Chapter 10TOTAL AND PARTIAL FRIGIDITY
Although we have discussed the various types of frigidity in a former chapter, I think it will be helpful now to go into the matter in greater detail. I am going to illustrate the major types of frigidity with case histories. In this way you can get a living picture of each problem.
I think the case method of presentation is particularly helpful to a full grasp of frigidity. Those who are caught up in the problem usually lose their objectivity about themselves, are unable to see with any real clarity just how their actions and reactions are neurotic and just how they are affecting those about them. The true story of another woman who has suffered from the same affliction mirrors the problem faithfully, allows one to achieve a clear view of herself, perhaps for the first time. For the fact is that each kind of frigidity has its own very distinctive characteristics and its own unique causes.
But as you read these cases I think you will be struck by the very special differences in each kind of frigidity, which will allow you to see your own image—to diagnose yourself, so to speak. You will see, too, that there are certaincharacteristics common to all the frigidities. Knowledge of both these facts, as you will discover, is important to the cure of the frigid woman.
In giving these stories I cannot, of course, include examples of all the pitfalls that are encountered from childhood to adulthood. That would require much more space than I have here. I will attempt, rather, to select cases of frigidity caused by experiences most common to our society.
The first case, then, is one of total frigidity. This kind, as you may recall from our earlier description of it, is one of the most severe forms of sexual disorder in women and is widely prevalent. Without further ado I give you the case of a woman we shall call Patricia Agnew.
When Patricia Agnew came to my office for her first interview, she had not come, consciously, to consult me for a frigidity problem or to discuss the results of such a problem on her marriage. She came because she was having, in her words, “another nervous breakdown.”
She was not a very good-looking woman, though she had nice teeth and large blue eyes. It was her figure that was striking. In direct contrast to her inner attitude, her figure was round and voluptuous, almost the American ideal of what is considered “sexy.” Her lips were full and sensual, but she held them tightly together, which gave her a censorious, critical, old-maidish look. She was thirty-six years old.
Her “nervous breakdowns” (she persisted in using the expression, though it was clearly inapplicable in her case), she told me, were recurrent. She had had them for three successive years. Each of them had started with a very marked increase in inner tension. She would feel growingly unable to cope with the manifold social and familial demands of her life; a great sense of inadequacy would set in gradually and she would become listless and depressed. Finally theslightest task would seem too much and she would now start to have day-long bouts of weeping. During such periods she suffered from chronic insomnia, and when she was able to snatch a few hours of sleep she would often have repetitive, nightmarish dreams in which she was pursued by criminals.
At the beginning of our talks Patricia would become extremely guarded whenever I attempted to open any discussion of a personal nature. She had come for help with the express conviction that I, the doctor, should find a quick and easy solution to her periods of acute anxiety: drugs, a sea voyage, anything that did not entail looking inward, taking responsibility for her condition. This evasiveness, this desire to find easy solutions, is characteristic of all forms of frigidity in women, but it is sometimes extremely pronounced in the type of frigidity this patient suffered from.
However, as Patricia developed confidence and trust in me, the real facts gradually emerged. She had been married for ten years and had two children, six and eight. Her husband was socially prominent, financially successful, and (as I saw for myself later, when I had a few discussions with him) strikingly handsome, a slender, tall, dark-haired man with a gentle and charming manner.
During her entire marriage this patient had never had, she finally told me, “one solid hour of happiness.” From the very beginning she had quarreled with her husband, and the domestic strife, at least on her part, had become truly bitter after the birth of their first son. She had felt that her husband was becoming increasingly cruel, selfish, demanding, and insensitive to her needs. She had believed that he was trying to impose his will on her in any and all situations and that it was an absolute necessity to struggle against this domination. “I felt as if he would shatter my integrity if I didn’t put up a fight,” she told me. “It was as though he wished to have me as a slave, nothing less; it was either he or I.”
The quarrels were generally over the most trifling matters, and though her husband almost invariably tried to make up within a few hours, she would rebuff him, and consequently bitter feelings would often endure for a week or more at a time. These battles of will, or power struggles, would terminate only, it became evident, when she had felt that he had been sufficiently punished for his transgressions, though she confessed that by the time she was ready to forgive him she had often forgotten what the original quarrel had been all about.
