Chapter 12
PSYCHIC FRIGIDITY
The problem of sexual promiscuity in women suffering from frigidity is a common one. Speaking in very general terms, it can be said to emanate from a desire to be sexually awakened. Women who seek a solution of this type feel that the next man will somehow break through the barrier that separates them from true sexual satisfaction, true relatedness, restore them to their erotic birthright. They are doomed to disappointment, of course, for an exterior solution of any permanent kind to this interior problem does not exist.
There is one form of promiscuity, however, that does not fit this above description. Basically it is not a search for the beloved but rather a deep, characterological tendency, closely allied to a curious and seemingly contradictory form of frigidity. The kind of woman who suffers from this disorder we have already characterized as the psychically frigid type. We have described this type as one which, if sexual reactions alone determined our definition, might be considered perfectly normal. The psychically frigid woman responds readily to sexual foreplay, and her orgasm is usually deep and satisfying. Examine her reactions as closely as we may, we can at first find no single aspect of them that would indicate a problem that could be classified as sexual frigidity.
However, the woman does have an obviously serious problem. She seems to be unable to form a close relationship that will endure. She is apparently devoted to an inner ideal of transiency in love. Sometimes she is not conscious of the fact that transiency in love is so important to her, but everything about her amorous career indicates this is so. She may select as partners married men or men who are chronically hostile to women and who always end up by rejecting them. Or she may do the rejecting herself. She is usually faithful to her partner of the moment and indeed sometimes pays lip service to the hope that this time the love affair will last. But just below the surface of her awareness she has no such wish. If the relationship shows any indication of moving toward permanency, she will create a reason for terminating it. And this is where her sexual problem shows: if she could not terminate it she would inevitably become sexually frigid with her partner.
One might wonder why I include this type here, since her problem is not one of physical frigidity as we ordinarily think of it--a primary blocking of sexual feeling, an inability to experience vaginal orgasm. I do so because in every case of this kind that I have treated there has been a profound sexual involvement. Early and destructive sexual experiences (usually some form of seduction) have led to a psychological inability to relate emotionally to another.
In the cases discussed up to now, we have seen that a too early experience can lead to a permanent repression of a child’s entire sexual nature. Overstimulation leads to anxiety; anxiety leads to a ruthless repression of sensuality by the little individual. Basically the sexual experience has been felt as dangerous and unpleasant.
In our psychically frigid type we see, on the sexual level, just the opposite kind of conscious reaction. A too early stimulation causes a pleasurable sensual reaction, and the memory of this is held onto passionately. The deep guilt that is generated in the little girl, however, causes a displaced psychological reaction of great intensity.
To understand this personality structure more fully, let us look at a typical case.
Molly M. was a passionate bohemian in every sense of the word. When she first came to my office she was dressed in the height of what was then bohemian high fashion: dancing slippers, a dirndl-effect skirt and blouse, and long cotton stockings. She wore her hair in a pony tail and had no makeup on whatsoever. She lived in Greenwich Village in a five-flight walk-up cold-water flat. She was then twenty-seven years old and had been living in the same place since her graduation from college at twenty-two. She had a decent job but preferred to stay in this exotic tenement.
Molly had come to me because, as she stated it, she was scared. In the past two years she had become pregnant twice and had had two abortions. The last one, which had occurred three months before, had been performed under the most sordid circumstances; in the basement of a tenement by a midwife with filthy hands. Performed without anesthetic, it had been terribly painful and resulted in a serious uterine infection which required hospitalization. In the hospital the gynecologist had warned Molly that if she had not already ruined her chances to have children she might very well do so the next time. Despite her resolution at that time to change her ways, she had recently picked up with a penniless art student who obviously had no real feelings for Molly and, I suspected, no real ability to care for any other person. It was clear that this relationship was going nowhere, just as the rest had.
But let us look at Molly’s story.
Molly’s mature sexual life had started at the age of thirteen! She had had an affair with a high school senior in her home town--she described it as a “back-seat” affair--and it had lasted for a year. From the beginning and even under the unfavorable circumstances that love-making in an automobile must certainly create, Molly had had a total sexual response.
Since that time she had had upward of forty sexual affairs. None of them had lasted for more than a year and some only one or two weeks. All of them had been with men who were ineligible for marriage either because they were already married or because they were not emotionally capable of marrying.
Molly, though she had certain superficial pretensions to being an intellectual, was not one by any means. But she was an intelligent girl. She had a position as a researcher on a weekly trade paper, and her work had put her in line to become head of the research department. Her job represented the “respectable” side of her life. However, despite some uneasiness of brief duration in college, she had never seriously questioned the “rightness” of her sexual conduct. Each time she had had an affair she believed that she was in love and she never had more than one affair at a time. When the current love was over she always experienced feelings of relief.
If Molly had come from an environment where a free attitude toward sexuality had prevailed, her actions might not have seemed so inexplicable. But her home environment could not have been more conventional. She had come from a small New England city near Boston. Her father was the president of the leading bank in that city and had been active in church and civic affairs. Her mother, too, had been a church leader and a member of the school board. Her parents’ marriage had obviously been a good one; the domestic life was serene; they rarely quarreled; their civic duties were most often shared enterprises. And they genuinely loved their three children. There were two girls older than Molly, and they had led most conventional lives. They had married after college and each had had two children.
What, then, had caused Molly’s rebellion against her environment? And what was at the root of her inability to form a relationship? What was the cause of her psychic frigidity?
A psychiatrist familiar with this kind of case considers the possibility of an early seduction of some kind. It had indeed occurred.
Molly was unwilling to discuss it at first. And this was followed by an unwillingness to ascribe any particular significance to the event. She believed it was an isolated occurrence that had had no particular or permanent effect on her. Actually, as the matter unfolded, it became clear that this event was the very nucleus of her later difficulties.
It had happened when she was six. Three houses down from her there had lived a man in his early sixties. I shall call him Mr. Brown. He was a well-to-do person whose wife had died some years before and who now lived alone. He was very friendly, she remembered, with everyone, and often her father, out for an evening stroll, would drop in on him and spend an hour or two chatting on Mr. Brown’s screened-in veranda. Occasionally he would come to Molly’s house for dinner. She found out later that he was a director in her father’s bank. He was certainly, as far as her parents or any other grownups were concerned, above all suspicion.
Sometimes Molly would play jump-rope or hopscotch outside of Mr. Brown’s house. One day he invited her in and gave her a piece of cake and ten cents. She was delighted, and often thereafter he would have her in, always giving her something sweet to eat. He was pleasant and gentle and she loved him. She did not remember the first time it happened, but soon sitting on his lap became an integral part of her now frequent visits. He would tell her a story and ruffle her hair, touch her arms or hands. Gradually his touching extended to her legs and thighs. She liked the sensations and, being so young, she could not conceive of his doing anything that would be wrong.
Her visits now became almost daily occurrences, and then one day he touched her vagina. She could recall the whole event with great clarity. She remembered that his hand shook and that he looked very pale. Her sensations were exquisite and she involuntarily closed her thighs, pressing his hand against her vagina. At this point the whole “affair” became enormously exciting to her. For a period of almost a month she visited him as often as she could.
It is important to note that Mr. Brown did not confine his caresses to the little girl’s clitoris. At length he actually penetrated her hymen with his finger. She remembered this because it was painful, but she also recalled that the sensations of pleasure outweighed the pain. Thereafter he would masturbate her vaginally whenever they met in his house.
This seduction lasted for some time, when one day while she was sitting on his lap he took his penis out and rubbed it against her. She was so initiated to the pleasures of sexuality by this time that the act did not seem strange to her, nor did the sight and size of a grown man’s penis cause her the alarm it would normally occasion in a child. Her vagina was of course too small to admit more than a very partial entrance, but (and this she remembers clearly) though he did not thrust in any way, the little girl herself pressed her body toward him despite the pain it caused.
This occasion ended this bizarre and shocking experience. Apparently Mr. Brown was tardily overwhelmed by feelings of guilt or by a fear of getting caught, for he was not home when she next called for a visit and he did not return for over two years. By that time she had put the matter out of her conscious mind, or at least held the memory very much in abeyance.
This seduction was not difficult for Molly to recall, however, but she found it hard to recapture other feelings which had been associated with the experience, primarily the feeling of guilt.
Now let us take the matter step by step. Why, in the first place, did Molly react with excitement rather than shock to this whole experience? There are two reasons. In the first place, the seduction was done by a person who was loved by the child. He was a friend of the family, no less acceptable or trustworthy to the little girl than her own father and mother.
In the second place, Molly had not yet passed completely through the stage of infantile sexuality into the latency period, when normally sex goes underground until puberty. She was still able to be excited by sensual experiences. A year or two later she might not have accepted the situation, probably would have reacted to it with shock or horror; it might have contributed to a different kind of frigidity, perhaps the anesthesia of total frigidity.
It was clear, however, that she had felt guilty about her reactions. She had not communicated the experience to her parents--a clear indication of guilt feelings. And later she had separated the seduction and its sensual pleasures from her conscious mind, made no connection between it and her later unconventional behavior. If she had not experienced guilt she would have had to make no such separation.
While Molly had no further sexual experiences in her latency period, she began to behave differently from the other girls in her group very early. At twelve she began to pet with a boy next door and was certain that she would have had intercourse with him had he not been so frightened of her advances. At thirteen she would sneak out at night to meet one of several older boys, and on one of these occasions she had sexual intercourse. She went around with this boy for about a year. He then graduated from high school and went away to college, and Molly promptly started another sexual relationship with another senior in high school.
Sexual affairs from then on followed one after the other through high school and college. The only concession Molly made to conventional morality was the afore-mentioned fact that she did not allow the affairs to overlap.
As she entered her teens another aspect of Molly’s behavior became apparent. More and more she sought out individuals markedly different from those on her own social level. By fifteen she had become distinctly “wild,” coming in late at night and refusing to obey her parents in any way. She would not go out with any of the high school or college boys she met. She had made friends with a group of girls on a lower economic level whose social life consisted largely of picking up men at dances. In this way Molly met several men who played in bands and who were, of course, not what her family could possibly have approved of. She did not care in the least; she felt she told me, “unutterably bored” with her family, felt “they were sunk in their way of life,” led absolutely “joyless and pointless existences.”
Despite all this, Molly maintained her scholastic record at a high level and was admitted to college--another sign of the division within her personality. In college her unremitting affairs persisted, as did her selection of friends outside of her own social sphere. At one point she had an affair with a Negro labor organizer, at another with an Italian dock hand, at still another with the father of a college classmate. It is not surprising, then, that as soon as she finished college (and here, too, she maintained her good scholastic record) she gravitated toward Greenwich Village and immediately launched into a bohemian social and sexual existence. She experienced no conscious regrets or qualms of conscience as, year in, year out, she continued in this mode of living, a mode so different from that of her parents. She was sustained by her pride in what she called her “healthy animality” and was fond of stating that most people led lives of great frustration and “of quiet desperation.”
Her animosity toward her parents did not diminish when she grew up, and at the time she came to see me she had not visited them for two years.
The consequences of Molly’s early seduction, as you can see, _were_ grave. However, the psychological structure she had developed to cope with this seduction is not a hard one to understand.
Human beings are largely guided by the pleasure principle, and this is most clearly evinced in childhood. Molly had received a great deal of pleasure from her early sexual experience, but she had also experienced a great deal of guilt about it. When Mr. Brown departed she had entered her latency period. But when puberty, with its reassertion of sexuality, set in, the original sexual experience had set a mold for Molly’s personality. She enjoyed and sought sex to an abnormal degree for her tender years.
In her unconscious life, however, she felt guilty for these feelings. Because of her precocious sensuality her problem then was to get rid of her guilt feelings so that she could indulge her sexuality. This meant, in effect, getting rid of her parents for, in childhood, guilt of this kind is always associated with parental prohibition. She did this by denying that her parents had any importance to her, by repressing all warm feelings toward them, by constructing a set of values in which they were, to use her words again, “stupid,” “loveless squares,” “without a drop of sensuality.”
As Molly and I continued our examination of her life and feelings it became apparent that the erection of this defensive mechanism had cost a great deal indeed, even in terms of those pleasures to which she was devoted. In order to be enjoyed, sex had to partake of the nature of the original seduction; it had to be a forbidden and guilty act; it had to be with a person who was, in her mind, anathema to her parents. And, primarily, it could not move over into a permanent and abiding relationship, for if it did it could no longer be considered forbidden and guilty.
This meant, of course, that love could never lead to marriage or to children and to the joys these bring. For if a man was respectable, “meant well by her,” loved her, in her unconscious life she would immediately associate him with her parents and their approval, and this would kill all sexual feeling in her. She would be frigid with him.
There was, of course, deep anxiety underneath Molly’s rebellion against a permanent relationship. During the course of our work together and after she had begun to see the implications of her problem, she began to try to associate with men who were more eligible for a decent relationship. A dream she had during the course of her first attempt at such a relationship (with a young doctor she had met) shows the problem quite clearly.
In this dream she is sitting in the back seat of a car, kissing a young man in an intern’s uniform. She is very excited as they kiss and decides that she will have intercourse with him. At this point the young intern says, “Please marry me.” No sooner are the words out of his mouth than she begins to feel terrified, as though something awful is going to happen. She begins to tremble and wants to get out of the car and run, but she is so frightened that she cannot move. Suddenly she sees the face of a man outside the car. He is dressed in evening clothes and has a large dollar sign on his hat. He points a gun at them and says very clearly, “Both of you must die.” At that point she woke up in an absolute panic which lasted for over an hour.
The intern in the dream stands, of course, for the young doctor she knows. The man with the dollar sign on his hat stands for her banker father. Sex is all right, and she wishes for it as long as it is furtive and hidden. The moment it becomes respectable (“Please marry me”) the hidden and guilty act will be made known and her father will punish her in the most horrible way possible.
She had, as you can see, never resolved her early guilt feelings about the childhood seduction. Her whole life had been built around this early experience.
Molly’s relationship with the young doctor did not prosper, but in the course of our work she finally did meet and marry a very fine man. On the basis of insights she had had, she had decided to postpone intercourse with him until after the marriage. When the love-making began she at first responded sexually, but in a matter of a few weeks she became quite frigid.
This reaction of course represented, as in the case of the intern, her lifelong fear. However, since she had faced up to her psychological frigidity, had stopped running away into pointless and meaningless relationships, the resolution of this problem was merely a matter of time, of “working through” the guilt feelings she had never dared to face before.
* * * * *
The form of psychic frigidity represented by Molly’s case has always, in my experience, been caused by a childhood seduction. The seduction usually takes place between the fourth and seventh year, and the child reacts to the experience with strong sensual pleasure accompanied by guilt. This guilt is handled by a withdrawal from the parents and from values they represent. And sensual pleasure becomes an end in itself, dissociated from friendly perduring relations with another person. It must be furtive, indulged in with unlikely persons; acute anxiety develops if there is any danger that it will lead to marriage.
The seduction need not be as complete or as direct as Molly’s. I have had a case in which a single sight of grownups having sexual intercourse has had the effect of a seduction on a child. In such a case the pleasure reaction becomes associated with the early erotic feelings toward the father. The suggestion in the child’s mind is that her “evil” wishes can be granted if she will displace them onto another person. In later years this becomes the model for sexual behavior; sexual desire in the woman is too closely associated with the father image, so the love object sought must be as different from the father image as possible.
Sometimes “liberal” parents seduce their children quite unwittingly. Not too long ago it became the practice among certain “liberated” or intellectual families to indulge in a species of nudism within the home. This practice was based on a misunderstanding of certain contributions of modern psychology, mainly the concept of inhibition. The parents wished to prevent their children from being inhibited or prudish about the human body. Such parents made no difficulty about parading around nude in front of sons and daughters of any age.
Parents who believe in this manner have rather elaborate rationales and present them convincingly. If certain of my patients are an indication, however, I can testify that many children do not have the “healthy” reaction to nudism in the home that the parents had expected. To a six-year-old girl the sight of a naked father can be far too stimulating an experience for her to handle. She will react either with shock or excitement or both. The same is true of boys who are permitted to view their mothers in the nude.
