These cases represent, then, the major forms of frigidity. My intent in presenting them has been threefold. In the first place, it is important to understand what type of frigidity you have. Second, it can be helpful to see the individual characteristics of each kind of frigidity. Third, it is necessary to understand that all of the frigidities have certain basic characteristics in common (with the exception of situational frigidity), for this latter fact will allow us to approach each individual type with one basic form of solution.
With this final information in mind we are now ready to turn our attention to the means by which frigidity can be resolved.
SECTION IV
The Bridge to Womanhood
Chapter 13
THE POWER OF LOVE
We have come now to the last and most important part of our journey together, to the point where we can examine the means by which real love can be achieved. Let us start by examining what real love is, its role in life and its component parts.
Because of their problems in loving, many people arrive at a point where they turn against love itself. Having lost their hope of achieving love, they quite humanly tend to depreciate it, try to minimize its importance. One of the commonest statements I hear from frigid patients in the first interview goes something like this: “Well, it really doesn’t matter, I suppose; there aren’t very many happy marriages anyway. And I suppose there are more important things than love.”
Let us correct any tendency of this kind right here and now.
Using the word in its widest sense, I would say that the ability to love is the single most important characteristic that man has. It is the faculty upon which all the great actions, hopes, and aspirations of the world are founded. Without it there could be no brotherhood among men, and therefore the very concept of civilization as we understand it would be unknown, even unthinkable. Men would be essentially isolated individuals whose personal drives, needs, and appetites would be the only realities to them. Aloneness, a terrible loneliness (those who cannot love will know what I mean), would be mankind’s lot.
Love means, in its very deepest sense, union; union between individuals, between women and women, men and men, men and women. It is the most basic and profound urge we have, and its power for good is illimitable.
In love we make the good of our partner (whether he is our child, our neighbor, or our sweetheart) as important to us as our own good. In the union of love we are able to experience the essential oneness of man and nature, to know that the universe is indeed our home and all men within it members of our family. In this way man learns through love that he is not alone, not condemned to the pain and anxiety he experiences when he has nobody with whom he can share his mind, his heart, his body.