its
deepest level, a need in her that must have expression. The finest
flower of this altruism blossoms in her joy in giving _the very best
of herself_ to her husband and to her children. She never resents this
need in herself to give; she never interprets its manifestations as
a burden to her, an imposition on her. It pervades her nature as the
color green pervades the countryside in the spring, and she is proud of
it and delights in it.
It is this altruism, this givingness, that motivates her to keep her
equilibrium, to hold onto her _joie de vivre_ despite whatever may
befall. It stands her in marvelous stead for all the demands that life
is going to make on her--and they will be considerable. When a woman
does not have this instinctually based altruism available to her, or
when she denies that it is a desirable trait, life’s continuous small
misfortunes leave her in a glowering rage, helpless and beside herself
with self-pity.
Another fact about her which you may be surprised to learn is that
she is deeply religious--though not officially or even consciously.
In fact, if her husband’s background has been antagonistic to formal
religion and he is still reflecting his background, she may pay lip
service to his agnosticism or even atheism. But that doesn’t mean a
thing. Just beneath the surface is an absolutely firm belief in the
existence of a Creator and in some form of heaven. She’s not so clear
about hell.
She also believes firmly in the fact that marriage is a sacrament,
binding forever. Given the slightest encouragement or support, she
will formalize these beliefs, join a church or develop a kind of
personal pantheism. Why? Biologically speaking, she is the carrier
of immortality, of the generations of man. This gives her a close
affinity to and appreciation of the awesome and creative mysteries of
the universe: moonrise, tidal flow, the growth, death, and rebirth of
things.
Sexually she almost always reaches a climax during the act of love.
Sometimes she reaches two or, if she and her husband are feeling
particularly lusty, even three. But the number of times is unimportant,
despite the Kinsey report.
What _is_ important is the _kind_ of orgasm she has. It is of the kind
described in the previous chapter, of course; the kind that starts deep
within her vagina and extends to all parts of her body. She doesn’t
talk about it very often, but when she does it is always poetically.
I have heard one woman refer to it as “a sensation of such beauty
and intensity that I can hardly think of it without weeping”; of it
another said, “It’s like a mounting symphony, rising in tremendous and
irresistible rhythms till your whole being feels as though it has been
swept away.” One woman, less lyrical but still exact, said, “It’s like
going over Niagara Falls in a barrel.” Nobody can ever _quite_ evoke
the exact sensations in words, but, as one woman told me, “Nobody who
has ever had it will doubt whether her experience is the real thing.”
What else characterizes her sexually? Well, she’s not very modest, I’m
afraid. In fact, she’s quite a show-off and likes sexual compliments
from her husband, dressed or undressed, verbal or otherwise. Her
nineteenth-century sister would have been vastly shocked by her whole
attitude in the bedroom.
She’s not sexually shy at all. She wouldn’t demur a moment at
initiating love with her husband, though she will immediately change
her amorous direction if she finds he is too tired or is preoccupied,
without feeling the least bit rejected. Don’t forget that, for one
thing, just under the surface (and sometimes on it) she considers her
marriage a heaven-made arrangement that is going to last forever, and
she need not look upon any one experience as too important in itself.
However, there is another very important point. I have indicated that
sexually she takes her cue from her husband. What does she know, do you
suppose--know deeply and instinctively--that makes her do this, while
other women refuse to?
She knows this: that it is the man who, from the purely physical
viewpoint, has to be ready before sexual intercourse can take place.
No matter how many books have been written that ignore the fact, it
is nevertheless true that, if the man does not have an erection,
love-making cannot take place.
Just think about it for a moment. A woman _can_ make love at any time;
a man only when he is ready. There may be psychologically preferential
circumstances for a woman, but there is no physical prerequisite.
That is why (by virtue of that deeper sense of reality we spoke of)
when her husband is ready to make love our lady is nearly always
willing, barring sickness or certain difficulties that may come up
during pregnancy. And that is why she is always willing to forgo
love-making if he is not ready. Her deep altruism makes her extremely
sensitive to his moods, and she will not find it in herself to treat
him as if he were a robot, become angry or feel rejected when, if the
button is pushed, he doesn’t respond.
On this same point: she knows how much store men put on their potency,
how vulnerable they can become if they are made to feel inadequate to
the needs of a wife. She would die a thousand deaths rather than have
her husband gain any such inference from her actions. It’s her altruism
again.
Her eternal acquiescence, her ever-readiness, never lets her in for a
painful sexual experience, however. She knows that ninety-nine times
out of one hundred even negative sexual feelings in herself will soon
turn to eagerness, and eagerness to desire. And even if that once in
a hundred times occurs, she will still get a profound satisfaction
from the pleasure she is able to give her husband, the very obvious
pleasure. Once more that deep altruism.
But she not only takes the lead from him about _whether_ they are
going to make love--the _kind_ of love they are going to make is also
usually his decision and, in pure delight, she follows him completely.
If he feels purely lusty, soon she does too; does he feel gentle and
tender, then she picks up that mood. Experimental? Let’s, by all means,
experiment. Passive? She’ll be active. It takes her little time to find
out that a geisha has the tremendous disadvantage of believing that
techniques are more important than love and the love of following one’s
partner.
Despite her very pronounced wantonness with her husband, however, she
has no promiscuous urges whatsoever. She is realistic about other men
and finds them attractive or unattractive, as the case may be. But she
neither desires them nor has any fantasies of a sexual nature about
them. One woman put it this way to me: “I like other men if they’re
attractive,” she said. “Their attractiveness does honor to the sex my
husband belongs to.”
Nor is she ever tempted to indulge in self-masturbation, at least not
after one or two tasteless and pointless experiments she may make
during her first absence from her husband. To her, sexuality is devoid
of any meaning whatsoever if there is not mutuality, if it is not
shared.
Lest you think that our paragon’s altruism could end up by making her a
martyr, a person without any real regard for herself, I must hasten to
nip that idea in the bud. In her quiet way she is quite self-centered.
In the first place, she’s contented with all aspects of her body, all
the details of a female anatomy that gives her so much pleasure. If in
her cultural background there were influences which tended to inculcate
disgust with certain natural functions, she finds herself rejecting
them. For example, I have had several patients who, during the course
of their therapy and as they found a new maturity developing in them,
find themselves ruminating on the word “curse” as it is used to
describe the menstrual flow. Reflection almost always makes them drop
the word from their vocabulary entirely. In the end they are far more
likely to call it a blessing.
This self-love, her pride in and love of her body, is reflected in
her outward appearance. She likes to be as clean as a cat and as neat
as a pin. She enjoys dressing well. She is very aware of the things
that bring out her special attractiveness. She also knows how to make
herself up to the very best advantage. But she does not spend hours
daily on her toilet in front of the mirror. She is far too confident
of herself, has too much self-love, to feel that such a production is
necessary.
Here’s the way I’d put it. She accepts and is pleased with the way she
is and the way, as time passes, she is going to be. This is true of her
mental capacities as well as of her physical attributes, but we can see
it most clearly in her attitude toward her physical self. As I said at
the beginning, we don’t know whether she has small breasts or large
breasts, rounded hips or narrow hips. We only know that, whatever she’s
got, she enjoys.
You see, she knows perfectly well that it is passion and response which
spin the plot of love and not, ever, fetish or fashion. She really
feels sorry for women who worry about what they haven’t got or the
effect of growing older. If she were small-breasted she would never
disguise that fact, and you can be certain that her husband, at least
after the relationship had got under way and he’d had a chance to
experience her pleasures, would soon drop any adolescent predilections
he had imagined he possessed.
The husband of one such woman said to me: “When I was in college I had
a conviction that really beautiful women had to be redheads. I can’t
imagine now _what_ made me believe such a thing.” I know his wife well;
she’s a brunette, and you and I might not be the least bit impressed by
her looks. But he knows better; he knows her real beauty. And, I happen
to know, so does she.
The confidence and pleasure our fair lady has in her person and in her
other attributes (her self-love) have one very odd quality. And it is
an all-important one. This self-love is _detachable_.
With a flick of her psyche she can project practically all of it onto
her children, take as much joy from their beauty, achievements, and
pleasures as she ever got from her own. She detaches it, too, on behalf
of her husband, often will exaggerate his good qualities and minimize
any weakness he might have, as long as the weakness is not a danger to
family and home.
Her detachable self-love and her need to give unrestrainedly are
two chief components of the maternal instinct. To put it mildly, as
perhaps you have noticed, she is pervaded with this instinct. To her
the fulfillment of it is the most central and all-important function
of her life. It colors and deepens and enriches her sexual life with
her husband. Her unconscious fantasy with every intercourse is that
he might make her with child, and her psychological and biological
gratitude to him for this richest of all potential gifts is boundless.
Her fantasies about becoming pregnant may excite her directly.
I have paid particular attention to this connection between the sexual
instinct and the maternal instinct in many patients of mine who have
come to therapy because they were afraid of childbirth. When they have
been able to rid themselves of such fears they are almost always struck
by the new dimension that is added to their sexual life. The things
they say about it are often poetic or even mystical.
One woman, who because of childhood experiences had been scared
to death of bearing a child and whose fear was causing a partial
frigidity, said to me of her new sexual experience: “I was living in
one room of a whole mansion, and now I have the whole mansion for my
own.” Another woman, who had believed her love life complete despite
her deep fear of pregnancy, said of the change in her feelings during
love-making: “Oh, it was fun before, but now the idea that I might
become pregnant makes me feel at one with the whole universe. It’s
strange. There are almost no words to express it.”
Our ideal woman carries this characteristic feeling of a deep
identification with nature, with all things that grow and bud and
blossom, through her pregnancy and long thereafter. Childbirth had no
real terrors for her; she sails through it proudly, like a clipper made
especially for such weather.
And she usually wants to nurse her child at her breast. She does, too,
unless a breast abscess or some other unforeseen difficulty arises.
And, though I have no statistics to prove it, I would bet that her milk
is both plentiful and good.
I know that today there is a tremendous emphasis on the importance
of careers for women, but I am afraid that our mature woman cannot
get terribly excited about the subject. I don’t mean that she’s
antagonistic to this whole modern movement. She may be a career woman
herself, a nurse, a doctor, a lawyer, a fashion designer, whatever. But
now, happily married and with children in the offing or already here,
she can’t feel that its of central importance. If it’s necessary for
the family welfare she will keep her job, but any drive she had after
high school or college to go far in it is sacrificed, if necessary, to
her love-making and homemaking instincts.
She is not the least bit jealous of her husband’s work. As I pointed
out earlier, she may be smarter than her husband or may basically
have a much higher intelligence quotient, or she may be far more
thoroughly educated than he is. Or she may be highly talented in some
art form--writing, music, painting, sculpture. You will never, however,
hear her complain that she gave up a career for her family, or angrily
envy the daily adventures of her man in the market place. Her joy and
satisfaction in the fulfillment of her own biological destiny make all
other personal achievements pale for her, any other considerable use
for her energies almost a waste.
As she grows older and her family grows up and the children learn to
stand on their own feet and use their own wings, she may return to
work. However, even then, interest in her now-grown children and their
children will be far greater than any she can summon up for her job.
As you might expect, our paragon ages very gracefully. Those sure
instincts which led her to successful love in marriage and to success
in rearing her children stand her in good stead now. She still loves
to give, and she perceives the right time to give her children up,
to let them stand on their own, learn the difficult uses of freedom.
Admittedly this is a great sacrifice for a mother, but she is deeply
pleased to make it. And in doing so without fuss or feathers, she wins
her children’s regard and love forever.
I am very pleased to say that the menopause brings no diminution in her
ability to enjoy her husband sexually. Contrary to what many people
still think, her orgasm does not decrease in intensity or in kind.
Increasing age and the absence of children in the home now bring her
and her husband closer together again and, great companions, they
develop a whole series of shared pleasures consistent with their years.
As she goes down into the other side of her middle years, she is not
troubled with regrets for things left undone. She has a deep sense
of fulfillment, of life lived rightly. And, whether she has become
consciously religious or not, she is still, basically, a believer in
immortality, for she has served it with her whole being. She looks on
death totally unafraid, wondering perhaps what the Creator who has made
her life such a marvel is like on an even closer view.
* * * * *
This, then, is the idealized picture of the truly feminine woman. While
granting that the plane of maturity she has achieved is rather too
exalted for most women to attain, I have given her to you for some very
concrete reasons.
With merely this ideal to follow, I have seen many women reap immediate
rewards some time before they were able to come to grips with their
frigidity per se. The characteristics and neurotic goals that accompany
frigidity often cause obvious domestic frictions that can be greatly
reduced when the woman begins to see new horizons for herself--that
she need not be blaming others. Her grateful husband will reward her
at once for her change, with renewed affection and tenderness, a new
solicitude, a new caring.
Our idealized portrait can help you, too, to grasp more thoroughly the
rest of this book. We have found, in psychiatry, that when a goal has
been clearly defined half the battle has been won. As we come now to
the chapters on frigidity, its history, its whys and wherefores, kinds
and causes and cures, you will have before you a picture of what the
potentialities of women are, a landmark to show you how far our sex can
stray from real femininity, a guide to keep you from confusion, from
ever subscribing again to false and destructive ideas of what it is
that constitutes real womanhood.
SECTION II
_The Psychology of Frigidity_
_Chapter 4_
WHAT IS FRIGIDITY?
Now that we have seen the real potential of woman, how she can flower
and blossom in the climate of love, what she can be like when she
embraces her true destiny, we may turn to an examination of frigidity
with some perspective. This section will deal with what frigidity is,
specifically, and why it can and does occur in women, blighting their
capacities, stunting their personality, chilling and killing their
ability to love at the heart’s deep core. When a woman gets a clear
picture of such matters, and _only_ when she does, can she find her way
back to the highroad of real womanhood.
If we take the word “frigidity” in its most general sense it means, as
I have already stated, an inability to enjoy sexual love to its fullest
potentiality. This means, purely and simply, the inability to have
an orgasm of the type described in Chapter 2. But the matter is more
complicated than that, for there are degrees of frigidity, and I think
it is very important to understand what this means.
Perhaps I can make this idea clearest by first describing the symptoms
of a woman who came to see me several months ago. She was an example of
total sexual frigidity.
In our first interview she described herself as having absolutely no
sexual reactions whatsoever. She did not respond to her husband’s
caresses in any way at all. Neither her clitoris, vagina, nor labia was
capable of the slightest sexual response. She received no stimulation
from kissing or physical closeness. Her breasts and all secondary
erotic regions were, from the standpoint of sensual response, dead. Her
vaginal passage never became lubricated before or during intercourse.
The act of love was very painful for her. An examination by a competent
gynecologist showed no physical condition which would explain her pain.
Her external genitalia were all fully developed. Her reproductive
organs--the vaginal tract, cervix, uterus, tubes, and ovaries--also
were normally developed and showed no pathology.
This woman’s sexual unresponsiveness was entirely psychological, and on
a scale showing the degrees of frigidity she would represent absolute
zero. (This is no longer true of her, incidentally; she has made
progress in therapy in a relatively short time, considering the extent
of her difficulty, and her final prognosis promises to be excellent.)
At the opposite end of this frigidity scale is the woman who trembles
on the verge of sexual maturity but cannot quite step over the line.
In the act of love she has all the responses which I have described
as taking place in normal sexual intercourse, but she cannot come to
orgasm, or at least orgasm happens quite rarely--say once in ten or
twenty times--and it is generally a mild and unsatisfactory one. You
will be interested to know that her sexual problem is a relatively
easy one to resolve. This is the kind of frigidity that may disappear
entirely after the birth of a child. I have seen it dispelled, too,
by a single conversation with a wise counselor or with just time and
a minimum of insightful understanding which she can obtain by taking
thought or learning more about the nature of her problem and dispelling
certain misunderstandings she has had about the nature of sex,
marriage, men, and love.
In between these two types there are all degrees of sexual frigidity.
The severity of a woman’s problem, or the lack of it, can be calculated
in terms of the degree of response she has to her husband’s caresses
and the frequency with which she achieves satisfaction in intercourse.
Also important in estimating the degree of the problem is the orgasm
itself. This is purely a subjective matter and can of course be judged
only by the individual. If the orgasm is weak and chronically leaves
one with a dissatisfied feeling, a certain degree of frigidity is
present.
In addition to the _degrees_ of frigidity there is a _type_ of
frigidity that it is very important to understand. We call a woman
suffering from this form of frigidity a “clitoridal” or “masculine”
type. To make her problem clear to you I shall have to describe her
typical sexual reaction.
This woman’s responses to sexual stimulation are usually quite
passionate. In the foreplay preceding sexual intercourse and even in
the first part of intercourse her reactions parallel the normal to a
greater or lesser extent. This type of woman, however, can always be
identified by the kind of orgasm she has.
This orgasm takes place on her clitoris exclusively. She does not
feel the orgasm in her vagina, nor do the sexual sensations spread
very strongly to the other parts of her body. The sensual experience
is primarily localized at climax, and though, owing to her lack of
experience with the mature form of orgasm, she may defend her orgasm as
perfectly normal and adequate, it is not. Therapy has helped many women
with this constricted reaction to sexual intercourse and, once they
have experienced the profound pleasure of the true orgasm, they will
admit quite freely their former deprivation.
The clitoridal woman seeks to obtain her typical orgasm in two ways. In
intercourse she will sometimes strive to bring her clitoris into direct
contact with the penis, thus obtaining the stimulation necessary for
her to achieve climax. Most women, however, are not able to gratify
themselves in this way. Intercourse seems to deaden their sexual
feelings, even their clitoral feelings. It is as though the male penis
in the vagina represented a dangerous and hostile presence. Such women
are only able to come to their clitoridal climax either by masturbating
themselves or having their husbands do so before or after intercourse.
The clitoridal woman--that is, the woman who experiences orgasm on her
clitoris alone--is very definitely suffering from a form of frigidity.
Indeed this form of frigidity is extremely widespread, and we will
devote much space to it later, tracing the origin of the difficulty and
the indications for treatment.
Since we have a name for the clitoridal type of sexual frigidity, let
us, for the sake of clarity, also give a name to the form of frigidity
first described, that which is characterized by a subnormal degree of
sensation in the entire genital area and weak and infrequent orgasm.
This form of frigidity is called sexual anesthesia in textbooks, and I
will use that phrase here when I refer to it. The word “anesthesia,” as
you probably know, simply means the absence, or relative absence, of
sensation.
Now that we have named names I should like to say that I wish the
problem of frigidity were as uncomplicated as this description makes
it sound. If it were we’d simply have the problem of a large number
of women who weren’t getting all the pleasure out of life that is
possible. But there is far more to it than that.
The sad fact is that frigidity usually has a profound psychological
repercussion on the individual. Her inadequacy is rooted in her
childhood or adolescence, in early fears and misunderstandings, in
events largely forgotten now. Around these early experiences, as
crystals around a string, have clustered a whole series of personality
traits that make life very hard for her and, much too often, unbearable
for those nearest and dearest to her--her husband and her children.
To put it most directly, frigidity is generally a product of neurosis.
And, most importantly, the frigid woman’s neurotic behavior is in
direct proportion to the degree of her frigidity. I have found it to be
true that, the more frigid a woman is, the more neurotic her behavior
becomes, the more inimical to her own good and to the good of her
family.
It is these psychological repercussions that make the problem of
frigidity a serious one for the individual and society. The frigid
woman’s often grossly neurotic psychological traits are raising havoc
with our marital institution in the form of unhappiness, divorce, and
maladjustment in her children.
Women will usually face the fact that they are sexually frigid;
generally they have to; the knowledge is forced upon them. But they
will rarely face the fact that they have personality difficulties that
are directly related to their obvious sexual difficulty.
Let me give you an illustration.
Last year a very intelligent woman came to see me. She was an associate
professor of history at a leading university and, according to her,
her only complaint was that she could not have an orgasm during
intercourse. She was unusually frank in describing the sexual aspect
of her problem in her first interview, and when she had finished the
description of her reactions and lack of them she had described a
woman with a rather severe sexual anesthesia. She had neither clitoral
nor vaginal sensation and could claim only some vaguely pleasant
sensations on her labia. She had nothing approximating an orgasm.
Actually she was a very fine woman, but she was totally confused about
this area of her life. “If I could only break through this silly little
block,” she told me, “our marriage would be ideal.” I could get no
further real facts from her. She insisted that she and her husband had
“a whole community of shared interests” and two “wonderfully normal”
children. I asked to see her husband.
I got the real story from him. He was, he told me, quite worried about
his wife and about their marriage and had been for a long time.
She had always, he said, been an extremely competitive woman, but since
his promotion from associate professor to full professor four years
before, this characteristic had become almost unendurable. “I hardly
dare to open my mouth any more,” he told me, “because I know she’s
going to contradict me.” Quarrels had become extremely frequent, and
their oldest child was definitely showing neurotic signs. I inquired
about her reactions during her pregnancies, and he told me that she
had been constantly ill physically and, while she would not admit it,
had clearly been deeply frightened of the whole experience. Indeed,
after the birth of the second child she had become severely depressed
for over two months. He told me that yes, indeed, they had _had_ a
community of interests for the first couple of years of their marriage
but that her competitiveness with him had become so pronounced that any
mutuality, from his standpoint, was now almost impossible.
Any psychiatrist knowledgeable in such matters could have guessed
from the woman’s description of her sexual problem pretty much what I
learned about her from her husband. For, as I have pointed out, the
kind and degree of frigidity a woman may confess to are also an open
statement of the kind and degree of personality distortion she is
subject to.
As one might guess, this patient was not easy to treat. She had
developed a powerful tendency to handle her fears by denying their
existence. When she was finally able to see through this self-deceiving
trait, however, she came to grips with her problem. She was able to
see that she had been in a ten-year competition with her husband
instead of a marriage. When she realized this she was able to control
her competitive actions, and the immediate rewards she received in
the form of renewed affection and companionship from her grateful
husband motivated her to find out more and more about herself. At
length this intelligent but dreadfully insecure person became, through
understanding and insight, a real woman able to give and take in every
aspect of the love relationship.
Frigidity causes a personality distortion. I wish to impress this on
you deeply. It means that the person has a misunderstanding of reality,
denies it, blames others for her own miseries and failures.
One woman who had been cured of a severe frigidity problem phrased
it this way: “I was looking at life and people through a distorting
glass. No wonder I made such poor decisions.” She was right, too. Her
problem had first driven her to promiscuity, then to marriage with an
alcoholic. I was very glad, when she first came for treatment, that she
had not yet had any children. With her deeply seated, sexually based
personality problem she might have ruined them. I am even gladder that,
remarried to a fine man, she has two children now.
In a later section we shall examine in great detail these personality
problems that accompany frigidity. There are, however, more immediate
symptoms which I should like to go into here.
You will recall in the description of sexual intercourse leading to
orgasm how thoroughly the body becomes mobilized: heartbeat, pulse, and
blood pressure rise precipitately, tissues become engorged with blood,
glands secrete freely, muscular tension mounts to a pitch which would
be unendurable if the sexual instinct were not demanding expression.
Complete satisfaction brings an end to all these processes, and the
energy discharged through normal channels and in a normal manner leaves
the person in a condition of relaxation and with a sense of well-being.
When orgasm does _not_ take place, when there is no release of the
intensely mobilized energy, there are immediate repercussions, both
physical and psychological, on the individual.
Psychologically the woman who has been brought to such a pitch
experiences a feeling of acute frustration which, consciously or
unconsciously, turns to anger at herself and at her partner. If the
anger is unconscious, she may have physiological symptoms--headache,
nausea, throat constrictions, heart palpitations, or difficulty with
breathing. She may also weep uncontrollably, vomit, or have tremors
throughout her body.
This unconscious anger at her frustration may also cause her to quarrel
with her husband or to take out her rage on the children.
I should like to emphasize that she usually does not see any connection
between these symptoms and her frustrated sexual experiences. When her
anger at her frustration does become conscious, she usually blames her
husband for her lack of satisfaction. As I have pointed out, he is
rarely to blame.
Purely physical symptoms not connected with repressed anger may also
follow upon sexual excitement which has not been released through
orgasm. These are somatic and can probably be traced to undischarged
neuromuscular and glandular energy. Such symptoms include low back
pain, general restlessness, and very often acute insomnia. Several of
my patients have complained of severe vaginal pains which have lasted
several hours. Gynecologists report that abdominal cramps, probably
emanating from contractions of the uterus, are frequent.
As you can see from this recital of symptoms and my preliminary
descriptions of personality disorders, women may pay a very high price
for their frigidity. If the condition were relatively rare, we could
take some comfort from _that_ fact at least.
But frigidity is not rare; it is one of the commonest and most serious
chronic ailments that beset society today. Conservative estimates
indicate that 40 per cent of all American women suffer from some degree
or kind of sexual frigidity. No other public health or social problem
of our time even approaches this magnitude.
* * * * *
I have now told you about the degrees and psychological consequences of
frigidity and described one basic type. There are, however, two other
types of frigidity which, because they have certain confusing elements
in them, I have reserved until now to explain. Psychologically and
sexually both of these types seem to run counter to the generalities I
have made about frigidity so far.
The first type, though we consider her definitely frigid in the wide
sense of the word, is able to have full and complete orgasm practically
every time she has intercourse. This is really quite an astonishing
fact, considering the usual close connection between personality and
sexuality. Actually one could not distinguish in any way the sexual
reaction of this type from that of the perfectly normal woman described
in Chapter 3.
However, this kind of woman is totally unable to build a relationship
with any man. For that reason she generally becomes, in the end,
sexually promiscuous. Somehow and somewhere along the line a wedge
has been driven between her sexuality and her ability to relate
psychologically in a love relationship. Her sexuality has come to
apparent maturity while her character has remained infantile. We call
this psychic frigidity.
This type of woman is not, however, to be confused with the nymphomanic
woman, who, in my experience, is generally seriously mentally disturbed
and for that reason is not included in this book. The woman with
psychic frigidity usually has sexual affairs with one man at a time;
her neurosis is usually based on sexual seduction in early childhood.
The second type is nearly the exact opposite of the psychic type of
frigidity. I call her the all-mother type. She is a distinct anomaly.
In the first place, she is definitely classifiable as sexually frigid;
the degree of her erotic reaction is zero. She is totally anesthetic
sexually.
Psychologically speaking, however, she exhibits almost the perfect
picture of normalcy. She is happily married, is a very giving and
altruistic person, and is totally loyal and devoted to her husband. She
is, above all, a wonderful mother, willing and able to give the very
best of herself to her children. Her husband is generally happy with
his marriage. We suspect, although there is not sufficient data on this
to say it with certainty, that the mate of the all-mother type has a
rather low-pitched sexual nature and also a rather low storehouse of
normal male vanity, albeit he is a good provider and a steady type. It
is probable that the woman divined his characteristics unconsciously
when she first fell in love with him.
There is generally little reason why the all-mother type of woman
should seek to change herself in any way. I must emphasize the fact
again and again that the reason frigidity presents a problem that
must be solved is that it has harmful repercussions on the woman
and on those close to her. It causes acute misery to her, causes
personality damage to the children, and tends to destroy her marriage.
The all-mother type of frigidity does none of these things, and I see
no reason, if the woman doesn’t, why she must contemplate changing
herself. However, the matter can be a subtle one, for this type of
woman can, without any awareness of the fact, tend to be overprotective
of her children or tend to have a hard time letting them go from the
nest when that period in their growth has arrived. She should be most
careful, weigh this matter thoroughly, before she decides in any final
sense whether her problem may or may not be having untoward effects of
a concealed nature.
These, then, are some of the basic facts about the nature of frigidity.
Let us now consider their implications.
_Chapter 5_
THE WAR BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN
When one contrasts the normal woman with the frigid woman, certain
questions come to mind at once. Why, for example, _do_ certain women
become frigid? Have millions of women always been this way, or is it a
problem of our times only? Why, if _not_ being frigid is so pleasant,
do some women hold onto this problem though they know they can get help
for it?
To answer these questions in part or in whole, you will first have to
know a little history. For, though every case of frigidity represents
a psychological problem in the individual, we have found that,
sociologically speaking, frigidity is rooted in certain destructive
events that have occurred to woman in the past two hundred years. If
you grasp them you will begin to get a picture of the over-all problem
that has beset woman, of how she lost her direction, her sense of self,
and what she must do to find them again.
The history I am going to tell you about is the history of a war, a
bitter and destructive war. It is often called “The War between Men and
Women.” For far too many women and men too--it is still going on.
It began toward the end of the eighteenth century, and the apparently
innocent event that started it all was the invention of the steam
engine by Watt--the great invention that ushered in the modern age. It
seems hard to believe now that this almost outdated means of creating
power could have been so important, but it was. It launched the
so-called Industrial Revolution, which was to change the whole fabric
of society, our ways of doing things and making things, our living
quarters and our living standards, our morals, religion, art; name it
and you will find that the Industrial Revolution has turned it upside
down and inside out.
Most of all, and most tragically, it changed the home. It would be more
accurate, if somewhat bleaker, to say that it destroyed the home, at
least as home was known up to that time.
But let me tell you what home was like before the Industrial
Revolution, for when you see that you will begin to discern the
outlines of the great tragedy that happened to woman when the
old-fashioned family home ceased to exist.
In that era our society was almost entirely rural and agricultural.
In other words, most homes were farms. There were cities and some
industry, of course, but where industries existed they were almost
entirely home industries run by individual families.
Home, then, was, almost without exception, the center of all life,
economic, social, and educational. Everything was produced at home;
all food was grown; suits and dresses and underclothing were made from
cloth woven on the premises. There were simply no stores in which to
buy anything. The leather for shoes was taken from the hides of animals
one had reared oneself, and the shoes were made at home, the leather
tanned, the shoes fashioned. A man made his own tools, was his own
blacksmith, carpenter, architect. He built his own house, too, and kept
it in repair.
Woman’s place in this early family home was indisputably at the very
center, an equal partner with her husband in all the manifold duties,
responsibilities, joys, hopes, and fears of the entire household. Her
work was heavy and constant; she cooked the food her husband had grown,
wove the cloth, fashioned and made the clothes for the entire family.
She cleaned and she swept, washed, and ironed from morning till night.
Children, as soon as they were old enough, lightened her labors. She
was responsible for their education (public schools had never been
heard of), which was not just a matter of teaching them the three R’s
but of inculcating in them all that she knew of the multitude of arts,
crafts, and techniques it took to run such a home.
Her reward for all this was the fact that she was needed, loved, held
in the highest esteem by her husband and her whole family. If she
failed in her duties or if she died, it would be not merely a sad or
inconvenient event for the family. It would be a disaster, for the
activities of the distaff side, although different from those of the
male, were of equal importance.
There were of course no social scientists to ask her probing questions
about her sex life, and we can only know about her indirectly and by
piecing odd patches of information together wherever we may find them.
From what we can gather, even the concept of frigidity in marriage
was unknown to her; love, home, work were a unified and profoundly
satisfying experience on all levels. As a woman she was profoundly
needed, and as a woman reared to respond to this need she had no single
occasion to question her worth or her abilities.
And then one by one, slowly but surely, her responsibilities and her
duties were removed from her; her close and equal working relationship
with her husband was destroyed; her importance to her children was
diminished sadly.
The new machines made possible by Watt’s harnessing of steam power
began to take over, to displace all those things that had been done
by hand. Transportation, via the new Iron Horse, developed, and trade
between sections that were once remote from one another was made
possible. A man could make more money than he had ever dreamed of if he
could supply a need of some group or community.
And so industry in the sense that we know it today started with a rush.
The principle of steam power was applied to the manufacture of goods
with tremendous success. Factories sprang up, and they needed men to
run them. Now husbands who but recently had worked at home, hand in
hand and side by side with their wives, labored outside the home,
developed lives that were independent to some extent of the home’s
activities and concerns.
The supply of manufactured goods from the factories began to render the
homemaking skills and handicrafts of women unnecessary. As time wore
on and new ideas developed to meet the new conditions created by the
machine, the education of the children passed from the home to a new
institution, the public school.
It happened slowly, very slowly, over generations, in fact, and the
full results of the Industrial Revolution were not felt until this
century. At first, so gradual was the process that only a few women,
scattered here and there, felt the impact of the change. But as time
passed and the process extended, more and more families were drawn into
the vortex of industrialization, and at length it had changed the lives
of every individual in the land.
Very slowly, too, but everywhere, women woke as if from a centuries-old
dream of peace and happiness to find themselves dispossessed. Gone
was their central place in the family home, gone their economic
importance, gone their close working partnership with their mate, their
functions of teacher and moral guide to the children. The child himself
was gone, to school, as the husband had gone to the mill or factory.
Yes, she was dispossessed, dispossessed of all those things that for
centuries had defined her womanhood for her, that had supported her
ego, given her the certain knowledge that being a woman, however hard,
was a wondrous and most desirable thing. She felt her womanhood itself
devalued, the things it represented unwanted.
And then she reacted. She reacted violently and with rage at this
depreciation of her feminine attributes, of her skills, of her
functions. Unhappily this reaction was precisely the wrong one, the one
from which no solution of a happy kind for her could be attained.
Here’s what she did. Looking about, she thought she spied a villain
in the piece. Who was it? None other than her partner through the
centuries, man. It was he who had deserted her, who was responsible
for her loss of self-respect as a woman, a mother, an equal socially
and mentally and morally. He despised women. Very well, she would show
him. She would simply stop being a woman. She would enter the lists
and compete with him on his own level. To hell with being a woman. She
would be a man.
You don’t believe it? It seems too far fetchedd? Woman as a sex would
never have made such a decision?
Well, let’s look a little more closely at some of the facts.
Earlier I mentioned the feminist movement. Now it is time to look at
it in more detail. It was launched by Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792,
less than thirty years after the invention of the steam engine that
ushered in the Industrial Revolution, and it’s power and influence were
and still are enormous. It has been the self-appointed spokesman for
womankind for over one hundred fifty years, and its program of reforms
has been almost entirely realized in every detail.
What did this movement want to achieve? Let me quote to you what
two profound students of feminism, Ferdinand Lundberg and Marynia
F. Farnham, had to say about it in their book _Modern Women, The
Lost Sex_: “Far from being a movement,” they wrote, “for the greater
self-realization of women, as it professed to be, feminism was the
very negation of femaleness. Although hostile to men and hostile to
children, it was at bottom most hostile to women. It bade women commit
suicide as women and attempt to live as men … Psychologically,
feminism had a single objective: the achievement of maleness by the
female, or the nearest possible approach to it. In so far as it was
attained, it spelled only vast individual suffering for men as well as
women, and much public disorder.”