We have seen that erotic fixation on parents constitutes a stage in the growth process. Whatever it may be in other societies, primitive or otherwise, nudity in our society is associated with lustful feelings. Family nudism, I firmly believe, tends to fixate children on parents permanently by causing unnecessary stimulation and hence strong guilt feelings. The result can be similar to a direct seduction of the child.
Psychic frigidity is often confused with a temporal emotional condition we call situational frigidity. A woman suffering from situational frigidity has no basic sexual problem. Her responses have always been normal and her orgasm is both frequent and satisfying. However, some severe reality problem has arisen in her life which has caused a temporary eclipse of her sexual responsiveness.
On occasion a woman may become quite disturbed by this fact. Let me give an example.
Anne S. was thirty-five. She had had a happy marriage for ten years. In the first seven years of her marriage she had had two children, both girls. She had had no more fears of pregnancy and motherhood than she had had of sex. Her upbringing had been, from the psychiatric standpoint, exemplary. In every determinable way she was an excellent sweetheart, mother, and wife.
Six months before she came to see me she had given birth to her third child, a boy. In a very short time it became clear that the child was mongoloid. After several weeks of indecision she had finally yielded to the pressure of the doctor and her husband and the child had been committed to an institution. At the time she came to me she had just learned that its congenital defects would be fatal within two or three months.
When Anne had resumed her sexual relationship with her husband after the birth of this child she had been completely unresponsive and actively disliked the whole act. This had upset her. She had thought this would pass in a week or two, but it had not. The fear that she may have lost her capacity to love or at least to love her husband had brought her to a psychiatrist.
Anne could not have been more mistaken about the significance of her unresponsiveness. She had underestimated the depth of the blow the birth of such a child can have on a mother. Grief and other profound emotions incapacitate the ability to love; one’s entire confidence in oneself is shaken. It is perfectly normal under such circumstances to withdraw emotionally. In fact, it is even desirable. Wounded feelings must heal, and immobilizing oneself emotionally is good therapeutic procedure.
Time is the only anodyne for this kind of normal emotional pull-back. In this case Anne’s child died within two months, as had been predicted. Her so-called situational frigidity lasted for three months after that and then disappeared entirely.
Since the sexuality of women, as we have seen, is so “psychological” in its nature, these temporary situational frigidities are probably quite prevalent, though there are no final statistics on them. They can be caused by a wide variety of circumstances and can last for a week or two to several months, depending on the severity of the circumstance. I have seen this type of temporary frigidity brought on by such disparate causes as the death of a loved parent, the illness of a child (even a relatively slight illness), a husband’s economic worries, and a difficult birth, to name but a few.
One very scrupulous wife, who took great pride in her ability to drive a car, even had a sexual blocking for a few nights when she was given her first traffic ticket. She had parked too long on the wrong side of the street, and the officer who gave her the ticket had also given her a stern talking-to.
All one really has to know about situational frigidity is that it isn’t serious and that it’s well within the normal range of woman’s delicately balanced sexual nature and will most certainly pass. The only therapy one needs is patience.
* * * * *
These cases represent, then, the major forms of frigidity. My intent in presenting them has been threefold. In the first place, it is important to understand what type of frigidity you have. Second, it can be helpful to see the individual characteristics of each kind of frigidity. Third, it is necessary to understand that all of the frigidities have certain basic characteristics in common (with the exception of situational frigidity), for this latter fact will allow us to approach each individual type with one basic form of solution.
With this final information in mind we are now ready to turn our attention to the means by which frigidity can be resolved.
SECTION IV
_The Bridge to Womanhood_
_Chapter 13_
THE POWER OF LOVE
We have come now to the last and most important part of our journey together, to the point where we can examine the means by which real love can be achieved. Let us start by examining what real love is, its role in life and its component parts.
Because of their problems in loving, many people arrive at a point where they turn against love itself. Having lost their hope of achieving love, they quite humanly tend to depreciate it, try to minimize its importance. One of the commonest statements I hear from frigid patients in the first interview goes something like this: “Well, it really doesn’t matter, I suppose; there aren’t very many happy marriages anyway. And I suppose there are more important things than love.”
Let us correct any tendency of this kind right here and now.
Using the word in its widest sense, I would say that the ability to love is the single most important characteristic that man has. It is the faculty upon which all the great actions, hopes, and aspirations of the world are founded. Without it there could be no brotherhood among men, and therefore the very concept of civilization as we understand it would be unknown, even unthinkable. Men would be essentially isolated individuals whose personal drives, needs, and appetites would be the only realities to them. Aloneness, a terrible loneliness (those who cannot love will know what I mean), would be mankind’s lot.
Love means, in its very deepest sense, union; union between individuals, between women and women, men and men, men and women. It is the most basic and profound urge we have, and its power for good is illimitable.
In love we make the good of our partner (whether he is our child, our neighbor, or our sweetheart) as important to us as our own good. In the union of love we are able to experience the essential oneness of man and nature, to know that the universe is indeed our home and all men within it members of our family. In this way man learns through love that he is not alone, not condemned to the pain and anxiety he experiences when he has nobody with whom he can share his mind, his heart, his body.
The concept of this happy unity is most clearly seen in the love between men and women. The act of sexual love is a direct expression of it. Two individuals once unknown to each other, until recently total strangers, now nevertheless literally merge together physically, know each other in the closest of physical embraces. They were miraculously made for this purpose, constructed for this union. The man leaves something of himself within the woman, his sperm. And a part of the woman joins this, merges with it. They have indeed become one flesh.
And this merging, in addition to the joy and comfort it brings to each to join with the other as one, can become a creative act. From the union a child may be created. Thus we see that the profound result of the union which always characterizes love is productivity, creation.
If this physical coupling were all there was, it would be miraculous still, though an experience shared by other than human forms of life. But man, as distinct from animals, has mind. And minds, as well as bodies, have the capacity to merge too, the need to, the profound joy in so doing. It is when body and mind of a man and woman merge, become a unity, that we see the highest expression of what we term love.
When two people are able to join as one in love, there are certain very definite things that happen to them, as far as each individual mind is concerned.
In the first place, each is able to come far closer to his or her own potentialities. The merging that takes place in psychological love is essentially creative (just as its physical counterpart is), and so each lover is able to come closer and closer to his true self. All who have ever loved know of this inward blossoming, this fecundation by the love of the other. In work, in play, in all the inner and outer activities of life, the individual becomes far more vital and more productive than before.
Another important aspect of love: to each, as I have said, the love partner becomes as important as oneself, and from this it follows that the good of the loved one is all important to the other. Thus all things that help the other, cause him to be joyful, secure, freely and completely himself, become a chief concern of the other. This fact is why real love never leads to domination or to a struggle for power between two people. Through the mersion of love the uniqueness and individuality of the other person becomes precious, and hence all effort is made to guard the special qualities of the beloved. In love we never encounter a man trampling on his wife’s rights and needs or a woman competing with her husband. The value of the other as he is and as he can grow to be becomes the highest value in life.
Because of the high value she places upon her loved one a woman makes the understanding of him one of her most important activities. And this understanding furthers love, which in turn furthers understanding, so that the process is a very dynamic one. By gaining a knowledge of her loved one she is able ultimately to go to the very root of his personality, thus making an even deeper merging of her with him possible. Such understanding implies, of course, a great sensitivity to all of his reactions. And it makes her, too, inquire urgently (and creatively) into herself, so that no blocks to their deep psychological communion can develop.
These are, then, some of the results of real love. I have listed them as a rebuttal of and a reminder to any who have, through repeated defeat, become discouraged in their struggles to love and have tended therefore to minimize love’s importance. There is nothing in life that is so important as love. In fact, as one of my patients once said, looking back on the period when she was unable to love, “Without love there is nothing in life.”
One cannot win the battle to love if one minimizes it. The frigid woman, above all, must realize this and never give up her struggle. Indeed, a complete awareness of how important love is can be in itself a big step along the way to achieving the ability to love and to be loved.
Now if we summarize what has just been said about love, what do we find is its essential characteristic? This: the ability to see the other person _as he is_ and to esteem him above everything else for his individual quality, indeed to love him (and so want to merge with him) for it.
On the other hand, if we were to summarize all the case histories of the various forms of frigidity I have given and all the other pertinent facts I have adduced about frigidity, we would find just the opposite fact. The frigid woman, of whatever variety she may be, _never sees the man she wants to love as he is_. His individual and essential quality is entirely unknown to her and unknowable by her. He is a series of projections from her past. He is a composite of the fears, the errors, the misunderstandings of her infancy and childhood. The real union of love is therefore impossible with this quasi monster she has conjured up.
Thus we can see that the major task of the frigid woman is to rid herself of these projections she makes upon mankind in general and upon her own man in particular. She must see through them and divest herself of them, come to see men in their true role vis-à-vis woman and her husband in all his uniqueness and with all his potentiality.
That is step one.
When she has done this there is another step she must take. If one thinks of the description of love I have given, one realizes that it implies a very great security within oneself, an acceptance of one’s own uniqueness and essential femininity. But the frigid woman fears and rejects femininity, as we have seen, feeling it to be a dangerous trap. She must learn to alter this basic and negative attitude entirely. She must see how childish and false, how utterly self-depriving this view of womanhood is and give it up.
Thus we see that in frigidity the two main doors to psychological and sexual union--to love, in short--have been closed and locked.
If these two doors can be opened again, the frigid woman will have resolved her problem.
Just these two doors? Is this not an oversimplification? To these two questions I can give unequivocal answers: yes to the first and no to the second. These are the two roots of the problem. Attack them head on, resolve them, and the major part of the task has been done.
_Chapter 14_
STEPS TO FREEDOM
The resolution of an emotional problem is a process, a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To put this process in motion and to maintain it in motion, two distinct approaches are necessary.
The first step is to grasp the problem _objectively_, to understand its nature, its implications, to learn all the _outside_ facts about it one can grasp with one’s intellect.
We have now taken this first step, an all-important one for most people. If you have read thus far, you have learned a great many objective facts about frigidity.
You have learned what it is and the toll it exacts; you have seen why women are subject to it and how it originates in the individual and the different forms it may take. You have seen, too, how woman has attempted to masculinize her personality, how she has tried to eschew sex entirely; and you have seen why these unhappy attempts _can_ be successful, why they are inherent biological and psychological possibilities.
This kind of objective understanding is of great importance. It frees one from prejudice and prevents one from seeking false solutions (which abound); it brings one face to face with the real nature of the dilemma of frigidity, its essentially psychological structure, and it uncovers the hidden area where personal responsibility lies.
Without this kind of objective intellectual understanding the individual woman could not come to direct grips with frigidity, for she would not know its nature. This type of knowledge, then, has carried us to the very edge of the bridge to true womanhood.
In order to cross it, however, the individual woman must do more than merely understand in an objective manner.
The second and all-important step in the resolution of the problem of frigidity requires a _subjective_ approach, an inquiry by the individual woman into the attitudes and emotions that are preventing her from achieving maturity. The kind of knowledge one gains in this way we call insight. If one can get true insight into the attitudes and feelings upon which one’s own frigidity is based, the problem can be completely resolved.
At the moment this may seem like a big order and insight a frightening word. Every woman knows how complex her emotions are, how difficult to understand, how multi-faceted every human being is.
But I wish to tell you now, at the outset, that the whole approach can be kept very simple. Frigidity is like a log jam on a narrow stream. If two or three logs jam together, forming a barrier, all the other logs will jam up behind them, forming a complicated maze that stretches backward sometimes for miles. To release the jam, however, all one has to do is to free the first two or three logs, and then the others will resume their unimpeded journey.
The emotional log jam we call frigidity is held in place by two basically neurotic attitudes. The first is an attitude toward men; the second is an attitude toward real womanhood. We have seen these attitudes in every form of frigidity and have seen how they function. If the individual woman can come to grips with these two attitudes in herself, if she can dislodge them, the free flow of her personality toward health and maturity will resume once again. Insight can dislodge these hindering attitudes and keep them dislodged.
Let us start, then, and see how insight into these attitudes can be achieved by the frigid woman.
The first thing you must do is a very practical one. You must give yourself, at least at the beginning, a certain amount of time alone, absolutely alone, each day. It might be for ten minutes or for a half hour or an hour, but you must be alone and you must seek this time regularly. It is most helpful if you can select a time when your mind is relatively free of worries and duties.
What do you do to achieve insight at these junctures? You start, on the simplest level possible, to let yourself _really feel_ your negative emotions about your husband or sweetheart. Your only aim at this point is to let these negative feelings come to the surface, to seek them out, experience them _to the full_.
Pick out some small but recurrent irritation or annoyance he causes you; the more trifling, the better. Fix on it, then dare to allow your emotions and thoughts about it to hold sway.
Let me give you a single example from the case history of a frigid patient. Every day this woman’s husband, on rising, dressed in the bathroom. He invariably left his razor on the sink and his pajamas in an untidy heap in a corner. This had irritated her and she had spoken about it to him several times; he would reform for a few days but then would invariably fall back into his old habits.
This bit of information about their married life had been presented quite casually in the course of my first discussion with this patient. At that time she spoke of this peccadillo of her husband’s as a minor annoyance. A bit later, when she had returned to the subject for the third time, each time expressing annoyance, I encouraged her to dwell on it, to let herself feel the full measure of her emotions about it. I told her that I suspected there was a good deal more in her _feelings_ about this apparently trifling matter than she suspected, and that I thought this because she had brought it up so many times.
At first she protested that the matter was too small to pay attention to; that there were more important things to consider. But with encouragement she gradually allowed herself to pursue her true feelings. Underneath her commonplace protest was, as I had thought, an emotional cave-of-the-four-winds.
Her husband’s “sloppy actions,” it turned out, did not merely “annoy” her; they “enraged” her. In her words, they signified his desire “to humiliate me”; “he thinks I have nothing to do but pick up after him, to wait on him hand and foot.” Her anger became more and more explosive as she reflected on the matter, and it led very quickly and directly to her underlying attitude toward men as a whole. Men wanted to do nothing more or less than to enslave women, to exploit them. They considered themselves a race apart, superior to women. All they wanted from a woman was sex, or anything else they could get out of them. And they were powerful, and thus dangerous; if a woman really showed her hostility they would use their physical strength against her. And so it went, on and on, the stored-up rage and the hostile and frightened attitudes that lay just beneath the surface and constituted the very bricks and mortar of her frigidity.
In pursuing this technique for getting at one’s feelings it is best always to select, as in the example quoted, one or more of the petty annoyances in everyday life. Does your husband’s behavior in company embarrass you? Has he an annoying habit? (Bathroom habits of a mate are very fruitful sources for this kind of self-investigation.) Is he untidy? Does his taste in clothes irritate you? Does he ignore the children or pay too much attention to them, ignoring you? You will know what has become the provocative agent in your life; select it and explore the feelings underneath it to their limit.
As you let your feeling come to the surface, please note how quickly you move from contemplation of your husband’s annoying characteristic to very broad generalities about men. In the case above the woman moved almost at once from annoyance, to rage, to ascribing a hidden motive to all men--a desire to enslave women, to exploit them.
It was the generalities she made which (in the end) revealed to her with great clarity that her underlying attitude created a spiritual climate in which real love and therefore a productive marriage were virtually impossible. How can one love, in any real sense, a person one regards, basically, as a tyrant?
Taking this highly emotional inventory cannot be a swift affair. In the beginning, for the first several sessions with herself, a frigid woman may find that no very strong feelings or passionate generalizations will come up. But if she perseveres she will inevitably get to an area where the feelings are intense and negative indeed. We have found that such feelings always exist in frigidity. If they did not, there would be no frigidity.
The frigid woman has hidden the intensity of such feelings from her conscious mind for two reasons. To know these reasons can help you, make you somewhat braver in your attempt to surface the feelings.
The first reason these emotions have remained hidden is their very intensity. They were, in the beginning, felt to be overwhelming; it was as if they proceeded from a bottomless well of feeling. And so, through the years, one has learned to hide them, even from oneself, to fix them on trifles in order to minimize them--to deny that, indeed, they exist at all.