She felt, too (still felt and always had), that her husband was extremely critical of her and that he never really gave her full approval for anything. She believed that he did not like the way she dressed, the way she conducted herself socially, or the way she managed the children. When I asked her just how he expressed his disapproval of her, to give me an example, she could not think of anything specific and concluded lamely: “Well, he usually praises me to my face, but I can tell by his expression that he doesn’t mean it.”
Later, in the areas she had specifically mentioned, I checked with her husband on his attitudes. He told me that he had felt at the beginning and still felt that his wife dressed beautifully and that she was absolutely perfect at any kind of social function. “She has a really remarkable gift for conversation of any kind with practically any person,” he said. On the other hand, he had sometimes felt that she tended to be too permissive with the children and that she worried about them excessively. However, he had learned early that he could not help her in this matter and only prayed that the children would have no adverse effects from her tendency to pamper them. I should like to report that, as she recovered, Patricia gradually became aware of the fact that this “critical” attitude she had ascribed to herhusband was almost entirely a product of her personal problem.
Another powerful conviction she possessed was that her husband did not really love her. She felt that he was mainly interested in exploiting her, both for his “selfish” sexual needs and to advance his business. At the beginning of their marriage her husband had entered his father’s engineering firm and at once had been faced with the necessity of doing a great deal of entertaining. His wife, he soon found out, was an excellent hostess and he came to depend on her gracious parties mightily. His dependency on her collaboration she at once took for exploitation and even extended that to mean: “He doesn’t love me; he merely finds me a convenience. Any other presentable woman would suit him as well.” There was another twist to this irrational conviction, though it was more hidden and did not emerge until quite late in the treatment. Her feelings might be expressed in these words: “He didn’t succeed on his own; I made him what he is, even if I never get the credit for it.” Imagine, with an underlying feeling of this kind, how much chance for survival any tender feelings toward her husband might have.
As the sessions continued and Mrs. Agnew gained more and more confidence, she began to feel freer about discussing her sexual life. She at length confessed that she had never experienced any sexual pleasure in her entire life, neither before nor after her marriage. At no point, could she recall, had she ever masturbated or attempted to do so, even in early childhood. Kissing or being stroked gave her no sensations whatsoever. From the beginning, intercourse had been distasteful and often painful, though sometimes she took a slight satisfaction from the obvious pleasure her husband obtained from orgasm.
The actual sexual life of this couple had been at a virtual standstill for nearly eight years. Intercourse occurred, atmost, at three-month intervals. It was never spontaneous. The husband was required to make an appointment for a “date” several days before actual intercourse. His wife would acquiesce to such a tryst only after she had refused him several times and had accumulated a great deal of guilt for so doing.
From the moment she made the appointment she would become anxious, and this would increase to the point where she was filled with actual dread. Often she would be forced to break the appointment and postpone it. As the time for the intercourse approached she would also experience feelings of rage, repeat to herself over and over, “WhymustI, whymustI?” In preparing for the act itself (putting her diaphragm in, inserting the jelly), she would linger for as much as an hour while her husband waited. She often found that her vaginal muscles contracted to such a degree that the insertion of the diaphragm was painful and difficult to accomplish.
With her misery increasing momently, she went, after these preparations, to the marital bed as one might to the executioner. Her husband’s looks repelled her now; his nakedness seemed disgusting and offensive. She saw him as “skinny, white, and ugly, with an enormous penis. It was as if he were nothing but a big disgusting sexual organ.”
It goes without saying that she could feel no tenderness or warmth—she could not even simulate it. She remained totally passive throughout the entire act, which her husband, in response to her rejection (as she later, in happier times, learned), hurried through as quickly as possible. It is interesting to note that, despite her own inability to respond, one of her bitterest complaints about her husband was that his love-making was mechanical, hasty, and that he never showed any tenderness.
It had never occurred to her, of course, that he might bereacting to her clear aversion to the whole process. Indeed, she saw no justification for his shamefaced approach to her until she was well on the road to sexual health. It is usual in such cases for the wife to blame the husband for her failures, no matter how glaringly unreasonable and untrue her accusation may be.
After intercourse she was always depressed. She felt “dirty and used.” Her husband’s semen appeared to her to be disgusting. “All I wanted was to get to sleep fast and to forget the whole episode until the next ordeal became necessary,” she said.
