The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

But let me give you a very clear example of a typical dream my women patients have. This is the dream of a frigid woman who had had several consultations with me and in one of them, the day before the dream, suddenly remembered that at the age of five she had been absolutely convinced that her father would marry her when she grew up. She had buried that memory in her mind, only to resurrect it in therapy.

Her dream, then, was that she was lying in a crib. A tall thin man with glasses and a thin mustache was lying on a bed nearby. A stout, florid-faced woman lay next to him. Suddenly this woman had a convulsive seizure and, after a few moments of writhing, became still. The man then looked at her and smiled as if pleased. “She’s dead,” he said. Then he rose from the bed, went to the crib, and picked my patient up. “We will have four,” he said to her, and she felt immeasurably excited and pleased.

My patient woke in a great state of anxiety. In our session she told me that her father had been tall, thin, and sometimes wore glasses to read in bed. And her mother was stout and very high-colored. My patient then suddenly recalled that in the childhood fantasy of marriage to her father she had decided that she would have four children with him. Her logic was this: her mother had had three children; she would go her mother one better!

I cannot tell you how often we psychiatrists get, directly from our patients, information as clearly confirmatory as this of the existence of an early triangle between mother, father, and child. It causes a conflict in the child, of course, and this early conflict in the little girl takes place in a very subtle manner, so subtle, indeed, that its very existence escaped the conscious notice of mankind from the dawn of history until the end of the nineteenth century. Just before the turn of the twentieth century Sigmund Freud, then an obscure Viennese psychiatrist, while using hypnosis on patients suffering from powerful feelings of repressed guilt, noted that these feelings were always connected with very early sexual conflicts. He was astonished to discover that these sexual conflicts dated back to early childhood, and in case after case he was able to demonstrate not only that children possessed strong sensual feelings but that these feelings became attached first to the mother and then to the father, causing a conflict in the childish mind which had to be resolved. He called this the Oedipal situation. If it was not resolved, the child developed irrational feelings of guilt which could and did impede normal sexual and psychological growth.

I described this early source of conflict to a woman patient of mine recently in much the same way that I have described it here. After pondering for a moment she asked a question that goes to the heart of the matter. “If this early situation causes a conflict in the child which can lead to a neurosis later, why did nature design things that way? I thought nature set things up to foster growth, not to hinder it.”

The observation and question were fine ones and raised points that are generally ignored. Nature did design this early sexual conflict for a very special reason. She did it to foster the growth of the little girl, to push her on to the next step in the development of her femininity, to move her a little farther along the path to her ultimate role of wife and mother.

Let me explain this a bit further. For the first few years, by the very nature of family life, as we have seen, all the little girl’s feelings are focused on her mother. She is the center, the fountain of life itself; the little one looks to her for food, security on all levels, and “love.” This love soon becomes tinged with a very strong erotic feeling connected with the little one’s growing sensuality, which, as we have seen, is centered on her clitoris.

Now, it is necessary for humans to love and to have erotic feelings centered on others. But clearly, if this early love situation did not change at some point, the little girl would grow up to have women as her erotic centers of interest. Nature intends no such end result. She intends these erotic feelings to become ultimately very much man-centered. Thus she makes the role of the father in the child’s development all-important. He becomes the first bridge from the infantile erotic and dependent relationship with the mother to mature relationships with members of the opposite sex. There are, of course, several other bridges that the growing girl will have to traverse on her journey to maturity, but this first one is of central importance. Ultimately, of course, she will have to give up her father, too, as the center of erotic interest, but he will remain in her unconscious life as the model of all that she wants from the male in her life.

We see, then, at the end of this early phase of development the first big step in the preparation of the little girl for her ultimate destiny as wife and mother. But since we know that she is nowhere near ready for such functions we might wonder how nature ends this early period and enters the second important period of growth.

The end of the first stage and the beginning of the second (which, you will recall, will last to about ten years of age) begins with a remarkable psychological event: the early infantile sexuality goes completely underground. The little girl “forgets” that she ever went through such sensual experiences, that there was anything the least bit erotic in her former attachments. Her masturbation stops, under normal circumstances, and she enters into approximately a five-year period of total non-sexuality.