It is always the shapeless and unattractive woman who is the most vociferous champion of highneck gowns and long skirts. A sense of bodily inferiority obsesses the woman who does not allow any caresses unless the room is darkened. Her modesty yields rapidly, however, to the praise of her attractions which she hears from the mouth of her lover.
Immodest Modesty. A woman took her daughter to a specialist's office for an examination. The girl, asked to strip, complied at once with the doctor's request and stood naked before him without any display of shame.
When they left, the mother made the very unwise remark that her daughter must have lacked modesty entirely to have stood the ordeal without any embarrassment. In this case, it was the mother who lacked "true modesty" and the daughter whose mind was "pure." The girl knew she was in the presence of a physician, but to the more highly sexed mother, the physician was above everything a "man."
This sort of prurient modesty which, very often, exerts a baneful influence on the love-life of the individual, is usually due to repressed childhood memories and complexes.
Fear of Love. Stekel, of Vienna, cites the case of a girl who evinced on every occasion a morbid fear of everything connected with love. She avoided men, she protected herself zealously against every "suggestive" influence, she decried love and marriage and was constantly trying to "spiritualise" the things of the flesh which she considered "bestial."
Analysis showed that until the age of thirteen she had been perfectly normal in her behavior, considering love and marriage as natural human goals.
One day, however, she chanced upon a collection of pornographic photographs belonging to her father. Instead of "corrupting" her mind, the incident disgusted her and caused her to renounce all the things of the flesh and to become unusually, negatively modest.
A patient of mine declared on the occasion of her first call at my office that all men were "beasts." Whenever she associated with a man, at dinner, theater or dancing parties, she suffered from choking sensations, nausea, etc. Analysis revealed that at the age of six she had been subjected to an attempt at seduction.
Another woman patient who went thru a mental crisis in the course of which she gave up all worldly pleasures and decided never to marry, merging into hysterical states very soon afterward, had bow legs and a tendency to skin eruptions which had, on many occasions, proved humiliating to her egotism. Her decision never to marry meant: "I shall not risk showing my deformed legs and my skin blemishes to a man." Also, at the age of ten, she had witnessed a scene of brutality in which a man had dragged his wife on the street by her hair.