Under such circumstances it is difficult to understand how a marriage could exist at all. However, such marriages do exist in great numbers, and by far the majority of them do not end up in the divorce courts, as one might expect. Despite the bitter complainings, the struggle for power, the fear of love, and the dread of sex on the wife’s part, I have found that there is usually a well-hidden but genuine bond of love between the couple. The husband seems originally to have seen in his now quarrelsome partner a part that can be truly loving, truly warm. It may show dimly and only in the interstices of the relationship, but it keeps hope alive in him that she will come into her true self one day; he warms himself as best he can, meanwhile, at her meager fires.
But now that we have seen a picture of the totally frigid woman let us examine the causes for it. I have stated that every kind of frigidity has its special cause. What was the cause in Patricia Agnew’s case?
To understand the origins of her problem, we will have to explore her earliest history, particularly her relationship to her mother and father. She was an only child, and her father was clearly the dominant figure in the household. He was an extremely successful and lovable man. He abounded in allthe virtues, was infinitely patient and loving with his little daughter. She told me that from her earliest times she considered him, physically speaking, “an enormously beautiful man,” and in describing him she lingered lovingly over the details of his appearance—his “sculptured head,” “wonderful deep kindly eyes,” “marvelously athletic figure.” A psychiatrist, of course, would pay very close attention to such an ecstatic description, coming as it did from such an otherwise withdrawn person.
By way of contrast she had considered her mother “mousy” and, while she had liked her in a general sense, she had never consciously had any very strong positive feelings about her.
Patricia clearly had been a “daddy’s girl.” There is nothing wrong, of course, with this under normal circumstances; had she grown up to be sexually free and had she been able to transfer her early love feelings from her father to other men, this early attachment to the father would have been merely a phase in normal development.
It is not necessary here to depict the stages by which Patricia and I arrived at a clear understanding of the early problem that had caused her later frigidity. It will be enough to state the events themselves.
You will recall the fact that in the first five years of life the child is a very sensual little being. Patricia had been no exception in the beginning; she had transferred these feelings, in the normal course of events, to her father. However, this powerful and charming man whose personality dominated the household, overshadowing his wife completely, had been far too responsive (unwittingly, of course) to the little girl’s erotic feelings. He dandled her and played with her endlessly, surrounded her with a stimulating warmth, psychologically and physically; he showered kisses and hugs,compliments and candy upon her; he gave her anything and everything to express his devotion to her.
The consequence? The very strength of his love, its varied and aggressive forms, its unrelenting intensity, had a negative effect on the child. To put it most simply, his love overstimulated her budding sexuality. This powerful man’s love overwhelmed her. Her small ego could not handle such powerful feelings; they frightened her. In order to cope with such feelings, therefore, she had had to repress them powerfully, deny their existence.
Children can do this, as you will remember from our discussion of the latency period of childhood. It is at the onset of this period, which occurs at about six years of age, that infantile sexuality is pushed under ground, to remain dormant until puberty. Patricia, under the influence of her prematurely strong sexual response to her father, had been forced to enter her latency period, we were able to determine, at the far too early age of four.
With sex out of the way, she was now able to indulge her worship of her father in complete “innocence.” He was a man who believed passionately in success, and his ebullience, love of life, and high intelligence had won him a great deal of it. His young daughter felt now that to win his love she must achieve and achieve, endlessly. From the first grade of school through her last year at college, therefore, she bent all her efforts to excelling mentally. But her father was also a perfectionist; he expected top honors from himself and jeered at anything less in himself. Thoughtlessly he made the same demands on his daughter. Since she did not have his qualifications she was not always able to come up to his standards in every field of endeavor; fewcouldhave equaled his demands. When she did not achieve such top honors she felt that she was not worthy of her father’s love and indeedthat he did not love her. He did nothing to correct this feeling.
If you will recall our normal stages of development for the growing child, you will easily see that when marriage time came around Patricia Agnew had not touched first, second, or third base. She had appeared to be growing normally, excelling in schoolwork, playing the role of the dutiful daughter, going out on dates. But in the emotional and sexual spheres she had been arrested at a very early stage.
So severe had been her repression of her childhood sexuality that when the glandular changes which usher in puberty occurred she failed to have the resurgence of sexual feeling and the development of psychological characteristics normal for that period. For that reason she omitted her adolescent phase of development, too, the period of young love’s long and lovely dream which prepares the girl for the activities of love sexually and psychologically. How could she have had such a dream? It depends on the development of a true and normal sexuality. The door had been locked on her sexuality in infancy and the key thrown away.