What was the program of the feminists? Actually Mary Wollstonecraft
had enunciated it in its entirety in her book, _A Vindication of the
Rights of Women_, and the movement never deviated from her original
demands. She had stated that men and women were, in all fundamental
characteristics, identical, and that therefore women should receive the
same education as men, be governed by the same moral standards, do the
same work, and have identical political rights and duties. Women were
to be treated exactly as men in every detail of living, and the same
demands were to be made on them.
The appeal of this program was enormous. Nineteenth-century woman
felt: “Ah, if we could only achieve _this_, then we would be happy
once again.” The fact--and it’s a dreadfully simple one--is that now,
indeed, the entire program has been realized and modern woman, having
reaped the benefits of it in full, is more confused, perhaps even
unhappier, than ever.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not saying that woman’s lot was
not difficult, often impossible, in the nineteenth century. Nor am
I saying that all of the goals set by the feminists were neurotic
and wrong-headed. The movement indeed helped to overcome some of
the gravest dislocations in social and economic life caused by the
upheavals that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution.
I _am_ saying this: that in so far as the feminist movement pitted
itself against the male, and at the same time advised woman to
masculinize herself or divest herself of her feminine nature, it was
dreadfully neurotic, and we have been reaping the whirlwind this
movement started ever since.
The rage of the feminist was directed against herself.
We know, for example, that to fulfill herself biologically--that is, to
give birth to children--a woman must have security, the protection of
the male, a permanent abode. Marriage has been society’s answer to this
feminine need from time immemorial. But the feminists pitted themselves
against the institution of marriage. Woman, they held, had the right,
even as men did, to be promiscuous sexually, to live with whom she
pleased, for as long or as short a time as she pleased. If she wished
to get married she should be able to do so, but she should also have
the privilege of terminating this marriage when she wished to, when she
tired of it.
We know, too, that maternal love for children, particularly love of
her own children, is one of the major traits of womankind, as typical
of her as her female anatomy. We know that only the very sickest
women, mentally, will desert or neglect their children. Maternality
is so deeply rooted in the biology of the female sex that its fierce
protectiveness can be observed in many animals.
Maternality is a trap, said the feminists in effect, a bill of goods
sold to women by men in order to keep them enslaved. Children should
not be allowed in any way to interfere with the new freedom of women.
Work, advised the feminists, right up to the last day of pregnancy.
Then, mothers, get back to work as soon as possible. Put your child in
the hands of some trained child handler or handlers. Public nurseries
were advocated, pre-kindergarten groups were advocated; anything that
“freed” the mother was advocated.
Freed the mother for what? you may well ask. To work in offices and
factories as the men did, of course. To substitute boss for husband, to
share the “privilege” of being hired or fired; to be, in short, men.
If space allowed I could continue with a long and circumstantial list
of masculine goals which the feminists advocated. And I could give an
equally long list of goals which ignored or denied the existence of
feminine characteristics in womankind. Very few of the early feminists
actually lived in the manner they prescribed. But it was as clear as
crystal that they ardently desired to.
But here is the important thing to remember: The feminist credo
thoroughly discredited truly feminine needs and characteristics
and substituted male goals for female goals. There weren’t so many
feminists in actual numbers, but those there were, were incredibly
vocal, and in the end their ideals and beliefs became the ideals and
beliefs of millions of women.
But the feminist front was not the only front in this war between
men and women; it was only the loudest and most militant. Unnoted,
hidden, unknown even to the women themselves, the war against feminine
sexuality, against the flowering of true womanhood, was being waged
in every home in the land. The chaste and prim-lipped heroine of this
front was Victorian woman, whom we already have had a look at. Let’s
take another quick one.
Her reaction to the loss of her position in the highly creative family
home which had preceded the Industrial Revolution was just as violent
as that of the feminist. But it was thoroughly unconscious. She had
been rejected, her place taken from her, her sexual and maternal
functions devalued. Very well. She had a perfectly good technique for
dealing with the situation.
She simply denied the very existence of female sexuality. Sex,
according to her, was exclusively a male characteristic; woman had none
of it in her nature. Although this was a form of psychological revenge
on the “rejecting” male, she was amazingly successful in convincing men
in general, even the scientists of the day, that frigidity was indeed a
basic attribute of the female.
Victorian woman was, of course, unconscious of her motives in affirming
that she was biologically frigid. She entirely believed it herself,
and there is much evidence to indicate that the individual woman was
generally deeply shocked if she discovered she was not as unresponsive
as she had been taught she was or wished to be. She kept any such
reactions a very dark secret indeed.
Frigidity as an article of female faith died with the Victorian
woman--a happy and mercifully early death during World War I. But the
influence of Victorianism is still very much with us in our unconscious
attitude toward sex and love.
This, then, is the heritage of woman today: On the one hand, from
Victorian woman, a profound belief that she is and should be
non-sexual, frigid, by natural law. On the other hand, from the
feminists, that man is woman’s natural enemy, that she should drop her
femininity altogether, oppose man, supersede him, become him.
Please stop for a moment now to think what effect either of these two
attitudes must have had on the marital life of a woman who held one
of them. Her hostility to her husband and all the misery such hatred
implies, we take for granted. But it was the effect on the children
that was decisive.
I have treated, as I have told you, several women who had been raised
by Victorian or feminist mothers. The attitudes inculcated into these
patients in their childhood would make one’s hair stand on end. Or
it should. This is what they learned at their mother’s knee: Shame
about their bodies; shame about menstruation, and disgust with it,
hatred of it, for it is a hallmark of womanhood; fear of pregnancy
and childbirth; punishment for early and natural sexual feelings and
experimentation; destruction and depreciation of the father as an ideal
image for the child to love or to emulate. In general, women learned
early and well to loathe their womanhood in all of its important
manifestations.
Can you begin to see why most psychiatrists passionately agree with
Dr. Marynia Farnham when she writes: “The most precise expression of
unhappiness is neurosis. The bases for most of this unhappiness … are
laid in the childhood home. The principal instrument of their creation
are women”.
You may perhaps have noticed that I have coupled our feminist with
our Victorian woman, and you may object that they really shouldn’t be
spoken of in the same breath. The feminists were, after all, for more
and more sexual freedom; Victorian woman was anti-sexual. I feel that
that is only superficially true. They were both, in their unconscious
lives, against feminine sexuality. It is not possible for woman to
be masculine sexually; to advocate that for her is exactly equal to
demanding that she be frigid.
Of course feminism, as a conscious attitude toward sexuality,
ultimately triumphed over Victorianism. Sexual freedom and all the
other equal rights with men demanded for women by the feminists after
World War I became the order of the day.
The flapper of the 1920’s represented the unintended flower of the
feminist philosophy of life, its definition of what constituted
womanhood. As we know, the flapper was a caricature of woman, a cheap
and shoddy imitation of the opposite sex, a second-class man. Happily,
she did not survive as a conscious national ideal, but the philosophy
that created her _did_ survive. The depreciation of the goals of
femininity, biological and psychological, became part and parcel of
the education of millions of American girls. Homemaking, childbearing
and rearing, cooking, the virtues of patience, lovingness, givingness
in marriage have been systematically devalued. The life of male
achievement has been substituted for the life of female achievement.
The feminist-Victorian antagonism toward men has survived too. It
has been handed down from mother to daughter in an unbroken line for
so many years now that, to millions of women, hostility toward the
opposite sex seems almost a natural law. Though many a modern woman may
pay lip service to the ideal of a passionate and productive marriage to
a man, underneath she deeply resents her role, conceives of the male as
fundamentally hostile to her, as an exploiter of her. She wishes in her
deepest heart, and often without the slightest awareness of the fact,
to supplant him, to exchange roles with him. She learned this attitude
at her mother’s knee or imbibed it with her formula. Little that she
learns elsewhere counteracts it with any great effectiveness.
Clearly, then, if this is the historical direction women have taken,
the individual woman who wishes to become a real woman must change
this direction. This she can do only by taking thought, long thought.
For among the women around her she will not necessarily find too much
support for her wish to be entirely feminine.
For one hundred fifty years now women have blamed their problems on the
outside world. They have used the very real difficulties created by
revolutionary social changes to avoid the task of looking within for
the real problem and the real solution. They have indulged in an orgy
of finger-pointing and self-pity.
If the results had been different; if this attitude had brought them
happiness and fulfillment, if feminism and Victorianism had made
them good mothers and joyful wives, or even pleased them with their
new place in industry, the game might have been worth the candle.
But it hasn’t been. The game has brought frigidity and restlessness
and a soaring divorce rate, neurosis, homosexuality, juvenile
delinquency--all that results when the woman in _any_ society deserts
her true function.
Last year a woman came to see me at the request of a lawyer she had
consulted. She was on the verge of divorce, she told me. And then, her
face distorted with rage, she said of her husband: “He will have to
come crawling to me on his hands and knees before I will even think of
forgiving him.”
I questioned her and soon elicited the fact that she had been totally
frigid from the first time she had had intercourse with her husband.
Yet consciously she felt blameless in the difficulties that had arisen,
self-righteous, indignant that her husband should find her anything
but eminently desirable after five years of joyless love-making. With
such an attitude, of course, she could never have made the slightest
headway against her underlying problem, so, as I sometimes do, I
told her in detail the history I have told you in this chapter. She
listened, at first with hostility and then with the growing shock of
self-recognition. Just by listening she developed a genuine concern
for the very first time about her whole attitude. She left that session
with an avowed intent to look more deeply and more thoroughly into
the whole matter and to reshape her values. There was no more talk of
divorce from her; just hard work on her real problem, and success,
finally, in dislodging the cause of it.
Seeing one’s own responsibility in a situation is often difficult.
However, in this problem of frigidity, not to take the blame is even
more difficult. It means--and has meant for millions--that one almost
literally commits sexual suicide, embraces emotional isolationism as
the proper condition for womankind.
Chapter 6
WHY WOMEN CAN BECOME FRIGID
Some time ago a young husband sat in my office. His wife had come to
me for help for a frigidity problem, and after the first session he
had asked her if he might see me. I take that to be a good omen for a
relationship, generally, and I was not disappointed when I met him. He
told me very quickly that he did not care how long it might take for
his wife to get over her difficulty. “I’d stay with her even if she
didn’t,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t love her problem, but I love
her and I want you to know that I didn’t marry her for better only but
for worse as well.”
No matter how much a psychiatrist hears about love, its difficulties
and its triumphs, a statement like that always moves one, makes one
feel that tasks and difficulties have been somehow lightened. In short,
I liked him, and this moved me to ask him about himself. “That’s what I
came to tell you about,” he said. “There’s something I thought just may
be of some help.”
What he wanted to tell me was the amazing similarity between his
background and his wife’s, and as he talked on I could see some of
the reasons for his broad sympathy with her problem. They were both
children of farm people and had been reared in the strictest of Puritan
disciplines. They were both the oldest children, and each had had two
brothers and a sister. Their mothers had hated and feared sexuality
and had communicated quite freely to the children their feeling that
it was dirty and wicked. The fathers had been punitive on the one hand
and withdrawn on the other. This young man had broken away from home
as early as possible and so had his wife. They had come to the city,
gotten jobs in the same business, and here they had met.
I will take leave of our young husband now because the above facts
illustrate the question I want you to ask yourself. However, in case
some of my warmth toward him has come over to you, I can tell you that
his marriage had a most happy outcome. His wife, motivated strongly,
I am sure, by the sense of security his love gave her, was able to
resolve her frigidity and the other neurotic problems which invariably
accompany it.
But to the question: With almost identical backgrounds, why had the
wife developed a rather severe frigidity problem and the husband
remained perfectly normal sexually?
If you wish to extend that question you may ask yourself: Why is
frigidity so widespread among women and sexual impotency so rare among
men? We saw that under the adverse conditions caused by the Industrial
Revolution women could, by the millions, abandon sexual gratification,
convince the world and themselves that, biologically speaking, they
were asexual beings. There was never the faintest suspicion that man,
on the other hand, would or could abandon his sexual nature, no matter
how difficult the going became. Men might develop neuroses, they might
even take odd sexual directions, develop perversions, if their parents
were sufficiently neurotic. But abandon sexual gratification en masse,
they could not.
I think we now understand the answer to this problem, and I think
it will be helpful for you to learn what we know about it. You
will be able to see why the problem of frigidity is so basically
_psychological_ in nature, for one thing, and therefore why, when a
woman’s chief complaint is frigidity, we feel that if she really means
business she can get over it.
There are three major reasons why frigidity can develop in women. I am
going to treat two of them here and reserve one of them for the next
chapter.
_The Sexual Drive in Women_
A lovely actress I was treating for a rather severe frigidity problem
came for her regular hour one day and paused on the threshold of my
office. She appeared different--her face was softer, her motions
slower--she was elated, and I felt at once that she had experienced the
first reward for the hard work she had put upon her problem.
I was right and shall never forget her method of telling it. She had
on a lovely pink cape; its flowing lines and delicate color seemed to
express the very essence of the feminine. As she stood smiling at me
she unbuttoned the cape and with a beautiful gesture threw it on the
floor between us. “Thus we can cast it away,” she said. Then, stooping,
she picked it up. “And _thus_,” she said, “we can put it on again,”
and with a flourish she put it back on her shoulders. That hour was a
celebration of her new-found capacity.
Her histrionic gesture, expressive of so much happiness in her, was
not only graceful but was deeply symbolic of woman’s sexual nature. To
see why this is so, let us first turn our attention to the biological
meaning of the sexual drive.
You perhaps know that every animal is motivated by a profound
instinctual need to preserve his species. His nature has developed
those characteristics that ensure the ongoingness of his kind,
lemmings excepted, perhaps. We know that characteristics that _do_
ensure the species are, so to speak, more deeply rooted in the biology
of a given animal than characteristics that are not absolutely
necessary to the preservation of a species.
Now, in the human animal and in many other species, sexual intercourse
is the basic method by which the species is continued. In this
elemental instinctual activity the male deposits his sperm in the
receptive female, who then, within her body, nurtures and protects it
until it is ready for birth.
But here’s the important point: In order to deposit his sperm, the male
_must have an orgasm_. If he did not, the sperm could not be deposited
inside the female. Thus the male orgasm is absolutely necessary to the
continuation of the species. If the male had ever lost his ability to
have an orgasm the species would have disappeared from the face of the
earth.
However, it is not a biological _necessity_ for woman to have an orgasm
to fulfill her sexual role. It is only necessary for her to receive the
sperm. The mere reception of it, no matter how unresponsive she may be
to the ardors of the male, fully discharges her duty to the species of
mankind. Maternity, not orgasm, is her biological duty. She can be as
frigid as the polar cap and it will not necessarily affect her ability
to have children in the slightest degree.
Can you see the implications? One of my colleagues summed up the
difference in this way: “To express it in a purely biological sense,
the male orgasm is a necessity. The female orgasm is a luxury.” This
“necessary” aspect of the male orgasm explains why men, no matter how
deeply disturbing their childhood experiences may be, rarely lose their
ability to have an orgasm and why women so frequently do.
Please do not misunderstand me, however. I am _not_ saying that the
orgasm a woman has, when she is able to achieve it, is any less
intense than a man’s. Nor am I saying that it is not necessary to her
psychological well-being, to her maturity, to be able to achieve it.
I _am_ saying that a woman’s ability to have an orgasm is far more
subject to outside influences than a man’s ability. It is in many ways
more subject to the psychological experiences, the mental and moral
traumas of growing up. Compare the female orgasm to a shallowly rooted
tree which the wind may blow down more easily than its deeply rooted
brother, it is still a tree, however, and if it can be sheltered and
protected from storms that are too severe it can flower as beautifully
as any other.
The fact that frigidity is so psychological, so subject to the mind,
gives it almost a “willful” character. It is often as if a woman had
“chosen” to be frigid in a very real sense. I don’t mean consciously
chosen to be, generally speaking. It’s an unconscious choice. But
the fact that it has that element of choosing in it often makes it a
poignant condition indeed.
I know one case where the “choice” was, in part at least, conscious,
and I am going to tell it briefly to emphasize my point, the fact that
frigidity has a very high element of the mental as opposed to the
biological.
Years ago, on a vacation with my husband, I met an older woman with
whom, until her death, I had a very close and highly valued friendship.
She was a wonderful woman. She was a doctor, but this had not prevented
her from having five children of her own, two of whom have since become
quite famous.
One day, after our friendship had deepened and we had begun to exchange
confidences, she told me the following story. She had been deeply in
love with her husband but had been totally frigid. This had not seemed
strange at the time; she had been married in 1904, and the traditions
of Victorianism were still very much adhered to. However, after the
birth of her third child she began to experience some feelings of
pleasure during intercourse, and these gradually increased. At this
point she had her fourth child, and intercourse was interrupted for
two or three months. When it was resumed her feelings of pleasure had
increased enormously and on the second time she had a profound orgasm.
But she was not, like my actress, delighted with the new horizons the
experience opened up for her. She was very consciously frightened and
very consciously ashamed. All her background and training had been
against it. She consciously decided never to let the experience repeat
itself. She was entirely successful in her resolution, she told me.
Unlike my actress, she threw off the lovely pink cloak of her feminine
potentiality and never donned it again. Her husband had died after the
birth of their last child, and it was not until a few years afterward,
with the new information science had developed on the subject, that she
realized the tragedy of her decision.
It’s a poignant story, but I have not told it for that reason. I have
told it because it illustrates very clearly how subject to the mind, to
outside cultural and moral influences, feminine sexuality can be. If a
grown woman can choose to destroy her mature and flowering sexuality
at the height of its strength, just think of the fragility of this
sexuality in the bud.
_The Fear of Motherhood_
On the whole, women will face anything to achieve motherhood. Recently
a woman of thirty-five came to my office. She had called me twice to
make appointments and twice broken them at the last moment. When this
happens a psychiatrist will generally assume that the patient has
become frightened of her decision to face up to whatever problem is
troubling her and has gone into a last-minute flight. I had assumed
that about this patient and had expected, if I ever did see her, to
encounter a reticent, scared, perhaps terrified person.
Instead the person who sat opposite me was a very pretty woman of
thirty-five, well dressed, clear-eyed, and straightforward. She came
right to the point.
“I’m here because I’m terrified of having children,” she told me. “I
must find out what’s at the root of my fear.”
“Was your fear the reason you canceled the two appointments?” I asked
sympathetically.
“Oh no,” she answered quickly, “the children were ill. We’ve had flu
for a month. First one came down and then another.”
“Children?” I asked in puzzlement. “What children?”
“Mine, of course,” she said.
“How many do you have?” I asked.
“Four,” she said, “but John and I want six and I thought … ” She
paused; then, catching my smile, she looked down at the floor for a
moment and back at me, and then we both burst into laughter.
She did have a fear of childbirth, however, dating from certain
traumatic experiences in her childhood, and we were able to resolve it.
It was a marked fear, but the important point is that even with it she
had gone right on and had four children.
The maternal instinct is as deep and as ineradicable in women as the
instinct to plant the seed of his species is in man. They both subserve
the same ends, the continuation of the race, and even if a woman’s
childhood is sown with neurotic fears by unhappy parents--yes, even
neurotic fears of childbirth--her desire to have children of her own
will, in by far the majority of cases, survive relatively intact.
Thank heavens this is so. For the bearing and rearing of children are
the beautiful destiny toward which a woman’s whole body and personality
point from earliest childhood on. If this profound goal cannot be
achieved, the result is far too often a shriveling of the personality
of the individual.
Thank heavens this is so, too, for the good of the race. I thought one
of my colleagues expressed the whole thing very neatly in a paper given
to a private psychiatric group recently. “If the feminists had been
able to injure the maternal instinct of nineteenth-century woman to the
same degree that they injured her sexual instinct, the Western world
would by now be well on its way to being depopulated.”
No, the maternal instinct cannot be fundamentally affected by adverse
circumstances. However, the proper handling of information about the
maternal instinct by a mother is very important to the proper sexual
development of her daughter. Misunderstandings about maternity and what
it means can scare a young child badly--so badly, in fact, that fear of
it can be a direct cause of later frigidity.
Here’s why the maternal instinct can cause trouble to a young girl’s
developing sexuality. Most women know this, even if they have never
phrased it in this manner.
To gratify the maternal instinct a woman has to put her very life right
on the line. In a real sense she has to be willing to say, and to keep
on saying: “I am willing and ready to die for the sake of or the safety
of my child.”
I’m not only speaking of the now very slim chance that she might die in
childbirth, though I should like to point out that until very recently
that possibility had to be faced by every mother-to-be. And the
enormously high mortality rate in childbirth throughout history and in
every civilization shows very clearly that women _were_ willing to face
death to have their child. They have not changed.
What I mean more directly, however, is the fact that the maternal
instinct demands of the woman in every situation an ever-readiness to
put her child before herself, before her safety, before her personal
needs, before everything.
Just yesterday I read of a woman who had saved two of her children
from their burning home. The place had gone up like tinder and she had
snatched them up, one seven and one ten, and, holding them under her
arms, brought them to safety down a flaming stairway. She had thought
her twelve-year-old had gotten out by himself but then discovered that
he had not. She started back at once, without a moment’s hesitation, to
rescue him, but the building was now on the point of collapse and she
was restrained by several firemen. However, so powerful was her drive
to save her child that she broke away from their grasp and entered the
building.
She found him, too, on the kitchen floor, overcome by smoke, and
somehow got him to the front hall and out. She was badly burned, though
she will live. But the child was all right; the child was all right!
_That_ was all that mattered.
And it is all that matters to every mother, unless, of course, she is
dreadfully ill mentally--psychotic, in fact.
Just think of it; this aspect of the maternal instinct is more powerful
than the instinct for self-preservation, which is known to be one of
the basic instincts of all life. It supersedes self-preservation,
annuls it; there are no reservations about it. It will never whisper:
“You’ve done all you can; three powerful men are holding you down and
you can’t get to him anyway.” It will fight powerfully and to the very
end for the mother’s right her indomitable need, to save her child.
Of course most mothers never have to face physically dangerous
situations for their children. In most lives the way this aspect of the
mother instinct expresses itself is in everyday sacrifices. Mothers
give up (and, in the healthy woman, with pleasure, by preference) their
time, intellectual pursuits, careers, first to have the child and then
to see him safely to maturity. Everything else a woman could call her
own becomes secondary to this impulse in the maternal woman. As you saw
in the normal woman, there are checks and balances within the female
personality which prevent her from making a psychological martyr of
herself to the point where she would be a _detriment_ to her children,
but at this time I should like to make a different point.
I have said that the maternal instinct is more powerful than the
instinct for self-preservation. I ask you to imagine for a moment how
easily this characteristic of women could frighten a young girl if the
experience of pregnancy or the role of the mother is presented to her
in an improper way. She will react with acute anxiety, fear, rather
than with joyful anticipation. This anxiety will color in dark hues
though will not overwhelm her desire and determination to have babies.
It _will_ tend to take all the pleasure out of her sex life, however;
it _will_ tend strongly to make her frigid. And it will tend to make
her a less effective mother, even a very poor one indeed.
The biological role of woman is motherhood. If a woman cannot dare to
accept this aspect of her destiny, she will be deeply defeated in her
life. From any standpoint one wishes to look at the maternal role, it
is a great and beautiful one, embodying in it and giving expression to
qualities that are universally admired and cultivated: nobility, the
sacrifice of self, fortitude, love that passeth understanding.
The depreciation of motherhood in any sense whatsoever in the mind
of a young girl is a crime against her if one is in a position to
be influential with her. To fill her with fears, misunderstandings,
resentments of and reservations about her historic role is to cut
her off from full flowering as a woman. The ability of woman to have
an orgasm, her deepest form of relatedness to man, is planted rather
lightly in biological soil, as we saw in the first section of this
chapter. This ability is tightly interwoven with her psychological
experiences at every stage of her development, and the quickest and
most effective way to force her into frigidity is to teach her to be
frightened of the maternal aspects of her personality.
We saw how well womankind functioned before the Industrial Revolution
as an equal partner with her husband in the family home. Her
experiences were fully satisfying to her body and mind because her role
was recognized at its true value; she was needed, rewarded, depended
upon, universally admired. When she lost her role and, in agony,
mistakenly turned to feminism to find a new definition of self, or to
Victorianism, she found only ashes, a depreciation of all those things
that made her a woman; she found, and adopted, values that turned her
against her feminine self, her maternal self, her passionate self.
Scorn for true femininity was what she found and, tragically, she took
this attitude for her own.
If woman is to find true happiness once again, she must return to her
real and joyful self. She must relearn that surrender to her biological
destiny is not a trap, not a condition of slavery to her uterus, of
exploitation by man and nature, but rather a wonderful and privileged
condition.
I should like to give the contents of a letter that came into my hands
recently. I consider it a beautiful letter. It describes in a very
simple way the reactions of a woman who had been caught in a maze of
misunderstanding and fear but who had found her way out, had learned
the power and joy she could receive by surrendering to her true destiny.
This letter was written by a young woman who had just become pregnant.
Six months before, sick with anguish at her joyless marriage, unable
to enjoy any aspect of her sexual relationship because of a constant
and acute fear of becoming pregnant, she had consulted the pastor of
her church, having heard that her church had psychiatric services. The
pastor had gained her admission to a group-therapy project run by a
psychologist. The group was made up of women who had encountered some
difficulty in their lives with their husbands and children.
The patient had attended the group for four months and then had had
to leave, for her husband’s job had been transferred to another part
of the state. The letter, sent to members of the group, arrived three
months after her departure. I have received special permission from
this ex-patient to reproduce this letter on the understanding that the
names originally mentioned in it be changed.
_Dear, dear Friends_:
I will leave out all the details of our move here except to say that
we are all settled down and in our wonderful new home. Anyway, I can’t
wait to tell you that I am going to have a baby. It is a constant
astonishment to me, for it is so different from my expectations. It
all happened so easily. I don’t quite know how, but my fears and
worries have left completely. I didn’t know life could be like this. I
must be a new person. If the doctor hadn’t told me to stay relatively
quiet I would be dancing in the streets. Sam says I sound like a
honeymooner, but he’s really delighted. To think what I have deprived
both of us of because of a lot of nonsense!
The strangest thing is that I can’t remember the things I used to talk
about in the group. I wonder if this happens to everybody. I keep
asking myself: What was so painful? What was it that made me always
angry with Sam? And I’ve found a new deep love for my mother. I am not
angry with her, only sorry that she had to miss so much. You probably
won’t remember, but when I asked my mother how she had felt when she
was pregnant she had said quite sharply to me: “Put such thoughts out
of your mind. You’re young, so enjoy yourself. You’ll know all about
it soon enough, too soon.” The reply seemed so ominous and foreboding
to me. Plus the fact that she was constantly complaining about all
things female. I guess I had picked up her attitude in toto without
realizing it, until I aired the effects on me for the first time with
all of you.
I tell you this so that you will know the fears _do_ go when you are
able to get them out and see them for what they are. I love you all,
and I am deeply grateful to you, and I shall never, never forget the
help my talk with all of you has given me.
_With love and deep gratitude_,
MARGARET
Chapter 7
ANATOMY AND DESTINY
We have seen two important reasons why women can, in the course of
growing up, be deflected from true sexual maturity. Let us now look at
a third, and equally important, reason.
I have already described the so-called clitoridal woman to you, but now
I must tell you more about the implications of her problem. You will
remember that in the female genitalia both the clitoris and the vagina
are capable of experiencing orgasm. This fact is of decisive importance
to the problem of frigidity in women.
Why? It means, in effect, _that women have two distinct sexual
organs, both capable of bringing her release from sexual tension_.
In the unconscious sense many women can “choose” one type of sexual
satisfaction in preference to another. This ability to choose often
spells disaster, for one of these methods of gratification represents
immaturity and is allied to neurosis.
A man has only one organ: his penis. He has been given no anatomical
alternative. If, as happens in relatively rare cases, upsetting early
experiences cause him to block off his sexual feelings, he simply
becomes impotent. He will experience this impotency as a tremendous and
tragic deprivation and will be powerfully motivated to overcome it.
Those who have witnessed the sufferings of a man with such a problem
will know just how powerful his drive back to health is.
The mature female’s orgasm takes place within the vagina; the fact that
a woman can experience this kind of orgasm generally marks her as a
fully developed woman in all aspects of her personality.
The clitoral orgasm takes place on the clitoris only. It excludes
the vagina from sensual participation and it is often independent of
the male penis. This kind of orgasm is possible at an early stage in
female development. If, in growing up, the young girl becomes for any
number of reasons frightened of mature vaginal sexuality, she can
block that pathway and keep it blocked permanently without consciously
experiencing any strong feelings of being deprived. She can do this
because she is already having, as far as she knows, an amply satisfying
experience through her clitoral orgasm. Since she has never experienced
true sexual awakening, she doesn’t know what she is missing,
consequently she doesn’t miss it.
You can see then that the woman who is able to have only a clitoral
orgasm has no very strong motive for moving on to the next stage of
sexual development. Her developing sexuality is channeled off into a
sensual cul-de-sac and there, unless valiant and very conscious steps
are taken, it tends to remain. As the early years of development move
on into adolescence and further, the direction of her sexuality will
not change, for she feels no reason to change it. Indeed the channel
grows deeper, the earlier method of sexual response more ingrained. In
the end she can respond in no other way.
Since such a woman is not advancing sexually she tends, too, to remain
static emotionally. If her psychological fears of real womanhood are
not resolved, she now begins to build up defenses of her childish
emotional needs and of her childish methods of sexual gratification.
By the time she is ready, in terms of her age, for marriage, she may
very well have a full-blown neurosis that militates gravely against the
success of any close relationship.
This then, is how, biology can represent destiny, with a helping hand
from psychology. In a very real sense this dual potentiality of woman’s
anatomy contains the seeds of sexual and hence personal tragedy.
Remember that the woman whose orgasm is confined to the clitoris is
definitely frigid. Statistics on the prevalence of this kind of sexual
problem are not available, but most psychiatrists and psychoanalysts
agree that it is very widespread, may even be the dominant form of
frigidity in our society.
Unhappily many women who suffer from this form of frigidity have
not been helped in the past several years by widely published and
thoroughly erroneous views concerning sexual behavior in the human
female. The Kinsey report, above all, has erred in this respect. It
makes no differentiation between vaginal and clitoral orgasm. Indeed
its authors passionately defend the view that all orgasm is clitoral.
How trained observers could come to this conclusion, it is difficult to
say. The great observers in the field of human sexuality in the past
fifty years have been in the field of psychiatry. They have been and
are unanimous in their observation on the difference between clitoral
and vaginal orgasm and its importance to personality development and to
neurosis. The fact that the Kinsey report ignores this important and
well-established fact about the female sex and, even worse, defends the
opposite viewpoint simply invalidates, from psychiatry’s viewpoint,
many of its basic findings about orgasm.
The sad thing, however, is that the Kinsey report is often used to
bolster the neurotically defensive attitude of women who are able
to achieve only clitoral orgasm. They can say to themselves that
their method of gratification is perfectly normal; do they not have
a tremendous body of “scientific” data to support their view? And
somehow or other women with this difficulty do get hold of the Kinsey
“results.” I myself have had several women suffering from the kind of
problem I have just described quote Kinsey to me at some length in
defense of their method of gratification. And, having checked with
several of my colleagues, I find that they all report many similar
experiences.
This is unfortunate. Women who suffer from any other form of frigidity
are frequently motivated to face up to their problem by feelings of
sexual frustration. Sooner or later, driven by natural hungers, they
will take steps to throw off the yoke of their difficulty.
The woman who is able to have a clitoral orgasm, however, has no such
strong motivation. She can ruin her life and never be the wiser, never
realize the reason why.
I strongly advise, therefore, that such women be more than usually wary
about their tendency to be complacent, more than usually insistent
about finding a way out of their dilemma; above all, they must
recognize their life situation _as_ a dilemma, a serious one that can
far too easily be rationalized.
At this point, then, I wish to emphasize once more the role of woman’s
responsibility in this matter of sexual response. There is often a
stronger-than-usual underlying irrational fear in clitoridal women
which makes them hesitate, even when they have admitted their problem,
to face up to it in any effective way. I wish therefore to reiterate
the point that nobody who suffers from this problem should feel shame
or blame for it. You did not choose in any conscious sense to remain
on this earlier and less “dangerous” plane of sexual development. Your
body made the choice, if you will, but you had nothing to say about
that. The strange dual sexuality of woman is at the base of the matter.
It all happened because you misunderstood or misinterpreted certain
early experiences. Or a grown-up responsible for your very early
training was ignorant or misinformed.
But now it will be the better part of wisdom and valor for you to face
up to the fact that your method of gratification is an expression of
immaturity, even if that immaturity was forced upon you when you were
too young to know the difference. Don’t subside into feelings of guilt
and inferiority about the problem. Remember that you are not alone.
There are probably millions of women who have the same problem. You can
be one who achieves the joys that lie just beyond this. They are real
and solid joys, and they contain none of the terrors you had thought
they contained. Not one.
One of the things I have found helpful in motivating a woman with a
clitoridal problem is to face her with its effect on her husband. Women
with this fixation have a curious inability to see these effects or to
face up to them realistically. I have found that even when such women
know that their form of gratification is infantile and expressive of
neurosis they insist that their husbands not only do not mind the
manual manipulation necessary to bring them to climax but actually
prefer this method of sexual contact to intercourse.
Such has never been the case in my years of clinical experience.
Husbands mind very much indeed.
Here, very recently, is what one husband, whose wife has been able to
move on from her clitoral fixation, told me: “I feel like a man again.
No matter what anybody says, your wife’s response is the most important
thing, and it’s got to be a response _in_ intercourse. If she doesn’t
respond that way, you gradually lose faith in yourself and then you
lose interest in making love.”
Another man, whose wife has just come to me and who has never been
able to have an orgasm except clitorally, recently said: “I may sound
unsympathetic and petty, but if I felt there was no end in sight to
this kid stuff, I mean this form of having to stroke endlessly, I think
I’d give up on the sex part. It’s lost all its fun.”
He’ll get his fun back, for his wife, knowing a lot more than she did
when she started, is very intent on helping herself. And the husband is
_not_ unsympathetic or petty in his complaints. He is simply human, and
there’s a limit to human endurance.
The wife’s denial that the husband is bothered by a clitoridal problem,
I have found, is based on a deeper fear--the fear that the marriage is
being endangered by her problem. Both of the women mentioned above (and
many others I have treated) finally admitted that they had come for
help because of their fear that their marriage was headed for trouble,
that their husbands were close to leaving them. The fact is, though,
that many men seem to have a very high tolerance for this problem in
their wives. I have yet to find any man who has broken up his marriage
for that reason. Indeed both the men I have quoted above had reassured
me that they could and would go on taking their frustrations. They just
strongly preferred not to.
