Psychologically the woman who has been brought to such a pitch experiences a feeling of acute frustration which, consciously or unconsciously, turns to anger at herself and at her partner. If the anger is unconscious, she may have physiological symptoms—headache, nausea, throat constrictions, heart palpitations, or difficulty with breathing. She may also weep uncontrollably, vomit, or have tremors throughout her body.
This unconscious anger at her frustration may also cause her to quarrel with her husband or to take out her rage on the children.
I should like to emphasize that she usually does not see any connection between these symptoms and her frustrated sexual experiences. When her anger at her frustration does become conscious, she usually blames her husband for her lack of satisfaction. As I have pointed out, he is rarely to blame.
Purely physical symptoms not connected with repressed anger may also follow upon sexual excitement which has not been released through orgasm. These are somatic and can probably be traced to undischarged neuromuscular and glandular energy. Such symptoms include low back pain, general restlessness, and very often acute insomnia. Several of my patients have complained of severe vaginal pains which have lasted several hours. Gynecologists report that abdominal cramps, probably emanating from contractions of the uterus, are frequent.
As you can see from this recital of symptoms and my preliminary descriptions of personality disorders, women may pay a very high price for their frigidity. If the condition were relatively rare, we could take some comfort from that fact at least.
But frigidity is not rare; it is one of the commonest and most serious chronic ailments that beset society today. Conservative estimates indicate that 40 per cent of all American women suffer from some degree or kind of sexual frigidity. No other public health or social problem of our time even approaches this magnitude.
I have now told you about the degrees and psychological consequences of frigidity and described one basic type. There are, however, two other types of frigidity which, because they have certain confusing elements in them, I have reserved until now to explain. Psychologically and sexually both of these types seem to run counter to the generalities I have made about frigidity so far.
The first type, though we consider her definitely frigid in the wide sense of the word, is able to have full and complete orgasm practically every time she has intercourse. This is really quite an astonishing fact, considering the usual close connection between personality and sexuality. Actually one could not distinguish in any way the sexual reaction of this type from that of the perfectly normal woman described in Chapter 3.
However, this kind of woman is totally unable to build a relationship with any man. For that reason she generally becomes, in the end, sexually promiscuous. Somehow and somewhere along the line a wedge has been driven between her sexuality and her ability to relate psychologically in a love relationship. Her sexuality has come to apparent maturity while her character has remained infantile. We call this psychic frigidity.