The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

You will recall the fact that in the first five years of life the child is a very sensual little being. Patricia had been no exception in the beginning; she had transferred these feelings, in the normal course of events, to her father. However, this powerful and charming man whose personality dominated the household, overshadowing his wife completely, had been far too responsive (unwittingly, of course) to the little girl’s erotic feelings. He dandled her and played with her endlessly, surrounded her with a stimulating warmth, psychologically and physically; he showered kisses and hugs, compliments and candy upon her; he gave her anything and everything to express his devotion to her.

The consequence? The very strength of his love, its varied and aggressive forms, its unrelenting intensity, had a negative effect on the child. To put it most simply, his love overstimulated her budding sexuality. This powerful man’s love overwhelmed her. Her small ego could not handle such powerful feelings; they frightened her. In order to cope with such feelings, therefore, she had had to repress them powerfully, deny their existence.

Children can do this, as you will remember from our discussion of the latency period of childhood. It is at the onset of this period, which occurs at about six years of age, that infantile sexuality is pushed under ground, to remain dormant until puberty. Patricia, under the influence of her prematurely strong sexual response to her father, had been forced to enter her latency period, we were able to determine, at the far too early age of four.

With sex out of the way, she was now able to indulge her worship of her father in complete “innocence.” He was a man who believed passionately in success, and his ebullience, love of life, and high intelligence had won him a great deal of it. His young daughter felt now that to win his love she must achieve and achieve, endlessly. From the first grade of school through her last year at college, therefore, she bent all her efforts to excelling mentally. But her father was also a perfectionist; he expected top honors from himself and jeered at anything less in himself. Thoughtlessly he made the same demands on his daughter. Since she did not have his qualifications she was not always able to come up to his standards in every field of endeavor; few could have equaled his demands. When she did not achieve such top honors she felt that she was not worthy of her father’s love and indeed that he did not love her. He did nothing to correct this feeling.

If you will recall our normal stages of development for the growing child, you will easily see that when marriage time came around Patricia Agnew had not touched first, second, or third base. She had appeared to be growing normally, excelling in schoolwork, playing the role of the dutiful daughter, going out on dates. But in the emotional and sexual spheres she had been arrested at a very early stage.

So severe had been her repression of her childhood sexuality that when the glandular changes which usher in puberty occurred she failed to have the resurgence of sexual feeling and the development of psychological characteristics normal for that period. For that reason she omitted her adolescent phase of development, too, the period of young love’s long and lovely dream which prepares the girl for the activities of love sexually and psychologically. How could she have had such a dream? It depends on the development of a true and normal sexuality. The door had been locked on her sexuality in infancy and the key thrown away.

Psychologically, too, she was an infant. The need to excel, to master one’s environment is of course normal for the latency period. Nature has arranged this period, sagely put sex out of the way for a few years so that the ego may have a chance to grow, to prepare itself for the sexual storms and stresses of puberty and adolescence.

However, since in a very real sense she could not pass through puberty and adolescence, she had remained psychologically in the latency period, the non-sexual, competitive, father-worshiping childhood period.

Patricia really had two distinct attitudes toward her husband. The first was expressed in her quarrelsomeness, her belief that he was selfish, unattractive, and unlovable. This attitude was based on the fact that, very literally, her heart still belonged to Daddy. With her exaggerated childhood feelings toward her father, every other man suffered by comparison, seemed unworthy of her love. Her husband was an interloper who came between her and her ideal. Therefore, his normal need for her to love him, to be a good wife to him, seemed hateful to her, filled her with rage. Sex under such circumstances was a virtual rape of Lucrece, with the husband playing the role of the dark and frightening rapist, the father representing her true love, for whom she must preserve her innocence and purity.

Another deeper and more hidden attitude was the exact opposite of this, indeed contradictory to it. In this aspect of her mind her husband stood for her father. Thus sexual feelings toward such a person must be entirely taboo; she must repress them as she had in her earliest years and she must keep them repressed. Too, she must excel in all the things her father wanted her to excel in. To her husband she must primarily excel in her wifely functions, and this was the essential trap. For because she very consciously knew she was not and under the circumstances could not be even a passable wife, she was constantly inundated by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.