The Power of Sexual Surrender

by Marie Nyswander Robinson

Despite all this, Molly maintained her scholastic record at a high level and was admitted to college—another sign of the division within her personality. In college her unremitting affairs persisted, as did her selection of friends outside of her own social sphere. At one point she had an affair with a Negro labor organizer, at another with an Italian dock hand, at still another with the father of a college classmate. It is not surprising, then, that as soon as she finished college (and here, too, she maintained her good scholastic record) she gravitated toward Greenwich Village and immediately launched into a bohemian social and sexual existence. She experienced no conscious regrets or qualms of conscience as, year in, year out, she continued in this mode of living, a mode so different from that of her parents. She was sustained by her pride in what she called her “healthy animality” and was fond of stating that most people led lives of great frustration and “of quiet desperation.”

Her animosity toward her parents did not diminish when she grew up, and at the time she came to see me she had not visited them for two years.

The consequences of Molly’s early seduction, as you can see, were grave. However, the psychological structure she had developed to cope with this seduction is not a hard one to understand.

Human beings are largely guided by the pleasure principle, and this is most clearly evinced in childhood. Molly had received a great deal of pleasure from her early sexual experience, but she had also experienced a great deal of guilt about it. When Mr. Brown departed she had entered her latency period. But when puberty, with its reassertion of sexuality, set in, the original sexual experience had set a mold for Molly’s personality. She enjoyed and sought sex to an abnormal degree for her tender years.

In her unconscious life, however, she felt guilty for these feelings. Because of her precocious sensuality her problem then was to get rid of her guilt feelings so that she could indulge her sexuality. This meant, in effect, getting rid of her parents for, in childhood, guilt of this kind is always associated with parental prohibition. She did this by denying that her parents had any importance to her, by repressing all warm feelings toward them, by constructing a set of values in which they were, to use her words again, “stupid,” “loveless squares,” “without a drop of sensuality.”

As Molly and I continued our examination of her life and feelings it became apparent that the erection of this defensive mechanism had cost a great deal indeed, even in terms of those pleasures to which she was devoted. In order to be enjoyed, sex had to partake of the nature of the original seduction; it had to be a forbidden and guilty act; it had to be with a person who was, in her mind, anathema to her parents. And, primarily, it could not move over into a permanent and abiding relationship, for if it did it could no longer be considered forbidden and guilty.

This meant, of course, that love could never lead to marriage or to children and to the joys these bring. For if a man was respectable, “meant well by her,” loved her, in her unconscious life she would immediately associate him with her parents and their approval, and this would kill all sexual feeling in her. She would be frigid with him.

There was, of course, deep anxiety underneath Molly’s rebellion against a permanent relationship. During the course of our work together and after she had begun to see the implications of her problem, she began to try to associate with men who were more eligible for a decent relationship. A dream she had during the course of her first attempt at such a relationship (with a young doctor she had met) shows the problem quite clearly.

In this dream she is sitting in the back seat of a car, kissing a young man in an intern’s uniform. She is very excited as they kiss and decides that she will have intercourse with him. At this point the young intern says, “Please marry me.” No sooner are the words out of his mouth than she begins to feel terrified, as though something awful is going to happen. She begins to tremble and wants to get out of the car and run, but she is so frightened that she cannot move. Suddenly she sees the face of a man outside the car. He is dressed in evening clothes and has a large dollar sign on his hat. He points a gun at them and says very clearly, “Both of you must die.” At that point she woke up in an absolute panic which lasted for over an hour.

The intern in the dream stands, of course, for the young doctor she knows. The man with the dollar sign on his hat stands for her banker father. Sex is all right, and she wishes for it as long as it is furtive and hidden. The moment it becomes respectable (“Please marry me”) the hidden and guilty act will be made known and her father will punish her in the most horrible way possible.