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.