The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

I might add that the same general effect can be caused by certain local irritations of the little girl’s genitalia. These can be easily recognized. The itching and soreness of such irritations may cause the child to scratch or stroke her genitals excessively, and this too may occasion an overexcitation which the little ego is not yet ready to handle. Or it may cause the child to associate pleasurable sensations with painful sensations, and this association can cause difficulties of a psychological nature later. Only real ignorance on the part of the parent could allow such easily remedied conditions to persist to the point where they might do harm to the child. On the other hand, I do not wish to alarm parents unnecessarily or to cause any mother to become obsessively concerned about the frequent irritations children may get in the genital area. To cause any real harm to the child psychologically, such irritations must be chronic and unattended to for a long period. The usual short-term irritation has no known permanent effect on the child’s development psychologically.

The last major danger of this early period which I shall mention stems from any deep-seated emotional problem of the mother. If because of problems created in her childhood the mother either neglects or overprotects the child to a great extent or over a long period of time, there can be serious harm done to the development of the little one. Overprotection can destroy the self-reliance of the child, keep her from passing into the rewarding and growth-provoking relationship with her father which moves her into the next natural step in development. Neglect, on the other hand, can thrust her into too close an association with the father and have equally dire results.

Failure of the relationship with her father is the chief danger the little girl faces during her latency period, which, as you may recall, she encounters from six to ten years of age. She has transferred many of the feelings of love and dependency, which a few years before she had felt for her mother, to this new idol. Forever after he will be the model male in her life, though she will seek her ideal in other men. For the present she worships him, and his approval means more to her than anything else in the world.

If the father is a disapproving and critical man and directs such attitudes toward his daughter, she may develop strong feelings of inferiority. These can lead her to feel that men are virtually impossible to please, and she can thus become fearful of them, feeling that if a man finds out her true nature he will disapprove of it. No reality or later acceptance by a man will overcome this irrational conviction unless, when she is grown, a woman with such a self-attitude examines herself deeply and eradicates this mistaken conception of the male. Her feelings of inferiority extend to her sexual drive, which she is apt to repress, as if it were discreditable, like the rest of her personality.

Some fathers, of course, have a closer identification with their sons than with their daughters. Men who are not aware of this tendency can wreak great havoc with a daughter’s personality at this stage of her growth. Since she adores her father and wishes to become what he will admire, she will quickly detect her father’s preference for the male. This often causes her to attempt to cultivate male characteristics and male pursuits and to depreciate totally all those typically feminine goals which one day she must achieve if she is to be a true woman.

The latency period, as we saw, is a non-sexual time for both boys and girls. Aside from their anatomical structure, there is little difference between boys and girls at this juncture: their glands function in roughly the same way; none of the typical characteristics which will differentiate them later have yet appeared. They are both interested in mastering the world about them and the world inside them; they are both roughly equal as far as their innate store of aggressiveness is concerned. Indeed, many scientists call this whole period the bisexual period of development.

For these reasons a father who implants male goals into his daughter’s psyche at this point finds a ready audience. Psychoanalysis shows us that the little girl very often can develop fantasies of an extremely odd kind at this juncture. In some children, for example, the idea that they can somehow magically grow a penis and turn into a boy is too often quite conscious. But even if such ideas do not become conscious, the yearning of the little girl to become a boy to win her father’s esteem can remain as part of the total equipment of her unconscious mind. Later, although hidden and disguised, this wish can be at the root of much of her sexual problems with men, causing her to be neurotically competitive with them and to reject her own female role as unworthy.

We saw that the girl in puberty and in adolescence had a formidable task to achieve. She must learn to accept and to love the “dangerous” role of the woman—she must, in effect, be willing to reverse the natural law of self-preservation and put childbirth and the welfare of the child ahead of her own needs and safety.

If she is not encouraged to believe that the feminine role is a worthy one, if she is taught that the male role is superior, then she will be highly motivated to reject her femininity and, almost literally, try to be a boy. It is frequently exactly this that occurs when a woman’s fear and rejection of femininity result in an inability to respond vaginally in sexual intercourse. In a curious and of course unconscious manner she may hold onto the sensual responses of her clitoris as if she had a small penis, but feel unable to allow the sensual feelings to be experienced within the vagina.

The young girl may be influenced to reject her feminine role by the mother as well as by the father. If the mother herself has a strong resentment of her own femininity and, like so many women, has been reared to feel that the role of wife and mother is a degraded and worthless one, she can pass this attitude on to her daughter without speaking a word. The child sees it in her mother’s reactions to her father in everyday life, hears it in her complaints, and sometimes feels it in the resigned and hopeless attitude with which she may face her life.