The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

The frigid woman has learned to fear physical love, to run from it, and this fear has profound repercussions on her relationships with men. The reasons for her fear are hidden from her, are locked in her unconscious mind. Consciously she may wish, above all things, to achieve real closeness with her husband, to give and receive the greatest of all mutual joys between man and woman, sexual gratification. But she has not the capacity to receive this joy. It is beyond her will and control. It is as if she had a million dollars and could not spend a cent of it; as if she were surrounded by the finest foods and must starve. The very fact of the new equality she has won makes her problem even more humiliating, bitterer, more frustrating.

In my fifteen years as a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst I have treated many, many women who have come to me in despair because of their partial or total inability to enjoy the sexual part of their marriage and because of the repercussions from this inability. I and hundreds of other psychiatrists have been fortunate in helping many of them to overcome their difficulties. We have found that before a woman can be expected to take full responsibility for reaching true sexual maturity she must really know all about herself, her sex and her problem. Then and only then has she the material in hand to start growing up, in all pleasure, to her full feminine stature.

If a woman is willing to work in all seriousness with a psychiatrist there is little question that she can be helped to overcome her sexual difficulty. The information she receives, the insights she obtains into the conditions which have kept her from experiencing real love can sweep away her ignorance, her misunderstandings, her irrational fears.

Her experience with the psychiatrist may help her husband, too, for with his wife’s consent the therapist will often see him for periodic discussions. These talks help him to understand her problem, to see deeply into the nature of his wife and therefore of all womankind. This knowledge allows the husband to be of direct help in effecting his wife’s release from the immobilizing grip of her frigidity. It helps him to be patient where he might have been irritable, tender when he might have been importunate; it keeps him from the major error of believing that he is to blame for her underlying condition and thus complicating the relationship by becoming defensive, as one unjustly accused would become—indeed, should.

The question then arises as to whether the kind of information a woman and her husband may receive during her therapy can also be helpful in book form.

I have given much thought to this question and have had many consultations with my psychiatric colleagues about it. We have come to the positive conclusion that a book on this subject can be of direct benefit to all women suffering from sexual frigidity.

I will go even further and say that the facts about frigidity that I present here—its origins, its causes, and its cures—must be known by every woman with a sexual problem if she wishes to be cured.

Frigidity is always rooted in incomplete knowledge gained in childhood and adolescence. We are not, as I have pointed out, far from the Victorian age. Any woman of thirty or more had, in all probability, parents who were reared in the traditions of Victorianism, which denied the sexuality of woman, connived with every available force to deny it, repress it, stop it at its source. These efforts were extraordinarily successful. And, too, any woman now in her twenties probably had parents who were deeply affected by the equally mindless and vicious protest against Victorianism which characterized this country from, roughly, 1920 to 1930—the period we now call the Roaring Twenties or the Jazz Age.

This era, too, was full of destructive misinformation about sex and love. A program of sexual promiscuity for women was openly advocated and found far too many adherents in the younger generation after World War I. The moral climate created in the Jazz Age was alien to the very nature of truly feminine love. It led to serious sexual conflicts in millions of individuals, and these conflicts were duly visited on their offspring.

This book then, I firmly believe, can help the individual to undo the early harm caused by improper upbringing. I have tried to design it in such a manner that a woman who reads it completely may achieve a deep understanding of frigidity, an understanding that can lead to a profound inner change, a complete reversal of those attitudes that are always at the root of frigidity.