The Power of Sexual Surrender

Now we have seen the stages the normal woman goes through on her way to true sexual and psychological maturity, the step-by-step process of her growth. But we must, of course, ask what might happen to impede this growth, what pitfalls lie along the way into which she may stumble (or be pushed), causing her to develop symptoms of frigidity and the personality difficulties that always accompany this frigidity.

I should like to list these pitfalls in the same manner that I showed the normal and unimpeded growth of a woman: by taking the stages of development in the order of their appearance. If you are able to see the specific dangers along the path to grown-uphood, you may avoid repeating them with your own child and may learn much about the origins of your own problem, particularly as I show their application in the specific case histories that follow this chapter.

In the first or infantile stage of development the greatest danger to the child comes from ignorance on the part of the parents. In the past, parents did not know that the newborn babe has sensual feelings that become quite specific by the time he or she is three years of age and continue that way until he is about six. I am afraid many parents still do not know this fact, either have not heard of it or do not believe it is true.

Such a lack of knowledge is often accompanied by a moral horror of masturbation or, at the very least, of strong feelings of moral disapproval. This often leads the parent, especially the mother, to restrain the child from such sensual activity. Many parents slap the infant’s hands, some systematically remove the child’s hands when they see her playing with herself. Others, when the child learns to speak, will reprove her for her activities, often spank her if the activity persists.

Such an attitude could not be more mistaken and can have a disastrous effect on the child. The infant is tremendously responsive to even the subtlest disapproval on the part of the parents. In this all-important area she will react violently to punishment and even to verbal warnings. Often she will not only attempt to prevent her own masturbatory activity but will try to repress the whole of her sexual nature in an effort to keep her mother’s love. She may be quite successful in doing this, kill all her natural impulses in the bud. First experiences, as we know, are of great importance in development, and this early inhibition of her sexual nature can, and often does, lay the groundwork for sexual frigidity and a generally inhibited and circumscribed personality.

Another danger in this period can come from an exorbitant amount of overt love from the father. This is very difficult for certain men to understand fully. They argue, and quite cogently, that the young need a great deal of love, demonstrative love. That is indeed so, but it must also be remembered that children at this age are extremely erotic. They can be overstimulated sensually if the father does not bestow his loving caresses in judicious amounts, and the result can be a strong fixation of erotic feelings on the father, with a consequent overload of guilt feelings. These guilt feelings can lead to total frigidity in later life, and indeed may be the leading cause of this symptom, as we shall presently see. I am not saying that a father should not caress and dandle his little daughter; that would be against nature. He should, however, dole out his physical expressions of love in amounts that are not too stimulating to the child.

Another pitfall the child can encounter at this stage is quite the opposite in nature. It is, luckily, met with infrequently, but it does happen and it can have an important effect on the child’s development. I am speaking of seduction by an older child or an adult. It is not unknown for nursemaids or even older brothers and sisters to stroke the young child’s genitals. German and Austrian maids used to do it as a matter of course, stroking the little boy’s testicles and penis or the little girl’s vulva to put the child to sleep. However, this is absolutely harmful to the child, causing an overexcitation that can have a permanent effect on her sexuality. Masturbation is normal for this age, and in this form of narcissistic sexual activity the child is able to control the amount of sexual excitation she receives. Under normal circumstances she will not exceed this amount. However, stimuli from the outside are not self-regulating, and the child’s ego is not sufficiently mature to handle this overexcitation.

The result of a seduction on the child at this age can be disastrous. It can lead to any of the major forms or degrees of frigidity. In my experience, however, it most frequently seems to lead to the form known as “psychic frigidity.”

I might add that the same general effect can be caused by certain local irritations of the little girl’s genitalia. These can be easily recognized. The itching and soreness of such irritations may cause the child to scratch or stroke her genitals excessively, and this too may occasion an overexcitation which the little ego is not yet ready to handle. Or it may cause the child to associate pleasurable sensations with painful sensations, and this association can cause difficulties of a psychological nature later. Only real ignorance on the part of the parent could allow such easily remedied conditions to persist to the point where they might do harm to the child. On the other hand, I do not wish to alarm parents unnecessarily or to cause any mother to become obsessively concerned about the frequent irritations children may get in the genital area. To cause any real harm to the child psychologically, such irritations must be chronic and unattended to for a long period. The usual short-term irritation has no known permanent effect on the child’s development psychologically.

