Chapter 12PSYCHIC 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 canat 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 domesticlife 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 overtwo 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 heradvances. 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 Villageand 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,weregrave. 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 lifeand 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 youmust 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 endin 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 completelyunresponsive 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 theofficer 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.