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.