The last major danger of this early period which I shall mention stems from any deep-seated emotional problem of the mother. If because of problems created in her childhood the mother either neglects or overprotects the child to a great extent or over a long period of time, there can be serious harm done to the development of the little one. Overprotection can destroy the self-reliance of the child, keep her from passing into the rewarding and growth-provoking relationship with her father which moves her into the next natural step in development. Neglect, on the other hand, can thrust her into too close an association with the father and have equally dire results.

Failure of the relationship with her father is the chief danger the little girl faces during her latency period, which, as you may recall, she encounters from six to ten years of age. She has transferred many of the feelings of love and dependency, which a few years before she had felt for her mother, to this new idol. Forever after he will be the model male in her life, though she will seek her ideal in other men. For the present she worships him, and his approval means more to her than anything else in the world.

If the father is a disapproving and critical man and directs such attitudes toward his daughter, she may develop strong feelings of inferiority. These can lead her to feel that men are virtually impossible to please, and she can thus become fearful of them, feeling that if a man finds out her true nature he will disapprove of it. No reality or later acceptance by a man will overcome this irrational conviction unless, when she is grown, a woman with such a self-attitude examines herself deeply and eradicates this mistaken conception of the male. Her feelings of inferiority extend to her sexual drive, which she is apt to repress, as if it were discreditable, like the rest of her personality.

Some fathers, of course, have a closer identification with their sons than with their daughters. Men who are not aware of this tendency can wreak great havoc with a daughter’s personality at this stage of her growth. Since she adores her father and wishes to become what he will admire, she will quickly detect her father’s preference for the male. This often causes her to attempt to cultivate male characteristics and male pursuits and to depreciate totally all those typically feminine goals which one day she must achieve if she is to be a true woman.

The latency period, as we saw, is a non-sexual time for both boys and girls. Aside from their anatomical structure, there is little difference between boys and girls at this juncture: their glands function in roughly the same way; none of the typical characteristics which will differentiate them later have yet appeared. They are both interested in mastering the world about them and the world inside them; they are both roughly equal as far as their innate store of aggressiveness is concerned. Indeed, many scientists call this whole period the bisexual period of development.

For these reasons a father who implants male goals into his daughter’s psyche at this point finds a ready audience. Psychoanalysis shows us that the little girl very often can develop fantasies of an extremely odd kind at this juncture. In some children, for example, the idea that they can somehow magically grow a penis and turn into a boy is too often quite conscious. But even if such ideas do not become conscious, the yearning of the little girl to become a boy to win her father’s esteem can remain as part of the total equipment of her unconscious mind. Later, although hidden and disguised, this wish can be at the root of much of her sexual problems with men, causing her to be neurotically competitive with them and to reject her own female role as unworthy.

We saw that the girl in puberty and in adolescence had a formidable task to achieve. She must learn to accept and to love the “dangerous” role of the woman—she must, in effect, be willing to reverse the natural law of self-preservation and put childbirth and the welfare of the child ahead of her own needs and safety.

If she is not encouraged to believe that the feminine role is a worthy one, if she is taught that the male role is superior, then she will be highly motivated to reject her femininity and, almost literally, try to be a boy. It is frequently exactly this that occurs when a woman’s fear and rejection of femininity result in an inability to respond vaginally in sexual intercourse. In a curious and of course unconscious manner she may hold onto the sensual responses of her clitoris as if she had a small penis, but feel unable to allow the sensual feelings to be experienced within the vagina.

The young girl may be influenced to reject her feminine role by the mother as well as by the father. If the mother herself has a strong resentment of her own femininity and, like so many women, has been reared to feel that the role of wife and mother is a degraded and worthless one, she can pass this attitude on to her daughter without speaking a word. The child sees it in her mother’s reactions to her father in everyday life, hears it in her complaints, and sometimes feels it in the resigned and hopeless attitude with which she may face her life.