No, the danger is not from the husband. Real men rarely leave women
for that reason. The danger is from the woman herself. She it is who,
because of her immaturity, will do the rejecting rather than face her
problem. The real danger is that she will force the man away from her
without even realizing that she has done so.
You begin to see, then, that the chief characteristic of women with
this type of problem is evasiveness, hiding from the facts. It is as
if they feared what they would find out if they faced up to things. I
can only tell them that they are not going to find out a thing that is
really frightening, not a thing that they cannot handle.
And I should like to put the mind of all such women to rest on one
particular point I cannot count the number of times that women with
a clitoridal problem have asked me whether I believed that, just
under the surface, they had a homosexual problem or at least strong
homosexual inclinations. The answer is invariably no.
Let me give you an example of one such typical case. Not long ago a
young nurse came to see me. She was extremely upset and wept copiously
before she could bring herself to tell me her problem. She had been
married for about a year and had found that she could not have an
orgasm during intercourse. It was necessary for her husband to
manipulate her clitoris for a rather extended period of time before
she could come to a climax. After she told me this she remained silent
for a long time. Then she burst out with it. “Doctor, I think I’m
homosexual.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Well, I had this dream, and I was hugging the head nurse in the
hospital and I felt very warm and good inside.”
“Any other damning evidence?” I asked.
Now she really blushed. She hung her head, and one could hardly keep
from going over and patting her head and saying there, there. “Yes,”
she said. “When I was twelve. With this other girl. We used to, used
to … ” Words failed her.
“Play with each other sexually?” I asked as gently as possible.
She looked at me, wide-eyed and said, “Yes,” nodding tragically.
She had had no repetition of the experience since she had really grown
up, and I was able to set her mind completely at rest on that matter.
She was not at all homosexual. That symptom is a very severe one, of
course, and not always amenable to treatment. It always implies that
the woman prefers women to men; she falls in love with objects of the
same sex. She has no conscious interest in men sexually.
Our little nurse’s “homosexual” dream simply meant that she was having
a disturbing time with her husband sexually and wanted a “mother image”
to protect her from her difficulties, help her through them. She got
one in me, of course, and her need for such a mother was probably why
she selected a woman psychiatrist in the first place.
Her early sexual play with another little girl is perfectly normal. Not
all children indulge in this kind of play, but many do, and unless it
continues into adolescence it is generally harmless.
The reasons behind this delusion of homosexuality are complex. They
lie in an early confusion of the clitoris with the male penis, as I
will illustrate later. But you may be certain of one thing--you are
not going to discover that your problem is based on homosexuality as
it appears in the difficulty called “lesbianism.” To hold onto such
mistaken conceptions is to frighten oneself with self-told ghost
stories after the fashion of young children.
I wish here to cover just one more attribute of the woman whose sexual
feelings have become fixed on her clitoris, one which, if she is
forewarned, she will and should be suspicious of. It is the tendency to
look for solutions for her problem in directions where no solutions lie.
I have treated women who have tried everything under the sun in their
search for an easy resolution of their clitoridal problem--drugs,
surgery, even yoga. One of the most widely used evasions can be found
(and how often it is!) in the many popular manuals written, ostensibly,
to tell one how to achieve a happy marriage. Such books, for the most
part published in all good faith, almost invariably counsel married
partners to diversify their sexual positions during intercourse. Many
of these books contain illustrations to drive their lesson home.
There is nothing wrong with this advice in and of itself. Anybody
with a modicum of experience knows that variety is one of the finest
spices of love. The books generally, if not always, neglect to say,
however, that such variety is only relevant to a sex life in which the
partners have no deep-seated sexual problem to start with. By omitting
that piece of information these books give the strong tacit impression
that variety of sexual position will solve an already well-established
sexual difficulty.
The desperate woman will seize upon these implications as upon a
panacea for her ills. I must state here that all of the innumerable
positions of love described in the Hindu Kamasutra (from which so
many of our marriage manuals, incidentally, derive much of their
information) will not undo a clitoral fixation. A woman is asking for
just one more emotional defeat if she insists that a solution lies in
this direction.
* * * * *
We have now seen the three things that make frigidity possible in
women. I will repeat them briefly so that you’ll remember them later.
The first is the fact that the female orgasm is not a biological
necessity in woman as it is in man. The race can and does go on if
women fail to have full sexual satisfaction. This strongly suggests why
the female orgasm is so susceptible to psychological influences of an
adverse kind.
The second is the fact that motherhood calls for tremendous
psychological and sometimes physical sacrifices; it means that a
woman has to reverse the natural law of self-preservation and put her
children’s welfare ahead of her own. This is deeply frightening to
some women and, unless they are properly educated, can cause them to
fear their feminine sexual impulses to the point where they are unable
to enjoy love-making.
The third reason is that women have, in effect, two organs of
gratification, the clitoris and the vagina. Clitoral orgasm is
immature, evades true feminine sexuality, and is considered a form
of frigidity. However, millions of women find this earlier method of
gratification so satisfying that they are not motivated to move up to
the mature level.
Chapter 8
THE GROWTH OF LOVE
In medical school one of our courses included the study of the
psychological stages of development man goes through from infancy to
maturity. It also included the various pitfalls people encounter during
these stages, the biological and psychological experiences that can
prevent them from reaching psychological maturity.
During one class in which we reviewed the psychological hazards
of adolescence a very intelligent student raised his hand and was
recognized by the professor. “How does anybody _ever_ really grow up?”
this student asked.
The class laughed, of course. But the professor, after the laughter
had died down, took the question quite seriously and complimented the
student for his acuity. He then proceeded to address us for a half
hour on the indomitable and surging drive of the human body and mind
toward health and pleasure, a drive that will often overcome seemingly
insurmountable obstacles, that will pause for a while at times,
apparently defeated, only to revive its original energy and resume its
move toward the goal of health and maturity.
We see this drive daily in people who come for psychiatric help, and
we know that it is the single most important element in psychological
healing. As soon as the difficulty which was holding the person back
has been resolved, his whole mind and body tend once again to resume
its move toward health and happiness. It is well to keep this factor in
mind as we explore here the stages of development women go through on
their way to grown-uphood.
We have seen the grown-up, truly feminine woman in operation. You
will remember that she is a delighted and delightful partner in that
closest and most perfect expression of love, the sexual act. You will
recall that a great part of her personality is organized around her
maternal instinct and that the chief characteristic of that instinct is
a pleasure in giving, an unappeasable altruism that always puts husband
and child before self, even to the point of risking her own life and
welfare. Her central activities revolve around her nest building and
child rearing. Her personality is characterized by a deep intuitiveness
about others. She is inward and passive, her energies devoted to that
deepest of all needs, the procreation of the race of man through her
own body. Her husband, by contrast, is aggressive, occupied basically
with his struggles in the outside world. Her stage, the focus of her
central interest, is the home and its preservation and its happiness.
How did she get this way? Or, in the case of women who fail to achieve
a truly feminine personality, what actually happens, how do they get
_that_ way?
To be able to answer these questions, one must first understand the
stages of development that women, all women, go through in the process
of growing up. These phases of development have been under the closest
scientific scrutiny for several decades. The realization of their
importance for psychological health and illness has been one of the
major achievements of modern psychiatry. They have been thoroughly
explored, and if we do not yet know all there is to know about the
subject, we still know a great deal.
The material I am about to go into is fact, scientific fact, not
opinion. If the information here seems new or strange or even
irritating to you, do not be surprised or upset. It is new and strange
to most people and at first it may not seem applicable to you. But if
you will stay with it, use it to understand the case histories which I
will discuss afterward, you will gradually see why understanding these
phases is so necessary and helpful to the individual who has not yet
been able to achieve her full femininity. As you have been told many
times, all psychological problems are rooted in infancy, childhood,
or in adolescence. To uproot these problems, we must return to those
stages of development with new tools, new ideas, a new master plan.
There are two over-all stages of biological and psychological
development that every individual must go through. The first stage
lasts from birth to about ten years of age. In turn this stage is
divided into two phases; the first, the phase we call infancy, lasts
roughly for the first five years of life. The second phase we call the
latency period and occupies the second five years of life.
The first five years of growth, the infantile period, is of enormous
importance for later development. In this phase the whole personality
takes the shape and develops the characteristics that will distinguish
it from that time on.
At this point I have to note a certain scientific fact that may
surprise or disconcert you. I ask you to withhold any prejudices of a
personal or moral kind you may have about this fact, for they will only
obscure the entire issue and make it difficult for you to understand
one of the most important contributions science has made to the
understanding of the human mind.
The decisive fact, then, about the infantile period is that the little
creature is very heavily endowed with strong sexual feelings. The
students of this subject are in absolute agreement on this point. There
is no longer the slightest inkling of a doubt about it. All scientific
methods of checking the fact have been employed. These range from
direct observation of children to the recovery of childhood memories
through hypnosis or while subjects have been under the influence of
hypnotic drugs, direct reports from children, and several other sources.
This sexual drive is centered on the genitals from the outset, and it
can be seen very clearly in children who masturbate. Such masturbation
is a perfectly normal activity in boys and girls during this entire
period.
The important point about this masturbation is the fact that the little
girl masturbates by the manipulation of her clitoris. She has no
awareness of her vagina as a sensual area.
The sexual feelings of infancy increase in intensity after the second
or third year. Now masturbation may increase. In a very real sense the
strong sensual feelings experienced at this age set the mold for the
later sexual development of the child.
For the first three years the little girl is deeply and primarily
attached to her mother. In the sense that infants “realize” things, the
little girl knows that her mother is the source of all her security.
These feelings have a very clear sensual nature. The little girl loves
to be close to the mother, to be stroked by her, to have her mother
clean her genitalia, etc. She associates her masturbation with the
pleasant sensations she receives, psychologically and physically, from
her mother.
Around three years of age the little girl becomes aware of her
growing attachment to her father. His tenderness toward her and his
play with her stimulate her whole being, and her sensuality becomes
increasingly attached to him. At first she is not aware of the conflict
in this attachment, but as her little mind becomes a bit more aware
of reality she senses, however vaguely and incompletely, the fact
that her increasingly sensual response to her father has put her into
competition with her mother; another woman has a prior claim on her
first man! At this point she begins to develop hostile feelings toward
her mother.
The whole thing seems too fantastic! A little child competing with her
mother for her father’s love? Impossible!
But let me give you a very clear example of a typical dream my women
patients have. This is the dream of a frigid woman who had had several
consultations with me and in one of them, the day before the dream,
suddenly remembered that at the age of five she had been absolutely
convinced that her father would marry her when she grew up. She had
buried that memory in her mind, only to resurrect it in therapy.
Her dream, then, was that she was lying in a crib. A tall thin
man with glasses and a thin mustache was lying on a bed nearby. A
stout, florid-faced woman lay next to him. Suddenly this woman had a
convulsive seizure and, after a few moments of writhing, became still.
The man then looked at her and smiled as if pleased. “She’s dead,”
he said. Then he rose from the bed, went to the crib, and picked
my patient up. “We will have four,” he said to her, and she felt
immeasurably excited and pleased.
My patient woke in a great state of anxiety. In our session she told
me that her father had been tall, thin, and sometimes wore glasses to
read in bed. And her mother was stout and very high-colored. My patient
then suddenly recalled that in the childhood fantasy of marriage to her
father she had decided that she would have four children with him. Her
logic was this: her mother had had three children; she would go her
mother one better!
I cannot tell you how often we psychiatrists get, directly from our
patients, information as clearly confirmatory as this of the existence
of an early triangle between mother, father, and child. It causes a
conflict in the child, of course, and this early conflict in the little
girl takes place in a very subtle manner, so subtle, indeed, that its
very existence escaped the conscious notice of mankind from the dawn
of history until the end of the nineteenth century. Just before the
turn of the twentieth century Sigmund Freud, then an obscure Viennese
psychiatrist, while using hypnosis on patients suffering from powerful
feelings of repressed guilt, noted that these feelings were always
connected with very early sexual conflicts. He was astonished to
discover that these sexual conflicts dated back to early childhood,
and in case after case he was able to demonstrate not only that
children possessed strong sensual feelings but that these feelings
became attached first to the mother and then to the father, causing a
conflict in the childish mind which had to be resolved. He called this
the Oedipal situation. If it was not resolved, the child developed
irrational feelings of guilt which could and did impede normal sexual
and psychological growth.
I described this early source of conflict to a woman patient of mine
recently in much the same way that I have described it here. After
pondering for a moment she asked a question that goes to the heart of
the matter. “If this early situation causes a conflict in the child
which can lead to a neurosis later, why did nature design things that
way? I thought nature set things up to foster growth, not to hinder it.”
The observation and question were fine ones and raised points that
are generally ignored. Nature _did_ design this early sexual conflict
for a very special reason. She did it to foster the growth of the
little girl, to push her on to the next step in the development of her
femininity, to move her a little farther along the path to her ultimate
role of wife and mother.
Let me explain this a bit further. For the first few years, by the very
nature of family life, as we have seen, all the little girl’s feelings
are focused on her mother. She is the center, the fountain of life
itself; the little one looks to her for food, security on all levels,
and “love.” This love soon becomes tinged with a very strong erotic
feeling connected with the little one’s growing sensuality, which, as
we have seen, is centered on her clitoris.
Now, it is necessary for humans to love and to have erotic feelings
centered on others. But clearly, if this early love situation did not
change at some point, the little girl would grow up to have women as
her erotic centers of interest. Nature intends no such end result.
She intends these erotic feelings to become ultimately very much
man-centered. Thus she makes the role of the father in the child’s
development all-important. He becomes the first bridge from the
infantile erotic and dependent relationship with the mother to mature
relationships with members of the opposite sex. There are, of course,
several other bridges that the growing girl will have to traverse on
her journey to maturity, but this first one is of central importance.
Ultimately, of course, she will have to give up her father, too, as the
center of erotic interest, but he will remain in her unconscious life
as the model of all that she wants from the male in her life.
We see, then, at the end of this early phase of development the first
big step in the preparation of the little girl for her ultimate destiny
as wife and mother. But since we know that she is nowhere near ready
for such functions we might wonder how nature ends this early period
and enters the second important period of growth.
The end of the first stage and the beginning of the second (which,
you will recall, will last to about ten years of age) begins with a
remarkable psychological event: the early infantile sexuality goes
completely underground. The little girl “forgets” that she ever went
through such sensual experiences, that there was anything the least bit
erotic in her former attachments. Her masturbation stops, under normal
circumstances, and she enters into approximately a five-year period of
total non-sexuality.
However, you must understand that when I use the word “forget” I do
not mean it literally. In psychiatry we use the word “repression” to
describe this kind of forgetting. It means the ability of the human
mind to push anything it does not wish to recall out of awareness, into
a part of the mind called the unconscious. When we repress something,
a memory or experience, we do not remember that it ever happened with
our conscious mind. However, it remains quite intact in our unconscious
mind and can and does exert an influence upon us that we are not aware
of. Too, it can be revived in the conscious mind by later experiences,
or, even if it does not revive, later experiences can be very much
influenced by the “forgotten” memory.
The new stage into which the young girl now enters is called the
“latency period,” because the sexual feelings of the earlier period
have become repressed, or latent.
The latency period is chiefly characterized by an attempt on the
part of the little girl to understand and master her environment.
It is marked by a tremendous growth physically and mentally. She is
interested in everything, in everything that gives her a chance to
advance herself physically: rope-jumping, doll-playing, ball-playing,
swimming, climbing, running; there is sometimes very little that she
does, feels, or thinks in this period that distinguishes her in any
very important manner from a little boy of the same age. She may be a
bit more obedient, a bit better about doing her homework than a boy,
but not dramatically so.
We may ask, then, what nature’s intention in bringing on this latency
period might be? Let me put it this way. Nature, plainly and simply,
wishes to give the child a chance to grow a little mentally, to
learn to master her body and mind, to integrate the earlier phase of
development, to learn to form personal relationships so that when
she comes to the next great step in development, the phase marked by
menstruation and female maturation, she will be ready. Think what would
happen if the little girl were plunged from the stresses and strains of
infantile sexuality directly into full sexual readiness. Her body might
be ready, but psychologically she would have no understanding of her
environment, no idea of personal relationships, no sense of her self
or of her abilities. She would have, as the actress Elizabeth Taylor
noted of herself and her reaction to a too-early plunge into grown-up
experiences, “a child’s mind in a woman’s body.” Nature _intends_ no
such dilemma for women. She has a step-by-step plan which leads the
woman, if parents co-operate, safely to the haven of physical _and_
psychological maturity.
The latency period is also marked by a very close relationship to
the parents, particularly to the father. However, there are now no
conscious sexual feelings attached to him. She admires and values her
father above all other things and wants his admiration and very high
regard too. Most fathers instinctively give their little daughters a
great deal of love and reassurance during this phase, and the child
basks in it as a flower in the sun. She strives to do the things
that will please him, make him notice her, make him love her. His
responses are studied assiduously, and it is in this way that she
receives her first real experience with the all-important feminine need
to “please her man.” The feelings of joy she gets from his pleasure
in her accomplishments, physical and mental, are the precursors of
the rewards she will later prize so highly when bestowed on her by a
loving husband. As you might suspect, this period is very important
to her development into full womanhood with its varied psychological
give-and-take. If the father seriously fails in his role during this
period he can do irreparable harm to the growing girl.
The mother’s role, of course, continues to be important too. The little
girl has repressed her guilt feelings toward her mother, along with all
of her directly sensual feelings, and during the latency period Mother
emerges as a model to imitate. In effect the little girl says something
like this to herself: “She, after all, got the man I prize most highly
in the whole world. Therefore, she must have something very desirable.
Therefore, I’ll imitate it.” She proceeds to do just that.
Of course I do not mean that this is _all_ there is to her feelings
about her mother; she loves her mother deeply and abidingly and without
her would feel, and indeed would be bereft. Her imitation of her mother
is a tribute to those feelings too. However, I may remind you that I am
selecting those aspects of the child’s relationships that bear directly
on her later sexual maturity.
The next stage of development starts approximately at the age of ten
and ends with the complete maturation, psychological and biological,
of the individual woman. It is often divided into two phases; the
first phase, which lasts until thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen, we call
puberty; the second, by that much-misunderstood word “adolescence.”
Puberty is ushered in by great glandular changes in the child. The
young body begins to take on the semblance of womanhood. Breasts
begin to grow; pubic hair starts. Gradually the uterus, or womb,
stirs, begins to expand, readies itself to hold the child which will
ultimately grow there. In the midst of this preparatory growth
menstruation, the cyclical ebb and flow of fecund woman, starts in
earnest. In a few months the child stands just within the portal of
physical maturity.
The little girl now again (for the first time since infancy) begins
to experience rather strong sexual feelings, and she reacts to them
with some anxiety. She may start once more to masturbate clitorally,
although this time the act is accompanied by guilt feelings and with
apprehension. As I have pointed out, these feelings of apprehension can
be thought of as fully justified. Her sexuality is going to lead to
motherhood, and this in turn means that she is going to have to face
the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, the biological need of putting
her child’s welfare ahead of her own. In effect, as we have seen, she
is going to suspend the law of self-preservation as it applies to her
own person.
The little girl knows this; she knows it with her body and mind, for
even the most prudishly reared child cannot be prevented from finding
out the facts of life. If her parents have not told her she will soon
find out all there is to know from her girl friends.
I have said that the new changes in her cause her apprehension. They
also cause her feelings of joy, excitement, and intense curiosity.
Throughout her entire puberty she will run between these two states of
mind, anxiety on the one hand and feelings of pleasure on the other. At
times she will look back in envy at the blissful latency period when
she was not bothered by these powerful indications of her biological
destiny, which lies immediately ahead. She will hate her developing
breasts, her menstrual period, the hair growing under her arms and
around her genitalia. At other moments she will be rapturous about
these very same changes.
At this point she withdraws from her parents to a large extent.
Nature, as we saw in the latency period, must not only prepare her
biologically for womanhood but must ready her psychologically too. If
the little girl were to maintain the total dependency on her parents
that she has had up to this point in her growth, she would not be able
to develop the fullness of personality, the strength and individuality
necessary for successful wifehood and motherhood.
But she is not a woman yet by any means. Do not get that impression,
for there are vital steps ahead which she must take first. The attempt
some girls make to embrace true sexuality and feminine functioning
around the age of fourteen or fifteen is generally disastrous. In
normal development she will flutter between strong feelings of
dependency on her parents and rebellion against them, or rather
rebellion against her intense desire to be a little girl with them
again. The success of this phase of her growth is marked by achieving
the feeling that she has the “potentiality,” _not_ the actuality, of
freedom from her parents.
At some point during this period she will become dramatically attached
to a girl friend. This fact is so unalterable in normal development
that the whole period of puberty is often referred to as “the chum
stage” of development. She uses this friend to buttress her feelings of
separateness, of independence from the parents. The two share secrets
together constantly, pool their information on all matters pertaining
to sex, boys, women, childbirth. The friendship is a liberal education
for both and should be encouraged for the most part. The girl friend
is sometimes older by a year or two or three, and the younger one’s
worship of her is clearly a substitute for her feelings toward her own
mother. If the older girl is not too precocious sexually, nothing but
good can come from this relationship.
Very gradually puberty merges into adolescence. This is the last stage
before maturity. I call this whole period the “daydream stage.” It
is a period of almost literal waking dreams on the part of the young
lady. She is still held lightly by the long preparatory sleep of
childhood and early youth, but she is ready to wake. Her head is filled
with tremendous plans for herself. These plans usually have a highly
maternal and altruistic character about them; she will become a great
doctor and serve suffering humanity in darkest Africa, or she will
become a lawyer and defend the poor free of charge, or she will become
a nurse and, under fire that would daunt a lesser creature, she will
tend the wounded among our boys at the front. She has scores of great
loves with boys or men whom she considers wonderful--all in her head.
The satisfaction of her now nearly mature maternal and sexual impulses
through such dreams is clear. But they serve another function which is
perhaps a bit more obscure. She is not quite ready for real love yet.
She has still half a foot in childhood, is still reluctant to give
herself wholly to the realities of grown-uphood. She needs to hang upon
the tree, so to speak, for a few more years, to ripen a bit. The great
roles she plays in her daydreams are, in most cases, not achievable.
They allow her, by the very impossibility of their fruition, to have
her cake and eat it too.
Yes, the dream of young love is a long and lovely one, and it readies
the dreamer for real love. Woman will always be a romantic dreamer,
a weaver of inner reveries, of tapestries of thought that give her
whole personality its richness and flavor. In love, as in life, man is
a doer, an aggressive achiever. Woman is the passive one; she is the
dreamer who values the man’s achievements, who creates the need for his
achievement and gives color and glory to it through her appreciation of
it. The dreams of adolescence ready her for this role with her man.
Adolescence is a gradual preparation for true sexuality and love. In it
the young girl conquers her impulse to masturbate, though in certain
rather “free” communities there may be a great deal of petting with
the opposite sex. If the girl’s development is normal and she puts the
normally high value on herself that is characteristic of this period,
she will not have sexual intercourse until she actually falls in love
seriously. Also, nature gives her an almost unerring instinct for the
“right” man, one who will cherish her and their children.
It is important to know that it is the man who ultimately wakens the
sleeping beauty sexually. Until she is ready for intercourse and all
that it implies in the way of a relationship, she is conscious of no
particularly urgent vaginal sensations of a sexual nature. The man
awakens these for the first time in the act of love.
With her first intercourse, she finds a whole continent of sensations
whose existence she had only heard about second-hand. While her
clitoral sensations may still be quite pleasurable in the period of
foreplay, her whole body now, in excitement, soon learns to yearn for
the penetration of her lover’s penis, the unspeakable delight of the
now vaginally centered sensations he can give her. She has little or no
block to these sensations; there may be a period of adjustment for a
few weeks or months until they become totally unfettered from childhood
inhibitions and fears, but the months will be short. Now true orgasm
is hers at virtually every sexual encounter with her husband, and in
mutual delight their relationship will prosper and deepen.
Chapter 9
DANGERS ON THE ROAD TO WOMANHOOD
Now we have seen the stages the normal woman goes through on her way
to true sexual and psychological maturity, the step-by-step process of
her growth. But we must, of course, ask what might happen to impede
this growth, what pitfalls lie along the way into which she may stumble
(or be pushed), causing her to develop symptoms of frigidity and the
personality difficulties that always accompany this frigidity.
I should like to list these pitfalls in the same manner that I showed
the normal and unimpeded growth of a woman: by taking the stages of
development in the order of their appearance. If you are able to see
the specific dangers along the path to grown-uphood, you may avoid
repeating them with your own child and may learn much about the origins
of your own problem, particularly as I show their application in the
specific case histories that follow this chapter.
In the first or infantile stage of development the greatest danger to
the child comes from ignorance on the part of the parents. In the past,
parents did not know that the newborn babe has sensual feelings that
become quite specific by the time he or she is three years of age and
continue that way until he is about six. I am afraid many parents still
do not know this fact, either have not heard of it or do not believe it
is true.
Such a lack of knowledge is often accompanied by a moral horror of
masturbation or, at the very least, of strong feelings of moral
disapproval. This often leads the parent, especially the mother, to
restrain the child from such sensual activity. Many parents slap the
infant’s hands, some systematically remove the child’s hands when they
see her playing with herself. Others, when the child learns to speak,
will reprove her for her activities, often spank her if the activity
persists.
Such an attitude could not be more mistaken and can have a disastrous
effect on the child. The infant is tremendously responsive to
even the subtlest disapproval on the part of the parents. In this
all-important area she will react violently to punishment and even
to verbal warnings. Often she will not only attempt to prevent her
own masturbatory activity but will try to repress the whole of her
sexual nature in an effort to keep her mother’s love. She may be quite
successful in doing this, kill all her natural impulses in the bud.
First experiences, as we know, are of great importance in development,
and this early inhibition of her sexual nature can, and often does,
lay the groundwork for sexual frigidity and a generally inhibited and
circumscribed personality.
Another danger in this period can come from an exorbitant amount of
overt love from the father. This is very difficult for certain men to
understand fully. They argue, and quite cogently, that the young need
a great deal of love, demonstrative love. That is indeed so, but it
must also be remembered that children at this age are extremely erotic.
They can be overstimulated sensually if the father does not bestow his
loving caresses in judicious amounts, and the result can be a strong
fixation of erotic feelings on the father, with a consequent overload
of guilt feelings. These guilt feelings can lead to total frigidity
in later life, and indeed may be the leading cause of this symptom,
as we shall presently see. I am not saying that a father should not
caress and dandle his little daughter; that would be against nature. He
should, however, dole out his physical expressions of love in amounts
that are not too stimulating to the child.
Another pitfall the child can encounter at this stage is quite the
opposite in nature. It is, luckily, met with infrequently, but it does
happen and it can have an important effect on the child’s development.
I am speaking of seduction by an older child or an adult. It is not
unknown for nursemaids or even older brothers and sisters to stroke
the young child’s genitals. German and Austrian maids used to do it as
a matter of course, stroking the little boy’s testicles and penis or
the little girl’s vulva to put the child to sleep. However, this is
absolutely harmful to the child, causing an overexcitation that can
have a permanent effect on her sexuality. Masturbation is normal for
this age, and in this form of narcissistic sexual activity the child
is able to control the amount of sexual excitation she receives. Under
normal circumstances she will not exceed this amount. However, stimuli
from the outside are _not_ self-regulating, and the child’s ego is not
sufficiently mature to handle this overexcitation.
The result of a seduction on the child at this age can be disastrous.
It can lead to any of the major forms or degrees of frigidity. In my
experience, however, it most frequently seems to lead to the form known
as “psychic frigidity.”
I might add that the same general effect can be caused by certain
local irritations of the little girl’s genitalia. These can be easily
recognized. The itching and soreness of such irritations may cause the
child to scratch or stroke her genitals excessively, and this too may
occasion an overexcitation which the little ego is not yet ready to
handle. Or it may cause the child to associate pleasurable sensations
with painful sensations, and this association can cause difficulties
of a psychological nature later. Only real ignorance on the part of
the parent could allow such easily remedied conditions to persist to
the point where they might do harm to the child. On the other hand, I
do not wish to alarm parents unnecessarily or to cause any mother to
become obsessively concerned about the frequent irritations children
may get in the genital area. To cause any real harm to the child
psychologically, such irritations must be chronic and unattended to for
a long period. The usual short-term irritation has no known permanent
effect on the child’s development psychologically.
The last major danger of this early period which I shall mention stems
from any deep-seated emotional problem of the mother. If because of
problems created in _her_ childhood the mother either neglects or
overprotects the child to a great extent or over a long period of time,
there can be serious harm done to the development of the little one.
Overprotection can destroy the self-reliance of the child, keep her
from passing into the rewarding and growth-provoking relationship with
her father which moves her into the next natural step in development.
Neglect, on the other hand, can thrust her into too close an
association with the father and have equally dire results.
Failure of the relationship with her father is the chief danger the
little girl faces during her latency period, which, as you may recall,
she encounters from six to ten years of age. She has transferred many
of the feelings of love and dependency, which a few years before she
had felt for her mother, to this new idol. Forever after he will be the
model male in her life, though she will seek her ideal in other men.
For the present she worships him, and his approval means more to her
than anything else in the world.
If the father is a disapproving and critical man and directs such
attitudes toward his daughter, she may develop strong feelings of
inferiority. These can lead her to feel that men are virtually
impossible to please, and she can thus become fearful of them, feeling
that if a man finds out her true nature he will disapprove of it. No
reality or later acceptance by a man will overcome this irrational
conviction unless, when she is grown, a woman with such a self-attitude
examines herself deeply and eradicates this mistaken conception of the
male. Her feelings of inferiority extend to her sexual drive, which she
is apt to repress, as if it were discreditable, like the rest of her
personality.
Some fathers, of course, have a closer identification with their sons
than with their daughters. Men who are not aware of this tendency can
wreak great havoc with a daughter’s personality at this stage of her
growth. Since she adores her father and wishes to become what he will
admire, she will quickly detect her father’s preference for the male.
This often causes her to attempt to cultivate male characteristics and
male pursuits and to depreciate totally all those typically feminine
goals which one day she must achieve if she is to be a true woman.
The latency period, as we saw, is a non-sexual time for both boys
and girls. Aside from their anatomical structure, there is little
difference between boys and girls at this juncture: their glands
function in roughly the same way; none of the typical characteristics
which will differentiate them later have yet appeared. They are both
interested in mastering the world about them and the world inside
them; they are both roughly equal as far as their innate store of
aggressiveness is concerned. Indeed, many scientists call this whole
period the bisexual period of development.
For these reasons a father who implants male goals into his daughter’s
psyche at this point finds a ready audience. Psychoanalysis shows us
that the little girl very often can develop fantasies of an extremely
odd kind at this juncture. In some children, for example, the idea that
they can somehow magically grow a penis and turn into a boy is too
often quite conscious. But even if such ideas do not become conscious,
the yearning of the little girl to become a boy to win her father’s
esteem can remain as part of the total equipment of her unconscious
mind. Later, although hidden and disguised, this wish can be at the
root of much of her sexual problems with men, causing her to be
neurotically competitive with them and to reject her own female role as
unworthy.
We saw that the girl in puberty and in adolescence had a formidable
task to achieve. She must learn to accept and to love the “dangerous”
role of the woman--she must, in effect, be willing to reverse the
natural law of self-preservation and put childbirth and the welfare of
the child ahead of her own needs and safety.
If she is not encouraged to believe that the feminine role is a worthy
one, if she is taught that the male role is superior, then she will be
highly motivated to reject her femininity and, almost literally, try to
be a boy. It is frequently exactly this that occurs when a woman’s fear
and rejection of femininity result in an inability to respond vaginally
in sexual intercourse. In a curious and of course unconscious manner
she may hold onto the sensual responses of her clitoris as if she had
a small penis, but feel unable to allow the sensual feelings to be
experienced within the vagina.
The young girl may be influenced to reject her feminine role by the
mother as well as by the father. If the mother herself has a strong
resentment of her own femininity and, like so many women, has been
reared to feel that the role of wife and mother is a degraded and
worthless one, she can pass this attitude on to her daughter without
speaking a word. The child sees it in her mother’s reactions to her
father in everyday life, hears it in her complaints, and sometimes
feels it in the resigned and hopeless attitude with which she may face
her life.
When I emphasize this early “masculine” direction which a little girl’s
values may be given, I do not wish to confuse the reader. There is
a “tomboy” stage through which many girls pass. This is a perfectly
natural phase in her development and has nothing to do with the problem
unless the child holds onto her tomboyism until well after twelve
years of age. This natural emulation of little boys is really quite a
feminine gesture on the little girl’s part--she is trying to learn more
about what that wonderful opposite sex does and thinks and feels. In
this way she enters into her first friendly relationships with males
other than her father.
Remember that we called puberty “the chum stage.” The young girl takes
to herself a bosom companion of the same sex with whom she shares
her “secrets.” One of the chief dangers to arise during this part of
the growing-up process comes from this relationship, which is, of
course, a normal one under optimum circumstances. However, if the chum
selected turns out to be precocious as far as sexual experiment with
the opposite sex is concerned, the friendship can lead to harmful
experiences for the more innocent member of the duo.
A girl entering puberty is often attracted to a girl a year or two
older than she is and will idealize this new friend, feeling that any
action she performs is entirely fine and defensible. Neither of these
children is, of course, ready for any truly heterosexual experience,
but the younger one may imitate the older one and attempt to follow
through in a sexual relationship with a boy or older man. Without
mentioning the possible disaster of pregnancy at this early juncture, I
should like to emphasize that sexual intercourse at this age, without
the preparatory stage of adolescence having intervened, can cause a
permanent aversion for the experience. It can produce a trauma of such
severity that the young person may withdraw from the opposite sex
entirely and remain withdrawn. Or it may encourage her to believe that
she has attained her majority and cause her to act out this joyless and
premature experience over and over with many different members of the
opposite sex.
The simple fact is that a girl is not ready for love-making until
she falls in love with a specific individual. For this to happen in
a meaningful manner, she must first pass through the daydream stage
of adolescence. Boys do not go through this phase and, indeed, do not
have to. They are ready for intercourse at a much younger age than
girls are. Girls have much to risk in love, even if we confine our
observations to the purely biological aspects of the experience of
sexual intercourse. Psychologically they must, so to speak, be sure
that it is indeed Prince Charming who leans over them. Until it is,
they must dream and sleep, for if it is a rude stranger he can shatter
the dream forever, thus rob the young girl of any chance of ever
bringing her dream to fulfillment in reality.