Only by letting them up into the awareness can one experience the fact that their intensity is _not_ overwhelming and that the emotion one experiences has very definite limits; it does not proceed from a bottomless well.
I recall one woman who, in approaching this problem, would not let herself weep over a strong underlying feeling of rejection by men that she had partially uncovered in herself. “If I start crying I feel I’ll never stop,” she told me. She was not being histrionic either; that’s the way she really felt. When she did let herself cry, however, the storm lasted for a mere thirty minutes or so--and then it was done with for good. She was terribly relieved to find that the emotion which, when unexpressed, seemed so boundless had very concrete limits. From that point on she was much more at home with all of her emotions, not nearly so frightened of them.
The second reason a woman fears to let her feelings about her husband (and men in general) come to the surface is that she believes that the things she feels are literally true. They exist in her unconscious or partly conscious mind as profound convictions. She holds them at bay because she does not wish to face just how completely a part of her mind believes that her highly irrational feelings are based on reality.
It will help, however, to know that, no matter how convinced a part of you is that your negative feelings represent reality, such is not the case. Your investigation is not going to prove that your hidden fears are valid; it is going to prove that they are invalid. These deep and hidden convictions are shaped early in a woman’s life, primarily by her relationships with her parents and secondarily through her relationships with her brothers and sisters. They are basically irrational feelings, erected as defenses against childhood and girlhood fears and misunderstandings. They have no real basis in fact; they do not pertain to the male _as he is_.
It is of very great importance to know this when you begin to uncover your most secret convictions. No matter how real these negative attitudes appear to be, remember that they are _only_ feelings, not reality. As long as you keep that fact in the forefront of your mind you will increasingly dare to let these feelings up into your awareness, into your conscious mind.
I counsel women to be remorseless with themselves in this search for any negative feelings they might possess toward their husband and toward all men. Do not stop when you have seen one or two details that indicate an amount of feeling you had not clearly known you possessed. Press onward and inward fearlessly until you have exposed every last hostile and irrational emotion and attitude you have.
One woman who came to me had worked very hard for five sessions on her negative feelings toward men. We had started our mutual investigation when she confessed that any slight irritability on her husband’s part caused her to feel extremely anxious, often resulted in actual nausea.
We pursued the matter and soon found a great store of antagonism toward men hidden just beneath the surface of an apparently gentle person. She had, we discovered, the common, classical conviction that men wish to exploit women, to bend them to their wills. She soon realized she had been interpreting many everyday happenings in the light of this belief. Her husband, an editor, sometimes had to work at home in the evening and had asked her to keep the television set low until he was finished. Though she knew his homework was exacting, she took this to be a characteristic infringement of her “rights” and had a great deal of stored-up rage about it. She also had hidden rage at such commonplace duties as bringing his clothes to the cleaner, entertaining his business friends, cleaning his “filthy” study, etc.
We explored them all, one by one. Neither of us, however, felt that we had come to the end of the matter. There was something that eluded us. She as well as I felt certain of that. We persisted, therefore, and the hidden feeling at last showed itself. Returning to her first complaint, I asked her if she had ever been physically struck by her husband.
“No,” she replied, “but I often _feel_ that he is going to strike me.”
Knowing her husband to be a kind person, I pursued the matter, and it soon developed that she had a very strong unconscious conviction that men in general had no compunction whatever about using their superior physical strength against women to obtain what they wanted. In other words, she not only felt that men were basically hostile to women but that they were potentially extremely violent.
This was a bizarre conviction, and my patient soon realized its irrational nature. Her picture of men was based on early memories of a truly sadistic father; he had frequently struck her mother. When she realized the pervasive importance of this only slightly repressed physical fear of men she was able to resume a psychological growth that had been severely impeded from the earliest age.
But the point I wish to emphasize is that she had to persist in her search for hidden attitudes. If she had assumed that she had gotten to the heart of her difficulty by uncovering the first few negative feelings, her self-investigation could not have succeeded. Please mark the fact that she did not _feel_ she had come to the end of her emotional inventory until she had actually done so. If one is honest with oneself one can sense, feel, when important attitudes still lie hidden within.
If you persist in your daily sessions with yourself, however, the time will come when you will feel that you have exposed to your own view all of your angry feelings and your negative attitudes toward men, come to the very lees of the feelings left over from childhood. You have now made a major step toward recovery. The biggest log in the jam has been removed.
Why does this necessarily follow?
One of the major contributions of modern psychiatry has been the establishment of the fact that attitudes and feelings have the power to do lasting harm only when they are hidden from one’s awareness, or half hidden from it. The frigid woman’s troubling vestiges of youthful error, once they have been made conscious, automatically lose the greater part of their power to do harm. When they become known to the conscious mind they are then exposed to judgment, reason, and further information. They are seen, by one’s intelligence, to be fragile balloons of easily exploded ignorance. When this happens, the natural movement of the personality toward health, blocked for years by hidden fears, rages, defenses, false attitudes, is resumed.
A woman who can achieve this is now _prepared_ to understand her husband _as he is_--and all other men _as man is_. If you will recall, that particular ability, to comprehend and care about the uniqueness of one’s mate, is a chief prerequisite for love.
If the frigid woman did not explore her irrational feelings in the manner I have described, any objective information about men, learned from whatever source, would be useless. Her _hidden_ feelings about men would still dominate. Now, however, with the hidden feelings up and out, she is ready to hear more about men as they really are, to contrast the reality to her projection upon it. We shall take that latter step in the next chapter, but before we do there is another, further insight into one’s feeling, which it will be very helpful to achieve.
Women who suffer from frigidity often have, in addition to negative feelings toward the male sex, another very marked characteristic. They are subject to powerful _fantasies_ which militate against the recovery of their lost sexuality and their psychological maturation. It is extremely important that these fantasies be ruthlessly explored and exploded. If they are not, they serve the unhappy function of preserving the unhealthy conviction that one deserves a far better fate than that of being a beloved wife and mother.
Such fantasies are often half hidden from view, just as are one’s negative feelings about men. They are daydreams left over from adolescence or earlier. Their destructive power derives from the fact that the daydreamer either still believes that the dreams are realizable or that she could have achieved them if her husband and family had not prevented her from doing so.
It is amazing how powerful and persistent these fantasies can be. They generally spring from an early desire to become an actress, a dancer, or a concert artist. However, they may also express wishes to become a doctor, lawyer, athlete, diplomat, or whatever. Their impossible, Walter-Mittyish character is blithely ignored by the daydreamer. I have had frigid women of forty and even fifty who still, just beneath the logical, sound surface of their minds, still believed that someday (tomorrow perhaps, next year certainly) they would go to acting school and soon obtain leading roles in a Broadway drama, or resume their piano lessons and become famous concert artists.
Such fantasies derive their power from the fact that the daydreamer feels unable to deal with reality. Since a woman who is frigid _is_ dealing with her real-life situation in an inadequate manner, it is not strange that she should hold onto such fantasies with passion. They protect her from her feelings of inferiority. What matter, says her unconscious mind, if you are unable to love, what matter if your husband exploits you, attempts to enslave you. Tomorrow--someday, at any rate--you will show them all that you are beautiful, glamorous, a great performer, or doctor, or lawyer, or Indian chief.
The frigid woman should approach such fantasies in the same manner as she approaches her negative feelings toward the male sex. First she should let the fantasy have full play. She should allow herself to imagine herself as impresario, doctor, whatever fantastic dream her unconscious has fixed on. Let the daydream roll on and on. Note its magnitude, its grandiose quality, its glitter and its glamor.
When all the details of the fantasy have been experienced, allow yourself to imagine what life would be like for you if you were _never_ able to realize any single aspect of this daydream. If you feel depressed by such a prospect, if the contemplation of life without the possibility of realizing such a dream of glory seems empty, you have had an important experience. You have taken your fantasy’s full measure. You now can get some idea of what an important part it plays in your emotional life.
Do not be afraid of the depression, the feeling of emptiness that will come with your first conscious attempts to free yourself of your fantasy. It can be the beginning of a far richer emotional life than any which depends on an unrealizable daydream. Therefore, persist for a few days in imagining what life will be like if you do not ever realize your daydream. Please notice that your depression does not go beyond a certain depth and that it is not incapacitating; also note that your feeling of deprivation is not unendurable.
I am not using auto-suggestion in these last remarks. A persistent daydream has certain characteristics in common with a drug or alcohol habituation. The daydreamer has, over a long period of time, learned to handle reality in terms of her drug--her deep-seated daydream. Without realizing it she has come to feel that, without this psychological narcotic, life would be impossible. She must, in a very real sense, wean herself from it, gradually realize that life without it is not nearly so dreary, so difficult, as she had imagined it would be.
The next step in this process is to explode the daydream entirely. This can be done with a few pinpricks of cold logic. Most people, realizing that such daydreams, formed in the heat of youth, have no function in reality, have long ago given them up in favor of living as passionately as possible in the present. The frigid woman, however, having a reason for keeping them alive, has never scrutinized them in the cold light of rationality.
I know of one woman who, at the age of thirty-eight, with three children under fifteen years of age, still felt she could become a dancer. As she looked more closely at this conviction she became increasingly surprised at how seriously she really took this fantasy. At length, when she felt really ready to face sacrificing her lifelong fantasy, she wrote a list of facts and questions. I present them here.
1. To become a dancer I would have to study the dance for a minimum of five years; during that time I would have to practice dancing for about eight hours a day. Could I take this discipline?
2. If my mind were able to take such discipline would my body be able to stand up under such arduous work?
3. If I were able to arrange it would I be willing to give up my daily contact and relationship with my three children?
4. If I overcame every obstacle and became a well-known dancer, achieving my wildest dream of success, I would have to go on tour for at least eight months of the year; this would mean separation from my husband and children during that time. Do I want this? Even if I do, could I take it emotionally?
The answers to these questions were obviously passionate noes. And the result of such a common-sensical examination of her long-standing fantasy was, at long length, freedom from it.
It will not take much logical thought to dispose of your daydreams, thus clearing the way to a life in the passionate present rather than in a mythical future. Ask yourself the kinds of questions indicated above and give yourself honest answers.
* * * * *
In giving the case histories of women suffering from the various forms and degrees of frigidity, I have described to some extent the early origins of their problems. I should now like to raise the question of just how much knowledge of one’s early, often buried, experiences one must uncover to achieve feminine maturity.
In my opinion, the majority of women suffering from frigidity do _not_ have to go into the matter of their childhood experiences to any extent at all. The evidence that their childhood experiences were traumatic to some degree is contained in the fact that they do have problems in the present. It is always the immediate problem about which people develop their deepest and strongest emotions. The technique of “feeling” one’s way through one’s problem is, as I have said, the method that really works with frigidity; it is one’s present emotions, therefore, that constitute the major material of one’s self-examination.
Actually understanding present feelings and attitudes reveals the past, for it was in the past that these attitudes were established; they have changed very little since their inception.
Why, then, did I go into the detailed childhood development of frigidity in my case histories? For the same reason that I gave all the other objective facts about frigidity before we approached this section. The more conscious knowledge one has of the entire problem of frigidity, the more one dares to face up to the responsibility for one’s own problem--and the more one is _able_ to face up to it also. For knowledge can free one of the ignorance and superstition upon which resistance to achieving psychic maturity is based.
I am not, on the other hand, holding that there is any fundamental objection to a scrutiny of early experiences or to helpful speculation about them. Sometimes, as in the case of an early seduction, or a rape that is remembered, early experiences can throw a therapeutic sidelight on one’s present feelings. However, the myriad details that go into the formation of everyone’s personality while growing up can be confusing if one tries to understand them all without the help of an expert guide; and it is not requisite for recovery to understand them all. So if self-examination of one’s early experiences does not seem to be immediately helpful, I would abandon it entirely; I would confine myself to a “feeling through” of my problem in the present, undoing the harm the childhood attitudes are still causing in the here and now.
The steps for achieving insight into one’s negative emotions which I recommend here are the most difficult steps one has to take on the road to maturity. If you can take them, the hardest part will be over. The remaining part of the process of recovery occurs rather naturally, is a matter of acquiring more information, allowing new feelings to grow and expand inside oneself, accepting guidance past a few possible pitfalls. You will see what I mean as we continue in the following chapters.
_Chapter 15_
THE MALE SEX: A NEW HORIZON
The self-exploration described in the last chapter results in the surfacing of hidden feelings, attitudes, and fantasies. Getting them up and out, exposing them to the bright light of reason and judgment, clears the psychological atmosphere almost miraculously.
The next most helpful step to take, I have found, is a re-evaluation of the male sex. The woman who suffers from frigidity has, by definition, very little knowledge of what men are really like. Since her attitudes toward men were formed in her distant past and have altered little through the years, she has a child’s-eye view of men. To her, as parents to a child, men are powers, not people. Projecting her own childhood fears and hopes and needs upon them, she has been calling that reality and acting accordingly.
This next step, the conscious revaluation of men, can be achieved by learning what the male sex is really like--how it differs from the female sex, what makes men think, act, and feel the way they do in everyday life--and by contrasting this knowledge with the negative attitudes and feelings she has now brought to the surface of her mind. In this way she will soon learn to understand her husband _as he is_, and thus achieve the ability to love him in all of his uniqueness and individuality.
The central characteristic of the male, and the one that most clearly differentiates him from the female, is his aggressiveness.
In the sexual sphere this shows itself most clearly in the fact that the man takes, for the most part, the initiative in wooing. He it is who is the pursuer, the girl the pursued; he it is who proposes and he it is who initiates sex.
An analogy to this fundamentally aggressive activity of the male in relationship to the female is seen, in a primordial biological form, by the function of his sperm. As you may know, the individual spermatozoon is an individual cell which is propelled by a microscopic tail. After the deposit of spermatozoa in the vagina, the individual sperm _actively_ seeks out and joins the ova, which has been _passively_ waiting for it. This physiological metaphor, according to certain leading theoreticians, well expresses the fundamentally aggressive nature of man in relationship to woman, psychologically as well as sexually.
The male’s aggressiveness is, in general, directed to mastery of the outside world. It shows in him from his earliest years. The sports that he selects have to do with physical aggression almost exclusively (of course some girls also like certain aggressive sports at an early age, but most give them up in puberty). He likes the sports in which he has to run hard, to charge, to tackle, throw, and hit. In his adolescence he will spend years in mastering skills that concern such aggressive activity. A component of this aggressive desire for mastery is his competitiveness with other boys. He wishes to be as good or better than they are, to make his mastery known to the outside world.
In the mental sphere, too, this basic aggressiveness is clearly displayed. His chief passion is in mastering the outward environment that surrounds him, in, to use a phrase from football, “throwing it for a loss.” This desire leads him to become a scientist to control-through-knowing some aspect of the world or even of the universe. Or it leads him to become a businessman, wresting a living from the competitive market place. Or it may lead him to become a philosopher, aggressively probing the “why” of the world. Whatever role he plays in life, he must use his aggression to master the environment he selects as his province.
Because of this basic thrusting aggression which largely defines his role in life, a boy is generally given a larger amount of freedom than a girl is. One reason for this is that the male role in life will demand a great deal of self-reliance in the individual, and this has been recognized by society. Men need the protection of the childhood home for a much less protracted period than women do.
In contrast to men, women have a much smaller store of aggression directed toward the outside world. Their activity is largely directed inward. Psychologically speaking, woman is, in a very real sense, conditioned by her final biological function. At the very center of her nature she is preparing herself for motherhood, and this fact determines the main direction of her psychic energy. Her childhood interests show this clearly. She plays with dolls, she plays house, loves to be around Mother, fantasies marriage, is enormously curious about all of her internal functions. She has, of course, a certain store of interest and aggression which she _can_ direct outward, but this characteristic becomes very secondary to her when inward or outward circumstances do not force her to use it.
Intellectually woman is also basically inward. Her most potent faculty is her great intuition, her almost magical ability to understand another person by consulting her own inward nature. This is contrasted to man’s objective “intellectual” type of understanding.