When I emphasize this early “masculine” direction which a little girl’s values may be given, I do not wish to confuse the reader. There is a “tomboy” stage through which many girls pass. This is a perfectly natural phase in her development and has nothing to do with the problem unless the child holds onto her tomboyism until well after twelve years of age. This natural emulation of little boys is really quite a feminine gesture on the little girl’s part—she is trying to learn more about what that wonderful opposite sex does and thinks and feels. In this way she enters into her first friendly relationships with males other than her father.

Remember that we called puberty “the chum stage.” The young girl takes to herself a bosom companion of the same sex with whom she shares her “secrets.” One of the chief dangers to arise during this part of the growing-up process comes from this relationship, which is, of course, a normal one under optimum circumstances. However, if the chum selected turns out to be precocious as far as sexual experiment with the opposite sex is concerned, the friendship can lead to harmful experiences for the more innocent member of the duo.

A girl entering puberty is often attracted to a girl a year or two older than she is and will idealize this new friend, feeling that any action she performs is entirely fine and defensible. Neither of these children is, of course, ready for any truly heterosexual experience, but the younger one may imitate the older one and attempt to follow through in a sexual relationship with a boy or older man. Without mentioning the possible disaster of pregnancy at this early juncture, I should like to emphasize that sexual intercourse at this age, without the preparatory stage of adolescence having intervened, can cause a permanent aversion for the experience. It can produce a trauma of such severity that the young person may withdraw from the opposite sex entirely and remain withdrawn. Or it may encourage her to believe that she has attained her majority and cause her to act out this joyless and premature experience over and over with many different members of the opposite sex.

The simple fact is that a girl is not ready for love-making until she falls in love with a specific individual. For this to happen in a meaningful manner, she must first pass through the daydream stage of adolescence. Boys do not go through this phase and, indeed, do not have to. They are ready for intercourse at a much younger age than girls are. Girls have much to risk in love, even if we confine our observations to the purely biological aspects of the experience of sexual intercourse. Psychologically they must, so to speak, be sure that it is indeed Prince Charming who leans over them. Until it is, they must dream and sleep, for if it is a rude stranger he can shatter the dream forever, thus rob the young girl of any chance of ever bringing her dream to fulfillment in reality.

Another danger of both puberty and adolescence is that the parents will be overly strict, interpreting the move of the young one toward independence as a danger to her. I have seen many cases of young girls who might have stayed within the home until their adolescence was safely over had it not been for the rather prurient and thick-skinned assumption of a mother or father, or both, that their early dating must inevitably be immoral. This assumption on the part of a parent can activate a very hostile reaction on the part of a young girl. It is as if the parent were saying to her, “You will never be independent of us, never have a life of your own. Why don’t you give up trying?” The fact that the parents do not intend their watchfulness to imply this at all is not relevant. That’s the way the young one too often interprets it, and in a gesture of defiance she may do something that will really injure her.

Equally seriously affected, if not more so, is the young girl who feels extremely rebellious but who submits to overzealous parental authority out of fear. I have seen several girls with this problem. What generally happens is that they have pulled back, because of undue parental influences, from indulging the personality-enrichening dreams of adolescence. This causes them to remain on the threshold of womanhood, lost in an emotional dependency which belongs to an earlier phase of development. By and large, the problems of such girls when they come to womanhood tend to be more severe than those of the girls who rebelled.

In making these observations on parental strictness I am in no way advocating a laissez-faire attitude. Every young girl needs to feel the force of the parents’ moral feelings; they give her guidance and a feeling of security. She will, however, generally react more normally and healthfully if the moral attitudes are expressed and interpreted rather than laid down as ukases.

We have now seen the stages of development that lead to maturity in woman and the pitfalls she may encounter on the way. With this final information in hand we are at last ready to look at frigidity itself. The next section, therefore, will treat of the frigid woman herself, and I will show you, with specific cases, how the kinds and degrees of frigidity develop and what concrete problems they bring in their train. With such models in mind we will then be prepared to examine the constructive steps which individuals who suffer from this problem must take to win their freedom, to cross the bridge to womanhood.