The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

However, you must understand that when I use the word “forget” I do not mean it literally. In psychiatry we use the word “repression” to describe this kind of forgetting. It means the ability of the human mind to push anything it does not wish to recall out of awareness, into a part of the mind called the unconscious. When we repress something, a memory or experience, we do not remember that it ever happened with our conscious mind. However, it remains quite intact in our unconscious mind and can and does exert an influence upon us that we are not aware of. Too, it can be revived in the conscious mind by later experiences, or, even if it does not revive, later experiences can be very much influenced by the “forgotten” memory.

The new stage into which the young girl now enters is called the “latency period,” because the sexual feelings of the earlier period have become repressed, or latent.

The latency period is chiefly characterized by an attempt on the part of the little girl to understand and master her environment. It is marked by a tremendous growth physically and mentally. She is interested in everything, in everything that gives her a chance to advance herself physically: rope-jumping, doll-playing, ball-playing, swimming, climbing, running; there is sometimes very little that she does, feels, or thinks in this period that distinguishes her in any very important manner from a little boy of the same age. She may be a bit more obedient, a bit better about doing her homework than a boy, but not dramatically so.

We may ask, then, what nature’s intention in bringing on this latency period might be? Let me put it this way. Nature, plainly and simply, wishes to give the child a chance to grow a little mentally, to learn to master her body and mind, to integrate the earlier phase of development, to learn to form personal relationships so that when she comes to the next great step in development, the phase marked by menstruation and female maturation, she will be ready. Think what would happen if the little girl were plunged from the stresses and strains of infantile sexuality directly into full sexual readiness. Her body might be ready, but psychologically she would have no understanding of her environment, no idea of personal relationships, no sense of her self or of her abilities. She would have, as the actress Elizabeth Taylor noted of herself and her reaction to a too-early plunge into grown-up experiences, “a child’s mind in a woman’s body.” Nature intends no such dilemma for women. She has a step-by-step plan which leads the woman, if parents co-operate, safely to the haven of physical and psychological maturity.

The latency period is also marked by a very close relationship to the parents, particularly to the father. However, there are now no conscious sexual feelings attached to him. She admires and values her father above all other things and wants his admiration and very high regard too. Most fathers instinctively give their little daughters a great deal of love and reassurance during this phase, and the child basks in it as a flower in the sun. She strives to do the things that will please him, make him notice her, make him love her. His responses are studied assiduously, and it is in this way that she receives her first real experience with the all-important feminine need to “please her man.” The feelings of joy she gets from his pleasure in her accomplishments, physical and mental, are the precursors of the rewards she will later prize so highly when bestowed on her by a loving husband. As you might suspect, this period is very important to her development into full womanhood with its varied psychological give-and-take. If the father seriously fails in his role during this period he can do irreparable harm to the growing girl.

The mother’s role, of course, continues to be important too. The little girl has repressed her guilt feelings toward her mother, along with all of her directly sensual feelings, and during the latency period Mother emerges as a model to imitate. In effect the little girl says something like this to herself: “She, after all, got the man I prize most highly in the whole world. Therefore, she must have something very desirable. Therefore, I’ll imitate it.” She proceeds to do just that.

Of course I do not mean that this is all there is to her feelings about her mother; she loves her mother deeply and abidingly and without her would feel, and indeed would be bereft. Her imitation of her mother is a tribute to those feelings too. However, I may remind you that I am selecting those aspects of the child’s relationships that bear directly on her later sexual maturity.

The next stage of development starts approximately at the age of ten and ends with the complete maturation, psychological and biological, of the individual woman. It is often divided into two phases; the first phase, which lasts until thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen, we call puberty; the second, by that much-misunderstood word “adolescence.”

Puberty is ushered in by great glandular changes in the child. The young body begins to take on the semblance of womanhood. Breasts begin to grow; pubic hair starts. Gradually the uterus, or womb, stirs, begins to expand, readies itself to hold the child which will ultimately grow there. In the midst of this preparatory growth menstruation, the cyclical ebb and flow of fecund woman, starts in earnest. In a few months the child stands just within the portal of physical maturity.

The little girl now again (for the first time since infancy) begins to experience rather strong sexual feelings, and she reacts to them with some anxiety. She may start once more to masturbate clitorally, although this time the act is accompanied by guilt feelings and with apprehension. As I have pointed out, these feelings of apprehension can be thought of as fully justified. Her sexuality is going to lead to motherhood, and this in turn means that she is going to have to face the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth, the biological need of putting her child’s welfare ahead of her own. In effect, as we have seen, she is going to suspend the law of self-preservation as it applies to her own person.