In describing the essential characterological structure of the male and contrasting it with the female I am describing absolute types, not people as they are. In actuality most men have a certain store of passivity, of inwardness; and normal women have a certain amount of aggression. However, the normal male will be preponderantly outgoing and aggressive; the normal female’s psychic energies will be preponderantly directed inward.
As a direct or indirect result of man’s aggression and his commitment to the outside world, in maturity he develops certain behavioristic patterns that are diametrically opposite to female characteristics. Inevitably the frigid woman will use his attributes to show that her man has no interest in her, or is weak, or is withdrawn, or is cruel and wishes to exploit her. Having no objectivity about men, she will find in his differences from her further cause for estrangement, fear, and hostility.
Let me give some instances of these behavioristic differences in everyday life.
To the woman, the bearer of children and the nest-maker, the home and everything in it are all-important. She invests her home with a great deal of pride. She loves clean sinks, clean windows, clean floors. She wants things in her nest to be neat and orderly; she has made them that way and she wants them to stay that way.
It will be very easy for her to misunderstand the fact that her husband has invested a major portion of his pride elsewhere: in his work, in his achievements in the outside world. The cleanliness and neatness of his home he takes for granted. He may even be, by his wife’s standards, seemingly antagonistic to neatness, actually sloppy, throwing his clothes around, leaving the sink cluttered, forgetting to use the ash tray, and what not. These things, of course, are not in themselves pleasant traits, but the frigid woman will generalize about them, use them to indicate her man’s essential indifference to her.
He may also not notice a new rug or even a new chair in the house. He may have very small patience with any household duties he is forced to undertake: replacing a broken step or even a burned-out bulb. These attitudes can be quite confusing to a woman, and if she has any motive to do so she can easily interpret this kind of male behavior as further evidence of her husband’s indifference to her and to the family. It is not; when it occurs it is just male. It may be helpful to her to try to imagine how long her interest in the details of his business life actually hold her attention. The house is her business, and it is not surprising that he behaves the way he does in it, nor is it indicative of any lack of love in him.
Another aspect of man that can be easily misinterpreted is the fact that the male tends to be more sociable, likes to seek out and find a vigorous and sometimes quite varied social life. This, too, is part of his aggressive nature. A woman, though she may be quite gregarious, is generally more content to sit at home, and her immediate circle of friends is enough for her. The frigid woman may try to make much of her husband’s aggressive sociability. She is not enough for him; he is restless and dissatisfied, etc.
The vigor and aggressiveness of a man during the course of a social evening are also often misunderstood by women. He may on occasions be quiet, but he sometimes wants to do a great deal of the talking, may even, in his enthusiasm, raise his voice in a conversation. His competitiveness may even embroil him in an actual argument, perhaps a violent one. The woman likes things to run smoothly, to be utterly friendly and tranquil. Her husband’s normal social aggressiveness can appear to be rude and crude to her. It can frighten her. Afterward she may confront him with it, accusing him of strutting, of showing off, of cock-of-the-walk behavior. She is merely confronting him with his maleness again.
A very odd difference between men and women is the difference in their reactions to pain and fatigue. Women have a very high threshold for both, and most men have a relatively low one. If a woman gets a burn on her hand she can stick it in butter or in cold water and go on making the dinner. A man with the same burn could be completely incapacitated for a while--and awfully angry at himself besides. The same is true of all sorts of minor aches and illnesses that occur in the normal course of events. Because of this difference in pain thresholds, men tend to pamper themselves or want to be pampered when they have head colds, headaches, sore throats, or other minor illnesses that a woman might ignore. The frigid woman, of course, finds this difference a rich mine to work. She can and does use it to taunt her husband with his “weakness,” again showing her essential ignorance of and lack of sympathy with the male nature.
Of course sex itself remains one of the most fruitful sources for resentment and misunderstanding in the frigid woman. Here male aggression can be most clearly seen. The man is stimulated easily by things that would not excite his woman in the least. He is susceptible erotically to all sorts of sights, sounds, and odors. His wife undressing may excite him; her perfume may excite him; he may become aroused if she is looking wan or looking bright-eyed. The frigid woman, not comprehending male reactions or their plural causes, generally feels that his lust is unselective and impersonal. She takes his ardor as an affront for that reason.
In the sexual act the aggressive thrusting of the penis offends too. As passion increases during the act, the strength of the thrust increases, sometimes becomes quite a formidable series of pushes (one of the slang expressions men use for intercourse is “a bang”). This sometimes violent thrusting is a perfectly normal aspect of male sexuality and to the normal woman is of course highly desirable. Frigid women are frightened of it, experience it as an invasion of their integrity, an act of hostility against them.
Nothing could be farther from the fact. In his aggressive movements a man is showing his love in his particular way, his passionate need to lose his isolation, to rid himself of it, to join with his beloved. To misunderstand this is to misunderstand all.
Doubtlessly we could make a longer list of the characteristic things men do and feel that anger or are misunderstood by women with a frigidity problem. If you have started the form of self-inquiry I have advocated you have made your own list and have felt strong negative emotions about many of the items on it.
But the point I wish to emphasize now is that the majority of these negative emotions is caused directly or indirectly by man’s underlying and most distinguishing characteristic--his aggression. It is this trait that most clearly defines him, and it is this trait that is at the root of the frigid woman’s anger, fear of, and feeling of rejection by men.
She is antagonistic to this aggression because she does not understand it. Since she cannot understand or accept her own role, her feminine nature, she feels that male aggression is opposed to her and she takes every opportunity to prove to herself that this is so. His strength, his ability to master the outside environment make her feel personally nullified, a drab, a slavey. She endlessly contrasts his essential quality of aggression with woman’s essential traits, to her detriment.
Now if men _were_ out to enslave them, women would be very justified in fearing, hating, envying man’s central strength, his aggressiveness. But is he?
A re-examination of this single point can put the whole basic attitude of the frigid woman (once she has allowed herself to feel the negative power of her emotions) back into proper perspective, to correct her fundamental distortion of view. We can do this by looking at the single most important thing men do with their aggression in our society.
“All men have nightmares.”
I heard a fellow psychiatrist say those words during an impromptu discussion of male psychology recently, and the phrase struck me as dramatically true. For the majority of men, when they come of age and marry, take on an enormous burden which they may not lay down with any conscience this side of the grave. Quietly and without histrionics they put aside, in the name of love, most of their vaunted freedom and contract to take upon their shoulders full social and economic responsibility for their wives and children.
As a woman, consider for a moment how you would feel if your child should be deprived of the good things of life: proper housing, clothing, education. Consider how you would feel if he should go hungry. Perhaps such ideas have occurred to you and have given you a bad turn momentarily. But they are passing thoughts; a woman does not give them much credence; they are not her direct responsibility; certainly she does not worry about them for long.
But such thoughts, conscious or unconscious, are her husband’s daily fare. He knows, and he takes the carking thought to work with him each morning (and every morning) and to bed with him at night, that upon the success or failure of his efforts rest the happiness, health, indeed the very lives of his wife and children. In the ultimate sense he alone must take the full responsibility for them.
I do not think it is possible to exaggerate how seriously men take this responsibility; how much they worry about it. Women, unless they are very close to their men, rarely know how heavily the burden weighs sometimes, for men talk about it but little. They do not want their loved ones to worry.
Men have been shouldering the entire responsibility for their family group since earliest times. I often think, however, when I see the stresses and strains of today’s market place, that civilized man has much harder going, psychologically speaking, than his primitive forefathers.
In the first place, the competition creates a terrible strain on the individual male. This competition is not only for preferment and advancement. It is often for his very job itself. Every man knows that if he falters, lets up his ceaseless drive, he can and will be easily replaced.
No level of employment is really free of this endless pressure. The executive must meet and exceed his last year’s quota or the quota of his competitors. Those under him must see that he does it, and he scrutinizes their performances most severely and therefore constantly.
Professional men--doctors, lawyers, professors--are under no less pressure for the most part. If the lawyer is self-employed he must constantly seek new clients; if he works for an organization he must exert himself endlessly to avoid being superseded by ambitious peers or by pushing young particles just out of law school and filled with the raw energy of youth. A score of unhappy contingencies can ruin or seriously threaten a doctor’s practice, not the least of which is a possible breakdown in his ability to practice. A teacher must work long hours on publishable projects outside of his arduous teaching assignments if he is to advance or even hold his ground.
There is no field of endeavor that a man may enter where he can count on complete economic safety; competition, the need for unremitting year-in, year-out performance, is his life lot. Over all this he knows, too, stands a separate specter upon which he can exert only the remotest control. It is the joblessness which may be caused by the cyclical depressions and recessions that characterize our economy.
It is true; all men have nightmares.
Few if any women could take the kind of daily strain and worry men commit themselves to when they sign the marriage contract. And no woman in her right mind would want to take it. It is true that many women go into the market place, but most of them are waiting only for the day that they marry, or they are already married. Those who stay of their own free will are few and far between, and in my experience some have proven to be difficult people in their family relationships, though some of them are talented. Women are designed for duties different from those of the market place, another kind of stress entirely, and lose or tend to lose their essential womanliness if they stay by choice.
As women look at man’s characteristic of aggressiveness in terms of the tremendous duties, daily struggles, and awful responsibilities men must and do assume, they can begin to call up in themselves a different emotion from anger or envy. They can begin to see how altogether worthy of their highest admiration man is. Not just some abstract man, either; the man they love, the man they have married, the man upon whom they have been heaping their criticism, their jealousy and rage.
Far from seeking to enslave our sex, to exploit us through his strength and his aggression, man has put these two great and basic attributes entirely at our service. It is (and always has been) this fact that makes it safe for us to be women, to bear his children with a sense of security, to rear them, knowing that he is there, always and forever, earning our bread, watching over us ceaselessly, keeping his terrible anxieties about us and our safety to himself so that we will not worry as he does.
Certain it is that boys are generally given their freedom a lot earlier than girls. And it is also true that the quality of aggression in the male makes him the wooer and the woman the wooed. I have yet to hear a woman suffering from a frigidity problem who did not deeply resent both of these facts.
But now, looking at the end to which male aggression is directed when it matures, can any woman honestly hold onto such resentment? When she realizes that society instinctively grants him more and earlier freedom so that he may develop the great self-reliance necessary to take on the responsibilities of a family, she cannot validly hold this view any longer.
Nor can she hold onto her resentment of the fact that it is generally the male who initiates the sexual act. For it is the same male aggression which protects her, allows her to be wife and mother, that makes him the wooer and she the wooed. Again, knowing how easily women are distracted from sexual feeling by trivial upsets, by the small things that occur during the day, imagine what would happen if women had to take the male’s anxieties and yet be responsible for initiating sex at night. Should such a reversal of roles ever happen to mankind, the world would soon be depopulated. Women must learn to thank God daily for the enormous energy and drive of their men.
In terms of this lifelong commitment of man to the service of his wife and family, let us take another look at the things in his conduct which irritate women, or at least irritate women with a frigidity problem, for now they begin to be understandable. Minor irritabilities, cock-of-the-walk behavior, slackness, sloppiness, whatever--these are either the outlets or the results of the accumulated tensions of a man’s day. He will not tell you of the humiliations or defeats or worries of his day in any direct manner usually. As his wife, you must understand that these are the only remonstrances against his hard and anxious struggle that he will permit himself. If you see his behavior in this light it will be difficult to harbor any deep-seated resentment against him; one can only wish to comfort him, to help in any conceivable way to make his burden less onerous, his worries less sharp, his nightmares less frequent.
The espousal of this view of the male, the accurate one, can be another great forward step toward femininity. Seeing her man’s aggression in its true light, aimed first and foremost at procuring her safety, happiness, and security, she can now dare to take down, one by one, the precarious defenses she has maintained against him from the beginning of their relationship. She sees that her husband’s wonderful aggression actually defines her true role, makes it ever clearer and more desirable to her.
Let us now see how her altered attitude can ultimately affect her and what she can do to hasten and further the process of change.
_Chapter 16_
THE NATURE OF SURRENDER
When the frigid woman, using the methods described in this section, has divested herself of the destructive fears and false convictions that have been left over from her childhood; and when, in all honesty, she is able to view her husband with new eyes, knowing him to be the hard-beset but loving human being he is rather than an abstract power she had conjured up in his image--when these things are achieved, a profound change begins to take place within her.
This change is not a direct product of her conscious will. Forces which have the character of a tide suddenly freed of long-standing barricades now begin to move irresistibly within her. She feels a new potentiality inside, intimations of an emotional richness she had not dared dream of.
When such a process is loosed within a woman, we say that she is ready to surrender; that, indeed, surrender has already started within her. What does this mean?
It means, in the broadest sense, that at long last she is prepared to become a woman. It means that she is ready, indeed anxious, to yield to her biological and psychological destiny. She has ceased to fear her real role, mentally, spiritually, and physically; ceased to resist it and ceased to resent it. Now she is ready to glory in it. She is ready to love.
When a woman is ready for this final step she no longer needs any urging, any coaxing or coaching. Since this ultimate surrender to her true nature is so natural to a woman, she is often not entirely conscious of its varied manifestations. It is slow, cellular, tidal, certainly unsubject to the conscious will.
Though change is now largely going on outside one’s awareness, I should like to emphasize, however, that this phase is very much a part of the _process_ that was initiated with the first two steps--of airing one’s emotions and fantasies and of revaluating one’s husband. We have found that, for a woman whose whole mind and body are, for the first time, taking the path nature intended, it is wise to be as conscious as possible of the process that is going on within her. Many of the feelings are new and powerful and run counter to much of what she has experienced and believed in before. New convictions, new insights, new prospects open up before her. This novel proliferation may be confusing or even frightening. Therefore, the more she understands the nature of her brave new inner world, the more thoroughly and swiftly can she claim it for her own.
For this reason I should like to urge that those who are trying the techniques advocated here continue with the regular daily sessions I mentioned at the beginning. At this point much of the mental activity in such sessions with oneself will be a simple matter of _watching_--of watching the process unfold in oneself, even of celebrating these advances of the unconscious.
In this role of constant observer, however, the conscious mind can also be ready for more aggressive activity. Any tendencies of the old pattern to reassert itself, for angers, fears, fantasies to come out in new guises, can thus be noted and dispensed with before any real damage can be done. Such pullbacks are not only possible but usual, and it is well not to abandon the sessions with oneself until they have disappeared entirely--or as entirely as they’re going to.
The process of inner growth that follows when a woman is ready to surrender to her real nature, we have found, traces a rather clear pattern. Some of the new feelings overlap, but mostly they emerge in a given order, each unfolding separately but related to the other as petals to a bud. Let us take them in the usual order of their coming.
As the woman who has suffered from frigidity explodes her groundless fears one by one and explores a new attitude toward men, toward love, toward motherhood, feels a new esteem for her husband--as all these things happen, her lifelong _restlessness_ begins to depart. For the first time she realizes just _how_ restless she has been, how unsatisfied; she feels how precariously balanced her life, inwardly and outwardly, has always felt. Now something deep within her relaxes, lets down. When this happens she is beginning to experience the essential attribute of all that is truly feminine, spiritual tranquillity.
The arrival of this tranquillity, or even the arrival of intimations of it results from the fact that she is really allowing herself to trust her husband in a very deep sense. It means that she finally realizes that she no longer has to fear or to oppose his strength, but that she can now rely on it to protect her, to give her the secure climate necessary for the full flowering of her femininity.
Feminine tranquillity of spirit is a grace and a beauty of the first order. It is the psychological cornerstone of the happy family. Based on an abiding faith in the goodness and loyalty of her husband, it emanates from a woman who has found herself and pervades those about her, giving them unity and strength. The children of such a mother are strong against the neurotic restlessness of these difficult times. The husband of a wife who has achieved such tranquillity returns from his work to his home as to an oasis, redoubles his loving efforts to make her ever more secure.
Because she can trust no man, the frigid woman’s approach to the tasks of life has a difficult, painful, frenetic quality. She feels responsible for everything; guiltily responsible. Details and trivia overwhelm her. She has no unity and has to fight herself, her resentment, her self-rejection to get the simplest things done--her household work, planning the dinner, carrying and fetching the children. Everything _looms_.
