The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

Actually she was a very fine woman, but she was totally confused about this area of her life. “If I could only break through this silly little block,” she told me, “our marriage would be ideal.” I could get no further real facts from her. She insisted that she and her husband had “a whole community of shared interests” and two “wonderfully normal” children. I asked to see her husband.

I got the real story from him. He was, he told me, quite worried about his wife and about their marriage and had been for a long time.

She had always, he said, been an extremely competitive woman, but since his promotion from associate professor to full professor four years before, this characteristic had become almost unendurable. “I hardly dare to open my mouth any more,” he told me, “because I know she’s going to contradict me.” Quarrels had become extremely frequent, and their oldest child was definitely showing neurotic signs. I inquired about her reactions during her pregnancies, and he told me that she had been constantly ill physically and, while she would not admit it, had clearly been deeply frightened of the whole experience. Indeed, after the birth of the second child she had become severely depressed for over two months. He told me that yes, indeed, they had had a community of interests for the first couple of years of their marriage but that her competitiveness with him had become so pronounced that any mutuality, from his standpoint, was now almost impossible.

Any psychiatrist knowledgeable in such matters could have guessed from the woman’s description of her sexual problem pretty much what I learned about her from her husband. For, as I have pointed out, the kind and degree of frigidity a woman may confess to are also an open statement of the kind and degree of personality distortion she is subject to.

As one might guess, this patient was not easy to treat. She had developed a powerful tendency to handle her fears by denying their existence. When she was finally able to see through this self-deceiving trait, however, she came to grips with her problem. She was able to see that she had been in a ten-year competition with her husband instead of a marriage. When she realized this she was able to control her competitive actions, and the immediate rewards she received in the form of renewed affection and companionship from her grateful husband motivated her to find out more and more about herself. At length this intelligent but dreadfully insecure person became, through understanding and insight, a real woman able to give and take in every aspect of the love relationship.

Frigidity causes a personality distortion. I wish to impress this on you deeply. It means that the person has a misunderstanding of reality, denies it, blames others for her own miseries and failures.

One woman who had been cured of a severe frigidity problem phrased it this way: “I was looking at life and people through a distorting glass. No wonder I made such poor decisions.” She was right, too. Her problem had first driven her to promiscuity, then to marriage with an alcoholic. I was very glad, when she first came for treatment, that she had not yet had any children. With her deeply seated, sexually based personality problem she might have ruined them. I am even gladder that, remarried to a fine man, she has two children now.

In a later section we shall examine in great detail these personality problems that accompany frigidity. There are, however, more immediate symptoms which I should like to go into here.

You will recall in the description of sexual intercourse leading to orgasm how thoroughly the body becomes mobilized: heartbeat, pulse, and blood pressure rise precipitately, tissues become engorged with blood, glands secrete freely, muscular tension mounts to a pitch which would be unendurable if the sexual instinct were not demanding expression. Complete satisfaction brings an end to all these processes, and the energy discharged through normal channels and in a normal manner leaves the person in a condition of relaxation and with a sense of well-being.

When orgasm does not take place, when there is no release of the intensely mobilized energy, there are immediate repercussions, both physical and psychological, on the individual.