Another danger of both puberty and adolescence is that the parents
will be overly strict, interpreting the move of the young one toward
independence as a danger to her. I have seen many cases of young girls
who might have stayed within the home until their adolescence was
safely over had it not been for the rather prurient and thick-skinned
assumption of a mother or father, or both, that their early dating must
inevitably be immoral. This assumption on the part of a parent can
activate a very hostile reaction on the part of a young girl. It is as
if the parent were saying to her, “You will never be independent of us,
never have a life of your own. Why don’t you give up trying?” The fact
that the parents do not intend their watchfulness to imply this at
all is not relevant. That’s the way the young one too often interprets
it, and in a gesture of defiance she may do something that will really
injure her.
Equally seriously affected, if not more so, is the young girl who
_feels_ extremely rebellious but who submits to overzealous parental
authority out of fear. I have seen several girls with this problem.
What generally happens is that they have pulled back, because of
undue parental influences, from indulging the personality-enrichening
dreams of adolescence. This causes them to remain on the threshold of
womanhood, lost in an emotional dependency which belongs to an earlier
phase of development. By and large, the problems of such girls when
they come to womanhood tend to be more severe than those of the girls
who rebelled.
In making these observations on parental strictness I am in no way
advocating a laissez-faire attitude. Every young girl needs to feel
the force of the parents’ moral feelings; they give her guidance and a
feeling of security. She will, however, generally react more normally
and healthfully if the moral attitudes are expressed and interpreted
rather than laid down as ukases.
* * * * *
We have now seen the stages of development that lead to maturity in
woman and the pitfalls she may encounter on the way. With this final
information in hand we are at last ready to look at frigidity itself.
The next section, therefore, will treat of the frigid woman herself,
and I will show you, with specific cases, how the kinds and degrees
of frigidity develop and what concrete problems they bring in their
train. With such models in mind we will then be prepared to examine the
constructive steps which individuals who suffer from this problem must
take to win their freedom, to cross the bridge to womanhood.
SECTION III
_The Fear of Love — Case Histories_
_Chapter 10_
TOTAL AND PARTIAL FRIGIDITY
Although we have discussed the various types of frigidity in a former
chapter, I think it will be helpful now to go into the matter in
greater detail. I am going to illustrate the major types of frigidity
with case histories. In this way you can get a living picture of each
problem.
I think the case method of presentation is particularly helpful to a
full grasp of frigidity. Those who are caught up in the problem usually
lose their objectivity about themselves, are unable to see with any
real clarity just how their actions and reactions are neurotic and just
how they are affecting those about them. The true story of another
woman who has suffered from the same affliction mirrors the problem
faithfully, allows one to achieve a clear view of herself, perhaps for
the first time. For the fact is that each kind of frigidity has its own
very distinctive characteristics and its own unique causes.
But as you read these cases I think you will be struck by the very
special differences in each kind of frigidity, which will allow you
to see your own image--to diagnose yourself, so to speak. You will
see, too, that there are certain characteristics common to all the
frigidities. Knowledge of both these facts, as you will discover, is
important to the cure of the frigid woman.
In giving these stories I cannot, of course, include examples of all
the pitfalls that are encountered from childhood to adulthood. That
would require much more space than I have here. I will attempt, rather,
to select cases of frigidity caused by experiences most common to our
society.
The first case, then, is one of total frigidity. This kind, as you may
recall from our earlier description of it, is one of the most severe
forms of sexual disorder in women and is widely prevalent. Without
further ado I give you the case of a woman we shall call Patricia Agnew.
* * * * *
When Patricia Agnew came to my office for her first interview, she had
not come, consciously, to consult me for a frigidity problem or to
discuss the results of such a problem on her marriage. She came because
she was having, in her words, “another nervous breakdown.”
She was not a very good-looking woman, though she had nice teeth
and large blue eyes. It was her figure that was striking. In direct
contrast to her inner attitude, her figure was round and voluptuous,
almost the American ideal of what is considered “sexy.” Her lips were
full and sensual, but she held them tightly together, which gave her a
censorious, critical, old-maidish look. She was thirty-six years old.
Her “nervous breakdowns” (she persisted in using the expression,
though it was clearly inapplicable in her case), she told me, were
recurrent. She had had them for three successive years. Each of them
had started with a very marked increase in inner tension. She would
feel growingly unable to cope with the manifold social and familial
demands of her life; a great sense of inadequacy would set in gradually
and she would become listless and depressed. Finally the slightest
task would seem too much and she would now start to have day-long bouts
of weeping. During such periods she suffered from chronic insomnia, and
when she was able to snatch a few hours of sleep she would often have
repetitive, nightmarish dreams in which she was pursued by criminals.
At the beginning of our talks Patricia would become extremely guarded
whenever I attempted to open any discussion of a personal nature. She
had come for help with the express conviction that I, the doctor,
should find a quick and easy solution to her periods of acute anxiety:
drugs, a sea voyage, anything that did not entail looking inward,
taking responsibility for her condition. This evasiveness, this desire
to find easy solutions, is characteristic of all forms of frigidity
in women, but it is sometimes extremely pronounced in the type of
frigidity this patient suffered from.
However, as Patricia developed confidence and trust in me, the real
facts gradually emerged. She had been married for ten years and had
two children, six and eight. Her husband was socially prominent,
financially successful, and (as I saw for myself later, when I had
a few discussions with him) strikingly handsome, a slender, tall,
dark-haired man with a gentle and charming manner.
During her entire marriage this patient had never had, she finally told
me, “one solid hour of happiness.” From the very beginning she had
quarreled with her husband, and the domestic strife, at least on her
part, had become truly bitter after the birth of their first son. She
had felt that her husband was becoming increasingly cruel, selfish,
demanding, and insensitive to her needs. She had believed that he was
trying to impose his will on her in any and all situations and that it
was an absolute necessity to struggle against this domination. “I felt
as if he would shatter my integrity if I didn’t put up a fight,” she
told me. “It was as though he wished to have me as a slave, nothing
less; it was either he or I.”
The quarrels were generally over the most trifling matters, and though
her husband almost invariably tried to make up within a few hours,
she would rebuff him, and consequently bitter feelings would often
endure for a week or more at a time. These battles of will, or power
struggles, would terminate only, it became evident, when she had felt
that he had been sufficiently punished for his transgressions, though
she confessed that by the time she was ready to forgive him she had
often forgotten what the original quarrel had been all about.
She felt, too (still felt and always had), that her husband was
extremely critical of her and that he never really gave her full
approval for anything. She believed that he did not like the way she
dressed, the way she conducted herself socially, or the way she managed
the children. When I asked her just how he expressed his disapproval of
her, to give me an example, she could not think of anything specific
and concluded lamely: “Well, he usually praises me to my face, but I
can tell by his expression that he doesn’t mean it.”
Later, in the areas she had specifically mentioned, I checked with
her husband on his attitudes. He told me that he had felt at the
beginning and still felt that his wife dressed beautifully and that
she was absolutely perfect at any kind of social function. “She has a
really remarkable gift for conversation of any kind with practically
any person,” he said. On the other hand, he had sometimes felt that
she tended to be too permissive with the children and that she worried
about them excessively. However, he had learned early that he could not
help her in this matter and only prayed that the children would have
no adverse effects from her tendency to pamper them. I should like to
report that, as she recovered, Patricia gradually became aware of the
fact that this “critical” attitude she had ascribed to her husband was
almost entirely a product of her personal problem.
Another powerful conviction she possessed was that her husband did not
really love her. She felt that he was mainly interested in exploiting
her, both for his “selfish” sexual needs and to advance his business.
At the beginning of their marriage her husband had entered his father’s
engineering firm and at once had been faced with the necessity of
doing a great deal of entertaining. His wife, he soon found out, was
an excellent hostess and he came to depend on her gracious parties
mightily. His dependency on her collaboration she at once took for
exploitation and even extended that to mean: “He doesn’t love me; he
merely finds me a convenience. Any other presentable woman would suit
him as well.” There was another twist to this irrational conviction,
though it was more hidden and did not emerge until quite late in the
treatment. Her feelings might be expressed in these words: “He didn’t
succeed on his own; I made him what he is, even if I never get the
credit for it.” Imagine, with an underlying feeling of this kind, how
much chance for survival any tender feelings toward her husband might
have.
As the sessions continued and Mrs. Agnew gained more and more
confidence, she began to feel freer about discussing her sexual life.
She at length confessed that she had never experienced any sexual
pleasure in her entire life, neither before nor after her marriage.
At no point, could she recall, had she ever masturbated or attempted
to do so, even in early childhood. Kissing or being stroked gave her
no sensations whatsoever. From the beginning, intercourse had been
distasteful and often painful, though sometimes she took a slight
satisfaction from the obvious pleasure her husband obtained from orgasm.
The actual sexual life of this couple had been at a virtual standstill
for nearly eight years. Intercourse occurred, at most, at three-month
intervals. It was never spontaneous. The husband was required to make
an appointment for a “date” several days before actual intercourse. His
wife would acquiesce to such a tryst only after she had refused him
several times and had accumulated a great deal of guilt for so doing.
From the moment she made the appointment she would become anxious,
and this would increase to the point where she was filled with
actual dread. Often she would be forced to break the appointment and
postpone it. As the time for the intercourse approached she would also
experience feelings of rage, repeat to herself over and over, “Why
_must_ I, why _must_ I?” In preparing for the act itself (putting her
diaphragm in, inserting the jelly), she would linger for as much as an
hour while her husband waited. She often found that her vaginal muscles
contracted to such a degree that the insertion of the diaphragm was
painful and difficult to accomplish.
With her misery increasing momently, she went, after these
preparations, to the marital bed as one might to the executioner. Her
husband’s looks repelled her now; his nakedness seemed disgusting and
offensive. She saw him as “skinny, white, and ugly, with an enormous
penis. It was as if he were nothing but a big disgusting sexual organ.”
It goes without saying that she could feel no tenderness or warmth--she
could not even simulate it. She remained totally passive throughout
the entire act, which her husband, in response to her rejection (as
she later, in happier times, learned), hurried through as quickly as
possible. It is interesting to note that, despite her own inability to
respond, one of her bitterest complaints about her husband was that
his love-making was mechanical, hasty, and that he never showed any
tenderness.
It had never occurred to her, of course, that he might be reacting
to her clear aversion to the whole process. Indeed, she saw no
justification for his shamefaced approach to her until she was well
on the road to sexual health. It is usual in such cases for the
wife to blame the husband for her failures, no matter how glaringly
unreasonable and untrue her accusation may be.
After intercourse she was always depressed. She felt “dirty and used.”
Her husband’s semen appeared to her to be disgusting. “All I wanted was
to get to sleep fast and to forget the whole episode until the next
ordeal became necessary,” she said.
Under such circumstances it is difficult to understand how a marriage
could exist at all. However, such marriages do exist in great numbers,
and by far the majority of them do not end up in the divorce courts,
as one might expect. Despite the bitter complainings, the struggle for
power, the fear of love, and the dread of sex on the wife’s part, I
have found that there is usually a well-hidden but genuine bond of love
between the couple. The husband seems originally to have seen in his
now quarrelsome partner a part that can be truly loving, truly warm. It
may show dimly and only in the interstices of the relationship, but it
keeps hope alive in him that she will come into her true self one day;
he warms himself as best he can, meanwhile, at her meager fires.
But now that we have seen a picture of the totally frigid woman let us
examine the causes for it. I have stated that every kind of frigidity
has its special cause. What was the cause in Patricia Agnew’s case?
To understand the origins of her problem, we will have to explore her
earliest history, particularly her relationship to her mother and
father. She was an only child, and her father was clearly the dominant
figure in the household. He was an extremely successful and lovable
man. He abounded in all the virtues, was infinitely patient and loving
with his little daughter. She told me that from her earliest times
she considered him, physically speaking, “an enormously beautiful
man,” and in describing him she lingered lovingly over the details of
his appearance--his “sculptured head,” “wonderful deep kindly eyes,”
“marvelously athletic figure.” A psychiatrist, of course, would pay
very close attention to such an ecstatic description, coming as it did
from such an otherwise withdrawn person.
By way of contrast she had considered her mother “mousy” and, while she
had liked her in a general sense, she had never consciously had any
very strong positive feelings about her.
Patricia clearly had been a “daddy’s girl.” There is nothing wrong, of
course, with this under normal circumstances; had she grown up to be
sexually free and had she been able to transfer her early love feelings
from her father to other men, this early attachment to the father would
have been merely a phase in normal development.
It is not necessary here to depict the stages by which Patricia and I
arrived at a clear understanding of the early problem that had caused
her later frigidity. It will be enough to state the events themselves.
You will recall the fact that in the first five years of life the
child is a very sensual little being. Patricia had been no exception
in the beginning; she had transferred these feelings, in the normal
course of events, to her father. However, this powerful and charming
man whose personality dominated the household, overshadowing his wife
completely, had been far too responsive (unwittingly, of course) to
the little girl’s erotic feelings. He dandled her and played with her
endlessly, surrounded her with a stimulating warmth, psychologically
and physically; he showered kisses and hugs, compliments and candy
upon her; he gave her anything and everything to express his devotion
to her.
The consequence? The very strength of his love, its varied and
aggressive forms, its unrelenting intensity, had a negative effect on
the child. To put it most simply, his love overstimulated her budding
sexuality. This powerful man’s love overwhelmed her. Her small ego
could not handle such powerful feelings; they frightened her. In order
to cope with such feelings, therefore, she had had to repress them
powerfully, deny their existence.
Children can do this, as you will remember from our discussion of the
latency period of childhood. It is at the onset of this period, which
occurs at about six years of age, that infantile sexuality is pushed
under ground, to remain dormant until puberty. Patricia, under the
influence of her prematurely strong sexual response to her father, had
been forced to enter her latency period, we were able to determine, at
the far too early age of four.
With sex out of the way, she was now able to indulge her worship of her
father in complete “innocence.” He was a man who believed passionately
in success, and his ebullience, love of life, and high intelligence had
won him a great deal of it. His young daughter felt now that to win his
love she must achieve and achieve, endlessly. From the first grade of
school through her last year at college, therefore, she bent all her
efforts to excelling mentally. But her father was also a perfectionist;
he expected top honors from himself and jeered at anything less in
himself. Thoughtlessly he made the same demands on his daughter. Since
she did not have his qualifications she was not always able to come up
to his standards in every field of endeavor; few _could_ have equaled
his demands. When she did not achieve such top honors she felt that she
was not worthy of her father’s love and indeed that he did not love
her. He did nothing to correct this feeling.
If you will recall our normal stages of development for the growing
child, you will easily see that when marriage time came around Patricia
Agnew had not touched first, second, or third base. She had appeared to
be growing normally, excelling in schoolwork, playing the role of the
dutiful daughter, going out on dates. But in the emotional and sexual
spheres she had been arrested at a very early stage.
So severe had been her repression of her childhood sexuality that
when the glandular changes which usher in puberty occurred she failed
to have the resurgence of sexual feeling and the development of
psychological characteristics normal for that period. For that reason
she omitted her adolescent phase of development, too, the period of
young love’s long and lovely dream which prepares the girl for the
activities of love sexually and psychologically. How could she have
had such a dream? It depends on the development of a true and normal
sexuality. The door had been locked on her sexuality in infancy and the
key thrown away.
Psychologically, too, she was an infant. The need to excel, to master
one’s environment is of course normal for the latency period. Nature
has arranged this period, sagely put sex out of the way for a few years
so that the ego may have a chance to grow, to prepare itself for the
sexual storms and stresses of puberty and adolescence.
However, since in a very real sense she could not pass through puberty
and adolescence, she had remained psychologically in the latency
period, the non-sexual, competitive, father-worshiping childhood period.
Patricia really had two distinct attitudes toward her husband. The
first was expressed in her quarrelsomeness, her belief that he was
selfish, unattractive, and unlovable. This attitude was based on the
fact that, very literally, her heart still belonged to Daddy. With
her exaggerated childhood feelings toward her father, every other man
suffered by comparison, seemed unworthy of her love. Her husband was an
interloper who came between her and her ideal. Therefore, his normal
need for her to love him, to be a good wife to him, seemed hateful to
her, filled her with rage. Sex under such circumstances was a virtual
rape of Lucrece, with the husband playing the role of the dark and
frightening rapist, the father representing her true love, for whom she
must preserve her innocence and purity.
Another deeper and more hidden attitude was the exact opposite of this,
indeed contradictory to it. In this aspect of her mind her husband
stood for her father. Thus sexual feelings toward such a person must
be entirely taboo; she must repress them as she had in her earliest
years and she must keep them repressed. Too, she must excel in all
the things her father wanted her to excel in. To her husband she must
primarily excel in her wifely functions, and this was the essential
trap. For because she very consciously knew she was not and under the
circumstances could not be even a passable wife, she was constantly
inundated by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
You can see then what a complete trap Patricia was in. Actually, unless
she had been strongly motivated to seek help, she would never have
found an exit from her difficulties. Her periodic “breakdowns” were
a simple and direct expression of the hopelessness of her situation.
It was as if she were saying: “I am truly a helpless child; I can do
nothing grown-up. I must be taken care of as a child is.”
She did recover her lost sexuality and her lost capacity for happiness,
and in a later chapter we shall see how the Patricia Agnews of this
life can achieve such an outcome. But before we leave her I should like
to make one further observation of a general kind: Consider how totally
beyond any help she would have been if her irrational opposition
to her husband, to sex, and to real love between the sexes had been
bolstered up, made to seem quite justifiable by a philosophy of life
based on the feminist school of thought. From such a standpoint every
one of her difficulties would have been considered perfectly normal!
Patricia, of course, represents frigidity in its most extreme form,
the type in which there is almost a total lack of sexual feeling.
To clarify this subject, recall our frigidity scale. On this scale
total frigidity would needle around zero. A woman at the opposite
end of this scale would experience a great deal of sexual excitement
before and during intercourse but would be unable to have orgasm, or
her orgasm would be so weak and unsatisfying that it would leave her
very consciously unsatisfied. (Normalcy, of course, is a more or less
absolute state and could not be described in terms of degrees.) We rate
her near or at 100 on the frigidity scale, meaning she is close to
normalcy. In between these two extremes there is every possible degree
of sexual blocking.
Women who suffer from some degree of frigidity (rather than from a type
of frigidity, such as our “masculine type”) have personality problems
similar to Patricia’s. These problems become milder as they go up the
scale toward normalcy. The underlying structure of their problem is
also similar to Patricia’s--it is based on a too strong and too early
attachment to their fathers. This early attachment has survived into
adulthood and, depending largely on its original strength, causes
a greater or lesser degree of sexual and interpersonal problems in
marriage.
But as we go up the scale toward greater sexual responsiveness the
difference in degree seems almost to become a difference in kind.
From roughly the middle of the scale upward, the essential sexual
problem has little to do with withdrawnness or unbridled or unrelenting
hostility toward one’s mate, or a feeling of being exploited sexually.
It is far more closely connected with direct sexual frustration, with a
kind of Tantalus-like feeling that one is terribly close to one’s goal
but cannot quite achieve it.
Here is an example of what I mean. I shall call this patient Joan. She
was twenty-eight years old when she came to me, a pretty woman with an
upturned nose, a generally insouciant manner, and a pleased-with-life
smile. She had been married two years, she told me, and came directly
to her problem. During intercourse she would become tremendously
excited most of the time. It took little to stimulate her, and as the
intercourse continued she would maintain her high level of excitement.
But on most occasions, no matter how long the love-making continued,
she would reach no climax at all. She was left with a frustrated,
almost frantic feeling.
There were, however, occasional exceptions to this rule. In about
one out of ten times Joan would achieve a climax of sorts during
love-making. But it was weak and inconclusive and not by any means
deeply satisfying to her, as it should have been and as she felt it
could be. Here, however, is the most important point. Whenever she did
experience this climax she almost invariably woke the next morning
with severe back pains which lasted for two or three days and were
clearly psychosomatic. And she would feel irritable and anxious. It was
_only_ on such days that she experienced personal difficulties with her
husband. She would find herself arguing with him about trifles, being
generally cross-grained and countersuggestible.
“I should think,” she said to me in puzzlement, “that it would be just
the other way around; that I would be difficult with him when I didn’t
come to any climax and pleased and hopeful when I did, even if it
wasn’t the perfect orgasm.”
But Joan was being merely logical in this assumption. The mind is not
necessarily run by such rational considerations. When she was able to
comprehend the reasons behind the apparent anomaly of her backaches and
her anxiety reactions, she was close to being cured.
Joan’s problem was a truly mild one. Her relationship with her husband
was basically as sound as a dollar; she thought him attractive
physically and respected him. She enjoyed their social life together
and never felt exploited or put upon when he had to entertain his
business associates. Indeed, she had a great deal of fun playing the
role of hostess to them. There was no area where one could find real
difficulty between Joan and her husband except in their sexual life.
This problem washed out very quickly, for it was lightly held in
the soil of Joan’s personality. And yet in exploring it we found it
had exactly the same structure as Patricia Agnew’s problem: a basic
overattachment to her father that had occurred in early childhood
and had not been resolved. The difference was that the attachment
on Joan’s part had been a much milder one than Patricia’s had been,
and therefore, while it did have a lingering aftereffect, it did not
encompass Joan’s entire personality and was therefore far easier to
deal with.
There were two things that made Joan’s relationship with her father
less destructive than Patricia’s had been. First, Joan’s father was
not _so_ overpoweringly loving and attentive to the little girl during
the first six years of her growth. Second, Joan’s mother had a very
distinctive and strong personality of her own, and Joan had had a good
relationship with her all during her formative years. This neutralized
to a certain extent the overstimulating effect of her father. It had
allowed her to identify with her own sex in a healthy manner, to give
her the feeling that it was a fine thing to be a sweetheart, wife, and
mother.
Joan’s frigidity problem was helped in a few sessions. One day she came
to me and was very upset. Her last intercourse had been successful and
had culminated in the strongest orgasm she had had up to this time. But
as usual, the next day had been an anxious one and she had had a severe
backache.
As she talked about it she suddenly said: “I had the most amazing
dream; I’ve just recalled it.” She had been on a swing in a playground,
she told me, and her father had been pushing her. “I flew higher and
higher,” she said. “It was like flying. The sensations were delicious.
I hoped he would never stop. Then suddenly I looked around and he had
turned into some kind of criminal or something. He seized me and I
screamed, but somehow I knew nobody could hear me. I then suddenly
remembered something a girl friend had actually told me in college when
a group of us were discussing rape. She had said that a woman might be
killed if she resisted. And she said that if it ever happened to her
she would just relax and try to enjoy it. I recalled this now, and the
criminal in my dream did rape me and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I came to
a terrific climax, a kind I’ve never had in real life.”
She had awakened at this point but then went back to sleep and had
the following nightmare. “Women policemen were pursuing me for having
committed some crime,” she said. “They’d almost catch me, but I’d get
away. Finally one of them did catch me, but when I looked in her face
she was smiling at me tenderly and she said: ‘Don’t worry; it’s not so
terrible after all.’”
Knowing what you know already, it should not be too hard to see what
Joan’s dream means. The swinging, with her father doing the pushing,
represented her very early sexual feelings toward her father. When
these became too direct she disguised them by turning her father into
the criminal rapist. Actually _she_ was the one who felt like the
criminal, and this is borne out by the fact that in the following
dream she was pursued by the police. It is significant that they were
policewomen, for the little girl feels very strong guilt toward her
mother because of the forbidden and taboo sex feelings toward her
father. The forgiving attitude of the policewoman represented both her
good relationship with her mother and her inner readiness to get over
the problem.
There could scarcely be a better illustration of the whole theory of
modern psychoanalysis than this. To Joan, at least, it was eminently
clear. Her terror, expressed by her dream of the pursuing policewomen,
disappeared before that session was over, and she stood ready to move
into a mature and satisfying sexuality with her husband. With her
conscious mind she now knew that she had been frightened of complete
sexual love because, in the highest reaches of passion, her feelings
for her husband unconsciously reminded her of the “dangerous” feelings
she bad once felt for her father; thus she dared not indulge them to
the utmost. Understanding the irrational basis of her fears allowed her
to dispense with them.
_Chapter 11_
THE MASCULINE WOMAN
She was a strikingly handsome woman. I looked at her as she sat
opposite me in my office and I remember being struck by the extreme
femininity of her appearance: the glossy, clean softness of her brown
hair, the peaches-and-cream texture of her complexion, the care she had
given her toilette and her clothes. Everything was perfect. I recall I
thought then: “Perhaps a little too perfect. It’s almost as if she is
dressing for a role.”
First impressions are not always correct, but in this case mine were.
My new patient, whom I shall call Toni (her real nickname was also
based on a boy’s name) was suffering from the form of frigidity that
is often called the “masculinity complex.” She was, in short, the
“clitoridal woman,” whose general characteristics we looked at briefly
before. Her case is so typical and illustrates so many aspects of this
very widespread type of frigidity that I have selected it to tell here.
In my first sessions with her I could see that Toni’s clear thinking
and logical mind, her emotionless, almost masculine forthrightness in
expressing herself belied her softly feminine appearance. Her way of
dressing was an unconscious attempt to hide from the world, and from
herself, her real problem.
She was thirty years old, had been married for seven years, and had a
five-year-old son. For the past two years she had had severe migraine
headaches, sometimes as often as three times a week. These headaches
had started at about the same time that serious marriage difficulties
had developed between herself and her husband. The problem, she stated
honestly, had originated with her. Rather quickly she seemed to have
lost all respect for her husband. Looking at him one day, she said, she
suddenly saw that he had no ambition of any kind and was “insufferably
smug and complacent.” He had not the slightest desire to better his
lot, she realized, but was content to putter around in his cellar
workshop with “inane and useless projects” or to spend his evenings
“glued to the television set” or playing poker with a few “useless men.”
This passivity on the part of her husband had inexplicably enraged her.
“I realized in that moment that we could rot, socially and financially,
if it were up to him,” she told me bitterly. “I can’t stand such
pointlessness in a man.”
I now asked her what their social life together had been like, and she
told me that it had been very active until two years before. “Most of
our friends were my friends originally. His friends just seemed to fall
away in the first year of our marriage. They weren’t very interesting
anyhow, and I was just as glad. But after I began to lose interest in
my husband, to lose my respect for him, I began to withdraw socially
myself. My husband didn’t seem to care about that either. He doesn’t
seem to care about anything.”
Further inquiry elicited the fact that Toni was extremely successful
in the business world. She had been through a leading woman’s college
and had been the president of her class and very prominent in
extracurricular activities. “I was a really Big Woman On Campus,”
she said nostalgically. She had then gone to graduate school, taking
her degree at Columbia University in business administration, and on
graduation had entered the buying department of one of the largest
merchandising corporations in America.
Within five years Toni had become the top buyer of women’s clothes for
the entire corporation. In actuality this was one of the top positions
of this kind in the United States, for the merchandising corporation
was gigantic. Her present salary exceeded twenty-five thousand dollars
a year.
I was not surprised to learn, at this point, that this was exactly
three times the salary her husband made as a junior member of a law
firm that specialized in corporation law.
I now asked Toni if she did not get a great deal of pleasure from her
success in the business world. She told me that before she was married
and for about two years afterward she had indeed felt a great deal of
pride in her success. Her husband, too, had shared her pleasure in her
achievements. After the baby had come, however, he had seemed gradually
to lose interest in her work. And gradually, too, she had developed a
growing sense of guilt about her activities in the business world. She
had the constant feeling that she was neglecting her child. Sometimes
she would call the nurse at home five or six times a day to find out if
the baby was all right. “Two months ago,” she told me, “I went in to
see my boss. I told him I wanted to leave or to cut down to a part-time
job. He was terribly upset and at once offered me a large increase and
gave me a big talk on how important I was and how much they needed me.
One part of me was flattered enormously, but after I left him I felt
depressed. I felt as though I were failing my child terribly, but I
felt trapped by the amount of money I had been offered. I also felt
that if I should really give it all up I would quickly become bored at
just staying home.”
Everything Toni had said up to this point fitted the classical picture
of the clitoridal woman. Almost invariably they marry a passive and
rather dependent (though often very attractive and charming) man and
finally become bitterly critical of his dependency and lack of drive,
thus upsetting the equilibrium of the marriage. In their mind’s eye
they wish for a more aggressive male who would dominate them, but
this is pure fantasy, for they would not be able to stand real male
assertiveness and, indeed, take it very poorly when their passive male
does assert himself. Such women, too, are often very successful in the
world of masculine achievement. And if they have children they develop
great guilt about neglecting them.
One further characteristic that Toni had was a tremendous anxiety
about childbirth. Her pregnancy had been characterized by a very deep
depression; she had suffered physically for the entire nine months and,
when the time for delivery arrived, had felt “absolutely certain that I
was going to die.”
Knowing all this, a psychiatrist could almost guess the nature of
Toni’s sexual life. It did not come out in our interviews for some
time, and I did not press for the details. However, when the facts did
emerge at length they portrayed the particular type of sexual response
which characterizes the clitoridal woman and has caused endless and
ill-informed speculation in various quarters. The fact that this
form of frigidity is so widespread in our society has actually given
rise to a group which believes that the clitoridal woman’s form of
sexual gratification is perfectly normal. This group is vociferous and
much-published and, in my opinion at least, can do incalculable harm if
its conclusions should reach wide acceptance.
Toni was what we call “clitorally centered,” though she did have some
general reactions to kissing and other forms of foreplay. For example,
she enjoyed having her back rubbed and she received a rather minor
pleasure if her husband manipulated her labia. But she definitely
preferred that the foreplay be confined to her clitoris. If her husband
stroked her labia for more than a few seconds, the sensations became
rather uncomfortable and she would ask him to stop.
Orgasm was almost invariably confined to the clitoris. During such
orgasm, though her vagina sometimes became lubricated, she felt no
pleasurable sensations there at all. At the point of orgasm she could
feel no vaginal contractions nor any desire to have her husband thrust
his penis ever deeper or more rapidly inside her, as is characteristic
of the normal orgasm in women.
On the contrary, she generally preferred to be masturbated manually
rather than to have sexual intercourse. Often, to avoid intercourse,
she would masturbate her husband. Or, when they did have sexual
intercourse, her husband would generally masturbate Toni afterward.
However, she was occasionally able to have a clitoral orgasm during
intercourse. This always was achieved when she took the position on top
and her husband was on the bottom. She was very circumstantial in her
explanation of why she could achieve orgasm in this position, pointing
out to me at some length that her clitoris could come into more direct
contact with his penis in this position. There may be some truth in
this fact, but what was of more interest to me was the extent to which
she went to make her point clear. I have often found that women with
this type of problem are, in the beginning at any rate, very anxious to
avoid any suggestion that they may be enjoying the position because in
our society it is the traditional male position in intercourse.
Just as she took the lead in financial and social matters in the family
so did Toni take the lead in sexual matters. It was she who almost
invariably initiated every intercourse. She explained this fact to me
by saying that her husband was very insensitive to her sensual moods.
“He just doesn’t seem to pick up any cues that I throw out,” she said,
“so I have to go after him when I feel passionate.” Please note that
this, too, is a reversal of the usual pattern in sexual love between
men and women in our society; the woman will sometimes initiate sex,
but it is usually the man who does so.
It is interesting, too, to note that although the personal relationship
between Toni and her husband had deteriorated badly in the two years
before she came to me there had been no diminution in the amount of
sex they had. Since Toni was the initiator of sex, the one who, so to
speak, set the sexual pace of the relationship, it would indicate that
she had split off her sexual feelings from other emotions. Unlike most
women, she could have sex with a person toward whom, at least during
this period, she felt no conscious feelings of love.
As soon as I possibly could, without upsetting her, I began to focus my
discussions with Toni on the period two years before, when she began to
develop feelings of anger toward her husband.
At first our discussions yielded nothing, though I had emphasized
to Toni the importance of reconstructing all the details of life at
that juncture as minutely as possible. At length she brought up the
important factor. Two days before the sudden onset of her intensely
critical feelings toward her husband she had, for the first time in her
life, pleasurable vaginal sensations during intercourse.
She had felt very warmly toward her husband that night; an unaccustomed
tenderness had filled her whole being before the love-making. They
had had no preliminary love play of the usual manual kind, starting
intercourse almost at once. The vaginal sensations had begun halfway
through the intercourse and had been maintained right up to the point
of orgasm, when her clitoral sensations once more took over. She
recalled that afterward she had been surprised and quite pleased but
had soon “forgotten” the whole experience.
There could be no doubt that Toni’s anger at her husband and her
migraines started right after this sexual experience. And there could
be no doubt that they were intimately related experiences. Though her
personality structure and the psychological events which caused her
kind of frigidity were different from Patricia’s and from Joan’s, they
were alike in one regard. All three had the deepest and most abiding
fear of real vaginal sensation and ultimately, of course, of vaginal
orgasm.
This fear is a profound one in the clitoridal or masculine woman. Toni,
rather than admit to herself how frightened she was of this vaginal
experience, chose unconsciously to ruin her personal relationship with
her husband, to denigrate all those characteristics which she had
formerly loved in him--his charm, his ability to relax, his quiet and
warm understanding, his refusal to be driven by circumstances, and
his insistence on enjoying the small, warm, everyday events of life.
To protect herself from knowing the real nature of her problem, she
had to blame him for her difficulties. She even had to make up the
difficulties, for though he was a rather passive man he was also a very
attractive and loving one.
The vagina is the very center of femininity, of female love, as we have
seen. If the individual fears this love, she learns unconsciously to
block vaginal sensations. If, however, at any point in her life she is
beguiled into feeling sensation there, she will have a severe anxiety
reaction, flee from the experience in any way she can. And this brings
us to the psychological structure of this kind of problem.
The clitoridal woman develops, very early, an underlying denial that
she is indeed feminine or that she has any use for the things of
womanhood. She learns to feel that womanhood is dangerous, a slavish
and humiliating role. Only men are powerful and secure; and thus she
identifies herself with the male exclusively.
If you will recall that, sexual anatomy aside, there is little to
distinguish boys from girls either psychologically or glandularly in
the first ten years of existence, you will get some indication that
the desire to be a boy need not seem so impossible of fulfillment to a
little girl. And even if we take her sexual anatomy into consideration,
the idea does not seem farfetched to her. She does have a clitoris,
which, in her wishful psychology, she can consider a penis, or at least
the beginnings of one. Though it is small it is, in medical parlance,
“the homologue of the penis.” It can become erect; it has a head; it
has a prepuce. Girls who are going to pursue (albeit unconsciously)
their daydreams of becoming male, eschewing femininity, pay a great
deal of very minute attention to these similarities.