With the development of the new quality of tranquillity those details of life that once seemed so difficult become simple. And because they are feminine tasks, household work, planning or getting dinners, keeping the children busy or in line--whatever life demands--soon lose their irksome and irritating quality and become easy, even joyful.
As tranquillity moves over to serenity, becomes more and more a part of her psychic character, a woman begins to realize what a miraculous and wonderful thing womanhood is. Most frequently this realization is ushered in by a sudden awareness of the miracle that her body is able to perform: the miracle of childbirth.
In her frightened heart the frigid woman has always detested and feared her capacity to become pregnant. To her this faculty has seemed onerous and burdensome, a curse. In pregnancy she feels trapped, sick at heart and in body during it, increasingly frightened of delivery as the day of confinement approaches. She views all this as woman’s burden; men, those enviable creatures, are free of such a frightening duty. Indeed, has she not heard that men use pregnancy as a technique of keeping women subject to them! Thus she frets and rages and trembles, rejecting her destiny.
But with her new evaluation of her husband, the deepening of her sense of security, and the growth of her tranquillity, all this childish frightened protest against the miracle of motherhood washes away. Now the scales really fall from her eyes and she feels the full meaning and majesty of what it means to be a woman.
What a privilege it is, she realizes, to be the carrier of the race, the agent of its immortality. What fate could be richer, more beautiful, more filled with wonder and with awe.
I am not exaggerating the importance of this realization. Pride in it, joy in it are the very most central characteristics of the feminine woman. To me its highest expression is in the Madonna paintings which the great Renaissance artists took, over and over again, as a major subject. The Alba Madonna by Raphael catches the essential quality of femininity, expresses it for all to see--and to revere.
Now, with this realization, the last vestiges of her envy of the male and of his role in life disappear. How, she may wonder, with this marvelous capability of hers, inimitable by man, could she ever have depreciated the role of woman, wanted what men have?
At this juncture, or closely following on it, a woman begins to feel her full power, the power that comes to her for her surrender to her destiny. She now realizes that, far from being in a weak position in relationship to man, her position is so strong that she must be careful not to exploit it. One of the deepest and strongest psychological needs of man is his poignant desire for immortality through his children. She could deny him this, or she could make his life miserable while granting him it. Or she can make it the most beautiful and meaningful thing in her life and in his.
What this new realization means to a woman was stated very beautifully in a letter I received from a former patient. We had been able to work only two weeks on her problem, for she came from a different section of the country and could spend only that amount of time in New York City. We worked quickly, and she had been able to surface the hostilities to and misapprehensions about men that had plagued her grown-up life. I had been able also to give her a thumbnail sketch of the problems and changes she might encounter within herself in the future--much as I have described them here. Within six months I had a letter from her. It described the step-by-step process I have depicted: the change in her feelings toward her husband, the incredibly swift growth within her of the new and wonderful serenity. And then she had come to the point where she realized with her whole emotional being the miraculous nature of the female body and the feeling of power and glory that it gave her.
But [she wrote] this feeling of power was quickly followed by an intense feeling of humility. I thought of how I held within me, within my body, the power to bring him the greatest of joys; or to deprive him of it. And then I realized the terrible thing it would be to ever misuse this power. And now I felt really for the first time, despite my former lip service to the idea, the reason why marriage must be considered sacramental. The relationship between husband and wife which results in the unsolvable mystery of birth goes far beyond human understanding. To participate in this mystery really requires a consecration by both. Any lesser attitude toward it is like the laughter of mockery in a holy place.
With this kind of acceptance of her central role, changes now come rapidly to a woman. As she feels the unity of need and goal between her husband and herself, any remaining contentiousness leaves her. In the marriage, consensus now becomes her aim. She is no longer afraid of losing an argument, fearful that she will be forced to do something that is repugnant or humiliating to her, for she realizes that to her husband her welfare is the dearest of all things. And, conversely, his happiness and peace of mind become her first desire.
And now she has tapped in on the greatest psychological joy of woman--her capacity to give. If you remember, in an earlier chapter we called this “essential female altruism,” a characteristic rooted in every woman’s biological nature. Women who are really secure within themselves and in their roles have an inexhaustible store of this altruism. Frigid women fear this basic characteristic, feeling as they do that men will exploit and abuse their desire to give.
As she reaps the rewards of her new capacity to give of herself unstintingly and fearlessly to her husband and her children, the very appearance of a woman often begins to change. Drawn expressions relax, anxious forehead wrinkles disappear, thin-lipped mouths soften. Indeed, her whole body rounds and softens, taking on the look associated with a tender and giving femininity.
Physical difficulties often disappear. I have known women who had been plagued with intense pre-menstrual and menstrual pains all their lives to lose such symptoms in a matter of weeks. I have known women whose irregular periods have become regularized. And I have also known women with one or two desperately difficult pregnancies behind them who, becoming pregnant again, went through the entire nine months not only without discomfort but with a highly accelerated feeling of pleasure and well-being.
These, then, are the results, or some of them, that a woman who is willing to give up the things of childhood and yield to her true self may expect. The return on such an investment of self is enormous. It is paid in the coinage of love returned for love given; love from one’s husband and children, love from friends, new and old, attracted by the endless largesse of the woman who has surrendered all to find all.
_Chapter 17_
SEXUAL SURRENDER
The ability to achieve normal orgasm can be called the physical counterpart of psychological surrender. In most cases of true frigidity it follows on a woman’s surrender of her rebellious and infantile attitudes as the day the night. It is the sign that she has given up the last vestige of resistance to her nature and has embraced womanhood with soul _and_ body.
The achievement of orgasm, usually, is the _last_ step in the process of growing up. If one reviews in one’s mind the actual orgastic experience it is not difficult to see why this is so.
For a woman orgasm requires a trust in one’s partner that is absolute. Recall for a moment that the physical experience is often so profound that it entails the loss of consciousness for a period of time. As we know, in sexual intercourse, as in life, man is the actor, woman the passive one, the receiver, the acted upon. Giving oneself up in this passive manner to another human being, making oneself his willing partner to such seismic physical experiences, means one must have complete faith in the other person. In the sexual embrace any trace of buried hostility, fear of one’s role, will show clearly and unmistakably.
But there is even more to the psychic state necessary for orgasm than faith in one’s partner and readiness to surrender. There must be a sensual eagerness to surrender, in the woman’s orgasm _the excitement comes from the act of surrender_. There is a tremendous surging physical ecstasy in the yielding itself, in the feeling of being the passive instrument of another person, of being stretched out supinely beneath him, taken up will-lessly by his passion as leaves are swept up before a wind.
There can, it is clear, be no crossed fingers about such yielding, no reservations in such surrender. As one thinks of it one can certainly feel why, of all the steps in the process of yielding, of surrendering, the orgasm should be last. To those who are moving toward it the experience often remains for a time elusive because its very totality, its uncompromising demand that the whole being be swept up in the experience, remains somewhat frightening.
Orgasm, as I have said, is the physical aspect of surrendering. However, while there are similarities between the physical and the psychological experience, there is also an important difference between the two.
The difference is that orgasm cannot be sought entirely rationally. It will arrive when it will arrive, as the end process of a total change in a frigid woman’s deepest psychological attitudes. It cannot be sought separately or as an end in itself. Indeed, to seek it directly, to wait upon it, to try to force it are the surest possible ways of postponing its arrival.
The idea that orgasm can be forced is typical of the thinking of a frigid woman. We have seen that, because she is basically frightened, basically mistrusts her husband’s love of her and her own femininity, she has to feel that she is “in control” all the time. The trouble with that standpoint is that in real orgasm a woman must be out of control; must willfully, delightedly desire to be entirely so.
The delusion that the orgasm can or should be sought as an end in itself and not as the result of a deep inner change of the kind discussed in the preceding chapters of this section has been fostered by many of the books which have dealt with the problem of frigidity or with the role or responsibility of woman in marriage. One recent book counseled the conscious contraction of certain muscles during intercourse, holding that this would heighten sexual pleasure. Other books emphasize the importance of position during intercourse. Their tacit or stated contention is that orgastic potency can be achieved by mechanical means.
The simple fact is that concentrating on one’s sensations during intercourse, wondering if one is feeling the “right” feeling, can destroy real sexual passion more completely than any technique I can think of. We know this from scores of patients. Such a clinical and objective attitude toward local sexual sensations merely reflects the frigid woman’s need to be in control of a situation and her fear of surrendering herself to her man. She can get little more from this obsessive scrutiny of her sexual reactions than an even more frustrating experience than usual.
Is there, then, an attitude one can take toward orgasm before one has achieved it? Yes, there is, and we have found it a helpful and productive one. This attitude may be summarized in this fashion: If one has truly pursued the goal of self-surrender, uprooting and exposing attitudes left over from childhood and youth, the ability to achieve orgasm must inevitably arrive. Until that time, and particularly during intercourse, _one must put the matter out of one’s mind entirely_.
The growth of a woman’s ability to have orgasm is a natural growth. It has been impeded by her psychic attitudes; it resumes its development when these attitudes change. It is as natural a move as the move from winter to spring. Gradually she finds herself allowing her new tenderness and concern for her husband to become a part of the meaning of her sexual embrace. She sees and feels the pleasure her sexual thawing brings him, and this process becomes circular, his increased pleasure giving her more pleasure. And with his pleasure in mind she now seeks out more and more those things that please him, and her exploration leads inevitably to the discovery that what pleases him most, outside of his own sensations, is her pleasure. This mutual spiraling of feeling ultimately climaxes in her unconscious decision to give him the greatest psychological pleasure of all, her total surrender to the delights he can bring her.
For many women the ability to surrender physically comes rather swiftly; to others it is a very gradual process, as though the unconscious mind needed to build up a reserve of reassurances before it felt perfectly secure. In either case, but particularly in the latter, they can be forewarned of one important thing: sexual thaw will not proceed uninterruptedly; there is no straight line from frigidity to true womanhood. I should like to explain this more fully.
When, in the sexual embrace, a woman allows herself to experience more pleasure as her physical sensations increase, a part of her unconscious mind very frequently takes alarm and causes her to draw back from any further immediate advance.
If you stop to ponder this point you will find it readily understandable in terms of our former discussions. The experiences and relationships upon which frigidity is based took place a long time ago, often in very early childhood. They occasioned fear in the child, fear of sexuality, of surrender to one’s sensual impulses, or powerful guilt. Now, as one starts to move toward a resumption of one’s sensuality, it is almost certain that these irrational, buried fears will try to reassert themselves.
In most cases it is not necessary to uncover the childhood incidents upon which these fears were based. If one will insist on pursuing the techniques for inner change I have described here, these fears will finally become inoperative in the sexual area. It is, however, necessary to know that you _are_ experiencing such fears. Generally speaking, they do not show themselves directly. A woman will not say to herself: “That new sensual experience I had last night is causing me alarm.”
The fear separates itself from the sensual experience and expresses itself indirectly. The woman may find herself once again becoming quarrelsome, critical of her husband; old feelings of deprivation or of inferiority may reassert themselves with apparently new vigor. And the new sensual capacity may retire once more from view. The reason: the old defenses are protecting one against the new femininity.
Such anxiety reactions, I wish to make clear, should not give any real cause for concern. Indeed, one does not have to analyze them or to investigate them. One merely has to be _aware_ that they _are_ the result of the new advance in sensuality, the new ability to surrender oneself a bit more completely than formerly. Advance of this kind is never lost in any final sense.
Let me give you an example of a typical reaction to such an advance. The patient was of the type I call the clitoridal woman. Her orgasm had been exclusively clitoral. Together we had covered the ground that I have presented in this section. She had been able to air her feelings about men and about woman’s lot; she had corrected her view of men and, in a very real way, had begun to view her husband with the eyes of a loving woman. Then one day she came to me in great excitement. It was unmistakable, she told me; during last night’s love-making she had felt, for the first time in her life, distinctly pleasurable vaginal sensations.
But in the next session her attitude was entirely different. She had had a quarrel with her husband over some trivial matter, and she forthwith launched into the kind of tirade against men I had not heard from her for several sessions.
After letting her air her feelings, I pointed out to her the possible connection between her new sensual experience and her regression to her old defenses. She was incredulous and remained so until, a week later, the episode repeated itself in its entirety: vaginal sensations and delight, followed quickly by a quarrel and ill feelings toward her husband. Forewarned, she was now on guard for such negative reactions, and when they did appear, knowing their significance, she was able to handle them, prevent herself from actually acting out her irrational feelings by quarreling with her husband.
In making the above point I do not wish to be misunderstood or thought to be contradicting myself. I am not advising women to fixate obsessively on their new sexual sensations. However, noticing such new experiences will be unavoidable, and I am simply saying that it is helpful to know that they may be followed by minor neurotic regressions.
The above observations now lead me to a closely related matter which I consider to be of central importance.
In the move toward womanhood there comes a juncture in most cases which can be called “the danger point.” When a woman is working with a therapist on her problem, the danger when she reaches this point is minimized by the fact that her therapist is aware of the problem and can usually help her to handle it when it arises. If a woman is working on her problem by herself, however, she should be strongly forewarned of her potential reaction.
This danger point generally comes when a woman who has suffered from frigidity has at last allowed herself to experience orgasm for the first time. Her immediate reaction is one of tremendous relief. But this is almost always followed by the same kind of regression I have described above; only this time the pull-back from her own advance and from her husband is far more powerful. We have seen in some of the case histories in the last section just how dangerous this period can be to the entire relationship. Indeed, the wife may at this point precipitate a crisis of such severity that the marriage itself is endangered.
The form the difficulty takes is always individual; it is usually an exaggerated version of the particular woman’s most typical neurotic characteristic. If she is argumentative, she is apt to start a fight of proportions heretofore undreamed of. If her tendency is to become depressed, her melancholy can become very, very profound indeed. If she is critical and carping, she can make Craig’s wife appear to be a normal, healthy woman.
I am not exaggerating. It is not impossible that many divorces are caused by wives who, by the natural reassurance that marriage to a tender husband often brings, have moved close to their true natures all unwittingly. They achieve orgasm; and then, without the benefit of any insight, the intense anxiety reaction sets in, causing a powerful desire to flee from the frightening situation.
The pull-back, of course, is caused by an exacerbation of early fears brought on by the orgasmic experience. But again I must emphasize that the chief danger during this period of reaction lies in the fact that the woman sees no connection between her emotional upset and the successful sexual experience she has just achieved. Why should she see such a connection? Orgasm is what she has been consciously waiting for, has it not? It would only be surprising if she did see a connection between the two experiences.
Her emotional outburst represents, at this point, an inner panic. Consider this: in the course of growing up it took her years to construct a defensive system against a feminine sensuality which she had learned was dangerous or wicked. Though this defensive system (her frigidity, her psychological rejection of men, etc.) had deprived her of much, it had at least allowed her to feel secure in some deep manner; she has maintained her defenses in order to hold onto her feeling of unconscious security.
And now, with orgasm, she feels all these defenses swept away in a moment. She feels exposed, guilty, naked to her imaginary enemy, tempted to surrender to him completely. In her panic she forgets the advance she has been making, the revaluation of her attitude toward men, children, womanhood.
She cannot admit the irrational nature of her unconscious fear, even to herself, so she represses it and creates an exterior diversion. Real trouble is always an excellent defense against insight.
In the case histories I have given of frigid women you will recall that the discovery of true feminine sexuality within her often brought a woman to therapy. In a sense the therapist, at the beginning, represents a safe harbor, a protection against the woman’s frightening femininity. Coming for help is, in part, a kind of flight in itself; a search for a place to hide.
When women do not understand the nature of their actions in such cases, the flight can take a potentially harmful direction. I have known some who “fall in love” with another man at this juncture. Others feel that they have really discovered just how incompatible their husbands are and think seriously of divorce. Still others develop somatic difficulties, sometimes serious ones. I know two women who had had tuberculosis during adolescence and who both broke down again during this “danger point.” In both cases their disease had been considered totally arrested.
