We pursued the matter and soon found a great store of antagonism toward men hidden just beneath the surface of an apparently gentle person. She had, we discovered, the common, classical conviction that men wish to exploit women, to bend them to their wills. She soon realized she had been interpreting many everyday happenings in the light of this belief. Her husband, an editor, sometimes had to work at home in the evening and had asked her to keep the television set low until he was finished. Though she knew his homework was exacting, she took this to be a characteristic infringement of her “rights” and had a great deal of stored-up rage about it. She also had hidden rage at such commonplace duties as bringing his clothes to the cleaner, entertaining his business friends, cleaning his “filthy” study, etc.
We explored them all, one by one. Neither of us, however, felt that we had come to the end of the matter. There was something that eluded us. She as well as I felt certain of that. We persisted, therefore, and the hidden feeling at last showed itself. Returning to her first complaint, I asked her if she had ever been physically struck by her husband.
“No,” she replied, “but I often feel that he is going to strike me.”
Knowing her husband to be a kind person, I pursued the matter, and it soon developed that she had a very strong unconscious conviction that men in general had no compunction whatever about using their superior physical strength against women to obtain what they wanted. In other words, she not only felt that men were basically hostile to women but that they were potentially extremely violent.
This was a bizarre conviction, and my patient soon realized its irrational nature. Her picture of men was based on early memories of a truly sadistic father; he had frequently struck her mother. When she realized the pervasive importance of this only slightly repressed physical fear of men she was able to resume a psychological growth that had been severely impeded from the earliest age.
But the point I wish to emphasize is that she had to persist in her search for hidden attitudes. If she had assumed that she had gotten to the heart of her difficulty by uncovering the first few negative feelings, her self-investigation could not have succeeded. Please mark the fact that she did not feel she had come to the end of her emotional inventory until she had actually done so. If one is honest with oneself one can sense, feel, when important attitudes still lie hidden within.
If you persist in your daily sessions with yourself, however, the time will come when you will feel that you have exposed to your own view all of your angry feelings and your negative attitudes toward men, come to the very lees of the feelings left over from childhood. You have now made a major step toward recovery. The biggest log in the jam has been removed.
Why does this necessarily follow?
One of the major contributions of modern psychiatry has been the establishment of the fact that attitudes and feelings have the power to do lasting harm only when they are hidden from one’s awareness, or half hidden from it. The frigid woman’s troubling vestiges of youthful error, once they have been made conscious, automatically lose the greater part of their power to do harm. When they become known to the conscious mind they are then exposed to judgment, reason, and further information. They are seen, by one’s intelligence, to be fragile balloons of easily exploded ignorance. When this happens, the natural movement of the personality toward health, blocked for years by hidden fears, rages, defenses, false attitudes, is resumed.
A woman who can achieve this is now prepared to understand her husband as he is—and all other men as man is. If you will recall, that particular ability, to comprehend and care about the uniqueness of one’s mate, is a chief prerequisite for love.