Such was the case with Toni. Typically for such cases, her father had
rejected her. During the stage of development when a young daughter
needs a sufficient quota of her father’s love and tenderness to give
her an experience of the rewards of womanhood, a substrate of feminine
security, he simply ignored her. He was, by all accounts, a very cold
man, engrossed in his business and quite indifferent to both his wife
and daughter. The concept that men rejected women, were actively
hostile to them, was very much deepened in Toni by the fact that her
father behaved in exactly an opposite manner to her brother, who was
three years younger. This young fellow received, by all accounts, the
lion’s share of her father’s small store of attention and devotion.
Reports from a patient, while they have a certain reliability, cannot
always be depended on completely. In Toni’s case I was fortunate to be
able to check the veracity of her story. She had maintained a close
relationship with her brother after they had grown up and, on Toni’s
insistence, I saw him. If anything, Toni had understated the degree
of her father’s withdrawn relationship to her and her mother. Even
at that, the damage to Toni’s ability to love might not have been
decisive had her mother been a warm and feminine woman. But here, too,
circumstances militated against the little girl. Her mother (perhaps as
a reaction against her husband’s personality but more likely because
she, too, was essentially a masculinized woman) refused to stay home
with the children after her son had achieved the age of three. She had
opened a dress shop with a friend in the business section of Toni’s
home town which had been very successful, demanding all her time. It
was a rare evening when Toni’s mother got home for dinner. Between the
ages of seven and fourteen the girl saw her mother little more than an
hour a day on weekdays and half a day on Sundays.
It is not hard to see then that Toni’s young world had little in it
that supported feminine values. It was clear to her that only male
activities, achievement in terms of male goals, could bring security.
Even her mother seemed to subscribe to this, for hadn’t she gone back
into the world of male activity as soon as she could manage it? Indeed,
judging the matter by her father’s relationship to her brother, she
very early reached the literal conclusion that in order to achieve love
a woman really had to be a man.
If we were to examine the purely sexual side of Toni’s unconscious
identification with the male sex, we would only have to examine
the dreams she brought to our sessions. At the beginning she would
frequently have dreams in which she was dressed as a man or in which
she was excelling in male sports. I have recorded one incredible dream,
really quite a funny one in a sense were it not so basically pathetic,
in which she played quarterback for Harvard in the annual Yale-Harvard
football game. In my notes taken at the time I wrote that she made four
touchdowns!
In her conscious mind Toni could not recall whether in her childhood
she actually believed she might turn into a boy. More disturbed women
than she often do remember such conscious fantasies in girlhood.
However, on a deeper level there is little doubt that Toni treasured
the possibility of such a metamorphosis. As time wore on, of course,
reality and her own good intelligence modified and disguised her wish.
She repressed the desire to be a boy in a physically external way,
by growing a literal penis. And she substituted for this concrete
idea fantasies of achievement in, to her, the male sense. In high
school and college she threw herself into a world of intellectual and
extracurricular activity and made an astonishing, almost legendary,
record for herself. In the college she attended she became not only
the president of her class but the editor of the school newspaper and
president of the college’s century-old literary society.
Sexually Toni did not abandon clitoral masturbation in adolescence as,
under normal circumstances, a girl would, or at least would attempt
to. She clung to this early form of sexual release with almost grim
determination, masturbating daily at least once. This continuation of
clitoral masturbation long after the time when it is normally given up
was, of course, the sexual sequel to her early rejection of all that
was feminine.
At this point one might be willing to grant that Toni had sufficient
reason to embrace masculine values but wonder just why she should
develop such a strong rejection of her feminine side, such a fear of
it. The question becomes more urgent when we learn that Toni’s sex
instruction was handled in an apparently intelligent manner by her
mother. Sex, menstruation, pregnancy, and other related matters were
explained to her calmly and clearly and at just the right times to
satisfy her normal curiosity.
She had no shocking experience, nobody seduced her; nothing whatsoever
that was visibly untoward had happened to her.
Many girls can be turned against sexuality by experiences that are
directly traumatic. Such experiences, however, are not an absolute
prerequisite for later difficulties. If you will recall our earlier
discussion, you will remember that to embrace the feminine role a woman
must be willing in the deepest biological and psychological sense to
suspend the natural law of self-preservation. She must be willing to
sacrifice her time, her being, her other goals--her very life--to give
birth to her children and to see them safely to maturity.
If in her formative years the young girl is not properly prepared for
this role, if womanhood is not treated as desirable, honorable, and
lovable, she will automatically turn against it. The game, to the
young mind, will seem far too risky for the candle. As the years pass,
nothing disproves this contention and the original childlike fears,
unmodified by reality, remain intact or even increase.
In other words, to the improperly prepared child, facing the reality
of being a woman is in itself traumatic. Such was the case with Toni.
She was convinced that real love, full of giving and willing sacrifice,
represented death. It is no wonder then that two years before she saw
me, when she had come to the verge of experiencing something like true
sexual pleasure with her husband, she turned against it in a panic,
barred it from her consciousness, attempted to render unlovable the man
who had dared to rouse such dangerous feelings in her.
In telling of Toni’s story I have selected a rather pure type of
clitoridal woman, but I should like to make clear that not all cases
show such an obvious masculinization. Nor am I making the point that
the woman who succeeds in the market place is necessarily dominated by
masculine motives. A woman can be a stay-at-home, apparently performing
all her duties as a wife and mother, and still be suffering from the
same kind of basic problem that confronted Toni. Perhaps we can put it
this way: many women of this kind have never learned to imitate men as
successfully as Toni did.
Helene Deutsch has said, “ … the masculinity complex is characterized
by the predominance of active and aggressive tendencies that lead
to conflict with the woman’s environment and above all with the
remaining feminine inner world … in its most primitive manifestation,
masculinity appears as the direct enemy of feminine tendencies,
disturbing their function.”
Toni certainly fitted this description. However, she like many other
women with this kind of problem, was finally able to overcome her fear
and envy of the male and to embrace her feminine nature without fear or
shame.
Chapter 12
PSYCHIC FRIGIDITY
The problem of sexual promiscuity in women suffering from frigidity
is a common one. Speaking in very general terms, it can be said to
emanate from a desire to be sexually awakened. Women who seek a
solution of this type feel that the next man will somehow break through
the barrier that separates them from true sexual satisfaction, true
relatedness, restore them to their erotic birthright. They are doomed
to disappointment, of course, for an exterior solution of any permanent
kind to this interior problem does not exist.
There is one form of promiscuity, however, that does not fit this
above description. Basically it is not a search for the beloved but
rather a deep, characterological tendency, closely allied to a curious
and seemingly contradictory form of frigidity. The kind of woman
who suffers from this disorder we have already characterized as the
psychically frigid type. We have described this type as one which, if
sexual reactions alone determined our definition, might be considered
perfectly normal. The psychically frigid woman responds readily to
sexual foreplay, and her orgasm is usually deep and satisfying. Examine
her reactions as closely as we may, we can at first find no single
aspect of them that would indicate a problem that could be classified
as sexual frigidity.
However, the woman does have an obviously serious problem. She seems
to be unable to form a close relationship that will endure. She is
apparently devoted to an inner ideal of transiency in love. Sometimes
she is not conscious of the fact that transiency in love is so
important to her, but everything about her amorous career indicates
this is so. She may select as partners married men or men who are
chronically hostile to women and who always end up by rejecting them.
Or she may do the rejecting herself. She is usually faithful to her
partner of the moment and indeed sometimes pays lip service to the hope
that this time the love affair will last. But just below the surface
of her awareness she has no such wish. If the relationship shows any
indication of moving toward permanency, she will create a reason for
terminating it. And this is where her sexual problem shows: if she
could not terminate it she would inevitably become sexually frigid with
her partner.
One might wonder why I include this type here, since her problem
is not one of physical frigidity as we ordinarily think of it--a
primary blocking of sexual feeling, an inability to experience vaginal
orgasm. I do so because in every case of this kind that I have treated
there has been a profound sexual involvement. Early and destructive
sexual experiences (usually some form of seduction) have led to a
psychological inability to relate emotionally to another.
In the cases discussed up to now, we have seen that a too early
experience can lead to a permanent repression of a child’s entire
sexual nature. Overstimulation leads to anxiety; anxiety leads to a
ruthless repression of sensuality by the little individual. Basically
the sexual experience has been felt as dangerous and unpleasant.
In our psychically frigid type we see, on the sexual level, just the
opposite kind of conscious reaction. A too early stimulation causes
a pleasurable sensual reaction, and the memory of this is held onto
passionately. The deep guilt that is generated in the little girl,
however, causes a displaced psychological reaction of great intensity.
To understand this personality structure more fully, let us look at a
typical case.
Molly M. was a passionate bohemian in every sense of the word. When
she first came to my office she was dressed in the height of what was
then bohemian high fashion: dancing slippers, a dirndl-effect skirt and
blouse, and long cotton stockings. She wore her hair in a pony tail
and had no makeup on whatsoever. She lived in Greenwich Village in a
five-flight walk-up cold-water flat. She was then twenty-seven years
old and had been living in the same place since her graduation from
college at twenty-two. She had a decent job but preferred to stay in
this exotic tenement.
Molly had come to me because, as she stated it, she was scared. In
the past two years she had become pregnant twice and had had two
abortions. The last one, which had occurred three months before, had
been performed under the most sordid circumstances; in the basement
of a tenement by a midwife with filthy hands. Performed without
anesthetic, it had been terribly painful and resulted in a serious
uterine infection which required hospitalization. In the hospital the
gynecologist had warned Molly that if she had not already ruined her
chances to have children she might very well do so the next time.
Despite her resolution at that time to change her ways, she had
recently picked up with a penniless art student who obviously had no
real feelings for Molly and, I suspected, no real ability to care
for any other person. It was clear that this relationship was going
nowhere, just as the rest had.
But let us look at Molly’s story.
Molly’s mature sexual life had started at the age of thirteen! She had
had an affair with a high school senior in her home town--she described
it as a “back-seat” affair--and it had lasted for a year. From the
beginning and even under the unfavorable circumstances that love-making
in an automobile must certainly create, Molly had had a total sexual
response.
Since that time she had had upward of forty sexual affairs. None of
them had lasted for more than a year and some only one or two weeks.
All of them had been with men who were ineligible for marriage either
because they were already married or because they were not emotionally
capable of marrying.
Molly, though she had certain superficial pretensions to being an
intellectual, was not one by any means. But she was an intelligent
girl. She had a position as a researcher on a weekly trade paper, and
her work had put her in line to become head of the research department.
Her job represented the “respectable” side of her life. However,
despite some uneasiness of brief duration in college, she had never
seriously questioned the “rightness” of her sexual conduct. Each time
she had had an affair she believed that she was in love and she never
had more than one affair at a time. When the current love was over she
always experienced feelings of relief.
If Molly had come from an environment where a free attitude toward
sexuality had prevailed, her actions might not have seemed so
inexplicable. But her home environment could not have been more
conventional. She had come from a small New England city near Boston.
Her father was the president of the leading bank in that city and
had been active in church and civic affairs. Her mother, too, had
been a church leader and a member of the school board. Her parents’
marriage had obviously been a good one; the domestic life was serene;
they rarely quarreled; their civic duties were most often shared
enterprises. And they genuinely loved their three children. There were
two girls older than Molly, and they had led most conventional lives.
They had married after college and each had had two children.
What, then, had caused Molly’s rebellion against her environment? And
what was at the root of her inability to form a relationship? What was
the cause of her psychic frigidity?
A psychiatrist familiar with this kind of case considers the
possibility of an early seduction of some kind. It had indeed occurred.
Molly was unwilling to discuss it at first. And this was followed by
an unwillingness to ascribe any particular significance to the event.
She believed it was an isolated occurrence that had had no particular
or permanent effect on her. Actually, as the matter unfolded, it became
clear that this event was the very nucleus of her later difficulties.
It had happened when she was six. Three houses down from her there
had lived a man in his early sixties. I shall call him Mr. Brown. He
was a well-to-do person whose wife had died some years before and who
now lived alone. He was very friendly, she remembered, with everyone,
and often her father, out for an evening stroll, would drop in on him
and spend an hour or two chatting on Mr. Brown’s screened-in veranda.
Occasionally he would come to Molly’s house for dinner. She found out
later that he was a director in her father’s bank. He was certainly,
as far as her parents or any other grownups were concerned, above all
suspicion.
Sometimes Molly would play jump-rope or hopscotch outside of Mr.
Brown’s house. One day he invited her in and gave her a piece of cake
and ten cents. She was delighted, and often thereafter he would have
her in, always giving her something sweet to eat. He was pleasant
and gentle and she loved him. She did not remember the first time it
happened, but soon sitting on his lap became an integral part of her
now frequent visits. He would tell her a story and ruffle her hair,
touch her arms or hands. Gradually his touching extended to her legs
and thighs. She liked the sensations and, being so young, she could not
conceive of his doing anything that would be wrong.
Her visits now became almost daily occurrences, and then one day
he touched her vagina. She could recall the whole event with great
clarity. She remembered that his hand shook and that he looked very
pale. Her sensations were exquisite and she involuntarily closed her
thighs, pressing his hand against her vagina. At this point the whole
“affair” became enormously exciting to her. For a period of almost a
month she visited him as often as she could.
It is important to note that Mr. Brown did not confine his caresses
to the little girl’s clitoris. At length he actually penetrated her
hymen with his finger. She remembered this because it was painful, but
she also recalled that the sensations of pleasure outweighed the pain.
Thereafter he would masturbate her vaginally whenever they met in his
house.
This seduction lasted for some time, when one day while she was sitting
on his lap he took his penis out and rubbed it against her. She was
so initiated to the pleasures of sexuality by this time that the act
did not seem strange to her, nor did the sight and size of a grown
man’s penis cause her the alarm it would normally occasion in a child.
Her vagina was of course too small to admit more than a very partial
entrance, but (and this she remembers clearly) though he did not thrust
in any way, the little girl herself pressed her body toward him despite
the pain it caused.
This occasion ended this bizarre and shocking experience. Apparently
Mr. Brown was tardily overwhelmed by feelings of guilt or by a fear of
getting caught, for he was not home when she next called for a visit
and he did not return for over two years. By that time she had put the
matter out of her conscious mind, or at least held the memory very much
in abeyance.
This seduction was not difficult for Molly to recall, however, but she
found it hard to recapture other feelings which had been associated
with the experience, primarily the feeling of guilt.
Now let us take the matter step by step. Why, in the first place, did
Molly react with excitement rather than shock to this whole experience?
There are two reasons. In the first place, the seduction was done by a
person who was loved by the child. He was a friend of the family, no
less acceptable or trustworthy to the little girl than her own father
and mother.
In the second place, Molly had not yet passed completely through the
stage of infantile sexuality into the latency period, when normally sex
goes underground until puberty. She was still able to be excited by
sensual experiences. A year or two later she might not have accepted
the situation, probably would have reacted to it with shock or horror;
it might have contributed to a different kind of frigidity, perhaps the
anesthesia of total frigidity.
It was clear, however, that she had felt guilty about her reactions.
She had not communicated the experience to her parents--a clear
indication of guilt feelings. And later she had separated the seduction
and its sensual pleasures from her conscious mind, made no connection
between it and her later unconventional behavior. If she had not
experienced guilt she would have had to make no such separation.
While Molly had no further sexual experiences in her latency period,
she began to behave differently from the other girls in her group
very early. At twelve she began to pet with a boy next door and was
certain that she would have had intercourse with him had he not been so
frightened of her advances. At thirteen she would sneak out at night
to meet one of several older boys, and on one of these occasions she
had sexual intercourse. She went around with this boy for about a year.
He then graduated from high school and went away to college, and Molly
promptly started another sexual relationship with another senior in
high school.
Sexual affairs from then on followed one after the other through high
school and college. The only concession Molly made to conventional
morality was the afore-mentioned fact that she did not allow the
affairs to overlap.
As she entered her teens another aspect of Molly’s behavior became
apparent. More and more she sought out individuals markedly different
from those on her own social level. By fifteen she had become
distinctly “wild,” coming in late at night and refusing to obey her
parents in any way. She would not go out with any of the high school
or college boys she met. She had made friends with a group of girls
on a lower economic level whose social life consisted largely of
picking up men at dances. In this way Molly met several men who played
in bands and who were, of course, not what her family could possibly
have approved of. She did not care in the least; she felt she told me,
“unutterably bored” with her family, felt “they were sunk in their way
of life,” led absolutely “joyless and pointless existences.”
Despite all this, Molly maintained her scholastic record at a high
level and was admitted to college--another sign of the division within
her personality. In college her unremitting affairs persisted, as did
her selection of friends outside of her own social sphere. At one
point she had an affair with a Negro labor organizer, at another with
an Italian dock hand, at still another with the father of a college
classmate. It is not surprising, then, that as soon as she finished
college (and here, too, she maintained her good scholastic record) she
gravitated toward Greenwich Village and immediately launched into a
bohemian social and sexual existence. She experienced no conscious
regrets or qualms of conscience as, year in, year out, she continued in
this mode of living, a mode so different from that of her parents. She
was sustained by her pride in what she called her “healthy animality”
and was fond of stating that most people led lives of great frustration
and “of quiet desperation.”
Her animosity toward her parents did not diminish when she grew up, and
at the time she came to see me she had not visited them for two years.
The consequences of Molly’s early seduction, as you can see, _were_
grave. However, the psychological structure she had developed to cope
with this seduction is not a hard one to understand.
Human beings are largely guided by the pleasure principle, and this is
most clearly evinced in childhood. Molly had received a great deal of
pleasure from her early sexual experience, but she had also experienced
a great deal of guilt about it. When Mr. Brown departed she had
entered her latency period. But when puberty, with its reassertion of
sexuality, set in, the original sexual experience had set a mold for
Molly’s personality. She enjoyed and sought sex to an abnormal degree
for her tender years.
In her unconscious life, however, she felt guilty for these feelings.
Because of her precocious sensuality her problem then was to get rid of
her guilt feelings so that she could indulge her sexuality. This meant,
in effect, getting rid of her parents for, in childhood, guilt of this
kind is always associated with parental prohibition. She did this by
denying that her parents had any importance to her, by repressing all
warm feelings toward them, by constructing a set of values in which
they were, to use her words again, “stupid,” “loveless squares,”
“without a drop of sensuality.”
As Molly and I continued our examination of her life and feelings it
became apparent that the erection of this defensive mechanism had cost
a great deal indeed, even in terms of those pleasures to which she was
devoted. In order to be enjoyed, sex had to partake of the nature of
the original seduction; it had to be a forbidden and guilty act; it
had to be with a person who was, in her mind, anathema to her parents.
And, primarily, it could not move over into a permanent and abiding
relationship, for if it did it could no longer be considered forbidden
and guilty.
This meant, of course, that love could never lead to marriage or to
children and to the joys these bring. For if a man was respectable,
“meant well by her,” loved her, in her unconscious life she would
immediately associate him with her parents and their approval, and this
would kill all sexual feeling in her. She would be frigid with him.
There was, of course, deep anxiety underneath Molly’s rebellion against
a permanent relationship. During the course of our work together and
after she had begun to see the implications of her problem, she began
to try to associate with men who were more eligible for a decent
relationship. A dream she had during the course of her first attempt at
such a relationship (with a young doctor she had met) shows the problem
quite clearly.
In this dream she is sitting in the back seat of a car, kissing a
young man in an intern’s uniform. She is very excited as they kiss and
decides that she will have intercourse with him. At this point the
young intern says, “Please marry me.” No sooner are the words out of
his mouth than she begins to feel terrified, as though something awful
is going to happen. She begins to tremble and wants to get out of the
car and run, but she is so frightened that she cannot move. Suddenly
she sees the face of a man outside the car. He is dressed in evening
clothes and has a large dollar sign on his hat. He points a gun at them
and says very clearly, “Both of you must die.” At that point she woke
up in an absolute panic which lasted for over an hour.
The intern in the dream stands, of course, for the young doctor she
knows. The man with the dollar sign on his hat stands for her banker
father. Sex is all right, and she wishes for it as long as it is
furtive and hidden. The moment it becomes respectable (“Please marry
me”) the hidden and guilty act will be made known and her father will
punish her in the most horrible way possible.
She had, as you can see, never resolved her early guilt feelings about
the childhood seduction. Her whole life had been built around this
early experience.
Molly’s relationship with the young doctor did not prosper, but in the
course of our work she finally did meet and marry a very fine man.
On the basis of insights she had had, she had decided to postpone
intercourse with him until after the marriage. When the love-making
began she at first responded sexually, but in a matter of a few weeks
she became quite frigid.
This reaction of course represented, as in the case of the intern, her
lifelong fear. However, since she had faced up to her psychological
frigidity, had stopped running away into pointless and meaningless
relationships, the resolution of this problem was merely a matter of
time, of “working through” the guilt feelings she had never dared to
face before.
* * * * *
The form of psychic frigidity represented by Molly’s case has always,
in my experience, been caused by a childhood seduction. The seduction
usually takes place between the fourth and seventh year, and the child
reacts to the experience with strong sensual pleasure accompanied by
guilt. This guilt is handled by a withdrawal from the parents and from
values they represent. And sensual pleasure becomes an end in itself,
dissociated from friendly perduring relations with another person.
It must be furtive, indulged in with unlikely persons; acute anxiety
develops if there is any danger that it will lead to marriage.
The seduction need not be as complete or as direct as Molly’s. I
have had a case in which a single sight of grownups having sexual
intercourse has had the effect of a seduction on a child. In such a
case the pleasure reaction becomes associated with the early erotic
feelings toward the father. The suggestion in the child’s mind is that
her “evil” wishes can be granted if she will displace them onto another
person. In later years this becomes the model for sexual behavior;
sexual desire in the woman is too closely associated with the father
image, so the love object sought must be as different from the father
image as possible.
Sometimes “liberal” parents seduce their children quite unwittingly.
Not too long ago it became the practice among certain “liberated”
or intellectual families to indulge in a species of nudism within
the home. This practice was based on a misunderstanding of certain
contributions of modern psychology, mainly the concept of inhibition.
The parents wished to prevent their children from being inhibited or
prudish about the human body. Such parents made no difficulty about
parading around nude in front of sons and daughters of any age.
Parents who believe in this manner have rather elaborate rationales
and present them convincingly. If certain of my patients are an
indication, however, I can testify that many children do not have the
“healthy” reaction to nudism in the home that the parents had expected.
To a six-year-old girl the sight of a naked father can be far too
stimulating an experience for her to handle. She will react either with
shock or excitement or both. The same is true of boys who are permitted
to view their mothers in the nude.
We have seen that erotic fixation on parents constitutes a stage in the
growth process. Whatever it may be in other societies, primitive or
otherwise, nudity in our society is associated with lustful feelings.
Family nudism, I firmly believe, tends to fixate children on parents
permanently by causing unnecessary stimulation and hence strong guilt
feelings. The result can be similar to a direct seduction of the child.
Psychic frigidity is often confused with a temporal emotional condition
we call situational frigidity. A woman suffering from situational
frigidity has no basic sexual problem. Her responses have always been
normal and her orgasm is both frequent and satisfying. However, some
severe reality problem has arisen in her life which has caused a
temporary eclipse of her sexual responsiveness.
On occasion a woman may become quite disturbed by this fact. Let me
give an example.
Anne S. was thirty-five. She had had a happy marriage for ten years.
In the first seven years of her marriage she had had two children,
both girls. She had had no more fears of pregnancy and motherhood than
she had had of sex. Her upbringing had been, from the psychiatric
standpoint, exemplary. In every determinable way she was an excellent
sweetheart, mother, and wife.
Six months before she came to see me she had given birth to her third
child, a boy. In a very short time it became clear that the child was
mongoloid. After several weeks of indecision she had finally yielded
to the pressure of the doctor and her husband and the child had been
committed to an institution. At the time she came to me she had just
learned that its congenital defects would be fatal within two or three
months.
When Anne had resumed her sexual relationship with her husband after
the birth of this child she had been completely unresponsive and
actively disliked the whole act. This had upset her. She had thought
this would pass in a week or two, but it had not. The fear that she
may have lost her capacity to love or at least to love her husband had
brought her to a psychiatrist.
Anne could not have been more mistaken about the significance of her
unresponsiveness. She had underestimated the depth of the blow the
birth of such a child can have on a mother. Grief and other profound
emotions incapacitate the ability to love; one’s entire confidence in
oneself is shaken. It is perfectly normal under such circumstances to
withdraw emotionally. In fact, it is even desirable. Wounded feelings
must heal, and immobilizing oneself emotionally is good therapeutic
procedure.
Time is the only anodyne for this kind of normal emotional pull-back.
In this case Anne’s child died within two months, as had been
predicted. Her so-called situational frigidity lasted for three months
after that and then disappeared entirely.
Since the sexuality of women, as we have seen, is so “psychological” in
its nature, these temporary situational frigidities are probably quite
prevalent, though there are no final statistics on them. They can be
caused by a wide variety of circumstances and can last for a week or
two to several months, depending on the severity of the circumstance. I
have seen this type of temporary frigidity brought on by such disparate
causes as the death of a loved parent, the illness of a child (even
a relatively slight illness), a husband’s economic worries, and a
difficult birth, to name but a few.
One very scrupulous wife, who took great pride in her ability to drive
a car, even had a sexual blocking for a few nights when she was given
her first traffic ticket. She had parked too long on the wrong side of
the street, and the officer who gave her the ticket had also given her
a stern talking-to.
All one really has to know about situational frigidity is that it
isn’t serious and that it’s well within the normal range of woman’s
delicately balanced sexual nature and will most certainly pass. The
only therapy one needs is patience.
* * * * *
These cases represent, then, the major forms of frigidity. My intent
in presenting them has been threefold. In the first place, it is
important to understand what type of frigidity you have. Second, it
can be helpful to see the individual characteristics of each kind
of frigidity. Third, it is necessary to understand that all of the
frigidities have certain basic characteristics in common (with the
exception of situational frigidity), for this latter fact will allow us
to approach each individual type with one basic form of solution.
With this final information in mind we are now ready to turn our
attention to the means by which frigidity can be resolved.
SECTION IV
_The Bridge to Womanhood_
_Chapter 13_
THE POWER OF LOVE
We have come now to the last and most important part of our journey
together, to the point where we can examine the means by which real
love can be achieved. Let us start by examining what real love is, its
role in life and its component parts.
Because of their problems in loving, many people arrive at a point
where they turn against love itself. Having lost their hope of
achieving love, they quite humanly tend to depreciate it, try to
minimize its importance. One of the commonest statements I hear from
frigid patients in the first interview goes something like this: “Well,
it really doesn’t matter, I suppose; there aren’t very many happy
marriages anyway. And I suppose there are more important things than
love.”
Let us correct any tendency of this kind right here and now.
Using the word in its widest sense, I would say that the ability to
love is the single most important characteristic that man has. It is
the faculty upon which all the great actions, hopes, and aspirations of
the world are founded. Without it there could be no brotherhood among
men, and therefore the very concept of civilization as we understand it
would be unknown, even unthinkable. Men would be essentially isolated
individuals whose personal drives, needs, and appetites would be the
only realities to them. Aloneness, a terrible loneliness (those who
cannot love will know what I mean), would be mankind’s lot.
Love means, in its very deepest sense, union; union between
individuals, between women and women, men and men, men and women. It
is the most basic and profound urge we have, and its power for good is
illimitable.
In love we make the good of our partner (whether he is our child, our
neighbor, or our sweetheart) as important to us as our own good. In
the union of love we are able to experience the essential oneness of
man and nature, to know that the universe is indeed our home and all
men within it members of our family. In this way man learns through
love that he is not alone, not condemned to the pain and anxiety he
experiences when he has nobody with whom he can share his mind, his
heart, his body.
The concept of this happy unity is most clearly seen in the love
between men and women. The act of sexual love is a direct expression of
it. Two individuals once unknown to each other, until recently total
strangers, now nevertheless literally merge together physically, know
each other in the closest of physical embraces. They were miraculously
made for this purpose, constructed for this union. The man leaves
something of himself within the woman, his sperm. And a part of the
woman joins this, merges with it. They have indeed become one flesh.
And this merging, in addition to the joy and comfort it brings to each
to join with the other as one, can become a creative act. From the
union a child may be created. Thus we see that the profound result of
the union which always characterizes love is productivity, creation.
If this physical coupling were all there was, it would be miraculous
still, though an experience shared by other than human forms of life.
But man, as distinct from animals, has mind. And minds, as well as
bodies, have the capacity to merge too, the need to, the profound joy
in so doing. It is when body and mind of a man and woman merge, become
a unity, that we see the highest expression of what we term love.
When two people are able to join as one in love, there are certain very
definite things that happen to them, as far as each individual mind is
concerned.
In the first place, each is able to come far closer to his or her own
potentialities. The merging that takes place in psychological love is
essentially creative (just as its physical counterpart is), and so each
lover is able to come closer and closer to his true self. All who have
ever loved know of this inward blossoming, this fecundation by the love
of the other. In work, in play, in all the inner and outer activities
of life, the individual becomes far more vital and more productive than
before.
Another important aspect of love: to each, as I have said, the love
partner becomes as important as oneself, and from this it follows that
the good of the loved one is all important to the other. Thus all
things that help the other, cause him to be joyful, secure, freely
and completely himself, become a chief concern of the other. This
fact is why real love never leads to domination or to a struggle for
power between two people. Through the mersion of love the uniqueness
and individuality of the other person becomes precious, and hence all
effort is made to guard the special qualities of the beloved. In love
we never encounter a man trampling on his wife’s rights and needs or a
woman competing with her husband. The value of the other as he is and
as he can grow to be becomes the highest value in life.
Because of the high value she places upon her loved one a woman makes
the understanding of him one of her most important activities. And this
understanding furthers love, which in turn furthers understanding,
so that the process is a very dynamic one. By gaining a knowledge
of her loved one she is able ultimately to go to the very root of
his personality, thus making an even deeper merging of her with him
possible. Such understanding implies, of course, a great sensitivity
to all of his reactions. And it makes her, too, inquire urgently (and
creatively) into herself, so that no blocks to their deep psychological
communion can develop.
These are, then, some of the results of real love. I have listed them
as a rebuttal of and a reminder to any who have, through repeated
defeat, become discouraged in their struggles to love and have tended
therefore to minimize love’s importance. There is nothing in life that
is so important as love. In fact, as one of my patients once said,
looking back on the period when she was unable to love, “Without love
there is nothing in life.”
One cannot win the battle to love if one minimizes it. The frigid
woman, above all, must realize this and never give up her struggle.
Indeed, a complete awareness of how important love is can be in itself
a big step along the way to achieving the ability to love and to be
loved.
Now if we summarize what has just been said about love, what do we
find is its essential characteristic? This: the ability to see the
other person _as he is_ and to esteem him above everything else for his
individual quality, indeed to love him (and so want to merge with him)
for it.
On the other hand, if we were to summarize all the case histories of
the various forms of frigidity I have given and all the other pertinent
facts I have adduced about frigidity, we would find just the opposite
fact. The frigid woman, of whatever variety she may be, _never sees the
man she wants to love as he is_. His individual and essential quality
is entirely unknown to her and unknowable by her. He is a series of
projections from her past. He is a composite of the fears, the errors,
the misunderstandings of her infancy and childhood. The real union of
love is therefore impossible with this quasi monster she has conjured
up.
Thus we can see that the major task of the frigid woman is to rid
herself of these projections she makes upon mankind in general and upon
her own man in particular. She must see through them and divest herself
of them, come to see men in their true role vis-à-vis woman and her
husband in all his uniqueness and with all his potentiality.
That is step one.
When she has done this there is another step she must take. If one
thinks of the description of love I have given, one realizes that it
implies a very great security within oneself, an acceptance of one’s
own uniqueness and essential femininity. But the frigid woman fears and
rejects femininity, as we have seen, feeling it to be a dangerous trap.
She must learn to alter this basic and negative attitude entirely. She
must see how childish and false, how utterly self-depriving this view
of womanhood is and give it up.
Thus we see that in frigidity the two main doors to psychological and
sexual union--to love, in short--have been closed and locked.
If these two doors can be opened again, the frigid woman will have
resolved her problem.
Just these two doors? Is this not an oversimplification? To these two
questions I can give unequivocal answers: yes to the first and no to
the second. These are the two roots of the problem. Attack them head
on, resolve them, and the major part of the task has been done.
_Chapter 14_
STEPS TO FREEDOM
The resolution of an emotional problem is a process, a process with a
beginning, a middle, and an end. To put this process in motion and to
maintain it in motion, two distinct approaches are necessary.
The first step is to grasp the problem _objectively_, to understand its
nature, its implications, to learn all the _outside_ facts about it one
can grasp with one’s intellect.
We have now taken this first step, an all-important one for most
people. If you have read thus far, you have learned a great many
objective facts about frigidity.
You have learned what it is and the toll it exacts; you have seen why
women are subject to it and how it originates in the individual and
the different forms it may take. You have seen, too, how woman has
attempted to masculinize her personality, how she has tried to eschew
sex entirely; and you have seen why these unhappy attempts _can_
be successful, why they are inherent biological and psychological
possibilities.
This kind of objective understanding is of great importance. It frees
one from prejudice and prevents one from seeking false solutions
(which abound); it brings one face to face with the real nature of the
dilemma of frigidity, its essentially psychological structure, and it
uncovers the hidden area where personal responsibility lies.
Without this kind of objective intellectual understanding the
individual woman could not come to direct grips with frigidity, for she
would not know its nature. This type of knowledge, then, has carried us
to the very edge of the bridge to true womanhood.
In order to cross it, however, the individual woman must do more than
merely understand in an objective manner.
The second and all-important step in the resolution of the problem
of frigidity requires a _subjective_ approach, an inquiry by the
individual woman into the attitudes and emotions that are preventing
her from achieving maturity. The kind of knowledge one gains in this
way we call insight. If one can get true insight into the attitudes and
feelings upon which one’s own frigidity is based, the problem can be
completely resolved.
At the moment this may seem like a big order and insight a frightening
word. Every woman knows how complex her emotions are, how difficult to
understand, how multi-faceted every human being is.
But I wish to tell you now, at the outset, that the whole approach can
be kept very simple. Frigidity is like a log jam on a narrow stream.
If two or three logs jam together, forming a barrier, all the other
logs will jam up behind them, forming a complicated maze that stretches
backward sometimes for miles. To release the jam, however, all one has
to do is to free the first two or three logs, and then the others will
resume their unimpeded journey.
The emotional log jam we call frigidity is held in place by two
basically neurotic attitudes. The first is an attitude toward men;
the second is an attitude toward real womanhood. We have seen these
attitudes in every form of frigidity and have seen how they function.