I realize, of course, that such reactions sound alarming to a reader. However, my intention in stating the facts here is not to frighten but to forewarn. There is nothing in _reality_ to be alarmed about. Feelings are not reality. But a woman must be certain that she does not act upon her feelings. The only danger is that she might.
But, I am often asked, how can one cope with such fears, fears so deep one does not even dare to let them into the conscious mind? The answer is that, generally speaking, you do not have to cope with them in any active way. They will pass. All you have to do is to sit tight, so to speak. The unconscious will in fairly short order (a week, a month) calm down.
Reality, a good reality, can prove to the infantile unconscious that it has nothing to fear. When one has quieted again, resumed the straight line of progress one had been pursuing, orgasm will occur again. This time the reaction of alarm is generally far less. By the third and fourth times it has become virtually nonexistent. The neurotic, defensive portion of one’s mind has then been permanently disarmed.
* * * * *
All frigidities are basically related. We could prescribe no general approach that would be helpful if this were not so. However, I have found that there are specific measures that can be of great value if applied to the individual kinds of frigidity. Indeed, if these measures are omitted, the return to full feminine maturity can be slowed down dramatically or even stopped, at least on the sexual level.
I must warn once again, however, that one should be careful to put no reliance on these techniques if they are not combined with the “feeling through” and revaluative processes I have described. With this in mind, then, let us examine these measures that can be taken by individual types.
First let us look at the _masculine type_. As we have seen both in our abstract description and in our case-history approach to this type, the only method of gratification possible for this woman is clitoral. She achieves climax through self-masturbation or through masturbation by her husband. She has few if any vaginal sensations during intercourse, and her orgasmic reactions are confined entirely to the clitoris. This is so even if she is able to establish contact between her clitoris and her husband’s penis in intercourse. In most cases vaginal entrance of the penis is a matter of indifference to such women; to some it is actively disliked.
We have seen how women establish this erotic primacy of the clitoris. Because of early fears connected with becoming women they have firmly rejected the vagina. They have held onto infantile and pubertal masturbation long past the point when it is normal for a girl to give it up.
Now, with a new evaluation of the meaning of feminine sexuality, with a new tenderness and warmth toward their husbands available to them, the time at length comes when it is possible for them to switch from clitoral sensations to vaginal. However, the pathways for satisfaction have been set up for many years, the “habit” of clitoral climax has been deeply established. What should they do?
We have found that, if the clitoridal woman wishes to achieve a more mature form of sexual satisfaction she may be aided in reaching her goal if she can give up the form of gratification she now employs. This form of gratification still symbolizes an attachment to the earlier form of sexuality. For that reason, of course, it is a defense against the type of sexuality that stands for psychic maturity. The simple decision to abandon the less mature form of gratification often signifies a deep decision within a woman: the decision to take the final step toward womanhood.
On the other hand, many women experience the abandonment of clitoral gratification as a keen deprivation and deeply resent it. In such cases the resentment signifies that they have not sufficiently “felt through” their childhood defenses against femininity.
Obviously there are only two possible steps to take: one can continue the practice of masturbation or one can examine the resentment that is caused by giving it up. If a woman decides on the first step, progress toward the goal of vaginal orgasm may be slowed down or halted completely.
If, however, one decides to examine the resentment more closely, using the “feeling through” technique I have described, the bases upon which the resentment rests may be discovered and disposed of, just as resentments against men and against motherhood were disposed of. Indeed, many of the same feelings, though now more specifically related to sexuality, often come out.
Let me give an example. A patient with a clitoridal fixation had worked through many of her negative feelings toward her husband; she had seen that these feelings had been based on an irrational envy and fear of men and a depreciation of women. Her progress, however, seemed to halt completely when she attempted to give up clitoral masturbation.
All of her early feelings toward men returned, only now they referred to the act of intercourse. Men were the lucky ones; they were on top. Just as in life. Woman’s classical sexual position in our civilization (on the bottom) was “degrading and humiliating.” It represented her position vis-à-vis men in life. As in life, men were the ones for whom irresponsible enjoyment was designed; no wonder they could enjoy sex so much; and they couldn’t get pregnant; they didn’t have to menstruate, etc., etc.
She aired these irrational feelings quite completely and saw them for what they were. She saw that they were a recapitulation, in sexual terms, of the negative feelings she had expressed earlier toward men. She realized, too, that her feeling that it was humiliating and degrading to be “on the bottom” really showed her deep distress, fear of, and underlying depression about what she took to be woman’s role in life.
The patient was rather surprised to see these irrational feelings reappearing. However, because of her earlier work on her psychological defenses, it was not too difficult for her to dispose of these negative attitudes toward the sexual act and to integrate her positive feelings about womanhood with woman’s sexual role. At that point she was not far from achieving vaginal orgasm. Within a month or so she had achieved it.
When a woman consciously abandons clitoral gratification in favor of her search for a deeper and more abiding joy, the switch from clitoris to vagina usually takes place gradually. I have known cases in which it has happened rather quickly, but it is more frequently a matter of two, three, or even more months.
One further word on this type: the clitoridal woman may discover that she cannot take the final step to vaginal primacy alone. She may need direct and expert counsel. This should in no way discourage her. The problem is a deep-seated one, but it almost certainly can be resolved. If after a few months of trying to handle the problem alone one finds out that too little progress is being achieved, I strongly urge that outside help be sought (see Addenda I, page 260, for methods of obtaining the correct kind of aid).
I have heard the therapy for _total frigidity_ described as “a problem in rerearing.” Recalling the case history of Patricia Agnew, one can easily see why this phrase is so apt. The causes of this kind of frigidity go back to infancy. Punishment for infantile masturbation and/or an overly strong early fixation on the male parent causes the child to repress her sexual feeling entirely. She does not go through, in any complete way, the normal stages of psycho-sexual development; a part of her, the sensual and sexual part, remains frozen in the bud.
In my opinion, psychotherapy is frequently indicated when the frigidity is of this total type. The sexual aspect of the problem is sometimes too deeply seated for the individual to handle alone.
However, I know of several women who, when therapy was not possible, were able to make great strides toward truly feminine values and behavior by adopting the procedures described in this section. Though some of them were not able to achieve orgasm, the psychological change they were able to effect in their personalities added greatly to their general happiness and security in marriage. A few even were able to achieve orgasm.
For women with this form and degree of frigidity who wish to or must attempt to approach their problem without outside aid, I should like to point out that if general sexual development is resumed it will tend to recapitulate the stages of psycho-sexual growth we have described. Thus we find that when such women, through insight, are once again able to experience sensual feeling they sometimes go through a period of self-masturbation. Recall that this stage had been omitted in their development.
I should like to emphasize that, in terms of the final resolution of her sexual frigidity, this masturbation is perfectly normal for this kind of woman--just as it is contraindicated for the masculine or clitoridal woman. The totally frigid woman is making up for phases of development she had missed in growing up. Guilt feelings about masturbation in such cases are harmful, and the ego of the individual can be put in the service of overcoming such emotions. For those who have moral feelings against masturbation it is sometimes helpful to realize that modern scientific findings indicate that societal prohibitions against it were partly based on insufficient and incorrect information. It was believed for centuries that pubertal or infantile masturbation was harmful physically and mentally. It has now been clearly demonstrated, however, that the only harm of any kind that can come from masturbation is the psychological harm that is caused by guilt feelings connected with it.
The fact is that, in attempting to establish her lost sexuality, the totally frigid woman may be helped by encouraging, any sensuality, however meager, she may discover in herself, whether it is psychological or physical. The sensuous feelings engendered by sun-bathing, of the press of the earth under one when lying down in a field or under a tree, the soft beauty of the moon on a hazy night, the warmth and coziness of a fireplace as the rain beats upon the roof--if she will allow her body and mind to enjoy these kinds of things, they can help to awaken her dormant sensuality, can help her to move back from her dusty sensationless condition toward a reappreciation of the glory of the senses.
Some women may discover (if they can consciously dispense with their inhibitions or with a hindering sense of propriety) that they are able to experience sensual feelings of a moderately keen nature in areas which are secondarily erotic. During our work together one woman suddenly discovered that she enjoyed having her back stroked by her husband. Another discovered that though she could not enjoy kissing her husband if she was in bed with him she could if she remained fully clothed in the living room. A third was able to respond quite strongly to clitoral stroking if she had a drink of liquor with her husband beforehand. In each case the sensual capacities described in these women preceded their work with me. But it was only when they realized that they possessed unexplored potentialities and that these could be used to enrichen their sensual lives, to move them closer to the ultimate experience of love, did they dare to take their first tentative steps toward maturity.
As we have observed, _partial frigidity_ includes those degrees of frigidity that lie between total frigidity and normalcy. This includes such a large range of sexual reaction (or the lack of it) that it would not be possible to describe specific measures that would be helpful in all cases.
However, those who find they are closer to total frigidity on this scale than to normalcy often discover that the general techniques just described are helpful. Many of these, if they persevere, will find that they will ultimately achieve orgasm without requiring psychotherapy. Others, after determining the distance they can go on their own, may wish to seek outside help.
For those who lie closer to normal feminine sexual reactions it is usually sufficient to persist in the techniques for self-discovery and self-realization described earlier in this section.
As we saw when we examined _psychic frigidity_, it seemed to be the exception that proved the rule. Women of this type are able to have orgasms that are apparently normal. But they cannot form a relationship with any man that will endure. They frequently select ineligible men as partners or, if by chance the man happens to become eligible, they will then flee the relationship. If they cannot flee it they become sexually frigid.
We have found that women with this type of frigidity can help themselves by denying themselves the easy gratification to which they are accustomed. Their facile sensuality is a red herring used to disguise their real fears from themselves. They can come to grips with these fears only when they allow themselves to enter a close psychological relationship with an eligible member of the opposite sex.
* * * * *
I have called the steps by which a woman moves from frigidity to emotional and sexual maturity a “process.” Once really started, it tends, almost by inertia, to complete itself, needing only a kind of minimal guidance from one’s intelligence and a few specific facts.
For the sake of clarity, then, let us review what the steps in this process are.
It is launched by the surfacing of negative emotions and fantasies from which the frigid woman has been hiding. These emotions and fantasies reflect an underlying attitude toward the opposite sex which is based on early childhood fears and misunderstandings and which is seriously affecting one’s ability to love. As the emotions are exposed to full view they lose their power for harm, for it is only when they are partially or totally hidden from oneself that their primitive force is dangerous. When they are exposed to the light of intelligence and judgment, their power over one can at first be greatly reduced and finally can be disposed of entirely.
When all or most of one’s negative daydreams and emotions have been exposed, step two can be taken. This is a revaluation of the male in terms of his real nature and real goals. We saw that his real nature is basically aggressive, and one of his chief aims in life is to put this aggression to work for his wife and family. Viewed from this standpoint, man’s differences from woman are seen in their true light. The frigid woman, from this revaluation, learns that she can now let down her defenses, knowing that her husband, far from being hostile or wishing to enslave or exploit her, is her loving ally. She sees that his once-feared aggression is the very thing that makes it really safe for her to be a woman.
From this realization, on a deep level of her personality, the next step follows naturally. She first achieves a tranquillity and then a serenity she had not known before. This is followed by an acceptance of and a surrender to her real role--that of a loving and wise wife who glories in her womanly functions and in her man’s love.
The last step was seen to be the achievement of orgasm as a natural sequel to her psychological maturation. This part of the process we saw was attended by a resurgence of early anxiety when orgasm finally occurred. This anxiety caused a desire to flee from the newly acquired ability to love. However, the only danger at this juncture was seen to be the possibility that the anxious woman might act upon her fears. Forewarned of this reaction, she is forearmed, and by seeking further insights and waiting out the anxiety she will find that it will gradually subside completely.
These general steps, then, outline the process that can lead to recovery. I can add little to them. I have seen this method work for many women and I know of no other that will.
Patience and faith are the prime requisites for emotional maturation. Nobody can name the time it will take for any given individual to cross the bridge to womanhood. But that most women can cross it, there can be no doubt. Those who have gone before make that point ultimately clear.
_Chapter 18_
THE ROLE OF THE MALE
When a woman decides to cross the bridge from frigidity to mature femininity her husband’s attitudes, feelings, and reactions can be all-important.
I said earlier that we have found that the man is rarely responsible for his wife’s frigidity; that it developed long before he met her. However, he must understand that, when she begins to assume responsibility for her difficulty, responsibilities of a new kind are thrust on him too. In the beginning at least, and contrary to what he might expect of himself, he may not like these responsibilities at all. He may find that he has a very negative attitude toward his wife’s attempt to mature, that indeed he does not want her to.
It is very necessary for a man to understand the elements that make his role appear to him to be very difficult during such a period. In a sense, if the project is to succeed, he must be as aware of his reactions as his wife is of hers.
What, then, are the main elements of his reactions?
In the first place, the husband of a frigid woman generally has a great store of repressed resentment toward his wife. This is quite understandable, of course. He has been the chief recipient of her very strong negative feelings toward life, people, love, and sex.
As we have seen, the frigid woman has a strong tendency to blame others for her difficulties. Her husband, doubtlessly, has received his full quota of such irrational blame from her. He has also been the main victim of all the other neurotic components of frigidity--the envy and mistrust she has of the entire male sex, the endless complaints she directs against her household duties, her general inability to handle even the trivia of every woman’s everyday life with any grace or ease.
In addition to her quarreling and complaints he has had to accept a tremendous amount of emotional frustration. Frigidity does not permit much honest or real interpersonal warmth, and the male has had to do without a normal amount of affection. His sexual frustration, too, is great. We saw in the case of the clitoridal woman just how laborious and boring the act of love can become to the man. It is not necessary to labor the point of how cumulatively bleak sexual intercourse with an unresponding partner can become.
All this (and more) that a man has gone through with a frigid wife must have a very definite effect on him. He builds up attitudes and develops defenses which allow him to preserve his equilibrium within the framework of his marriage as it is.
Some of these defenses are psychological, some external.
The chief psychological defense he uses is a general withdrawal; he pulls back from “caring” about the unhappy circumstances of his married life. He may cease to react, either to his wife’s attacks on him or to her general complaints. He may cease, too, to care very much about the failure of their sexual life. His withdrawal from the problem may be marked by actual sexual impotence with his wife. Or he may, in response to his wife’s rejection of sex, take a purely mechanical attitude toward intercourse, getting it over with as quickly as possible, taking it like a hurried but necessary meal.
His external defenses against his home life may be a withdrawal from it. He may reorganize his social life around a men’s social or athletic club, spending a great deal of time with “the boys.” He may take to drinking at bars in the evening, forming a circle of cronies whom he likes to be with. He may do any of a number of things that take him out of his home in the evening and give him substitute pleasures.
Now of course there is nothing the least bit reprehensible about the erection of such defenses if one’s marriage and home life are unsatisfactory. Indeed, such defenses may keep a marriage together by allowing the man to get some compensatory pleasures out of life.
One husband said just this in so many words to me recently. “If I hadn’t taken a firm stand within myself,” he told me, “the marriage would have broken up long ago. I simply decided that, if things were to work out at all, I just had to pull back from her and not take what she said to me seriously. If I went on believing half of the attacks she made on me I couldn’t have lived with myself. And since sex was no fun, what was there left between us? I’ve made up a social life of sorts outside of the family for myself. At least I get a little fun out of life, and since I’m not around mainly I’m not boring her so much and she’s not boring me so much.”
But the danger is that such defenses and such compensatory activities will be held onto even if the marriage has been given a chance to turn from a meaningless one into a deeply meaningful and joyful one. A husband who wishes to help his wife in her struggle to become a woman, who wishes to make a marriage where only the semblance of one now exists, must now examine his attitudes with great honesty, courage, and thoroughness.
