On occasion a woman may become quite disturbed by this fact. Let me give an example.
Anne S. was thirty-five. She had had a happy marriage for ten years. In the first seven years of her marriage she had had two children, both girls. She had had no more fears of pregnancy and motherhood than she had had of sex. Her upbringing had been, from the psychiatric standpoint, exemplary. In every determinable way she was an excellent sweetheart, mother, and wife.
Six months before she came to see me she had given birth to her third child, a boy. In a very short time it became clear that the child was mongoloid. After several weeks of indecision she had finally yielded to the pressure of the doctor and her husband and the child had been committed to an institution. At the time she came to me she had just learned that its congenital defects would be fatal within two or three months.
When Anne had resumed her sexual relationship with her husband after the birth of this child she had been completely unresponsive and actively disliked the whole act. This had upset her. She had thought this would pass in a week or two, but it had not. The fear that she may have lost her capacity to love or at least to love her husband had brought her to a psychiatrist.
Anne could not have been more mistaken about the significance of her unresponsiveness. She had underestimated the depth of the blow the birth of such a child can have on a mother. Grief and other profound emotions incapacitate the ability to love; one’s entire confidence in oneself is shaken. It is perfectly normal under such circumstances to withdraw emotionally. In fact, it is even desirable. Wounded feelings must heal, and immobilizing oneself emotionally is good therapeutic procedure.
Time is the only anodyne for this kind of normal emotional pull-back. In this case Anne’s child died within two months, as had been predicted. Her so-called situational frigidity lasted for three months after that and then disappeared entirely.
Since the sexuality of women, as we have seen, is so “psychological” in its nature, these temporary situational frigidities are probably quite prevalent, though there are no final statistics on them. They can be caused by a wide variety of circumstances and can last for a week or two to several months, depending on the severity of the circumstance. I have seen this type of temporary frigidity brought on by such disparate causes as the death of a loved parent, the illness of a child (even a relatively slight illness), a husband’s economic worries, and a difficult birth, to name but a few.
One very scrupulous wife, who took great pride in her ability to drive a car, even had a sexual blocking for a few nights when she was given her first traffic ticket. She had parked too long on the wrong side of the street, and the officer who gave her the ticket had also given her a stern talking-to.
All one really has to know about situational frigidity is that it isn’t serious and that it’s well within the normal range of woman’s delicately balanced sexual nature and will most certainly pass. The only therapy one needs is patience.