If the individual woman can come to grips with these two attitudes in
herself, if she can dislodge them, the free flow of her personality
toward health and maturity will resume once again. Insight can dislodge
these hindering attitudes and keep them dislodged.
Let us start, then, and see how insight into these attitudes can be
achieved by the frigid woman.
The first thing you must do is a very practical one. You must give
yourself, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of time alone,
absolutely alone, each day. It might be for ten minutes or for a half
hour or an hour, but you must be alone and you must seek this time
regularly. It is most helpful if you can select a time when your mind
is relatively free of worries and duties.
What do you do to achieve insight at these junctures? You start, on the
simplest level possible, to let yourself _really feel_ your negative
emotions about your husband or sweetheart. Your only aim at this point
is to let these negative feelings come to the surface, to seek them
out, experience them _to the full_.
Pick out some small but recurrent irritation or annoyance he causes
you; the more trifling, the better. Fix on it, then dare to allow your
emotions and thoughts about it to hold sway.
Let me give you a single example from the case history of a frigid
patient. Every day this woman’s husband, on rising, dressed in the
bathroom. He invariably left his razor on the sink and his pajamas in
an untidy heap in a corner. This had irritated her and she had spoken
about it to him several times; he would reform for a few days but then
would invariably fall back into his old habits.
This bit of information about their married life had been presented
quite casually in the course of my first discussion with this patient.
At that time she spoke of this peccadillo of her husband’s as a minor
annoyance. A bit later, when she had returned to the subject for the
third time, each time expressing annoyance, I encouraged her to dwell
on it, to let herself feel the full measure of her emotions about it. I
told her that I suspected there was a good deal more in her _feelings_
about this apparently trifling matter than she suspected, and that I
thought this because she had brought it up so many times.
At first she protested that the matter was too small to pay attention
to; that there were more important things to consider. But with
encouragement she gradually allowed herself to pursue her true
feelings. Underneath her commonplace protest was, as I had thought, an
emotional cave-of-the-four-winds.
Her husband’s “sloppy actions,” it turned out, did not merely “annoy”
her; they “enraged” her. In her words, they signified his desire “to
humiliate me”; “he thinks I have nothing to do but pick up after him,
to wait on him hand and foot.” Her anger became more and more explosive
as she reflected on the matter, and it led very quickly and directly
to her underlying attitude toward men as a whole. Men wanted to do
nothing more or less than to enslave women, to exploit them. They
considered themselves a race apart, superior to women. All they wanted
from a woman was sex, or anything else they could get out of them. And
they were powerful, and thus dangerous; if a woman really showed her
hostility they would use their physical strength against her. And so
it went, on and on, the stored-up rage and the hostile and frightened
attitudes that lay just beneath the surface and constituted the very
bricks and mortar of her frigidity.
In pursuing this technique for getting at one’s feelings it is best
always to select, as in the example quoted, one or more of the petty
annoyances in everyday life. Does your husband’s behavior in company
embarrass you? Has he an annoying habit? (Bathroom habits of a mate
are very fruitful sources for this kind of self-investigation.) Is he
untidy? Does his taste in clothes irritate you? Does he ignore the
children or pay too much attention to them, ignoring you? You will
know what has become the provocative agent in your life; select it and
explore the feelings underneath it to their limit.
As you let your feeling come to the surface, please note how quickly
you move from contemplation of your husband’s annoying characteristic
to very broad generalities about men. In the case above the woman moved
almost at once from annoyance, to rage, to ascribing a hidden motive to
all men--a desire to enslave women, to exploit them.
It was the generalities she made which (in the end) revealed to her
with great clarity that her underlying attitude created a spiritual
climate in which real love and therefore a productive marriage were
virtually impossible. How can one love, in any real sense, a person one
regards, basically, as a tyrant?
Taking this highly emotional inventory cannot be a swift affair. In the
beginning, for the first several sessions with herself, a frigid woman
may find that no very strong feelings or passionate generalizations
will come up. But if she perseveres she will inevitably get to an area
where the feelings are intense and negative indeed. We have found that
such feelings always exist in frigidity. If they did not, there would
be no frigidity.
The frigid woman has hidden the intensity of such feelings from her
conscious mind for two reasons. To know these reasons can help you,
make you somewhat braver in your attempt to surface the feelings.
The first reason these emotions have remained hidden is their very
intensity. They were, in the beginning, felt to be overwhelming; it was
as if they proceeded from a bottomless well of feeling. And so, through
the years, one has learned to hide them, even from oneself, to fix them
on trifles in order to minimize them--to deny that, indeed, they exist
at all.
Only by letting them up into the awareness can one experience the
fact that their intensity is _not_ overwhelming and that the emotion
one experiences has very definite limits; it does not proceed from a
bottomless well.
I recall one woman who, in approaching this problem, would not let
herself weep over a strong underlying feeling of rejection by men that
she had partially uncovered in herself. “If I start crying I feel I’ll
never stop,” she told me. She was not being histrionic either; that’s
the way she really felt. When she did let herself cry, however, the
storm lasted for a mere thirty minutes or so--and then it was done with
for good. She was terribly relieved to find that the emotion which,
when unexpressed, seemed so boundless had very concrete limits. From
that point on she was much more at home with all of her emotions, not
nearly so frightened of them.
The second reason a woman fears to let her feelings about her husband
(and men in general) come to the surface is that she believes that the
things she feels are literally true. They exist in her unconscious or
partly conscious mind as profound convictions. She holds them at bay
because she does not wish to face just how completely a part of her
mind believes that her highly irrational feelings are based on reality.
It will help, however, to know that, no matter how convinced a part
of you is that your negative feelings represent reality, such is not
the case. Your investigation is not going to prove that your hidden
fears are valid; it is going to prove that they are invalid. These
deep and hidden convictions are shaped early in a woman’s life,
primarily by her relationships with her parents and secondarily through
her relationships with her brothers and sisters. They are basically
irrational feelings, erected as defenses against childhood and girlhood
fears and misunderstandings. They have no real basis in fact; they do
not pertain to the male _as he is_.
It is of very great importance to know this when you begin to uncover
your most secret convictions. No matter how real these negative
attitudes appear to be, remember that they are _only_ feelings, not
reality. As long as you keep that fact in the forefront of your
mind you will increasingly dare to let these feelings up into your
awareness, into your conscious mind.
I counsel women to be remorseless with themselves in this search for
any negative feelings they might possess toward their husband and
toward all men. Do not stop when you have seen one or two details that
indicate an amount of feeling you had not clearly known you possessed.
Press onward and inward fearlessly until you have exposed every last
hostile and irrational emotion and attitude you have.
One woman who came to me had worked very hard for five sessions on her
negative feelings toward men. We had started our mutual investigation
when she confessed that any slight irritability on her husband’s part
caused her to feel extremely anxious, often resulted in actual nausea.
We pursued the matter and soon found a great store of antagonism toward
men hidden just beneath the surface of an apparently gentle person.
She had, we discovered, the common, classical conviction that men wish
to exploit women, to bend them to their wills. She soon realized she
had been interpreting many everyday happenings in the light of this
belief. Her husband, an editor, sometimes had to work at home in the
evening and had asked her to keep the television set low until he was
finished. Though she knew his homework was exacting, she took this
to be a characteristic infringement of her “rights” and had a great
deal of stored-up rage about it. She also had hidden rage at such
commonplace duties as bringing his clothes to the cleaner, entertaining
his business friends, cleaning his “filthy” study, etc.
We explored them all, one by one. Neither of us, however, felt that we
had come to the end of the matter. There was something that eluded us.
She as well as I felt certain of that. We persisted, therefore, and the
hidden feeling at last showed itself. Returning to her first complaint,
I asked her if she had ever been physically struck by her husband.
“No,” she replied, “but I often _feel_ that he is going to strike me.”
Knowing her husband to be a kind person, I pursued the matter, and it
soon developed that she had a very strong unconscious conviction that
men in general had no compunction whatever about using their superior
physical strength against women to obtain what they wanted. In other
words, she not only felt that men were basically hostile to women but
that they were potentially extremely violent.
This was a bizarre conviction, and my patient soon realized its
irrational nature. Her picture of men was based on early memories of
a truly sadistic father; he had frequently struck her mother. When
she realized the pervasive importance of this only slightly repressed
physical fear of men she was able to resume a psychological growth that
had been severely impeded from the earliest age.
But the point I wish to emphasize is that she had to persist in her
search for hidden attitudes. If she had assumed that she had gotten
to the heart of her difficulty by uncovering the first few negative
feelings, her self-investigation could not have succeeded. Please
mark the fact that she did not _feel_ she had come to the end of her
emotional inventory until she had actually done so. If one is honest
with oneself one can sense, feel, when important attitudes still lie
hidden within.
If you persist in your daily sessions with yourself, however, the time
will come when you will feel that you have exposed to your own view all
of your angry feelings and your negative attitudes toward men, come to
the very lees of the feelings left over from childhood. You have now
made a major step toward recovery. The biggest log in the jam has been
removed.
Why does this necessarily follow?
One of the major contributions of modern psychiatry has been the
establishment of the fact that attitudes and feelings have the power
to do lasting harm only when they are hidden from one’s awareness, or
half hidden from it. The frigid woman’s troubling vestiges of youthful
error, once they have been made conscious, automatically lose the
greater part of their power to do harm. When they become known to the
conscious mind they are then exposed to judgment, reason, and further
information. They are seen, by one’s intelligence, to be fragile
balloons of easily exploded ignorance. When this happens, the natural
movement of the personality toward health, blocked for years by hidden
fears, rages, defenses, false attitudes, is resumed.
A woman who can achieve this is now _prepared_ to understand her
husband _as he is_--and all other men _as man is_. If you will recall,
that particular ability, to comprehend and care about the uniqueness of
one’s mate, is a chief prerequisite for love.
If the frigid woman did not explore her irrational feelings in the
manner I have described, any objective information about men, learned
from whatever source, would be useless. Her _hidden_ feelings about
men would still dominate. Now, however, with the hidden feelings up
and out, she is ready to hear more about men as they really are, to
contrast the reality to her projection upon it. We shall take that
latter step in the next chapter, but before we do there is another,
further insight into one’s feeling, which it will be very helpful to
achieve.
Women who suffer from frigidity often have, in addition to negative
feelings toward the male sex, another very marked characteristic.
They are subject to powerful _fantasies_ which militate against the
recovery of their lost sexuality and their psychological maturation.
It is extremely important that these fantasies be ruthlessly explored
and exploded. If they are not, they serve the unhappy function of
preserving the unhealthy conviction that one deserves a far better fate
than that of being a beloved wife and mother.
Such fantasies are often half hidden from view, just as are one’s
negative feelings about men. They are daydreams left over from
adolescence or earlier. Their destructive power derives from the
fact that the daydreamer either still believes that the dreams are
realizable or that she could have achieved them if her husband and
family had not prevented her from doing so.
It is amazing how powerful and persistent these fantasies can be. They
generally spring from an early desire to become an actress, a dancer,
or a concert artist. However, they may also express wishes to become
a doctor, lawyer, athlete, diplomat, or whatever. Their impossible,
Walter-Mittyish character is blithely ignored by the daydreamer. I
have had frigid women of forty and even fifty who still, just beneath
the logical, sound surface of their minds, still believed that someday
(tomorrow perhaps, next year certainly) they would go to acting school
and soon obtain leading roles in a Broadway drama, or resume their
piano lessons and become famous concert artists.
Such fantasies derive their power from the fact that the daydreamer
feels unable to deal with reality. Since a woman who is frigid _is_
dealing with her real-life situation in an inadequate manner, it is
not strange that she should hold onto such fantasies with passion.
They protect her from her feelings of inferiority. What matter, says
her unconscious mind, if you are unable to love, what matter if your
husband exploits you, attempts to enslave you. Tomorrow--someday, at
any rate--you will show them all that you are beautiful, glamorous, a
great performer, or doctor, or lawyer, or Indian chief.
The frigid woman should approach such fantasies in the same manner as
she approaches her negative feelings toward the male sex. First she
should let the fantasy have full play. She should allow herself to
imagine herself as impresario, doctor, whatever fantastic dream her
unconscious has fixed on. Let the daydream roll on and on. Note its
magnitude, its grandiose quality, its glitter and its glamor.
When all the details of the fantasy have been experienced, allow
yourself to imagine what life would be like for you if you were _never_
able to realize any single aspect of this daydream. If you feel
depressed by such a prospect, if the contemplation of life without
the possibility of realizing such a dream of glory seems empty, you
have had an important experience. You have taken your fantasy’s full
measure. You now can get some idea of what an important part it plays
in your emotional life.
Do not be afraid of the depression, the feeling of emptiness that
will come with your first conscious attempts to free yourself of your
fantasy. It can be the beginning of a far richer emotional life than
any which depends on an unrealizable daydream. Therefore, persist for
a few days in imagining what life will be like if you do not ever
realize your daydream. Please notice that your depression does not go
beyond a certain depth and that it is not incapacitating; also note
that your feeling of deprivation is not unendurable.
I am not using auto-suggestion in these last remarks. A persistent
daydream has certain characteristics in common with a drug or alcohol
habituation. The daydreamer has, over a long period of time, learned to
handle reality in terms of her drug--her deep-seated daydream. Without
realizing it she has come to feel that, without this psychological
narcotic, life would be impossible. She must, in a very real sense,
wean herself from it, gradually realize that life without it is not
nearly so dreary, so difficult, as she had imagined it would be.
The next step in this process is to explode the daydream entirely. This
can be done with a few pinpricks of cold logic. Most people, realizing
that such daydreams, formed in the heat of youth, have no function in
reality, have long ago given them up in favor of living as passionately
as possible in the present. The frigid woman, however, having a reason
for keeping them alive, has never scrutinized them in the cold light of
rationality.
I know of one woman who, at the age of thirty-eight, with three
children under fifteen years of age, still felt she could become a
dancer. As she looked more closely at this conviction she became
increasingly surprised at how seriously she really took this fantasy.
At length, when she felt really ready to face sacrificing her lifelong
fantasy, she wrote a list of facts and questions. I present them here.
1. To become a dancer I would have to study the dance for a minimum
of five years; during that time I would have to practice dancing for
about eight hours a day. Could I take this discipline?
2. If my mind were able to take such discipline would my body be able
to stand up under such arduous work?
3. If I were able to arrange it would I be willing to give up my daily
contact and relationship with my three children?
4. If I overcame every obstacle and became a well-known dancer,
achieving my wildest dream of success, I would have to go on tour for
at least eight months of the year; this would mean separation from my
husband and children during that time. Do I want this? Even if I do,
could I take it emotionally?
The answers to these questions were obviously passionate noes. And
the result of such a common-sensical examination of her long-standing
fantasy was, at long length, freedom from it.
It will not take much logical thought to dispose of your daydreams,
thus clearing the way to a life in the passionate present rather than
in a mythical future. Ask yourself the kinds of questions indicated
above and give yourself honest answers.
* * * * *
In giving the case histories of women suffering from the various forms
and degrees of frigidity, I have described to some extent the early
origins of their problems. I should now like to raise the question of
just how much knowledge of one’s early, often buried, experiences one
must uncover to achieve feminine maturity.
In my opinion, the majority of women suffering from frigidity do _not_
have to go into the matter of their childhood experiences to any extent
at all. The evidence that their childhood experiences were traumatic to
some degree is contained in the fact that they do have problems in the
present. It is always the immediate problem about which people develop
their deepest and strongest emotions. The technique of “feeling” one’s
way through one’s problem is, as I have said, the method that really
works with frigidity; it is one’s present emotions, therefore, that
constitute the major material of one’s self-examination.
Actually understanding present feelings and attitudes reveals the past,
for it was in the past that these attitudes were established; they have
changed very little since their inception.
Why, then, did I go into the detailed childhood development of
frigidity in my case histories? For the same reason that I gave all
the other objective facts about frigidity before we approached this
section. The more conscious knowledge one has of the entire problem
of frigidity, the more one dares to face up to the responsibility for
one’s own problem--and the more one is _able_ to face up to it also.
For knowledge can free one of the ignorance and superstition upon which
resistance to achieving psychic maturity is based.
I am not, on the other hand, holding that there is any fundamental
objection to a scrutiny of early experiences or to helpful speculation
about them. Sometimes, as in the case of an early seduction, or a
rape that is remembered, early experiences can throw a therapeutic
sidelight on one’s present feelings. However, the myriad details that
go into the formation of everyone’s personality while growing up can be
confusing if one tries to understand them all without the help of an
expert guide; and it is not requisite for recovery to understand them
all. So if self-examination of one’s early experiences does not seem to
be immediately helpful, I would abandon it entirely; I would confine
myself to a “feeling through” of my problem in the present, undoing the
harm the childhood attitudes are still causing in the here and now.
The steps for achieving insight into one’s negative emotions which I
recommend here are the most difficult steps one has to take on the road
to maturity. If you can take them, the hardest part will be over. The
remaining part of the process of recovery occurs rather naturally, is a
matter of acquiring more information, allowing new feelings to grow and
expand inside oneself, accepting guidance past a few possible pitfalls.
You will see what I mean as we continue in the following chapters.
_Chapter 15_
THE MALE SEX: A NEW HORIZON
The self-exploration described in the last chapter results in the
surfacing of hidden feelings, attitudes, and fantasies. Getting them
up and out, exposing them to the bright light of reason and judgment,
clears the psychological atmosphere almost miraculously.
The next most helpful step to take, I have found, is a re-evaluation of
the male sex. The woman who suffers from frigidity has, by definition,
very little knowledge of what men are really like. Since her attitudes
toward men were formed in her distant past and have altered little
through the years, she has a child’s-eye view of men. To her, as
parents to a child, men are powers, not people. Projecting her own
childhood fears and hopes and needs upon them, she has been calling
that reality and acting accordingly.
This next step, the conscious revaluation of men, can be achieved by
learning what the male sex is really like--how it differs from the
female sex, what makes men think, act, and feel the way they do in
everyday life--and by contrasting this knowledge with the negative
attitudes and feelings she has now brought to the surface of her mind.
In this way she will soon learn to understand her husband _as he is_,
and thus achieve the ability to love him in all of his uniqueness and
individuality.
The central characteristic of the male, and the one that most clearly
differentiates him from the female, is his aggressiveness.
In the sexual sphere this shows itself most clearly in the fact that
the man takes, for the most part, the initiative in wooing. He it is
who is the pursuer, the girl the pursued; he it is who proposes and he
it is who initiates sex.
An analogy to this fundamentally aggressive activity of the male in
relationship to the female is seen, in a primordial biological form, by
the function of his sperm. As you may know, the individual spermatozoon
is an individual cell which is propelled by a microscopic tail.
After the deposit of spermatozoa in the vagina, the individual sperm
_actively_ seeks out and joins the ova, which has been _passively_
waiting for it. This physiological metaphor, according to certain
leading theoreticians, well expresses the fundamentally aggressive
nature of man in relationship to woman, psychologically as well as
sexually.
The male’s aggressiveness is, in general, directed to mastery of the
outside world. It shows in him from his earliest years. The sports that
he selects have to do with physical aggression almost exclusively (of
course some girls also like certain aggressive sports at an early age,
but most give them up in puberty). He likes the sports in which he has
to run hard, to charge, to tackle, throw, and hit. In his adolescence
he will spend years in mastering skills that concern such aggressive
activity. A component of this aggressive desire for mastery is his
competitiveness with other boys. He wishes to be as good or better than
they are, to make his mastery known to the outside world.
In the mental sphere, too, this basic aggressiveness is clearly
displayed. His chief passion is in mastering the outward environment
that surrounds him, in, to use a phrase from football, “throwing
it for a loss.” This desire leads him to become a scientist to
control-through-knowing some aspect of the world or even of the
universe. Or it leads him to become a businessman, wresting a living
from the competitive market place. Or it may lead him to become a
philosopher, aggressively probing the “why” of the world. Whatever role
he plays in life, he must use his aggression to master the environment
he selects as his province.
Because of this basic thrusting aggression which largely defines his
role in life, a boy is generally given a larger amount of freedom than
a girl is. One reason for this is that the male role in life will
demand a great deal of self-reliance in the individual, and this has
been recognized by society. Men need the protection of the childhood
home for a much less protracted period than women do.
In contrast to men, women have a much smaller store of aggression
directed toward the outside world. Their activity is largely directed
inward. Psychologically speaking, woman is, in a very real sense,
conditioned by her final biological function. At the very center of
her nature she is preparing herself for motherhood, and this fact
determines the main direction of her psychic energy. Her childhood
interests show this clearly. She plays with dolls, she plays house,
loves to be around Mother, fantasies marriage, is enormously curious
about all of her internal functions. She has, of course, a certain
store of interest and aggression which she _can_ direct outward, but
this characteristic becomes very secondary to her when inward or
outward circumstances do not force her to use it.
Intellectually woman is also basically inward. Her most potent faculty
is her great intuition, her almost magical ability to understand
another person by consulting her own inward nature. This is contrasted
to man’s objective “intellectual” type of understanding.
In describing the essential characterological structure of the male
and contrasting it with the female I am describing absolute types,
not people as they are. In actuality most men have a certain store
of passivity, of inwardness; and normal women have a certain amount
of aggression. However, the normal male will be preponderantly
outgoing and aggressive; the normal female’s psychic energies will be
preponderantly directed inward.
As a direct or indirect result of man’s aggression and his commitment
to the outside world, in maturity he develops certain behavioristic
patterns that are diametrically opposite to female characteristics.
Inevitably the frigid woman will use his attributes to show that her
man has no interest in her, or is weak, or is withdrawn, or is cruel
and wishes to exploit her. Having no objectivity about men, she will
find in his differences from her further cause for estrangement, fear,
and hostility.
Let me give some instances of these behavioristic differences in
everyday life.
To the woman, the bearer of children and the nest-maker, the home and
everything in it are all-important. She invests her home with a great
deal of pride. She loves clean sinks, clean windows, clean floors. She
wants things in her nest to be neat and orderly; she has made them that
way and she wants them to stay that way.
It will be very easy for her to misunderstand the fact that her husband
has invested a major portion of his pride elsewhere: in his work, in
his achievements in the outside world. The cleanliness and neatness of
his home he takes for granted. He may even be, by his wife’s standards,
seemingly antagonistic to neatness, actually sloppy, throwing his
clothes around, leaving the sink cluttered, forgetting to use the ash
tray, and what not. These things, of course, are not in themselves
pleasant traits, but the frigid woman will generalize about them, use
them to indicate her man’s essential indifference to her.
He may also not notice a new rug or even a new chair in the house. He
may have very small patience with any household duties he is forced to
undertake: replacing a broken step or even a burned-out bulb. These
attitudes can be quite confusing to a woman, and if she has any motive
to do so she can easily interpret this kind of male behavior as further
evidence of her husband’s indifference to her and to the family. It is
not; when it occurs it is just male. It may be helpful to her to try
to imagine how long her interest in the details of his business life
actually hold her attention. The house is her business, and it is not
surprising that he behaves the way he does in it, nor is it indicative
of any lack of love in him.
Another aspect of man that can be easily misinterpreted is the fact
that the male tends to be more sociable, likes to seek out and find a
vigorous and sometimes quite varied social life. This, too, is part of
his aggressive nature. A woman, though she may be quite gregarious,
is generally more content to sit at home, and her immediate circle of
friends is enough for her. The frigid woman may try to make much of
her husband’s aggressive sociability. She is not enough for him; he is
restless and dissatisfied, etc.
The vigor and aggressiveness of a man during the course of a social
evening are also often misunderstood by women. He may on occasions
be quiet, but he sometimes wants to do a great deal of the talking,
may even, in his enthusiasm, raise his voice in a conversation. His
competitiveness may even embroil him in an actual argument, perhaps
a violent one. The woman likes things to run smoothly, to be utterly
friendly and tranquil. Her husband’s normal social aggressiveness can
appear to be rude and crude to her. It can frighten her. Afterward she
may confront him with it, accusing him of strutting, of showing off,
of cock-of-the-walk behavior. She is merely confronting him with his
maleness again.
A very odd difference between men and women is the difference in their
reactions to pain and fatigue. Women have a very high threshold for
both, and most men have a relatively low one. If a woman gets a burn on
her hand she can stick it in butter or in cold water and go on making
the dinner. A man with the same burn could be completely incapacitated
for a while--and awfully angry at himself besides. The same is true
of all sorts of minor aches and illnesses that occur in the normal
course of events. Because of this difference in pain thresholds, men
tend to pamper themselves or want to be pampered when they have head
colds, headaches, sore throats, or other minor illnesses that a woman
might ignore. The frigid woman, of course, finds this difference a
rich mine to work. She can and does use it to taunt her husband with
his “weakness,” again showing her essential ignorance of and lack of
sympathy with the male nature.
Of course sex itself remains one of the most fruitful sources for
resentment and misunderstanding in the frigid woman. Here male
aggression can be most clearly seen. The man is stimulated easily by
things that would not excite his woman in the least. He is susceptible
erotically to all sorts of sights, sounds, and odors. His wife
undressing may excite him; her perfume may excite him; he may become
aroused if she is looking wan or looking bright-eyed. The frigid woman,
not comprehending male reactions or their plural causes, generally
feels that his lust is unselective and impersonal. She takes his ardor
as an affront for that reason.
In the sexual act the aggressive thrusting of the penis offends
too. As passion increases during the act, the strength of the thrust
increases, sometimes becomes quite a formidable series of pushes (one
of the slang expressions men use for intercourse is “a bang”). This
sometimes violent thrusting is a perfectly normal aspect of male
sexuality and to the normal woman is of course highly desirable. Frigid
women are frightened of it, experience it as an invasion of their
integrity, an act of hostility against them.
Nothing could be farther from the fact. In his aggressive movements a
man is showing his love in his particular way, his passionate need to
lose his isolation, to rid himself of it, to join with his beloved. To
misunderstand this is to misunderstand all.
Doubtlessly we could make a longer list of the characteristic things
men do and feel that anger or are misunderstood by women with a
frigidity problem. If you have started the form of self-inquiry I have
advocated you have made your own list and have felt strong negative
emotions about many of the items on it.
But the point I wish to emphasize now is that the majority of these
negative emotions is caused directly or indirectly by man’s underlying
and most distinguishing characteristic--his aggression. It is this
trait that most clearly defines him, and it is this trait that is at
the root of the frigid woman’s anger, fear of, and feeling of rejection
by men.
She is antagonistic to this aggression because she does not understand
it. Since she cannot understand or accept her own role, her feminine
nature, she feels that male aggression is opposed to her and she takes
every opportunity to prove to herself that this is so. His strength,
his ability to master the outside environment make her feel personally
nullified, a drab, a slavey. She endlessly contrasts his essential
quality of aggression with woman’s essential traits, to her detriment.
Now if men _were_ out to enslave them, women would be very justified
in fearing, hating, envying man’s central strength, his aggressiveness.
But is he?
A re-examination of this single point can put the whole basic attitude
of the frigid woman (once she has allowed herself to feel the negative
power of her emotions) back into proper perspective, to correct her
fundamental distortion of view. We can do this by looking at the single
most important thing men do with their aggression in our society.
“All men have nightmares.”
I heard a fellow psychiatrist say those words during an impromptu
discussion of male psychology recently, and the phrase struck me as
dramatically true. For the majority of men, when they come of age and
marry, take on an enormous burden which they may not lay down with any
conscience this side of the grave. Quietly and without histrionics
they put aside, in the name of love, most of their vaunted freedom
and contract to take upon their shoulders full social and economic
responsibility for their wives and children.
As a woman, consider for a moment how you would feel if your child
should be deprived of the good things of life: proper housing,
clothing, education. Consider how you would feel if he should go
hungry. Perhaps such ideas have occurred to you and have given you
a bad turn momentarily. But they are passing thoughts; a woman does
not give them much credence; they are not her direct responsibility;
certainly she does not worry about them for long.
But such thoughts, conscious or unconscious, are her husband’s daily
fare. He knows, and he takes the carking thought to work with him each
morning (and every morning) and to bed with him at night, that upon the
success or failure of his efforts rest the happiness, health, indeed
the very lives of his wife and children. In the ultimate sense he alone
must take the full responsibility for them.
I do not think it is possible to exaggerate how seriously men take
this responsibility; how much they worry about it. Women, unless they
are very close to their men, rarely know how heavily the burden weighs
sometimes, for men talk about it but little. They do not want their
loved ones to worry.
Men have been shouldering the entire responsibility for their family
group since earliest times. I often think, however, when I see the
stresses and strains of today’s market place, that civilized man
has much harder going, psychologically speaking, than his primitive
forefathers.
In the first place, the competition creates a terrible strain on the
individual male. This competition is not only for preferment and
advancement. It is often for his very job itself. Every man knows that
if he falters, lets up his ceaseless drive, he can and will be easily
replaced.
No level of employment is really free of this endless pressure. The
executive must meet and exceed his last year’s quota or the quota of
his competitors. Those under him must see that he does it, and he
scrutinizes their performances most severely and therefore constantly.
Professional men--doctors, lawyers, professors--are under no less
pressure for the most part. If the lawyer is self-employed he must
constantly seek new clients; if he works for an organization he must
exert himself endlessly to avoid being superseded by ambitious peers
or by pushing young particles just out of law school and filled with
the raw energy of youth. A score of unhappy contingencies can ruin
or seriously threaten a doctor’s practice, not the least of which is
a possible breakdown in his ability to practice. A teacher must work
long hours on publishable projects outside of his arduous teaching
assignments if he is to advance or even hold his ground.
There is no field of endeavor that a man may enter where he can count
on complete economic safety; competition, the need for unremitting
year-in, year-out performance, is his life lot. Over all this he
knows, too, stands a separate specter upon which he can exert only the
remotest control. It is the joblessness which may be caused by the
cyclical depressions and recessions that characterize our economy.
It is true; all men have nightmares.
Few if any women could take the kind of daily strain and worry men
commit themselves to when they sign the marriage contract. And no woman
in her right mind would want to take it. It is true that many women go
into the market place, but most of them are waiting only for the day
that they marry, or they are already married. Those who stay of their
own free will are few and far between, and in my experience some have
proven to be difficult people in their family relationships, though
some of them are talented. Women are designed for duties different from
those of the market place, another kind of stress entirely, and lose or
tend to lose their essential womanliness if they stay by choice.
As women look at man’s characteristic of aggressiveness in terms of
the tremendous duties, daily struggles, and awful responsibilities men
must and do assume, they can begin to call up in themselves a different
emotion from anger or envy. They can begin to see how altogether worthy
of their highest admiration man is. Not just some abstract man, either;
the man they love, the man they have married, the man upon whom they
have been heaping their criticism, their jealousy and rage.
Far from seeking to enslave our sex, to exploit us through his strength
and his aggression, man has put these two great and basic attributes
entirely at our service. It is (and always has been) this fact that
makes it safe for us to be women, to bear his children with a sense of
security, to rear them, knowing that he is there, always and forever,
earning our bread, watching over us ceaselessly, keeping his terrible
anxieties about us and our safety to himself so that we will not worry
as he does.
Certain it is that boys are generally given their freedom a lot earlier
than girls. And it is also true that the quality of aggression in the
male makes him the wooer and the woman the wooed. I have yet to hear a
woman suffering from a frigidity problem who did not deeply resent both
of these facts.
But now, looking at the end to which male aggression is directed when
it matures, can any woman honestly hold onto such resentment? When she
realizes that society instinctively grants him more and earlier freedom
so that he may develop the great self-reliance necessary to take on the
responsibilities of a family, she cannot validly hold this view any
longer.
Nor can she hold onto her resentment of the fact that it is generally
the male who initiates the sexual act. For it is the same male
aggression which protects her, allows her to be wife and mother, that
makes him the wooer and she the wooed. Again, knowing how easily women
are distracted from sexual feeling by trivial upsets, by the small
things that occur during the day, imagine what would happen if women
had to take the male’s anxieties and yet be responsible for initiating
sex at night. Should such a reversal of roles ever happen to mankind,
the world would soon be depopulated. Women must learn to thank God
daily for the enormous energy and drive of their men.
In terms of this lifelong commitment of man to the service of his wife
and family, let us take another look at the things in his conduct
which irritate women, or at least irritate women with a frigidity
problem, for now they begin to be understandable. Minor irritabilities,
cock-of-the-walk behavior, slackness, sloppiness, whatever--these
are either the outlets or the results of the accumulated tensions
of a man’s day. He will not tell you of the humiliations or defeats
or worries of his day in any direct manner usually. As his wife, you
must understand that these are the only remonstrances against his
hard and anxious struggle that he will permit himself. If you see his
behavior in this light it will be difficult to harbor any deep-seated
resentment against him; one can only wish to comfort him, to help in
any conceivable way to make his burden less onerous, his worries less
sharp, his nightmares less frequent.
The espousal of this view of the male, the accurate one, can be another
great forward step toward femininity. Seeing her man’s aggression in
its true light, aimed first and foremost at procuring her safety,
happiness, and security, she can now dare to take down, one by one, the
precarious defenses she has maintained against him from the beginning
of their relationship. She sees that her husband’s wonderful aggression
actually defines her true role, makes it ever clearer and more
desirable to her.
Let us now see how her altered attitude can ultimately affect her and
what she can do to hasten and further the process of change.
_Chapter 16_
THE NATURE OF SURRENDER
When the frigid woman, using the methods described in this section,
has divested herself of the destructive fears and false convictions
that have been left over from her childhood; and when, in all honesty,
she is able to view her husband with new eyes, knowing him to be the
hard-beset but loving human being he is rather than an abstract power
she had conjured up in his image--when these things are achieved, a
profound change begins to take place within her.
This change is not a direct product of her conscious will. Forces which
have the character of a tide suddenly freed of long-standing barricades
now begin to move irresistibly within her. She feels a new potentiality
inside, intimations of an emotional richness she had not dared dream of.
When such a process is loosed within a woman, we say that she is ready
to surrender; that, indeed, surrender has already started within her.
What does this mean?
It means, in the broadest sense, that at long last she is prepared to
become a woman. It means that she is ready, indeed anxious, to yield to
her biological and psychological destiny. She has ceased to fear her
real role, mentally, spiritually, and physically; ceased to resist it
and ceased to resent it. Now she is ready to glory in it. She is ready
to love.
When a woman is ready for this final step she no longer needs any
urging, any coaxing or coaching. Since this ultimate surrender to
her true nature is so natural to a woman, she is often not entirely
conscious of its varied manifestations. It is slow, cellular, tidal,
certainly unsubject to the conscious will.