The way ahead of him at the beginning will not be by any means clear or easygoing. The initial progress of his wife as she undertakes to change is often barely perceptible. Why should he have any hope that anything new, exciting, or beautiful could develop from such tentative starts? And what motive can he develop to turn back, emotionally and sexually, to a woman who has so often and so thoroughly rejected and frustrated him? A very strong part of him feels that he has worked out a precarious inner and outer equilibrium which at least keeps this semblance of marriage from falling apart entirely. He generally actively resents the demand on him to alter his attitude, to see his wife through the inner odyssey on which she now wishes to embark.
We have found that at such a juncture a husband is often helped to alter his defensive attitude by seriously reflecting on the picture of marriage and love he had when he first fell in love with his wife. He should then compare that image of a relationship with the custom-staled and defeated feelings he has now, compare his first hopes of creatively shared lives with the empty realities of the present, the time-wasting, essentially loveless activities he now engages in.
Memories and thoughts of this kind can make him angry, the way a _man_ can get angry, healthfully and aggressively; not at his wife, who now wants to make up for all that has been lost, but at himself for his passive acceptance and easy adjustment to a defeated life, a life that has become a resigned and pointless existence. Such anger is good because it can clear his inner atmosphere; it can start him back with renewed resolution on the road to his real desires. For no man who feels worthy of his manhood ever really accepts a half existence in love of the kind I have just depicted.
We have found, too, that such husbands can remotivate themselves if they will contemplate the potentialities of womanhood toward which their wives now consciously aspire. I have tried throughout this book to show, in some of their variety, the magnificent and exciting qualities that characterize true womanhood. I have shown how giving women can be in their love, how supportive, how filled with deep warmth and understanding. And I have tried to show how, in sex itself, there is no responsiveness that can compare even remotely with that of a loved and emotionally secure woman. If at this critical point in his marriage a man can clarify what he really wants and then develop the patience to wait for it, he will be most thoroughly rewarded.
Patience is _very_ important. He will need all of it he can muster for a time and, at certain points, he may have to remind himself hard of the rewards at the end of the journey. He can, we find, be greatly helped by having as thorough a knowledge as possible of the psychological problems his wife will encounter in her hegira to womanhood.
I have shown that the path to feminine maturity is not a straight one. The traveler will often become frightened of the very progress she is making and for a short time will tend to pull back into her former neurotic defenses. At such a point the husband must be very clear that she has not pulled back for good.
The critical period, as we have seen, in a woman’s forward march, the thing that is apt to make her pull back most strongly and with most anxiety, is her first encounter with real orgasm. However, the husband must realize once more that this regression is temporary, too, even though it lasts for several weeks or, in some cases, longer. The solicitude of her husband at this point and the reassurance she gets from the knowledge of his love can be the main factors in her final victory over her difficulty.
Many psychiatrists make it a practice to discuss with husbands, whenever it is feasible, the importance of their role in the complete recovery of their wives. It is a very rare man who, after such discussions, cannot or will not mobilize his resources to aid his wife and to see her through her hard struggle. And I know of no woman who has won a victory over her frigidity who has ignored the fact that her husband’s help was decisive.
In addition to changing his defensive attitude toward his wife (or perhaps searching for and recapturing his earlier feelings toward her), in what other ways can a husband be helpful to his wife as she struggles toward maturity?
I would say that the primary virtue he should cultivate in himself is sensitivity, particularly sensitivity to any advances or changes in her manner of relating to him, to their children, or to friends in their immediate circle. She is trying to rid herself of a lifelong mistrust of men and fear of them. She is trying to dare to be soft, warm, and giving. Every recognition she gets for her efforts will be like manna to her. In many ways she is like a frightened child, and only total acceptance can give her enough courage to advance further.
Let me give a simple example of what I mean: The relationship between a woman patient of mine and her husband had, in the course of their five-year marriage, deteriorated sadly. In their courtship days they had been in the habit of giving each other gifts, frequent and personally meaningful gifts. But now, even on birthdays, they bought presents “for the home” rather than for each other.
During the course of our work the wife, one cold winter day, on the spur of a tender moment, bought her husband a very bright yellow scarf and presented it to him that night. I learned later from him that his first impulse on receiving the gift was to laugh. He dressed most conservatively, and the garish scarf was very much out of keeping with his tastes.
He did not laugh, however, realizing that the gift was an expression of something new in his wife, that it showed a new concern for him and an attempt to begin to show it. Instead he kissed her tenderly and wore the scarf to his office the next day. When he came home that night he presented her with a lovely platinum watch of a make he had once heard her admire. “She looked down for a moment,” he told me, “as though she were confused, and then she looked up at me and put her arms around me and wept a very long time.” Those tears, of course, were the sure beginning of a deep thaw. His sensitivity to his wife’s need at this point in her life had been a decisive element, and her progress from that point on was greatly accelerated.
In counseling husbands to be sensitively attentive to their wives’ needs during this period of change I must warn against one thing. Insincerity or artificiality will not work at all, indeed could actually be harmful. Women are deeply intuitive and can detect any hypocritical attempt to manipulate them. It is not wise to try to express love if you do not feel it. A man who cannot experience real feeling toward his wife should put his main effort into self-inquiry. He may discover that the anger and hurt that have built up in him during the unhappy years that are past are too great to handle alone and he may wish to discuss these intransigent feelings with a counselor or psychiatrist.
I know of one man who, paying lip service to the idea of helping his wife, put in a weekly order at the local florist shop for flowers. When in the next three months she had received “enough,” as she put it, “for an elaborate funeral,” she begged him to stop sending them.
Another man, having ignored any social life with his wife for years, was told that she should get away from her household duties occasionally. He suddenly insisted, therefore, on dragging her on a round of night clubs and theater parties that would have exhausted Elsa Maxwell. His wife was essentially rather shy and withdrawn and of course resented this enforced and artificial approach to her real needs.
Women rightly consider these kinds of gestures a mockery, an expression of a latent hostility toward them rather than as an expression of love. Of course women love luxury, going out, gifts--but only when they express a sensitive awareness on the part of the giver. A rule of thumb that works is to do what one feels but to refrain firmly from doing what one doesn’t feel. Somebody once said that the proper mixture for the real lover is 80 per cent male aggression and 20 per cent feminine sensitivity. The formula has much to recommend it.
One important thing that husbands and wives must learn to do is to share their deeper thoughts, problems, and feelings with one another. Over the years the general withdrawal of both partners has made communication of any kind most superficial, and hope of any important contact through conversation has been abandoned almost entirely. When the wife has finally told her husband of her determination to attack her problem frontally, the couple now have a new opportunity for establishing deep lines of communication. If the husband can seize on this new chance, divest himself of his lonely and habitual reticence, he can help his wife and their entire relationship immeasurably.
Everything may be discussed in such conversations, although one should avoid any recrimination or “confessions” that would hurt the other. Conversation about one’s emotional or reality difficulties, about one’s loneliness, plans, successes, fears, and hopes, are deeply moving to a woman. If a man can learn to share his real inner life with his wife it will help her to realize once more the importance of the woman’s role, make her know that she has her husband’s confidence in those things that are of real importance to him.
As I have pointed out, frigid women have little knowledge of what men are really like. Basically they see men as “powers,” without worries or fears. When they learn from their husbands’ own lips their real feelings, these women are very greatly aided in changing their underlying attitudes.
One woman told me that her whole marriage-long conception of her husband had been completely altered by one emotional confession from him. She had told him that she had finally realized her frigidity had been the cause of the problem between them and that she had determined to attempt to change herself. He listened quietly as she talked and was silent for a moment when she finished. Then he said in a low voice: “I have been terribly lonely without you.” This honest communication reached past all her neurotic defenses, informed her simply and directly how important her decision was to him, how human and needful the husband she had feared and rejected really was.
It is in such real, such personal exchanges with his wife that a man most often begins to reap the rewards his wife’s decision to change will bring him. As he expresses himself more and her security in him deepens, he begins to encounter the depths of tranquillity that have always lain beneath her defensive exterior; he begins to feel her great capacity to give him something that he has missed, missed terribly--a companionship, support, and love that ask for nothing but to be needed. In this way a new and profound mutuality develops and, cleared of the fears that have impeded it, the real marriage between these two people can begin to flourish.
In the sexual aspect of the marriage, as in its psychological aspect, sensitivity is also the key word for the husband who wishes to help his wife.
In every case of frigidity that I have encountered the sexual life between husband and wife has, through the years, become an extremely self-conscious one. The wife generally is acutely aware of every genital sensation that she has or every sensation that she does not have. Her chronic sense of failure is at the root of this hawk-like attention to her reactions. Often this self-concern has been encouraged by reading books that emphasize the mechanical aspects of sexual love, giving her false hopes that somehow she is going to be able to solve her orgastic problem if she can only get in the right position, make the right movement, contract the right muscles at the right time, or teach her husband the right techniques.
Under such circumstances it is impossible for a husband not to react to his wife’s hyper-narcissism. He tends then to put his awareness of her experience ahead of his own enjoyment. This is one of the prime reasons why the sex act for both of them has become anxious and dull.
In sex one’s body can feel only its own raptures. Even the exquisite sensation of giving the partner pleasure is psychological and, by definition, important only when it heightens one’s pleasure, not when it decreases it.
It is very important, therefore, for the husband to drop his self-consciousness about his wife’s pleasures or lack of them during intercourse. In fact, both must start with a clean slate on this score, take the healthy natural view that sexual sensation is a self-centered, even selfish, matter basically. Overconcern for the other can rob it of its lusty spontaneity entirely.
This may strike a man as a new conception. In most books on married sexuality the mutuality of the act is the point emphasized; such books always speak glowingly of the pleasure one experiences in the other’s reactions. When frigidity is present this “mutuality” can become a mockery.
A woman suffering from frigidity will be very relieved if her husband will make a gentle but blanket announcement to her that she is to drop her entire concern with orgasm until it happens. I have pointed out before that this indeed must be her working attitude before she has her first orgasmic experience. For a husband to affirm that this attitude is also his can be a great reassurance to her. She will then allow herself to really enjoy his “selfish” ecstasy without neurotically fixing on her own localized sensations. Indulging the deeply feminine role of _giving_ pleasure can be more exciting to her than any other thing.
Now a word about foreplay--in my opinion one of the most grossly misunderstood words in the language. Many men, and women too, take it to mean solely a duty-bound interval in which a man tries to arouse a woman by physically caressing and kissing her. This mechanistic interpretation is based on the oft-quoted statement that women are slower to respond sexually than men and that it is the man’s duty to arouse her.
I think it is absolutely necessary for this particular conception of foreplay to be expanded considerably where women who have had a sexual difficulty are concerned. As we have seen over and over again, frigidity in women is caused by psychological problems of a very specific kind. Any exclusively mechanical approach to these difficulties is foredoomed to failure.
Husbands of women with a frigidity problem are well advised to consider foreplay primarily a psychological rather than a physical matter.
If you will recall the stages of development the growing girl goes through, you will remember that they culminate in adolescence. During that stage a long romantic dream prepares the girl for real love. This dream of romance never leaves a woman. Foreplay is most successful when it arouses these dormant romantic feelings. Woman is truly an incurable romantic.
But what does romance really mean to her? And how can the romantic feeling be conjured up?
Romantic feelings are aroused in a woman when she feels that her husband’s entire emotion is fixed on her tenderly and lovingly. She feels romantic when all the other goals and needs and duties of life are for the time being relinquished. In such a situation she dares to relax, to loaf and invite her soul, to concentrate on her deep belief that love is centrally important, the thing that gives life its meaning and its beauty. Every woman, at the heart’s deep core, wishes to give all for love.
Such a mood of romance cannot, of course, be bumped up suddenly, nor can it be created by a man who feels cynical or abashed by it. To woo a woman successfully, a man must believe in her dream of love and become a passionate sharer in it.
Certain things that remove a couple for a while from the highly goal-centered activities of daily life help to create this romantic mood. A housewife will respond to a luxurious evening out; putting on an evening gown can separate her from her housekeeping, penny-pinching view of herself, and the sight of her husband in a tuxedo can fill her romantic cup to the brim. A few champagnes and dancing to a good orchestra, and the magic is complete.
Picnics together, too, can engender a deeply romantic feeling in a wife. But of course the children should not be along. And the whole thing should be carried off with a little style. Wine, a good one, is a must, and the man should know beforehand of a fine and very private spot for the picnic.
I have known several women who have broken through the barriers of sexual frigidity during ocean cruises. These seem to represent the romantic circumstance par excellence, and a husband who can afford them should add them to his loving calculations.
In my opinion, husbands and wives should arrange their lives to get some vacation time alone together. With even the best intentions the duties and responsibilities of life close in on one, tend to take some of the bloom off the rose. A week, a month if possible, alone together can help to re-establish vitality and meaning in a marriage.
The fact that a man has stayed with a woman despite her frigidity and the problems it causes is a testament to the abiding love he has for her. If he will forget his old despair now that his wife has taken responsibility in the relationship, call on his real manhood to reassert itself in helping her to her goal, his rewards can be as bounteous as femininity can bestow.
_Chapter 19_
THE LORE OF LOVE
In this book, as you have noted, I have taken a firm stand against any mechanical approach to love or love-making. This represents the psychiatric view of love and is based on the premise that frigidity is psychological in nature and that the resolution of it must be therefore a psychological one.
The mechanical approach is based on the premise that love-making is an art or even a science that can be learned, as the piano or chemistry can be learned. From the psychiatric view the so-called art of love is instinctual. The perfectly free person, if one can be imagined, would, if he loved and were loved in return, soon become a sophisticated practitioner of this art with the barest of preparation.
I recall an anecdote that illustrates this point. It was told to me by a sociologist who was conducting a survey of married couples in an effort to find the correlation between premarital advice and sexual happiness. While questioning one healthy couple whose marriage was obviously happy, he asked the husband:
“And did your parents give you any advice?”
“Yes.”
“Which parent?”
“My father.”
“Did he give you a thorough briefing?”
Pause. “Yes, it was brief.” Pause. “And it was thorough.”
“What did he tell you?”
“You want his words?”
“Yes, if you like.”
“He said, ‘Everything goes.’”
However, such free spirits as this one are relatively rare in our society. Usually more instruction is needed. Taboos against sexuality have characterized Western civilization. The art of love, therefore, seems to me to be largely the art of getting over societally induced ignorance, superstition, and inhibition.
Here’s how I view the matter. When through the methods employed in this section or through therapy one has at length achieved psychological maturity and therefore vaginal orgasm is no longer blocked, an examination of some of the technical information about love-making can be helpful. Before that point, such lore tends to lead to an inhibiting self-consciousness.
It is generally agreed by students of the matter that spontaneity in sexual relations must never be lost. Married life tends to impose a rather rigid pattern in all areas of living. Such routinization is a necessity if the world’s work is to get done. For most people, for example, it becomes necessary to breakfast every day at the same time, in the same place, and in the same manner. If one allows this to happen to sexuality one is imprisoning the unicorn, exposing love-making to a loss of its magic.
Variety is the spice that married love often needs, and it takes no great effort to be various in love-making. It takes only a sense of its importance and the knowledge of a few minimal facts.
One method of preserving spontaneity is to prevent love-making from always occurring at the same time. Evenings in most homes tend to follow a pattern. Supper must be cooked, dishes must be done, children must be put to bed. And then there’s television or guests. I have had many men and women defend the proposition that, since love-making tends to make them sleepy when it is finished, the last moments of the day are by necessity the time for love.
But this is making convenience a necessity. And love is too beautiful, too centrally important to be domesticated so. If it can laugh at locksmiths, it can also, once every week or two, laugh behind locked bedroom doors. Children have homework to do or a television program to watch, and anyhow, it is good for them to realize that Mother and Father spend some time alone and love to.
Dishes can wait occasionally, too, at least in the name of love. And a television program is rarely so good or demanding that a delicious sleepiness won’t improve it.
Desire often arises unbidden and for no apparently rational reason. Men are more subject to outside stimuli than women and are perhaps more uninhibited, so the inception of love-making at unroutine times may most frequently originate with them. But women, too, when they feel the urge should realize that they can initiate a passionate interlude and should not prevent themselves from doing so. It is proper and good that a woman should do this. And her husband will love it.