Psychologically, too, she was an infant. The need to excel, to master one’s environment is of course normal for the latency period. Nature has arranged this period, sagely put sex out of the way for a few years so that the ego may have a chance to grow, to prepare itself for the sexual storms and stresses of puberty and adolescence.
However, since in a very real sense she could not pass through puberty and adolescence, she had remained psychologically in the latency period, the non-sexual, competitive, father-worshiping childhood period.
Patricia really had two distinct attitudes toward her husband. The first was expressed in her quarrelsomeness, her belief that he was selfish, unattractive, and unlovable. This attitude was based on the fact that, very literally, her heartstill belonged to Daddy. With her exaggerated childhood feelings toward her father, every other man suffered by comparison, seemed unworthy of her love. Her husband was an interloper who came between her and her ideal. Therefore, his normal need for her to love him, to be a good wife to him, seemed hateful to her, filled her with rage. Sex under such circumstances was a virtual rape of Lucrece, with the husband playing the role of the dark and frightening rapist, the father representing her true love, for whom she must preserve her innocence and purity.
Another deeper and more hidden attitude was the exact opposite of this, indeed contradictory to it. In this aspect of her mind her husband stood for her father. Thus sexual feelings toward such a person must be entirely taboo; she must repress them as she had in her earliest years and she must keep them repressed. Too, she must excel in all the things her father wanted her to excel in. To her husband she must primarily excel in her wifely functions, and this was the essential trap. For because she very consciously knew she was not and under the circumstances could not be even a passable wife, she was constantly inundated by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
You can see then what a complete trap Patricia was in. Actually, unless she had been strongly motivated to seek help, she would never have found an exit from her difficulties. Her periodic “breakdowns” were a simple and direct expression of the hopelessness of her situation. It was as if she were saying: “I am truly a helpless child; I can do nothing grown-up. I must be taken care of as a child is.”
She did recover her lost sexuality and her lost capacity for happiness, and in a later chapter we shall see how the Patricia Agnews of this life can achieve such an outcome. But before we leave her I should like to make one further observation of a general kind: Consider how totallybeyond any help she would have been if her irrational opposition to her husband, to sex, and to real love between the sexes had been bolstered up, made to seem quite justifiable by a philosophy of life based on the feminist school of thought. From such a standpoint every one of her difficulties would have been considered perfectly normal!
Patricia, of course, represents frigidity in its most extreme form, the type in which there is almost a total lack of sexual feeling. To clarify this subject, recall our frigidity scale. On this scale total frigidity would needle around zero. A woman at the opposite end of this scale would experience a great deal of sexual excitement before and during intercourse but would be unable to have orgasm, or her orgasm would be so weak and unsatisfying that it would leave her very consciously unsatisfied. (Normalcy, of course, is a more or less absolute state and could not be described in terms of degrees.) We rate her near or at 100 on the frigidity scale, meaning she is close to normalcy. In between these two extremes there is every possible degree of sexual blocking.
Women who suffer from some degree of frigidity (rather than from a type of frigidity, such as our “masculine type”) have personality problems similar to Patricia’s. These problems become milder as they go up the scale toward normalcy. The underlying structure of their problem is also similar to Patricia’s—it is based on a too strong and too early attachment to their fathers. This early attachment has survived into adulthood and, depending largely on its original strength, causes a greater or lesser degree of sexual and interpersonal problems in marriage.
But as we go up the scale toward greater sexual responsiveness the difference in degree seems almost to become a difference in kind. From roughly the middle of the scale upward, the essential sexual problem has little to do with withdrawnness or unbridled or unrelenting hostility towardone’s mate, or a feeling of being exploited sexually. It is far more closely connected with direct sexual frustration, with a kind of Tantalus-like feeling that one is terribly close to one’s goal but cannot quite achieve it.
Here is an example of what I mean. I shall call this patient Joan. She was twenty-eight years old when she came to me, a pretty woman with an upturned nose, a generally insouciant manner, and a pleased-with-life smile. She had been married two years, she told me, and came directly to her problem. During intercourse she would become tremendously excited most of the time. It took little to stimulate her, and as the intercourse continued she would maintain her high level of excitement. But on most occasions, no matter how long the love-making continued, she would reach no climax at all. She was left with a frustrated, almost frantic feeling.
