With her misery increasing momently, she went, after these preparations, to the marital bed as one might to the executioner. Her husband’s looks repelled her now; his nakedness seemed disgusting and offensive. She saw him as “skinny, white, and ugly, with an enormous penis. It was as if he were nothing but a big disgusting sexual organ.”
It goes without saying that she could feel no tenderness or warmth—she could not even simulate it. She remained totally passive throughout the entire act, which her husband, in response to her rejection (as she later, in happier times, learned), hurried through as quickly as possible. It is interesting to note that, despite her own inability to respond, one of her bitterest complaints about her husband was that his love-making was mechanical, hasty, and that he never showed any tenderness.
It had never occurred to her, of course, that he might be reacting to her clear aversion to the whole process. Indeed, she saw no justification for his shamefaced approach to her until she was well on the road to sexual health. It is usual in such cases for the wife to blame the husband for her failures, no matter how glaringly unreasonable and untrue her accusation may be.
After intercourse she was always depressed. She felt “dirty and used.” Her husband’s semen appeared to her to be disgusting. “All I wanted was to get to sleep fast and to forget the whole episode until the next ordeal became necessary,” she said.
Under such circumstances it is difficult to understand how a marriage could exist at all. However, such marriages do exist in great numbers, and by far the majority of them do not end up in the divorce courts, as one might expect. Despite the bitter complainings, the struggle for power, the fear of love, and the dread of sex on the wife’s part, I have found that there is usually a well-hidden but genuine bond of love between the couple. The husband seems originally to have seen in his now quarrelsome partner a part that can be truly loving, truly warm. It may show dimly and only in the interstices of the relationship, but it keeps hope alive in him that she will come into her true self one day; he warms himself as best he can, meanwhile, at her meager fires.
But now that we have seen a picture of the totally frigid woman let us examine the causes for it. I have stated that every kind of frigidity has its special cause. What was the cause in Patricia Agnew’s case?
To understand the origins of her problem, we will have to explore her earliest history, particularly her relationship to her mother and father. She was an only child, and her father was clearly the dominant figure in the household. He was an extremely successful and lovable man. He abounded in all the virtues, was infinitely patient and loving with his little daughter. She told me that from her earliest times she considered him, physically speaking, “an enormously beautiful man,” and in describing him she lingered lovingly over the details of his appearance—his “sculptured head,” “wonderful deep kindly eyes,” “marvelously athletic figure.” A psychiatrist, of course, would pay very close attention to such an ecstatic description, coming as it did from such an otherwise withdrawn person.
By way of contrast she had considered her mother “mousy” and, while she had liked her in a general sense, she had never consciously had any very strong positive feelings about her.
Patricia clearly had been a “daddy’s girl.” There is nothing wrong, of course, with this under normal circumstances; had she grown up to be sexually free and had she been able to transfer her early love feelings from her father to other men, this early attachment to the father would have been merely a phase in normal development.
It is not necessary here to depict the stages by which Patricia and I arrived at a clear understanding of the early problem that had caused her later frigidity. It will be enough to state the events themselves.