I am assuming that the partners in such delightfully off-hour trysts are sensitive to each other’s responses. What every man and woman must realize is that it is perfectly all right to say no if one is fatigued or preoccupied. But the nay-saying must be gentle, and if it is so and the partner who makes the advance is hurt, he or she must examine the rejected feeling, take full responsibility for it, and dispose of it. Holding onto such feelings causes one to fear making advances, and this will deprive the relationship of one of the best techniques for maintaining spontaneity. It is insensitive and unloving to force a partner by sulking or other forms of psychological blackmail to satisfy a need. It is far easier for the ardent one to wait; the time will come soon enough; the fact that you have announced your desire has a delayed reaction on your loved one.
Waking in the middle of the night, many men find themselves prepared for love-making, the penis firmly erect. And many women love to be awakened from their sleep to find themselves mistily, dreamily in the embrace of love; the body on waking is often very sensual.
Changes on the time for love can be rung in a variety of ways, and it is advisable to see that they are. Not too much effort is necessary; the hour at the end of the day when one is preparing for sleep will still remain the basic time for intercourse. It will need but an occasional switch in time to keep this customary trysting hour from losing its quality of ever-renewed excitement.
Another and perhaps even more basic technique for preserving the spontaneity of sex is that of varying the position used during intercourse. In most relationships one preferred position generally evolves. If this position is always adopted, the feeling of a monotonous repetitiveness can enter the love situation, and this must be guarded against.
This fact has been recognized from earliest times, and efforts to combat it have given rise through the centuries to a vast number of books on the subject. Hindu, Greek, Roman, and Persian literature record hundreds of sexual positions and animadversions, and if one has a library of erotica available and is sufficiently curious these positions may be studied. However, such a proliferation of detail can become exhausting and even morbid and absurd--though perhaps gaily absurd. Most of the modern books which dispense direct sexual advice obtain their material from these ancient sources.
There are only five basic positions which have real relevance to most couples. I am going to describe them so that when you encounter them or wish yourself to change from your usual position you will not feel that they are strange, awkward, or so exotic as to cause you feelings of shyness, embarrassment, or guilt.
The first position, of course, is the ventro-ventral (or face to face) position, with the man on top and the woman on the bottom with her knees up. Not even the most puritanically reared person will demur at this position, for it is the classical sexual position used in our society.
It is, if used properly, perhaps the best position for sexual union. It allows for deep penetration of the vagina by the penis, and because it leaves the pelvic regions of both partners free, it allows for variety in sexual movement, though the man has more freedom of movement in this position than the woman.
There’s an old but apt joke about this position. A young chorus girl asks an older one what her definition of a gentleman is. The older one promptly replies: “One who leans on his elbows.” Men should remember that this fact can be pertinent. The full weight of the heavy man can be quite tiring even to a very passionate woman.
A pleasant variant of this position can be achieved if a pillow is placed under the buttocks of the woman before intercourse. If it is placed a little toward the small of the back, those women who receive preliminary pleasure from friction between the clitoris and the penis will find the contact easier to effect. If it is placed a bit forward it will be very exciting to those who get a great deal of sensation from pressure of the penis against the posterior walls of the vagina.
Generally in this classical position the woman simply spreads her legs and raises them (lying with the legs straight down makes vaginal entrance difficult for the male). Those who enjoy stimulation of the posterior vaginal wall may lock their legs around their partner’s hips. Those who in the initial stages of intercourse are most aroused by clitoral stimulation may close their legs; in this position the man is half kneeling, straddling his partner’s hips. This latter position is not too comfortable for the man if it is maintained for long. A less arduous position for the man is achieved if he straddles one of his partner’s legs and enters the vagina at a slightly oblique angle. This allows the woman to close the leg that is free, which gives maximum contact of all portions of the vulva with the penis.
The next major position reverses the top-bottom roles. The woman, in this variant, is on the top, the man on the bottom.
Many couples feel inhibited about this position. The man will often feel “feminized,” the woman “masculinized.” Such relativistic concepts of what is male and what is female could actually have any application only if this were the chief position in which a couple had intercourse. And even this fact could be altered by circumstance; for example, the woman might be physically very small and the man very large and heavy.
This position is adopted either as a spontaneous change for variety’s sake or because the woman may be feeling far more energetic than the man at the moment; the partner on top, of course, does the major portion of the moving. Psychologically this position can represent an expression of tenderness on the woman’s part. If her husband feels sensual but fatigued, she can give him pleasure without making it necessary for him to develop the usual amount of male aggressiveness. Such a passive role can be exciting to a man on occasion, and he should allow himself to indulge it.
In this position the woman may straddle her husband’s hips; this occasions very deep penetration, and may be particularly pleasurable because since she is in charge she may feel freer to exert more than the usual pressure of the penis against the cervix. In this position, too, she may lie on top of her husband, her legs supported by his, or she may lie between his legs. In these two latter positions the clitoris can be brought into very close contact with the penis, and this is of course very pleasant for women who become aroused in this fashion.
Another alternative for love-making is the face to face and sideways position. In this position, since the woman is generally the lighter of the two, one of her legs is placed over the man’s hips; this allows him to insert his penis at a slightly oblique angle. Pillows for head and shoulder are generally necessary if this position is maintained for the entire intercourse.
The next position is the dorso-ventral position, in which the man’s penis enters the woman’s vagina from the back. If the entire intercourse is performed while lying sideways, this is perhaps the most “restful” of all positions. For obvious reasons it is sometimes the preferred form for intercourse during pregnancy.
This position is often extremely exciting to a man. I do not know exactly why this is so, though it has been suggested that the position suggests the “animality” of pure lust. And this idea could be stimulated by the fact that the position is the familiar one that animals take. Or perhaps the fact that the partners are not face to face may remove some of the personal factor from the sexual embrace, giving it a more primordial and impersonal character. This may be the reason men may find it more enjoyable than women, their sexual natures being, as we have seen, somewhat more deeply rooted in their biology than the woman’s sexual nature. I must emphasize, however, that these ideas are merely speculative.
The dorso-ventral position can also be assumed with the woman kneeling, or standing up and bending over, supporting herself against a chair or wall with her hands. It can be achieved less athletically if the man sits on a chair and his partner sits on his lap, although this obviously allows for less movement by both.
The last general position I shall describe here is the standing position. It is a particularly arduous position for the male; he generally must bend his knees slightly to enter and must hold onto his partner’s buttocks to maintain entrance.
I think these are the major sexual positions which it is relevant to know and to adopt when the mood is upon one. Most of the “hundreds” of others described in the literature of antiquity are subtle variations of these and have no particular application to the love-making a modern couple might engage in. Indeed, I think it is apparent that any excessive preoccupation with such nuances could indicate a morbidity, may be a confession that the person, far from having achieved sexual maturity, is in some profound way impotent.
There is one further point I should like to make about these positions. While men can usually have an orgasm in any position, many women, if not most, achieve it most completely and satisfyingly in one favorite position. This is perfectly consonant with full psychological and sexual maturity, and one should in no wise feel the slightest bit apologetic about it. It is absolutely advisable to make this fact known to one’s partner in love. He will, of course, if you are both feeling positionally experimental, return to the position you prefer when you are ready to have your climax.
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A psychiatrist is asked a wide variety of questions about sexuality by his patients. Here are some of the more frequent areas about which individuals seem to wish further information:
(1) _Frequency of intercourse_
There are no rules whatever about this, though suggestions about what is “normal” have been made from earliest times. Mohammed the Prophet stated that once a week was best; Martin Luther found that twice a week “does harm neither to her nor to me.”
In these days of sociological studies there have of course been endless attempts to find the statistical norm for frequency of intercourse. The Margaret Sanger Research Bureau in 1933 released figures showing that, of ten thousand cases investigated, sexual intercourse occurred from one to three times per week--4 per cent had intercourse one or more times daily. Kinsey found that frequency depended greatly on the age of the husband; men between twenty-one and twenty-five showed an intercourse rate of just over three times per week; those between thirty-one and thirty-five showed a frequency rate of a little more than twice a week; those aged forty-one to forty-five had intercourse on an average of one and one half times a week; and men over fifty-six averaged less than once a week.
These studies, of course, always show wide variations in individual cases.
In my opinion frequency of intercourse is entirely an individual matter. The only criterion of any importance is that both partners feel completely satisfied with the amount of intercourse they are having. If one of the partners is dissatisfied, the subject should be open for discussion in a very frank manner. No cause for feelings of rejection by a partner should be allowed to develop in silence.
There will always be periods in which, because of exterior circumstances (pregnancy, business worries, sickness, etc.), the rate of intercourse in any marriage may slow down or stop for a while.
(2) _Variations in woman’s sexual desire_
There are such variations, as far as most of the research undertaken so far can determine. Katherine Davis, in a study of one thousand married women, and studies by Marie Stokes, Therese Benedek, and others indicate that the desire of women vary during the menstrual cycle. According to Hannah and Abraham Stone, who have made a study of a large number of women, “Most … state that their erotic impulses are increased either a few days before the onset of the menstrual flow or, more usually, right after menstruation, although the latter rise may be partly due to the abstinence which is generally maintained during the menstrual week.” Stokes reported also a second rise of sexual desire at some point in the middle of the menstrual month. There are apparently individual differences in the cycle of desire, and a woman can best determine for herself her own particular rhythm.
There is much to be learned about this matter. The relationship between hormonal secretion and female sexuality and “femininity” has been most recently studied by Therese Benedek in her book _Psychosexual Functions in Women_. This is a technical book, but anyone interested in this aspect of the subject will find the material fascinating.
As far as can be determined, there is no corresponding cycle of desire in the male.
(3) _Length of intercourse_
This is entirely an individual matter. It varies with each couple and often with each intercourse. Indeed, this variability in time can add to the spontaneity factor in intercourse.
There seems to be only one basic rule governing the length of time; to see that the other partner achieves orgasm if it is desired. This often means that the husband must postpone his climax until the wife achieves hers. Most men are able to learn to control the moment at which they reach orgasm and therefore can wait until their wives are ready.
Orgasm in unison is widely held to be the most desirable form of climax. However, I have had many people of both sexes report that they preferred to reach climax immediately before or immediately after their partners. Some say that they are distracted by the other’s movements at this juncture. Others say that they profoundly enjoy the partner’s excitement and that they prefer to have a modicum of ego left to experience it more completely.
Some women have two or more orgasms to their husband’s one. By far the majority of men have only one orgasm per intercourse. If on occasion a man has his ejaculation before the woman achieves her climax, she will often continue her movements until she is satisfied. However, the glans penis (head of the penis) of many men becomes extremely sensitive immediately after orgasm, and in that case the woman may have to postpone her satisfaction until the next time. If she continues her movements it may cause her husband to have unpleasant sensations, even though he may still have an erection and thus appear to be able to continue.
(4) _Limits to love-making_
I am often asked the question whether any sexual practice between husband and wife could be considered “unhealthy” or “wrong.” In my opinion, certain practices could be considered so, though I know I am at variance with certain sexologists. A long discussion of the matter, however, would take us into psychological and even perhaps moral realms which I do not feel are pertinent to this book. As a rule of thumb, I would say that any practice that does not culminate in intercourse tends to be regressive and infantile if it becomes a chief method of sexual expression. Also, insistence on any practice that cannot be shared pleasurably by the partner is likewise regressive.
The so-called “polymorphus perverse” pleasures are aspects of foreplay and not ends in themselves. The primacy of the oral, anal, onanistic, or sado-masochistic forms of sexuality is a hallmark of the immature personality. Another unmistakable sign of such immaturity (or even of downright psychic illness) is the insistence on _any_ form of sexuality not heartily endorsed by one’s partner.
(5) _Contraception_
To use or not to use contraceptives is a personal matter that every individual must settle for himself.
When the responsibility for contraception is up to the woman, she should always be prepared for intercourse whenever it is even remotely possible. There is nothing so deadening to sexual excitement as the woman who comes to love unprepared and must interrupt the process to put her diaphragm on. If this is a repetitive situation in marital life it is almost a certain sign that the woman has not yet accepted her feminine role. The tacit assumption when you obtain a diaphragm is that you are accepting the responsibility for contraception. There is rarely any need, other than a negative one on the woman’s part, for this to interfere or to impinge on sexual intercourse in any manner. The husband is quite correct who interprets chronic remissiveness of this sort as an unsolved problem of his wife.
ADDENDA I
Many women will find that with the methods prescribed here their frigidity can be conquered. Some, however, will find that though they can be helped by using these techniques they cannot achieve their goal without outside help. Throughout the book I have tried to indicate the kind of person and the kind of problem that may require additional therapeutic aid, and I have tried to indicate that a person who needs such outside help should feel no sense of shame about that fact nor hesitancy about seeking it. Indeed, one of my chief reasons for writing this book has been to open vistas hitherto unknown to many women. If reading it has but started you on the road to mature femininity, its chief function has been accomplished.
How does one decide whether outside aid is indicated?
There is no rule of thumb that will cover all cases. Some may decide that they would prefer to start and finish their work on this problem with a trained therapist. Others may start alone but find that self-exploration, the surfacing of painful emotions and attitudes and fantasies, is too difficult and confusing and decide to seek expert guidance. Still others may find that though they can go a long distance alone the final goal will elude them if they do not consult with a trained worker in the field.
If and when one does decide that outside help is necessary, one should know how to find qualified people in this field. The following information, then, is proffered to aid you in that respect.
Your family physician can be most helpful. If he has the time he may be able to counsel you directly, act as a guide to those insights that will help you to achieve your goal. More than likely, however, you will find that his schedule is far too heavy to permit him to do this, no matter how much he would wish to do so. In that case he will refer you to another person who is qualified to give such help or to a proper agency.
If for any reason you cannot obtain a referral from your own physician, it is important to know to whom you may turn for help in your community.
There are three kinds of specialists who are trained to give you proper counseling for your problem. These are psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social workers.
The hospital in your community can usually give you the name of a person in one of these specialties whom you could consult privately. Such hospitals may also have outpatient counseling clinics, and these are staffed by competent psychotherapists. If your hospital does not maintain such a service it will nevertheless know where you can obtain help.
One of the resources you have open to you may be one of the so-called “family agencies.” You can have confidence in such agencies. They are devoted to the task of resolving any and all types of family problems and are frequently staffed by social workers with excellent training in marriage counseling.
Many American communities are relatively rich in counseling resources, but there are also many where psychological help is difficult to obtain. If your doctor or your local hospital cannot help you, it may be necessary for you to journey to the nearest large city to obtain aid. If you wish to obtain the names of the qualified psychiatrists nearest your residence you may write to the American Psychiatric Association, 1270 Sixth Avenue, New York, N.Y., and they will furnish you with the required information. Be certain that in your letter you specify the urban center nearest you.
ADDENDA II
There is no book that covers the problem of psychological frigidity in women as such. However, the books listed below may be helpful adjuncts to a thorough understanding of the problem. I have divided them into two categories, popular and technical.
The popular books can be understood by all. The technical books I list are generally used by physicians, but much in them can be understood by the intelligent layman.
POPULAR
_The Art of Loving_, Erich Fromm (New York: Harper, 1956).
_A Marriage Manual_, Hannah and Abraham Stone (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952).
_Modern Woman--The Lost Sex_, Lundberg and Farnham (New York: Harper, 1947).
_Marriage, Morals and Sex in America_, Sidney Ditzion (New York: Bookman Associates, 1953).
_Psychology of Sex Relations_, Theodor Reik (New York: Rinehart, 1945).
_The Christian Interpretation of Sex_, Otto Piper (New York: Scribner, 1941).
TECHNICAL
_Factors in the Sex Life of Twenty-Two Hundred Women_, K. B. Davis (New York: Harper, 1929).
_Female Sexuality_, Marie Bonaparte (New York: International Universities Press, 1953).
_The Psychology of Women_ (Vols. 1 and 2), Helene Deutsch (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1944-45).
_Psychosexual Functions in Women_, Therese Benedek (New York: Ronald Press, 1952).
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Transcriber’s note:
A few minor typographical errors have been silently corrected.
The cover image was prepared by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.