There were, however, occasional exceptions to this rule. In about one out of ten times Joan would achieve a climax of sorts during love-making. But it was weak and inconclusive and not by any means deeply satisfying to her, as it should have been and as she felt it could be. Here, however, is the most important point. Whenever she did experience this climax she almost invariably woke the next morning with severe back pains which lasted for two or three days and were clearly psychosomatic. And she would feel irritable and anxious. It wasonlyon such days that she experienced personal difficulties with her husband. She would find herself arguing with him about trifles, being generally cross-grained and countersuggestible.
“I should think,” she said to me in puzzlement, “that it would be just the other way around; that I would be difficult with him when I didn’t come to any climax and pleased and hopeful when I did, even if it wasn’t the perfect orgasm.”
But Joan was being merely logical in this assumption. Themind is not necessarily run by such rational considerations. When she was able to comprehend the reasons behind the apparent anomaly of her backaches and her anxiety reactions, she was close to being cured.
Joan’s problem was a truly mild one. Her relationship with her husband was basically as sound as a dollar; she thought him attractive physically and respected him. She enjoyed their social life together and never felt exploited or put upon when he had to entertain his business associates. Indeed, she had a great deal of fun playing the role of hostess to them. There was no area where one could find real difficulty between Joan and her husband except in their sexual life.
This problem washed out very quickly, for it was lightly held in the soil of Joan’s personality. And yet in exploring it we found it had exactly the same structure as Patricia Agnew’s problem: a basic overattachment to her father that had occurred in early childhood and had not been resolved. The difference was that the attachment on Joan’s part had been a much milder one than Patricia’s had been, and therefore, while it did have a lingering aftereffect, it did not encompass Joan’s entire personality and was therefore far easier to deal with.
There were two things that made Joan’s relationship with her father less destructive than Patricia’s had been. First, Joan’s father was notsooverpoweringly loving and attentive to the little girl during the first six years of her growth. Second, Joan’s mother had a very distinctive and strong personality of her own, and Joan had had a good relationship with her all during her formative years. This neutralized to a certain extent the overstimulating effect of her father. It had allowed her to identify with her own sex in a healthy manner, to give her the feeling that it was a fine thing to be a sweetheart, wife, and mother.
Joan’s frigidity problem was helped in a few sessions. One day she came to me and was very upset. Her last intercourse had been successful and had culminated in the strongest orgasm she had had up to this time. But as usual, the next day had been an anxious one and she had had a severe backache.
As she talked about it she suddenly said: “I had the most amazing dream; I’ve just recalled it.” She had been on a swing in a playground, she told me, and her father had been pushing her. “I flew higher and higher,” she said. “It was like flying. The sensations were delicious. I hoped he would never stop. Then suddenly I looked around and he had turned into some kind of criminal or something. He seized me and I screamed, but somehow I knew nobody could hear me. I then suddenly remembered something a girl friend had actually told me in college when a group of us were discussing rape. She had said that a woman might be killed if she resisted. And she said that if it ever happened to her she would just relax and try to enjoy it. I recalled this now, and the criminal in my dream did rape me and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I came to a terrific climax, a kind I’ve never had in real life.”
She had awakened at this point but then went back to sleep and had the following nightmare. “Women policemen were pursuing me for having committed some crime,” she said. “They’d almost catch me, but I’d get away. Finally one of them did catch me, but when I looked in her face she was smiling at me tenderly and she said: ‘Don’t worry; it’s not so terrible after all.’”
Knowing what you know already, it should not be too hard to see what Joan’s dream means. The swinging, with her father doing the pushing, represented her very early sexual feelings toward her father. When these became too direct she disguised them by turning her father into the criminalrapist. Actuallyshewas the one who felt like the criminal, and this is borne out by the fact that in the following dream she was pursued by the police. It is significant that they were policewomen, for the little girl feels very strong guilt toward her mother because of the forbidden and taboo sex feelings toward her father. The forgiving attitude of the policewoman represented both her good relationship with her mother and her inner readiness to get over the problem.
There could scarcely be a better illustration of the whole theory of modern psychoanalysis than this. To Joan, at least, it was eminently clear. Her terror, expressed by her dream of the pursuing policewomen, disappeared before that session was over, and she stood ready to move into a mature and satisfying sexuality with her husband. With her conscious mind she now knew that she had been frightened of complete sexual love because, in the highest reaches of passion, her feelings for her husband unconsciously reminded her of the “dangerous” feelings she bad once felt for her father; thus she dared not indulge them to the utmost. Understanding the irrational basis of her fears allowed her to dispense with them.