Though change is now largely going on outside one’s awareness, I should
like to emphasize, however, that this phase is very much a part of
the _process_ that was initiated with the first two steps--of airing
one’s emotions and fantasies and of revaluating one’s husband. We have
found that, for a woman whose whole mind and body are, for the first
time, taking the path nature intended, it is wise to be as conscious
as possible of the process that is going on within her. Many of the
feelings are new and powerful and run counter to much of what she has
experienced and believed in before. New convictions, new insights, new
prospects open up before her. This novel proliferation may be confusing
or even frightening. Therefore, the more she understands the nature
of her brave new inner world, the more thoroughly and swiftly can she
claim it for her own.
For this reason I should like to urge that those who are trying the
techniques advocated here continue with the regular daily sessions I
mentioned at the beginning. At this point much of the mental activity
in such sessions with oneself will be a simple matter of _watching_--of
watching the process unfold in oneself, even of celebrating these
advances of the unconscious.
In this role of constant observer, however, the conscious mind can
also be ready for more aggressive activity. Any tendencies of the old
pattern to reassert itself, for angers, fears, fantasies to come out
in new guises, can thus be noted and dispensed with before any real
damage can be done. Such pullbacks are not only possible but usual, and
it is well not to abandon the sessions with oneself until they have
disappeared entirely--or as entirely as they’re going to.
The process of inner growth that follows when a woman is ready to
surrender to her real nature, we have found, traces a rather clear
pattern. Some of the new feelings overlap, but mostly they emerge in
a given order, each unfolding separately but related to the other as
petals to a bud. Let us take them in the usual order of their coming.
As the woman who has suffered from frigidity explodes her groundless
fears one by one and explores a new attitude toward men, toward love,
toward motherhood, feels a new esteem for her husband--as all these
things happen, her lifelong _restlessness_ begins to depart. For
the first time she realizes just _how_ restless she has been, how
unsatisfied; she feels how precariously balanced her life, inwardly and
outwardly, has always felt. Now something deep within her relaxes, lets
down. When this happens she is beginning to experience the essential
attribute of all that is truly feminine, spiritual tranquillity.
The arrival of this tranquillity, or even the arrival of intimations of
it results from the fact that she is really allowing herself to trust
her husband in a very deep sense. It means that she finally realizes
that she no longer has to fear or to oppose his strength, but that
she can now rely on it to protect her, to give her the secure climate
necessary for the full flowering of her femininity.
Feminine tranquillity of spirit is a grace and a beauty of the first
order. It is the psychological cornerstone of the happy family. Based
on an abiding faith in the goodness and loyalty of her husband, it
emanates from a woman who has found herself and pervades those about
her, giving them unity and strength. The children of such a mother are
strong against the neurotic restlessness of these difficult times. The
husband of a wife who has achieved such tranquillity returns from his
work to his home as to an oasis, redoubles his loving efforts to make
her ever more secure.
Because she can trust no man, the frigid woman’s approach to the
tasks of life has a difficult, painful, frenetic quality. She feels
responsible for everything; guiltily responsible. Details and trivia
overwhelm her. She has no unity and has to fight herself, her
resentment, her self-rejection to get the simplest things done--her
household work, planning the dinner, carrying and fetching the
children. Everything _looms_.
With the development of the new quality of tranquillity those details
of life that once seemed so difficult become simple. And because they
are feminine tasks, household work, planning or getting dinners,
keeping the children busy or in line--whatever life demands--soon lose
their irksome and irritating quality and become easy, even joyful.
As tranquillity moves over to serenity, becomes more and more a part
of her psychic character, a woman begins to realize what a miraculous
and wonderful thing womanhood is. Most frequently this realization is
ushered in by a sudden awareness of the miracle that her body is able
to perform: the miracle of childbirth.
In her frightened heart the frigid woman has always detested and feared
her capacity to become pregnant. To her this faculty has seemed onerous
and burdensome, a curse. In pregnancy she feels trapped, sick at heart
and in body during it, increasingly frightened of delivery as the day
of confinement approaches. She views all this as woman’s burden; men,
those enviable creatures, are free of such a frightening duty. Indeed,
has she not heard that men use pregnancy as a technique of keeping
women subject to them! Thus she frets and rages and trembles, rejecting
her destiny.
But with her new evaluation of her husband, the deepening of her sense
of security, and the growth of her tranquillity, all this childish
frightened protest against the miracle of motherhood washes away. Now
the scales really fall from her eyes and she feels the full meaning and
majesty of what it means to be a woman.
What a privilege it is, she realizes, to be the carrier of the
race, the agent of its immortality. What fate could be richer, more
beautiful, more filled with wonder and with awe.
I am not exaggerating the importance of this realization. Pride in it,
joy in it are the very most central characteristics of the feminine
woman. To me its highest expression is in the Madonna paintings which
the great Renaissance artists took, over and over again, as a major
subject. The Alba Madonna by Raphael catches the essential quality of
femininity, expresses it for all to see--and to revere.
Now, with this realization, the last vestiges of her envy of the male
and of his role in life disappear. How, she may wonder, with this
marvelous capability of hers, inimitable by man, could she ever have
depreciated the role of woman, wanted what men have?
At this juncture, or closely following on it, a woman begins to feel
her full power, the power that comes to her for her surrender to her
destiny. She now realizes that, far from being in a weak position in
relationship to man, her position is so strong that she must be careful
not to exploit it. One of the deepest and strongest psychological needs
of man is his poignant desire for immortality through his children.
She could deny him this, or she could make his life miserable while
granting him it. Or she can make it the most beautiful and meaningful
thing in her life and in his.
What this new realization means to a woman was stated very beautifully
in a letter I received from a former patient. We had been able to
work only two weeks on her problem, for she came from a different
section of the country and could spend only that amount of time in New
York City. We worked quickly, and she had been able to surface the
hostilities to and misapprehensions about men that had plagued her
grown-up life. I had been able also to give her a thumbnail sketch of
the problems and changes she might encounter within herself in the
future--much as I have described them here. Within six months I had a
letter from her. It described the step-by-step process I have depicted:
the change in her feelings toward her husband, the incredibly swift
growth within her of the new and wonderful serenity. And then she had
come to the point where she realized with her whole emotional being the
miraculous nature of the female body and the feeling of power and glory
that it gave her.
But [she wrote] this feeling of power was quickly followed by an
intense feeling of humility. I thought of how I held within me, within
my body, the power to bring him the greatest of joys; or to deprive
him of it. And then I realized the terrible thing it would be to ever
misuse this power. And now I felt really for the first time, despite
my former lip service to the idea, the reason why marriage must be
considered sacramental. The relationship between husband and wife
which results in the unsolvable mystery of birth goes far beyond
human understanding. To participate in this mystery really requires
a consecration by both. Any lesser attitude toward it is like the
laughter of mockery in a holy place.
With this kind of acceptance of her central role, changes now come
rapidly to a woman. As she feels the unity of need and goal between
her husband and herself, any remaining contentiousness leaves her. In
the marriage, consensus now becomes her aim. She is no longer afraid
of losing an argument, fearful that she will be forced to do something
that is repugnant or humiliating to her, for she realizes that to her
husband her welfare is the dearest of all things. And, conversely, his
happiness and peace of mind become her first desire.
And now she has tapped in on the greatest psychological joy of
woman--her capacity to give. If you remember, in an earlier chapter we
called this “essential female altruism,” a characteristic rooted in
every woman’s biological nature. Women who are really secure within
themselves and in their roles have an inexhaustible store of this
altruism. Frigid women fear this basic characteristic, feeling as they
do that men will exploit and abuse their desire to give.
As she reaps the rewards of her new capacity to give of herself
unstintingly and fearlessly to her husband and her children, the very
appearance of a woman often begins to change. Drawn expressions relax,
anxious forehead wrinkles disappear, thin-lipped mouths soften. Indeed,
her whole body rounds and softens, taking on the look associated with a
tender and giving femininity.
Physical difficulties often disappear. I have known women who had been
plagued with intense pre-menstrual and menstrual pains all their lives
to lose such symptoms in a matter of weeks. I have known women whose
irregular periods have become regularized. And I have also known women
with one or two desperately difficult pregnancies behind them who,
becoming pregnant again, went through the entire nine months not only
without discomfort but with a highly accelerated feeling of pleasure
and well-being.
These, then, are the results, or some of them, that a woman who is
willing to give up the things of childhood and yield to her true self
may expect. The return on such an investment of self is enormous. It is
paid in the coinage of love returned for love given; love from one’s
husband and children, love from friends, new and old, attracted by the
endless largesse of the woman who has surrendered all to find all.
_Chapter 17_
SEXUAL SURRENDER
The ability to achieve normal orgasm can be called the physical
counterpart of psychological surrender. In most cases of true frigidity
it follows on a woman’s surrender of her rebellious and infantile
attitudes as the day the night. It is the sign that she has given up
the last vestige of resistance to her nature and has embraced womanhood
with soul _and_ body.
The achievement of orgasm, usually, is the _last_ step in the process
of growing up. If one reviews in one’s mind the actual orgastic
experience it is not difficult to see why this is so.
For a woman orgasm requires a trust in one’s partner that is absolute.
Recall for a moment that the physical experience is often so profound
that it entails the loss of consciousness for a period of time. As
we know, in sexual intercourse, as in life, man is the actor, woman
the passive one, the receiver, the acted upon. Giving oneself up
in this passive manner to another human being, making oneself his
willing partner to such seismic physical experiences, means one must
have complete faith in the other person. In the sexual embrace any
trace of buried hostility, fear of one’s role, will show clearly and
unmistakably.
But there is even more to the psychic state necessary for orgasm than
faith in one’s partner and readiness to surrender. There must be a
sensual eagerness to surrender, in the woman’s orgasm _the excitement
comes from the act of surrender_. There is a tremendous surging
physical ecstasy in the yielding itself, in the feeling of being the
passive instrument of another person, of being stretched out supinely
beneath him, taken up will-lessly by his passion as leaves are swept up
before a wind.
There can, it is clear, be no crossed fingers about such yielding, no
reservations in such surrender. As one thinks of it one can certainly
feel why, of all the steps in the process of yielding, of surrendering,
the orgasm should be last. To those who are moving toward it the
experience often remains for a time elusive because its very totality,
its uncompromising demand that the whole being be swept up in the
experience, remains somewhat frightening.
Orgasm, as I have said, is the physical aspect of surrendering.
However, while there are similarities between the physical and the
psychological experience, there is also an important difference between
the two.
The difference is that orgasm cannot be sought entirely rationally. It
will arrive when it will arrive, as the end process of a total change
in a frigid woman’s deepest psychological attitudes. It cannot be
sought separately or as an end in itself. Indeed, to seek it directly,
to wait upon it, to try to force it are the surest possible ways of
postponing its arrival.
The idea that orgasm can be forced is typical of the thinking of a
frigid woman. We have seen that, because she is basically frightened,
basically mistrusts her husband’s love of her and her own femininity,
she has to feel that she is “in control” all the time. The trouble with
that standpoint is that in real orgasm a woman must be out of control;
must willfully, delightedly desire to be entirely so.
The delusion that the orgasm can or should be sought as an end in
itself and not as the result of a deep inner change of the kind
discussed in the preceding chapters of this section has been fostered
by many of the books which have dealt with the problem of frigidity
or with the role or responsibility of woman in marriage. One recent
book counseled the conscious contraction of certain muscles during
intercourse, holding that this would heighten sexual pleasure. Other
books emphasize the importance of position during intercourse. Their
tacit or stated contention is that orgastic potency can be achieved by
mechanical means.
The simple fact is that concentrating on one’s sensations during
intercourse, wondering if one is feeling the “right” feeling, can
destroy real sexual passion more completely than any technique I can
think of. We know this from scores of patients. Such a clinical and
objective attitude toward local sexual sensations merely reflects
the frigid woman’s need to be in control of a situation and her fear
of surrendering herself to her man. She can get little more from
this obsessive scrutiny of her sexual reactions than an even more
frustrating experience than usual.
Is there, then, an attitude one can take toward orgasm before one
has achieved it? Yes, there is, and we have found it a helpful and
productive one. This attitude may be summarized in this fashion: If one
has truly pursued the goal of self-surrender, uprooting and exposing
attitudes left over from childhood and youth, the ability to achieve
orgasm must inevitably arrive. Until that time, and particularly during
intercourse, _one must put the matter out of one’s mind entirely_.
The growth of a woman’s ability to have orgasm is a natural growth. It
has been impeded by her psychic attitudes; it resumes its development
when these attitudes change. It is as natural a move as the move
from winter to spring. Gradually she finds herself allowing her new
tenderness and concern for her husband to become a part of the meaning
of her sexual embrace. She sees and feels the pleasure her sexual
thawing brings him, and this process becomes circular, his increased
pleasure giving her more pleasure. And with his pleasure in mind she
now seeks out more and more those things that please him, and her
exploration leads inevitably to the discovery that what pleases him
most, outside of his own sensations, is her pleasure. This mutual
spiraling of feeling ultimately climaxes in her unconscious decision
to give him the greatest psychological pleasure of all, her total
surrender to the delights he can bring her.
For many women the ability to surrender physically comes rather
swiftly; to others it is a very gradual process, as though the
unconscious mind needed to build up a reserve of reassurances before it
felt perfectly secure. In either case, but particularly in the latter,
they can be forewarned of one important thing: sexual thaw will not
proceed uninterruptedly; there is no straight line from frigidity to
true womanhood. I should like to explain this more fully.
When, in the sexual embrace, a woman allows herself to experience more
pleasure as her physical sensations increase, a part of her unconscious
mind very frequently takes alarm and causes her to draw back from any
further immediate advance.
If you stop to ponder this point you will find it readily
understandable in terms of our former discussions. The experiences
and relationships upon which frigidity is based took place a long
time ago, often in very early childhood. They occasioned fear in the
child, fear of sexuality, of surrender to one’s sensual impulses, or
powerful guilt. Now, as one starts to move toward a resumption of one’s
sensuality, it is almost certain that these irrational, buried fears
will try to reassert themselves.
In most cases it is not necessary to uncover the childhood incidents
upon which these fears were based. If one will insist on pursuing
the techniques for inner change I have described here, these fears
will finally become inoperative in the sexual area. It is, however,
necessary to know that you _are_ experiencing such fears. Generally
speaking, they do not show themselves directly. A woman will not say to
herself: “That new sensual experience I had last night is causing me
alarm.”
The fear separates itself from the sensual experience and expresses
itself indirectly. The woman may find herself once again becoming
quarrelsome, critical of her husband; old feelings of deprivation or of
inferiority may reassert themselves with apparently new vigor. And the
new sensual capacity may retire once more from view. The reason: the
old defenses are protecting one against the new femininity.
Such anxiety reactions, I wish to make clear, should not give any
real cause for concern. Indeed, one does not have to analyze them or
to investigate them. One merely has to be _aware_ that they _are_ the
result of the new advance in sensuality, the new ability to surrender
oneself a bit more completely than formerly. Advance of this kind is
never lost in any final sense.
Let me give you an example of a typical reaction to such an advance.
The patient was of the type I call the clitoridal woman. Her orgasm had
been exclusively clitoral. Together we had covered the ground that I
have presented in this section. She had been able to air her feelings
about men and about woman’s lot; she had corrected her view of men and,
in a very real way, had begun to view her husband with the eyes of a
loving woman. Then one day she came to me in great excitement. It was
unmistakable, she told me; during last night’s love-making she had
felt, for the first time in her life, distinctly pleasurable vaginal
sensations.
But in the next session her attitude was entirely different. She had
had a quarrel with her husband over some trivial matter, and she
forthwith launched into the kind of tirade against men I had not heard
from her for several sessions.
After letting her air her feelings, I pointed out to her the possible
connection between her new sensual experience and her regression to
her old defenses. She was incredulous and remained so until, a week
later, the episode repeated itself in its entirety: vaginal sensations
and delight, followed quickly by a quarrel and ill feelings toward her
husband. Forewarned, she was now on guard for such negative reactions,
and when they did appear, knowing their significance, she was able to
handle them, prevent herself from actually acting out her irrational
feelings by quarreling with her husband.
In making the above point I do not wish to be misunderstood or
thought to be contradicting myself. I am not advising women to fixate
obsessively on their new sexual sensations. However, noticing such new
experiences will be unavoidable, and I am simply saying that it is
helpful to know that they may be followed by minor neurotic regressions.
The above observations now lead me to a closely related matter which I
consider to be of central importance.
In the move toward womanhood there comes a juncture in most cases
which can be called “the danger point.” When a woman is working with
a therapist on her problem, the danger when she reaches this point is
minimized by the fact that her therapist is aware of the problem and
can usually help her to handle it when it arises. If a woman is working
on her problem by herself, however, she should be strongly forewarned
of her potential reaction.
This danger point generally comes when a woman who has suffered from
frigidity has at last allowed herself to experience orgasm for the
first time. Her immediate reaction is one of tremendous relief. But
this is almost always followed by the same kind of regression I have
described above; only this time the pull-back from her own advance and
from her husband is far more powerful. We have seen in some of the case
histories in the last section just how dangerous this period can be to
the entire relationship. Indeed, the wife may at this point precipitate
a crisis of such severity that the marriage itself is endangered.
The form the difficulty takes is always individual; it is usually an
exaggerated version of the particular woman’s most typical neurotic
characteristic. If she is argumentative, she is apt to start a fight
of proportions heretofore undreamed of. If her tendency is to become
depressed, her melancholy can become very, very profound indeed. If
she is critical and carping, she can make Craig’s wife appear to be a
normal, healthy woman.
I am not exaggerating. It is not impossible that many divorces are
caused by wives who, by the natural reassurance that marriage to a
tender husband often brings, have moved close to their true natures
all unwittingly. They achieve orgasm; and then, without the benefit of
any insight, the intense anxiety reaction sets in, causing a powerful
desire to flee from the frightening situation.
The pull-back, of course, is caused by an exacerbation of early fears
brought on by the orgasmic experience. But again I must emphasize
that the chief danger during this period of reaction lies in the fact
that the woman sees no connection between her emotional upset and
the successful sexual experience she has just achieved. Why should
she see such a connection? Orgasm is what she has been consciously
waiting for, has it not? It would only be surprising if she did see a
connection between the two experiences.
Her emotional outburst represents, at this point, an inner panic.
Consider this: in the course of growing up it took her years to
construct a defensive system against a feminine sensuality which she
had learned was dangerous or wicked. Though this defensive system (her
frigidity, her psychological rejection of men, etc.) had deprived
her of much, it had at least allowed her to feel secure in some deep
manner; she has maintained her defenses in order to hold onto her
feeling of unconscious security.
And now, with orgasm, she feels all these defenses swept away in a
moment. She feels exposed, guilty, naked to her imaginary enemy,
tempted to surrender to him completely. In her panic she forgets the
advance she has been making, the revaluation of her attitude toward
men, children, womanhood.
She cannot admit the irrational nature of her unconscious fear, even to
herself, so she represses it and creates an exterior diversion. Real
trouble is always an excellent defense against insight.
In the case histories I have given of frigid women you will recall
that the discovery of true feminine sexuality within her often brought
a woman to therapy. In a sense the therapist, at the beginning,
represents a safe harbor, a protection against the woman’s frightening
femininity. Coming for help is, in part, a kind of flight in itself; a
search for a place to hide.
When women do not understand the nature of their actions in such cases,
the flight can take a potentially harmful direction. I have known some
who “fall in love” with another man at this juncture. Others feel
that they have really discovered just how incompatible their husbands
are and think seriously of divorce. Still others develop somatic
difficulties, sometimes serious ones. I know two women who had had
tuberculosis during adolescence and who both broke down again during
this “danger point.” In both cases their disease had been considered
totally arrested.
I realize, of course, that such reactions sound alarming to a reader.
However, my intention in stating the facts here is not to frighten
but to forewarn. There is nothing in _reality_ to be alarmed about.
Feelings are not reality. But a woman must be certain that she does not
act upon her feelings. The only danger is that she might.
But, I am often asked, how can one cope with such fears, fears so deep
one does not even dare to let them into the conscious mind? The answer
is that, generally speaking, you do not have to cope with them in any
active way. They will pass. All you have to do is to sit tight, so to
speak. The unconscious will in fairly short order (a week, a month)
calm down.
Reality, a good reality, can prove to the infantile unconscious that it
has nothing to fear. When one has quieted again, resumed the straight
line of progress one had been pursuing, orgasm will occur again.
This time the reaction of alarm is generally far less. By the third
and fourth times it has become virtually nonexistent. The neurotic,
defensive portion of one’s mind has then been permanently disarmed.
* * * * *
All frigidities are basically related. We could prescribe no general
approach that would be helpful if this were not so. However, I have
found that there are specific measures that can be of great value if
applied to the individual kinds of frigidity. Indeed, if these measures
are omitted, the return to full feminine maturity can be slowed down
dramatically or even stopped, at least on the sexual level.
I must warn once again, however, that one should be careful to put
no reliance on these techniques if they are not combined with the
“feeling through” and revaluative processes I have described. With
this in mind, then, let us examine these measures that can be taken by
individual types.
First let us look at the _masculine type_. As we have seen both in our
abstract description and in our case-history approach to this type, the
only method of gratification possible for this woman is clitoral. She
achieves climax through self-masturbation or through masturbation by
her husband. She has few if any vaginal sensations during intercourse,
and her orgasmic reactions are confined entirely to the clitoris. This
is so even if she is able to establish contact between her clitoris
and her husband’s penis in intercourse. In most cases vaginal entrance
of the penis is a matter of indifference to such women; to some it is
actively disliked.
We have seen how women establish this erotic primacy of the clitoris.
Because of early fears connected with becoming women they have firmly
rejected the vagina. They have held onto infantile and pubertal
masturbation long past the point when it is normal for a girl to give
it up.
Now, with a new evaluation of the meaning of feminine sexuality, with
a new tenderness and warmth toward their husbands available to them,
the time at length comes when it is possible for them to switch from
clitoral sensations to vaginal. However, the pathways for satisfaction
have been set up for many years, the “habit” of clitoral climax has
been deeply established. What should they do?
We have found that, if the clitoridal woman wishes to achieve a more
mature form of sexual satisfaction she may be aided in reaching her
goal if she can give up the form of gratification she now employs. This
form of gratification still symbolizes an attachment to the earlier
form of sexuality. For that reason, of course, it is a defense against
the type of sexuality that stands for psychic maturity. The simple
decision to abandon the less mature form of gratification often
signifies a deep decision within a woman: the decision to take the
final step toward womanhood.
On the other hand, many women experience the abandonment of clitoral
gratification as a keen deprivation and deeply resent it. In such cases
the resentment signifies that they have not sufficiently “felt through”
their childhood defenses against femininity.
Obviously there are only two possible steps to take: one can continue
the practice of masturbation or one can examine the resentment that
is caused by giving it up. If a woman decides on the first step,
progress toward the goal of vaginal orgasm may be slowed down or halted
completely.
If, however, one decides to examine the resentment more closely, using
the “feeling through” technique I have described, the bases upon
which the resentment rests may be discovered and disposed of, just
as resentments against men and against motherhood were disposed of.
Indeed, many of the same feelings, though now more specifically related
to sexuality, often come out.
Let me give an example. A patient with a clitoridal fixation had worked
through many of her negative feelings toward her husband; she had seen
that these feelings had been based on an irrational envy and fear of
men and a depreciation of women. Her progress, however, seemed to halt
completely when she attempted to give up clitoral masturbation.
All of her early feelings toward men returned, only now they referred
to the act of intercourse. Men were the lucky ones; they were on top.
Just as in life. Woman’s classical sexual position in our civilization
(on the bottom) was “degrading and humiliating.” It represented her
position vis-à-vis men in life. As in life, men were the ones for whom
irresponsible enjoyment was designed; no wonder they could enjoy sex so
much; and they couldn’t get pregnant; they didn’t have to menstruate,
etc., etc.
She aired these irrational feelings quite completely and saw them for
what they were. She saw that they were a recapitulation, in sexual
terms, of the negative feelings she had expressed earlier toward
men. She realized, too, that her feeling that it was humiliating and
degrading to be “on the bottom” really showed her deep distress, fear
of, and underlying depression about what she took to be woman’s role in
life.
The patient was rather surprised to see these irrational feelings
reappearing. However, because of her earlier work on her psychological
defenses, it was not too difficult for her to dispose of these negative
attitudes toward the sexual act and to integrate her positive feelings
about womanhood with woman’s sexual role. At that point she was not far
from achieving vaginal orgasm. Within a month or so she had achieved it.
When a woman consciously abandons clitoral gratification in favor of
her search for a deeper and more abiding joy, the switch from clitoris
to vagina usually takes place gradually. I have known cases in which it
has happened rather quickly, but it is more frequently a matter of two,
three, or even more months.
One further word on this type: the clitoridal woman may discover that
she cannot take the final step to vaginal primacy alone. She may need
direct and expert counsel. This should in no way discourage her. The
problem is a deep-seated one, but it almost certainly can be resolved.
If after a few months of trying to handle the problem alone one finds
out that too little progress is being achieved, I strongly urge that
outside help be sought (see Addenda I, page 260, for methods of
obtaining the correct kind of aid).
I have heard the therapy for _total frigidity_ described as “a problem
in rerearing.” Recalling the case history of Patricia Agnew, one can
easily see why this phrase is so apt. The causes of this kind of
frigidity go back to infancy. Punishment for infantile masturbation
and/or an overly strong early fixation on the male parent causes the
child to repress her sexual feeling entirely. She does not go through,
in any complete way, the normal stages of psycho-sexual development; a
part of her, the sensual and sexual part, remains frozen in the bud.
In my opinion, psychotherapy is frequently indicated when the frigidity
is of this total type. The sexual aspect of the problem is sometimes
too deeply seated for the individual to handle alone.
However, I know of several women who, when therapy was not possible,
were able to make great strides toward truly feminine values and
behavior by adopting the procedures described in this section. Though
some of them were not able to achieve orgasm, the psychological change
they were able to effect in their personalities added greatly to their
general happiness and security in marriage. A few even were able to
achieve orgasm.
For women with this form and degree of frigidity who wish to or must
attempt to approach their problem without outside aid, I should like to
point out that if general sexual development is resumed it will tend
to recapitulate the stages of psycho-sexual growth we have described.
Thus we find that when such women, through insight, are once again
able to experience sensual feeling they sometimes go through a period
of self-masturbation. Recall that this stage had been omitted in their
development.
I should like to emphasize that, in terms of the final resolution of
her sexual frigidity, this masturbation is perfectly normal for this
kind of woman--just as it is contraindicated for the masculine or
clitoridal woman. The totally frigid woman is making up for phases
of development she had missed in growing up. Guilt feelings about
masturbation in such cases are harmful, and the ego of the individual
can be put in the service of overcoming such emotions. For those who
have moral feelings against masturbation it is sometimes helpful
to realize that modern scientific findings indicate that societal
prohibitions against it were partly based on insufficient and incorrect
information. It was believed for centuries that pubertal or infantile
masturbation was harmful physically and mentally. It has now been
clearly demonstrated, however, that the only harm of any kind that can
come from masturbation is the psychological harm that is caused by
guilt feelings connected with it.
The fact is that, in attempting to establish her lost sexuality,
the totally frigid woman may be helped by encouraging, any
sensuality, however meager, she may discover in herself, whether it
is psychological or physical. The sensuous feelings engendered by
sun-bathing, of the press of the earth under one when lying down in a
field or under a tree, the soft beauty of the moon on a hazy night, the
warmth and coziness of a fireplace as the rain beats upon the roof--if
she will allow her body and mind to enjoy these kinds of things, they
can help to awaken her dormant sensuality, can help her to move back
from her dusty sensationless condition toward a reappreciation of the
glory of the senses.
Some women may discover (if they can consciously dispense with their
inhibitions or with a hindering sense of propriety) that they are
able to experience sensual feelings of a moderately keen nature in
areas which are secondarily erotic. During our work together one woman
suddenly discovered that she enjoyed having her back stroked by her
husband. Another discovered that though she could not enjoy kissing
her husband if she was in bed with him she could if she remained
fully clothed in the living room. A third was able to respond quite
strongly to clitoral stroking if she had a drink of liquor with her
husband beforehand. In each case the sensual capacities described in
these women preceded their work with me. But it was only when they
realized that they possessed unexplored potentialities and that these
could be used to enrichen their sensual lives, to move them closer to
the ultimate experience of love, did they dare to take their first
tentative steps toward maturity.
As we have observed, _partial frigidity_ includes those degrees of
frigidity that lie between total frigidity and normalcy. This includes
such a large range of sexual reaction (or the lack of it) that it would
not be possible to describe specific measures that would be helpful in
all cases.
However, those who find they are closer to total frigidity on this
scale than to normalcy often discover that the general techniques just
described are helpful. Many of these, if they persevere, will find that
they will ultimately achieve orgasm without requiring psychotherapy.
Others, after determining the distance they can go on their own, may
wish to seek outside help.
For those who lie closer to normal feminine sexual reactions it is
usually sufficient to persist in the techniques for self-discovery and
self-realization described earlier in this section.
As we saw when we examined _psychic frigidity_, it seemed to be the
exception that proved the rule. Women of this type are able to have
orgasms that are apparently normal. But they cannot form a relationship
with any man that will endure. They frequently select ineligible men as
partners or, if by chance the man happens to become eligible, they will
then flee the relationship. If they cannot flee it they become sexually
frigid.
We have found that women with this type of frigidity can help
themselves by denying themselves the easy gratification to which they
are accustomed. Their facile sensuality is a red herring used to
disguise their real fears from themselves. They can come to grips
with these fears only when they allow themselves to enter a close
psychological relationship with an eligible member of the opposite sex.
* * * * *
I have called the steps by which a woman moves from frigidity to
emotional and sexual maturity a “process.” Once really started, it
tends, almost by inertia, to complete itself, needing only a kind of
minimal guidance from one’s intelligence and a few specific facts.
For the sake of clarity, then, let us review what the steps in this
process are.
It is launched by the surfacing of negative emotions and fantasies from
which the frigid woman has been hiding. These emotions and fantasies
reflect an underlying attitude toward the opposite sex which is based
on early childhood fears and misunderstandings and which is seriously
affecting one’s ability to love. As the emotions are exposed to full
view they lose their power for harm, for it is only when they are
partially or totally hidden from oneself that their primitive force
is dangerous. When they are exposed to the light of intelligence and
judgment, their power over one can at first be greatly reduced and
finally can be disposed of entirely.
When all or most of one’s negative daydreams and emotions have been
exposed, step two can be taken. This is a revaluation of the male in
terms of his real nature and real goals. We saw that his real nature
is basically aggressive, and one of his chief aims in life is to put
this aggression to work for his wife and family. Viewed from this
standpoint, man’s differences from woman are seen in their true light.
The frigid woman, from this revaluation, learns that she can now let
down her defenses, knowing that her husband, far from being hostile or
wishing to enslave or exploit her, is her loving ally. She sees that
his once-feared aggression is the very thing that makes it really safe
for her to be a woman.
From this realization, on a deep level of her personality, the next
step follows naturally. She first achieves a tranquillity and then a
serenity she had not known before. This is followed by an acceptance of
and a surrender to her real role--that of a loving and wise wife who
glories in her womanly functions and in her man’s love.
The last step was seen to be the achievement of orgasm as a natural
sequel to her psychological maturation. This part of the process we
saw was attended by a resurgence of early anxiety when orgasm finally
occurred. This anxiety caused a desire to flee from the newly acquired
ability to love. However, the only danger at this juncture was seen to
be the possibility that the anxious woman might act upon her fears.
Forewarned of this reaction, she is forearmed, and by seeking further
insights and waiting out the anxiety she will find that it will
gradually subside completely.
These general steps, then, outline the process that can lead to
recovery. I can add little to them. I have seen this method work for
many women and I know of no other that will.
Patience and faith are the prime requisites for emotional maturation.
Nobody can name the time it will take for any given individual to cross
the bridge to womanhood. But that most women can cross it, there can be
no doubt. Those who have gone before make that point ultimately clear.
_Chapter 18_
THE ROLE OF THE MALE
When a woman decides to cross the bridge from frigidity to mature
femininity her husband’s attitudes, feelings, and reactions can be
all-important.
I said earlier that we have found that the man is rarely responsible
for his wife’s frigidity; that it developed long before he met
her. However, he must understand that, when she begins to assume
responsibility for her difficulty, responsibilities of a new kind are
thrust on him too. In the beginning at least, and contrary to what he
might expect of himself, he may not like these responsibilities at all.
He may find that he has a very negative attitude toward his wife’s
attempt to mature, that indeed he does not want her to.
It is very necessary for a man to understand the elements that make
his role appear to him to be very difficult during such a period. In
a sense, if the project is to succeed, he must be as aware of his
reactions as his wife is of hers.
What, then, are the main elements of his reactions?
In the first place, the husband of a frigid woman generally has a
great store of repressed resentment toward his wife. This is quite
understandable, of course. He has been the chief recipient of her very
strong negative feelings toward life, people, love, and sex.
As we have seen, the frigid woman has a strong tendency to blame others
for her difficulties. Her husband, doubtlessly, has received his full
quota of such irrational blame from her. He has also been the main
victim of all the other neurotic components of frigidity--the envy and
mistrust she has of the entire male sex, the endless complaints she
directs against her household duties, her general inability to handle
even the trivia of every woman’s everyday life with any grace or ease.
In addition to her quarreling and complaints he has had to accept a
tremendous amount of emotional frustration. Frigidity does not permit
much honest or real interpersonal warmth, and the male has had to do
without a normal amount of affection. His sexual frustration, too, is
great. We saw in the case of the clitoridal woman just how laborious
and boring the act of love can become to the man. It is not necessary
to labor the point of how cumulatively bleak sexual intercourse with an
unresponding partner can become.
All this (and more) that a man has gone through with a frigid wife
must have a very definite effect on him. He builds up attitudes and
develops defenses which allow him to preserve his equilibrium within
the framework of his marriage as it is.
Some of these defenses are psychological, some external.
The chief psychological defense he uses is a general withdrawal; he
pulls back from “caring” about the unhappy circumstances of his married
life. He may cease to react, either to his wife’s attacks on him or
to her general complaints. He may cease, too, to care very much about
the failure of their sexual life. His withdrawal from the problem
may be marked by actual sexual impotence with his wife. Or he may,
in response to his wife’s rejection of sex, take a purely mechanical
attitude toward intercourse, getting it over with as quickly as
possible, taking it like a hurried but necessary meal.
