She was morbidly modest and wept bitterly once when a man whom she knew only slightly, pressed a kiss upon her lips. Withal her dreams revealed a violently erotic temperament.
Like all exaggerated feelings morbid modesty is the mask for the opposite feelings, passionate sexual cravings. The woman who allows every one to kiss her is aroused but little by such caresses. The woman who never kisses any one and pretends she does not like being kissed, is usually the one who knows that a kiss might cause her to lose her self-control and to abandon all modesty.
The puritanical male, paragon of modesty among his sex, is either an inflammable type who is afraid of his own sensuality or an impotent individual who protects himself against being put to any sexual test.
That exaggerated modesty is only one of the components of the neurotic temperament has been well demonstrated by Adler: "The morbid modesty of neurotics," he writes, "who cannot visit a public toilet, who are unable to urinate in the presence of others, who avoid the society of women on account of blushing or anxiety or heart palpitations, reveals to us the strained manly ambition which supports itself against the original feeling of inferiority.
"The Masculine Protest(craving for virility) of those patients, insecure to the core, forces them into this arrangement whose boundaries encroach upon those of bashfulness and awkwardness. Often, in neurotics of either sex, one observes an inability to go to a toilet in cases of great necessity if some one is looking at them. The greater modesty of women, especially of neurotic women, in all relations of life, originates from the fear which is implanted in them from the earliest childhood that attention might be directed to their sex.
"I have often convinced myself that the behavior of girls and of women is considerably influenced by this more or less unconscious factor, indeed that the progress of their sexual development, like that of male patients who feel unmanly, the formation of social and professional relations and love relations, are immediately checked as soon as the patient is allowed to play a real 'feminine' or subordinate part or presupposes this expectation from others.
"This fact is in no way affected when repressed sexual stimuli come to light as the present source of the checks of aggression. They are similarly arranged and have the purpose of enhancing the fear of the partner and of permitting the retreat decided upon in the plan of life, to be entered upon with certainty; they are therefore acts of foresight. The neurotic had already in childhood laid the foundation of this foresight and in it is reflected the feeling of shame as the guiding line of reassuring modesty and the prudery of civilisation.
"The previous history of the patient reveals an exaggerated modesty and this is true at times of those who in other respects show a boyish nature; the anxiety of nervous children on being exposed may be observed in their conduct. They exclude every one from the room and lock the door when they are going to undress. This conduct is also observable in boys who have grown up among girls. In the prognosis of neurosis, this expedient of cowardice is a bad symptom. It is the equivalent of later castration thoughts and neurotic wishes, the wish to be a woman, for instance, which expresses itself as soon as the fear of the life mate becomes actual or a decision has to be avoided."
Lack of Modesty, when it assumes a morbid form, has, according to Adler, the same meaning as prurient modesty.
"The very shameless, obscene talker," Adler writes, "is trying to demonstrate to his listeners the fact of his great manliness of which he is not very sure himself, the very immodest woman merely demonstrates her inability to adapt herself to her feminine role.... In the analysis of such women, at times only in their dreams, is observed the childish expectation of a metamorphosis into a male, an attempted substitute for the will-to-power, the will-to-be-above."