His external defenses against his home life may be a withdrawal from
it. He may reorganize his social life around a men’s social or athletic
club, spending a great deal of time with “the boys.” He may take to
drinking at bars in the evening, forming a circle of cronies whom he
likes to be with. He may do any of a number of things that take him out
of his home in the evening and give him substitute pleasures.
Now of course there is nothing the least bit reprehensible about
the erection of such defenses if one’s marriage and home life are
unsatisfactory. Indeed, such defenses may keep a marriage together by
allowing the man to get some compensatory pleasures out of life.
One husband said just this in so many words to me recently. “If I
hadn’t taken a firm stand within myself,” he told me, “the marriage
would have broken up long ago. I simply decided that, if things were
to work out at all, I just had to pull back from her and not take what
she said to me seriously. If I went on believing half of the attacks
she made on me I couldn’t have lived with myself. And since sex was
no fun, what was there left between us? I’ve made up a social life of
sorts outside of the family for myself. At least I get a little fun out
of life, and since I’m not around mainly I’m not boring her so much and
she’s not boring me so much.”
But the danger is that such defenses and such compensatory activities
will be held onto even if the marriage has been given a chance to turn
from a meaningless one into a deeply meaningful and joyful one. A
husband who wishes to help his wife in her struggle to become a woman,
who wishes to make a marriage where only the semblance of one now
exists, must now examine his attitudes with great honesty, courage, and
thoroughness.
The way ahead of him at the beginning will not be by any means clear
or easygoing. The initial progress of his wife as she undertakes to
change is often barely perceptible. Why should he have any hope that
anything new, exciting, or beautiful could develop from such tentative
starts? And what motive can he develop to turn back, emotionally and
sexually, to a woman who has so often and so thoroughly rejected and
frustrated him? A very strong part of him feels that he has worked
out a precarious inner and outer equilibrium which at least keeps
this semblance of marriage from falling apart entirely. He generally
actively resents the demand on him to alter his attitude, to see his
wife through the inner odyssey on which she now wishes to embark.
We have found that at such a juncture a husband is often helped to
alter his defensive attitude by seriously reflecting on the picture of
marriage and love he had when he first fell in love with his wife. He
should then compare that image of a relationship with the custom-staled
and defeated feelings he has now, compare his first hopes of creatively
shared lives with the empty realities of the present, the time-wasting,
essentially loveless activities he now engages in.
Memories and thoughts of this kind can make him angry, the way a _man_
can get angry, healthfully and aggressively; not at his wife, who now
wants to make up for all that has been lost, but at himself for his
passive acceptance and easy adjustment to a defeated life, a life that
has become a resigned and pointless existence. Such anger is good
because it can clear his inner atmosphere; it can start him back with
renewed resolution on the road to his real desires. For no man who
feels worthy of his manhood ever really accepts a half existence in
love of the kind I have just depicted.
We have found, too, that such husbands can remotivate themselves if
they will contemplate the potentialities of womanhood toward which
their wives now consciously aspire. I have tried throughout this
book to show, in some of their variety, the magnificent and exciting
qualities that characterize true womanhood. I have shown how giving
women can be in their love, how supportive, how filled with deep warmth
and understanding. And I have tried to show how, in sex itself, there
is no responsiveness that can compare even remotely with that of a
loved and emotionally secure woman. If at this critical point in his
marriage a man can clarify what he really wants and then develop the
patience to wait for it, he will be most thoroughly rewarded.
Patience is _very_ important. He will need all of it he can muster
for a time and, at certain points, he may have to remind himself
hard of the rewards at the end of the journey. He can, we find, be
greatly helped by having as thorough a knowledge as possible of the
psychological problems his wife will encounter in her hegira to
womanhood.
I have shown that the path to feminine maturity is not a straight one.
The traveler will often become frightened of the very progress she is
making and for a short time will tend to pull back into her former
neurotic defenses. At such a point the husband must be very clear that
she has not pulled back for good.
The critical period, as we have seen, in a woman’s forward march,
the thing that is apt to make her pull back most strongly and with
most anxiety, is her first encounter with real orgasm. However, the
husband must realize once more that this regression is temporary, too,
even though it lasts for several weeks or, in some cases, longer. The
solicitude of her husband at this point and the reassurance she gets
from the knowledge of his love can be the main factors in her final
victory over her difficulty.
Many psychiatrists make it a practice to discuss with husbands,
whenever it is feasible, the importance of their role in the complete
recovery of their wives. It is a very rare man who, after such
discussions, cannot or will not mobilize his resources to aid his wife
and to see her through her hard struggle. And I know of no woman who
has won a victory over her frigidity who has ignored the fact that her
husband’s help was decisive.
In addition to changing his defensive attitude toward his wife (or
perhaps searching for and recapturing his earlier feelings toward
her), in what other ways can a husband be helpful to his wife as she
struggles toward maturity?
I would say that the primary virtue he should cultivate in himself is
sensitivity, particularly sensitivity to any advances or changes in her
manner of relating to him, to their children, or to friends in their
immediate circle. She is trying to rid herself of a lifelong mistrust
of men and fear of them. She is trying to dare to be soft, warm, and
giving. Every recognition she gets for her efforts will be like manna
to her. In many ways she is like a frightened child, and only total
acceptance can give her enough courage to advance further.
Let me give a simple example of what I mean: The relationship between
a woman patient of mine and her husband had, in the course of their
five-year marriage, deteriorated sadly. In their courtship days
they had been in the habit of giving each other gifts, frequent and
personally meaningful gifts. But now, even on birthdays, they bought
presents “for the home” rather than for each other.
During the course of our work the wife, one cold winter day, on the
spur of a tender moment, bought her husband a very bright yellow scarf
and presented it to him that night. I learned later from him that his
first impulse on receiving the gift was to laugh. He dressed most
conservatively, and the garish scarf was very much out of keeping with
his tastes.
He did not laugh, however, realizing that the gift was an expression of
something new in his wife, that it showed a new concern for him and an
attempt to begin to show it. Instead he kissed her tenderly and wore
the scarf to his office the next day. When he came home that night he
presented her with a lovely platinum watch of a make he had once heard
her admire. “She looked down for a moment,” he told me, “as though she
were confused, and then she looked up at me and put her arms around
me and wept a very long time.” Those tears, of course, were the sure
beginning of a deep thaw. His sensitivity to his wife’s need at this
point in her life had been a decisive element, and her progress from
that point on was greatly accelerated.
In counseling husbands to be sensitively attentive to their wives’
needs during this period of change I must warn against one thing.
Insincerity or artificiality will not work at all, indeed could
actually be harmful. Women are deeply intuitive and can detect any
hypocritical attempt to manipulate them. It is not wise to try to
express love if you do not feel it. A man who cannot experience real
feeling toward his wife should put his main effort into self-inquiry.
He may discover that the anger and hurt that have built up in him
during the unhappy years that are past are too great to handle alone
and he may wish to discuss these intransigent feelings with a counselor
or psychiatrist.
I know of one man who, paying lip service to the idea of helping his
wife, put in a weekly order at the local florist shop for flowers. When
in the next three months she had received “enough,” as she put it, “for
an elaborate funeral,” she begged him to stop sending them.
Another man, having ignored any social life with his wife for
years, was told that she should get away from her household duties
occasionally. He suddenly insisted, therefore, on dragging her on a
round of night clubs and theater parties that would have exhausted
Elsa Maxwell. His wife was essentially rather shy and withdrawn and of
course resented this enforced and artificial approach to her real needs.
Women rightly consider these kinds of gestures a mockery, an expression
of a latent hostility toward them rather than as an expression of love.
Of course women love luxury, going out, gifts--but only when they
express a sensitive awareness on the part of the giver. A rule of thumb
that works is to do what one feels but to refrain firmly from doing
what one doesn’t feel. Somebody once said that the proper mixture for
the real lover is 80 per cent male aggression and 20 per cent feminine
sensitivity. The formula has much to recommend it.
One important thing that husbands and wives must learn to do is to
share their deeper thoughts, problems, and feelings with one another.
Over the years the general withdrawal of both partners has made
communication of any kind most superficial, and hope of any important
contact through conversation has been abandoned almost entirely. When
the wife has finally told her husband of her determination to attack
her problem frontally, the couple now have a new opportunity for
establishing deep lines of communication. If the husband can seize on
this new chance, divest himself of his lonely and habitual reticence,
he can help his wife and their entire relationship immeasurably.
Everything may be discussed in such conversations, although one should
avoid any recrimination or “confessions” that would hurt the other.
Conversation about one’s emotional or reality difficulties, about one’s
loneliness, plans, successes, fears, and hopes, are deeply moving to a
woman. If a man can learn to share his real inner life with his wife it
will help her to realize once more the importance of the woman’s role,
make her know that she has her husband’s confidence in those things
that are of real importance to him.
As I have pointed out, frigid women have little knowledge of what
men are really like. Basically they see men as “powers,” without
worries or fears. When they learn from their husbands’ own lips their
real feelings, these women are very greatly aided in changing their
underlying attitudes.
One woman told me that her whole marriage-long conception of her
husband had been completely altered by one emotional confession from
him. She had told him that she had finally realized her frigidity had
been the cause of the problem between them and that she had determined
to attempt to change herself. He listened quietly as she talked and was
silent for a moment when she finished. Then he said in a low voice:
“I have been terribly lonely without you.” This honest communication
reached past all her neurotic defenses, informed her simply and
directly how important her decision was to him, how human and needful
the husband she had feared and rejected really was.
It is in such real, such personal exchanges with his wife that a man
most often begins to reap the rewards his wife’s decision to change
will bring him. As he expresses himself more and her security in him
deepens, he begins to encounter the depths of tranquillity that have
always lain beneath her defensive exterior; he begins to feel her great
capacity to give him something that he has missed, missed terribly--a
companionship, support, and love that ask for nothing but to be needed.
In this way a new and profound mutuality develops and, cleared of the
fears that have impeded it, the real marriage between these two people
can begin to flourish.
In the sexual aspect of the marriage, as in its psychological aspect,
sensitivity is also the key word for the husband who wishes to help his
wife.
In every case of frigidity that I have encountered the sexual life
between husband and wife has, through the years, become an extremely
self-conscious one. The wife generally is acutely aware of every
genital sensation that she has or every sensation that she does not
have. Her chronic sense of failure is at the root of this hawk-like
attention to her reactions. Often this self-concern has been encouraged
by reading books that emphasize the mechanical aspects of sexual love,
giving her false hopes that somehow she is going to be able to solve
her orgastic problem if she can only get in the right position, make
the right movement, contract the right muscles at the right time, or
teach her husband the right techniques.
Under such circumstances it is impossible for a husband not to react to
his wife’s hyper-narcissism. He tends then to put his awareness of her
experience ahead of his own enjoyment. This is one of the prime reasons
why the sex act for both of them has become anxious and dull.
In sex one’s body can feel only its own raptures. Even the exquisite
sensation of giving the partner pleasure is psychological and, by
definition, important only when it heightens one’s pleasure, not when
it decreases it.
It is very important, therefore, for the husband to drop his
self-consciousness about his wife’s pleasures or lack of them during
intercourse. In fact, both must start with a clean slate on this score,
take the healthy natural view that sexual sensation is a self-centered,
even selfish, matter basically. Overconcern for the other can rob it of
its lusty spontaneity entirely.
This may strike a man as a new conception. In most books on married
sexuality the mutuality of the act is the point emphasized; such books
always speak glowingly of the pleasure one experiences in the other’s
reactions. When frigidity is present this “mutuality” can become a
mockery.
A woman suffering from frigidity will be very relieved if her husband
will make a gentle but blanket announcement to her that she is to drop
her entire concern with orgasm until it happens. I have pointed out
before that this indeed must be her working attitude before she has her
first orgasmic experience. For a husband to affirm that this attitude
is also his can be a great reassurance to her. She will then allow
herself to really enjoy his “selfish” ecstasy without neurotically
fixing on her own localized sensations. Indulging the deeply feminine
role of _giving_ pleasure can be more exciting to her than any other
thing.
Now a word about foreplay--in my opinion one of the most grossly
misunderstood words in the language. Many men, and women too, take it
to mean solely a duty-bound interval in which a man tries to arouse
a woman by physically caressing and kissing her. This mechanistic
interpretation is based on the oft-quoted statement that women are
slower to respond sexually than men and that it is the man’s duty to
arouse her.
I think it is absolutely necessary for this particular conception
of foreplay to be expanded considerably where women who have had
a sexual difficulty are concerned. As we have seen over and over
again, frigidity in women is caused by psychological problems of a
very specific kind. Any exclusively mechanical approach to these
difficulties is foredoomed to failure.
Husbands of women with a frigidity problem are well advised to consider
foreplay primarily a psychological rather than a physical matter.
If you will recall the stages of development the growing girl goes
through, you will remember that they culminate in adolescence. During
that stage a long romantic dream prepares the girl for real love. This
dream of romance never leaves a woman. Foreplay is most successful when
it arouses these dormant romantic feelings. Woman is truly an incurable
romantic.
But what does romance really mean to her? And how can the romantic
feeling be conjured up?
Romantic feelings are aroused in a woman when she feels that her
husband’s entire emotion is fixed on her tenderly and lovingly. She
feels romantic when all the other goals and needs and duties of life
are for the time being relinquished. In such a situation she dares to
relax, to loaf and invite her soul, to concentrate on her deep belief
that love is centrally important, the thing that gives life its meaning
and its beauty. Every woman, at the heart’s deep core, wishes to give
all for love.
Such a mood of romance cannot, of course, be bumped up suddenly, nor
can it be created by a man who feels cynical or abashed by it. To woo a
woman successfully, a man must believe in her dream of love and become
a passionate sharer in it.
Certain things that remove a couple for a while from the highly
goal-centered activities of daily life help to create this romantic
mood. A housewife will respond to a luxurious evening out; putting on
an evening gown can separate her from her housekeeping, penny-pinching
view of herself, and the sight of her husband in a tuxedo can fill
her romantic cup to the brim. A few champagnes and dancing to a good
orchestra, and the magic is complete.
Picnics together, too, can engender a deeply romantic feeling in a
wife. But of course the children should not be along. And the whole
thing should be carried off with a little style. Wine, a good one, is
a must, and the man should know beforehand of a fine and very private
spot for the picnic.
I have known several women who have broken through the barriers of
sexual frigidity during ocean cruises. These seem to represent the
romantic circumstance par excellence, and a husband who can afford them
should add them to his loving calculations.
In my opinion, husbands and wives should arrange their lives to get
some vacation time alone together. With even the best intentions the
duties and responsibilities of life close in on one, tend to take some
of the bloom off the rose. A week, a month if possible, alone together
can help to re-establish vitality and meaning in a marriage.
The fact that a man has stayed with a woman despite her frigidity
and the problems it causes is a testament to the abiding love he has
for her. If he will forget his old despair now that his wife has
taken responsibility in the relationship, call on his real manhood
to reassert itself in helping her to her goal, his rewards can be as
bounteous as femininity can bestow.
_Chapter 19_
THE LORE OF LOVE
In this book, as you have noted, I have taken a firm stand against
any mechanical approach to love or love-making. This represents the
psychiatric view of love and is based on the premise that frigidity is
psychological in nature and that the resolution of it must be therefore
a psychological one.
The mechanical approach is based on the premise that love-making is an
art or even a science that can be learned, as the piano or chemistry
can be learned. From the psychiatric view the so-called art of love is
instinctual. The perfectly free person, if one can be imagined, would,
if he loved and were loved in return, soon become a sophisticated
practitioner of this art with the barest of preparation.
I recall an anecdote that illustrates this point. It was told to me
by a sociologist who was conducting a survey of married couples in an
effort to find the correlation between premarital advice and sexual
happiness. While questioning one healthy couple whose marriage was
obviously happy, he asked the husband:
“And did your parents give you any advice?”
“Yes.”
“Which parent?”
“My father.”
“Did he give you a thorough briefing?”
Pause. “Yes, it was brief.” Pause. “And it was thorough.”
“What did he tell you?”
“You want his words?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“He said, ‘Everything goes.’”
However, such free spirits as this one are relatively rare in our
society. Usually more instruction is needed. Taboos against sexuality
have characterized Western civilization. The art of love, therefore,
seems to me to be largely the art of getting over societally induced
ignorance, superstition, and inhibition.
Here’s how I view the matter. When through the methods employed in this
section or through therapy one has at length achieved psychological
maturity and therefore vaginal orgasm is no longer blocked, an
examination of some of the technical information about love-making can
be helpful. Before that point, such lore tends to lead to an inhibiting
self-consciousness.
It is generally agreed by students of the matter that spontaneity in
sexual relations must never be lost. Married life tends to impose a
rather rigid pattern in all areas of living. Such routinization is a
necessity if the world’s work is to get done. For most people, for
example, it becomes necessary to breakfast every day at the same time,
in the same place, and in the same manner. If one allows this to happen
to sexuality one is imprisoning the unicorn, exposing love-making to a
loss of its magic.
Variety is the spice that married love often needs, and it takes no
great effort to be various in love-making. It takes only a sense of
its importance and the knowledge of a few minimal facts.
One method of preserving spontaneity is to prevent love-making from
always occurring at the same time. Evenings in most homes tend to
follow a pattern. Supper must be cooked, dishes must be done, children
must be put to bed. And then there’s television or guests. I have had
many men and women defend the proposition that, since love-making tends
to make them sleepy when it is finished, the last moments of the day
are by necessity the time for love.
But this is making convenience a necessity. And love is too beautiful,
too centrally important to be domesticated so. If it can laugh at
locksmiths, it can also, once every week or two, laugh behind locked
bedroom doors. Children have homework to do or a television program
to watch, and anyhow, it is good for them to realize that Mother and
Father spend some time alone and love to.
Dishes can wait occasionally, too, at least in the name of love. And
a television program is rarely so good or demanding that a delicious
sleepiness won’t improve it.
Desire often arises unbidden and for no apparently rational reason. Men
are more subject to outside stimuli than women and are perhaps more
uninhibited, so the inception of love-making at unroutine times may
most frequently originate with them. But women, too, when they feel the
urge should realize that they can initiate a passionate interlude and
should not prevent themselves from doing so. It is proper and good that
a woman should do this. And her husband will love it.
I am assuming that the partners in such delightfully off-hour trysts
are sensitive to each other’s responses. What every man and woman must
realize is that it is perfectly all right to say no if one is fatigued
or preoccupied. But the nay-saying must be gentle, and if it is so and
the partner who makes the advance is hurt, he or she must examine the
rejected feeling, take full responsibility for it, and dispose of it.
Holding onto such feelings causes one to fear making advances, and
this will deprive the relationship of one of the best techniques for
maintaining spontaneity. It is insensitive and unloving to force a
partner by sulking or other forms of psychological blackmail to satisfy
a need. It is far easier for the ardent one to wait; the time will come
soon enough; the fact that you have announced your desire has a delayed
reaction on your loved one.
Waking in the middle of the night, many men find themselves prepared
for love-making, the penis firmly erect. And many women love to be
awakened from their sleep to find themselves mistily, dreamily in the
embrace of love; the body on waking is often very sensual.
Changes on the time for love can be rung in a variety of ways, and it
is advisable to see that they are. Not too much effort is necessary;
the hour at the end of the day when one is preparing for sleep will
still remain the basic time for intercourse. It will need but an
occasional switch in time to keep this customary trysting hour from
losing its quality of ever-renewed excitement.
Another and perhaps even more basic technique for preserving the
spontaneity of sex is that of varying the position used during
intercourse. In most relationships one preferred position generally
evolves. If this position is always adopted, the feeling of a
monotonous repetitiveness can enter the love situation, and this must
be guarded against.
This fact has been recognized from earliest times, and efforts to
combat it have given rise through the centuries to a vast number of
books on the subject. Hindu, Greek, Roman, and Persian literature
record hundreds of sexual positions and animadversions, and if one
has a library of erotica available and is sufficiently curious these
positions may be studied. However, such a proliferation of detail can
become exhausting and even morbid and absurd--though perhaps gaily
absurd. Most of the modern books which dispense direct sexual advice
obtain their material from these ancient sources.
There are only five basic positions which have real relevance to most
couples. I am going to describe them so that when you encounter them or
wish yourself to change from your usual position you will not feel that
they are strange, awkward, or so exotic as to cause you feelings of
shyness, embarrassment, or guilt.
The first position, of course, is the ventro-ventral (or face to face)
position, with the man on top and the woman on the bottom with her
knees up. Not even the most puritanically reared person will demur at
this position, for it is the classical sexual position used in our
society.
It is, if used properly, perhaps the best position for sexual union. It
allows for deep penetration of the vagina by the penis, and because it
leaves the pelvic regions of both partners free, it allows for variety
in sexual movement, though the man has more freedom of movement in this
position than the woman.
There’s an old but apt joke about this position. A young chorus girl
asks an older one what her definition of a gentleman is. The older one
promptly replies: “One who leans on his elbows.” Men should remember
that this fact can be pertinent. The full weight of the heavy man can
be quite tiring even to a very passionate woman.
A pleasant variant of this position can be achieved if a pillow is
placed under the buttocks of the woman before intercourse. If it is
placed a little toward the small of the back, those women who receive
preliminary pleasure from friction between the clitoris and the penis
will find the contact easier to effect. If it is placed a bit forward
it will be very exciting to those who get a great deal of sensation
from pressure of the penis against the posterior walls of the vagina.
Generally in this classical position the woman simply spreads her
legs and raises them (lying with the legs straight down makes vaginal
entrance difficult for the male). Those who enjoy stimulation of the
posterior vaginal wall may lock their legs around their partner’s hips.
Those who in the initial stages of intercourse are most aroused by
clitoral stimulation may close their legs; in this position the man is
half kneeling, straddling his partner’s hips. This latter position is
not too comfortable for the man if it is maintained for long. A less
arduous position for the man is achieved if he straddles one of his
partner’s legs and enters the vagina at a slightly oblique angle. This
allows the woman to close the leg that is free, which gives maximum
contact of all portions of the vulva with the penis.
The next major position reverses the top-bottom roles. The woman, in
this variant, is on the top, the man on the bottom.
Many couples feel inhibited about this position. The man will often
feel “feminized,” the woman “masculinized.” Such relativistic concepts
of what is male and what is female could actually have any application
only if this were the chief position in which a couple had intercourse.
And even this fact could be altered by circumstance; for example, the
woman might be physically very small and the man very large and heavy.
This position is adopted either as a spontaneous change for variety’s
sake or because the woman may be feeling far more energetic than the
man at the moment; the partner on top, of course, does the major
portion of the moving. Psychologically this position can represent an
expression of tenderness on the woman’s part. If her husband feels
sensual but fatigued, she can give him pleasure without making it
necessary for him to develop the usual amount of male aggressiveness.
Such a passive role can be exciting to a man on occasion, and he should
allow himself to indulge it.
In this position the woman may straddle her husband’s hips; this
occasions very deep penetration, and may be particularly pleasurable
because since she is in charge she may feel freer to exert more than
the usual pressure of the penis against the cervix. In this position,
too, she may lie on top of her husband, her legs supported by his,
or she may lie between his legs. In these two latter positions the
clitoris can be brought into very close contact with the penis, and
this is of course very pleasant for women who become aroused in this
fashion.
Another alternative for love-making is the face to face and sideways
position. In this position, since the woman is generally the lighter of
the two, one of her legs is placed over the man’s hips; this allows him
to insert his penis at a slightly oblique angle. Pillows for head and
shoulder are generally necessary if this position is maintained for the
entire intercourse.
The next position is the dorso-ventral position, in which the
man’s penis enters the woman’s vagina from the back. If the entire
intercourse is performed while lying sideways, this is perhaps the most
“restful” of all positions. For obvious reasons it is sometimes the
preferred form for intercourse during pregnancy.
This position is often extremely exciting to a man. I do not know
exactly why this is so, though it has been suggested that the
position suggests the “animality” of pure lust. And this idea could
be stimulated by the fact that the position is the familiar one that
animals take. Or perhaps the fact that the partners are not face to
face may remove some of the personal factor from the sexual embrace,
giving it a more primordial and impersonal character. This may be the
reason men may find it more enjoyable than women, their sexual natures
being, as we have seen, somewhat more deeply rooted in their biology
than the woman’s sexual nature. I must emphasize, however, that these
ideas are merely speculative.
The dorso-ventral position can also be assumed with the woman kneeling,
or standing up and bending over, supporting herself against a chair
or wall with her hands. It can be achieved less athletically if the
man sits on a chair and his partner sits on his lap, although this
obviously allows for less movement by both.
The last general position I shall describe here is the standing
position. It is a particularly arduous position for the male; he
generally must bend his knees slightly to enter and must hold onto his
partner’s buttocks to maintain entrance.
I think these are the major sexual positions which it is relevant to
know and to adopt when the mood is upon one. Most of the “hundreds” of
others described in the literature of antiquity are subtle variations
of these and have no particular application to the love-making a
modern couple might engage in. Indeed, I think it is apparent that any
excessive preoccupation with such nuances could indicate a morbidity,
may be a confession that the person, far from having achieved sexual
maturity, is in some profound way impotent.
There is one further point I should like to make about these positions.
While men can usually have an orgasm in any position, many women, if
not most, achieve it most completely and satisfyingly in one favorite
position. This is perfectly consonant with full psychological and
sexual maturity, and one should in no wise feel the slightest bit
apologetic about it. It is absolutely advisable to make this fact known
to one’s partner in love. He will, of course, if you are both feeling
positionally experimental, return to the position you prefer when you
are ready to have your climax.
* * * * *
A psychiatrist is asked a wide variety of questions about sexuality
by his patients. Here are some of the more frequent areas about which
individuals seem to wish further information:
(1) _Frequency of intercourse_
There are no rules whatever about this, though suggestions about what
is “normal” have been made from earliest times. Mohammed the Prophet
stated that once a week was best; Martin Luther found that twice a week
“does harm neither to her nor to me.”
In these days of sociological studies there have of course been endless
attempts to find the statistical norm for frequency of intercourse.
The Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1933 released figures showing
that, of ten thousand cases investigated, sexual intercourse occurred
from one to three times per week--4 per cent had intercourse one or
more times daily. Kinsey found that frequency depended greatly on the
age of the husband; men between twenty-one and twenty-five showed an
intercourse rate of just over three times per week; those between
thirty-one and thirty-five showed a frequency rate of a little more
than twice a week; those aged forty-one to forty-five had intercourse
on an average of one and one half times a week; and men over fifty-six
averaged less than once a week.
These studies, of course, always show wide variations in individual
cases.
In my opinion frequency of intercourse is entirely an individual
matter. The only criterion of any importance is that both partners feel
completely satisfied with the amount of intercourse they are having.
If one of the partners is dissatisfied, the subject should be open for
discussion in a very frank manner. No cause for feelings of rejection
by a partner should be allowed to develop in silence.
There will always be periods in which, because of exterior
circumstances (pregnancy, business worries, sickness, etc.), the rate
of intercourse in any marriage may slow down or stop for a while.
(2) _Variations in woman’s sexual desire_
There are such variations, as far as most of the research undertaken
so far can determine. Katherine Davis, in a study of one thousand
married women, and studies by Marie Stokes, Therese Benedek, and others
indicate that the desire of women vary during the menstrual cycle.
According to Hannah and Abraham Stone, who have made a study of a
large number of women, “Most … state that their erotic impulses are
increased either a few days before the onset of the menstrual flow or,
more usually, right after menstruation, although the latter rise may be
partly due to the abstinence which is generally maintained during the
menstrual week.” Stokes reported also a second rise of sexual desire at
some point in the middle of the menstrual month. There are apparently
individual differences in the cycle of desire, and a woman can best
determine for herself her own particular rhythm.
There is much to be learned about this matter. The relationship between
hormonal secretion and female sexuality and “femininity” has been most
recently studied by Therese Benedek in her book _Psychosexual Functions
in Women_. This is a technical book, but anyone interested in this
aspect of the subject will find the material fascinating.
As far as can be determined, there is no corresponding cycle of desire
in the male.
(3) _Length of intercourse_
This is entirely an individual matter. It varies with each couple and
often with each intercourse. Indeed, this variability in time can add
to the spontaneity factor in intercourse.
There seems to be only one basic rule governing the length of time; to
see that the other partner achieves orgasm if it is desired. This often
means that the husband must postpone his climax until the wife achieves
hers. Most men are able to learn to control the moment at which they
reach orgasm and therefore can wait until their wives are ready.
Orgasm in unison is widely held to be the most desirable form of
climax. However, I have had many people of both sexes report that they
preferred to reach climax immediately before or immediately after their
partners. Some say that they are distracted by the other’s movements
at this juncture. Others say that they profoundly enjoy the partner’s
excitement and that they prefer to have a modicum of ego left to
experience it more completely.
Some women have two or more orgasms to their husband’s one. By far the
majority of men have only one orgasm per intercourse. If on occasion
a man has his ejaculation before the woman achieves her climax, she
will often continue her movements until she is satisfied. However,
the glans penis (head of the penis) of many men becomes extremely
sensitive immediately after orgasm, and in that case the woman may have
to postpone her satisfaction until the next time. If she continues her
movements it may cause her husband to have unpleasant sensations, even
though he may still have an erection and thus appear to be able to
continue.
(4) _Limits to love-making_
I am often asked the question whether any sexual practice between
husband and wife could be considered “unhealthy” or “wrong.” In my
opinion, certain practices could be considered so, though I know I am
at variance with certain sexologists. A long discussion of the matter,
however, would take us into psychological and even perhaps moral realms
which I do not feel are pertinent to this book. As a rule of thumb,
I would say that any practice that does not culminate in intercourse
tends to be regressive and infantile if it becomes a chief method of
sexual expression. Also, insistence on any practice that cannot be
shared pleasurably by the partner is likewise regressive.
The so-called “polymorphus perverse” pleasures are aspects of foreplay
and not ends in themselves. The primacy of the oral, anal, onanistic,
or sado-masochistic forms of sexuality is a hallmark of the immature
personality. Another unmistakable sign of such immaturity (or even of
downright psychic illness) is the insistence on _any_ form of sexuality
not heartily endorsed by one’s partner.
(5) _Contraception_
To use or not to use contraceptives is a personal matter that every
individual must settle for himself.
When the responsibility for contraception is up to the woman, she
should always be prepared for intercourse whenever it is even remotely
possible. There is nothing so deadening to sexual excitement as the
woman who comes to love unprepared and must interrupt the process to
put her diaphragm on. If this is a repetitive situation in marital
life it is almost a certain sign that the woman has not yet accepted
her feminine role. The tacit assumption when you obtain a diaphragm is
that you are accepting the responsibility for contraception. There is
rarely any need, other than a negative one on the woman’s part, for
this to interfere or to impinge on sexual intercourse in any manner.
The husband is quite correct who interprets chronic remissiveness of
this sort as an unsolved problem of his wife.
ADDENDA I
Many women will find that with the methods prescribed here their
frigidity can be conquered. Some, however, will find that though they
can be helped by using these techniques they cannot achieve their goal
without outside help. Throughout the book I have tried to indicate the
kind of person and the kind of problem that may require additional
therapeutic aid, and I have tried to indicate that a person who needs
such outside help should feel no sense of shame about that fact nor
hesitancy about seeking it. Indeed, one of my chief reasons for writing
this book has been to open vistas hitherto unknown to many women. If
reading it has but started you on the road to mature femininity, its
chief function has been accomplished.
How does one decide whether outside aid is indicated?
There is no rule of thumb that will cover all cases. Some may decide
that they would prefer to start and finish their work on this problem
with a trained therapist. Others may start alone but find that
self-exploration, the surfacing of painful emotions and attitudes and
fantasies, is too difficult and confusing and decide to seek expert
guidance. Still others may find that though they can go a long
distance alone the final goal will elude them if they do not consult
with a trained worker in the field.
If and when one does decide that outside help is necessary, one
should know how to find qualified people in this field. The following
information, then, is proffered to aid you in that respect.
Your family physician can be most helpful. If he has the time he may
be able to counsel you directly, act as a guide to those insights that
will help you to achieve your goal. More than likely, however, you will
find that his schedule is far too heavy to permit him to do this, no
matter how much he would wish to do so. In that case he will refer you
to another person who is qualified to give such help or to a proper
agency.
If for any reason you cannot obtain a referral from your own physician,
it is important to know to whom you may turn for help in your community.
There are three kinds of specialists who are trained to give you
proper counseling for your problem. These are psychiatrists, clinical
psychologists, and social workers.
The hospital in your community can usually give you the name of a
person in one of these specialties whom you could consult privately.
Such hospitals may also have outpatient counseling clinics, and these
are staffed by competent psychotherapists. If your hospital does not
maintain such a service it will nevertheless know where you can obtain
help.
One of the resources you have open to you may be one of the so-called
“family agencies.” You can have confidence in such agencies. They are
devoted to the task of resolving any and all types of family problems
and are frequently staffed by social workers with excellent training in
marriage counseling.
Many American communities are relatively rich in counseling resources,
but there are also many where psychological help is difficult to
obtain. If your doctor or your local hospital cannot help you, it may
be necessary for you to journey to the nearest large city to obtain
aid. If you wish to obtain the names of the qualified psychiatrists
nearest your residence you may write to the American Psychiatric
Association, 1270 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y., and they will furnish
you with the required information. Be certain that in your letter you
specify the urban center nearest you.
ADDENDA II
There is no book that covers the problem of psychological frigidity in
women as such. However, the books listed below may be helpful adjuncts
to a thorough understanding of the problem. I have divided them into
two categories, popular and technical.
The popular books can be understood by all. The technical books I list
are generally used by physicians, but much in them can be understood by
the intelligent layman.
POPULAR
_The Art of Loving_, Erich Fromm (New York: Harper, 1956).
_A Marriage Manual_, Hannah and Abraham Stone (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1952).
_Modern Woman--The Lost Sex_, Lundberg and Farnham (New York: Harper,
1947).
_Marriage, Morals and Sex in America_, Sidney Ditzion (New York:
Bookman Associates, 1953).
_Psychology of Sex Relations_, Theodor Reik (New York: Rinehart, 1945).
_The Christian Interpretation of Sex_, Otto Piper (New York: Scribner,
1941).
TECHNICAL
_Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women_, K. B. Davis
(New York: Harper, 1929).
_Female Sexuality_, Marie Bonaparte (New York: International
Universities Press, 1953).
_The Psychology of Women_ (Vols. 1 and 2), Helene Deutsch (New York:
Grune and Stratton, 1944-45).
_Psychosexual Functions in Women_, Therese Benedek (New York: Ronald
Press, 1952).
* * * * * *
Transcriber’s note:
A few minor typographical errors have been silently corrected.
The cover image was prepared by the transcriber and is placed in the
public domain.
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