Actually understanding present feelings and attitudes reveals the past, for it was in the past that these attitudes were established; they have changed very little since their inception.
Why, then, did I go into the detailed childhood development of frigidity in my case histories? For the same reason that I gave all the other objective facts about frigidity before we approached this section. The more conscious knowledge one has of the entire problem of frigidity, the more one dares to face up to the responsibility for one’s own problem—and the more one is able to face up to it also. For knowledge can free one of the ignorance and superstition upon which resistance to achieving psychic maturity is based.
I am not, on the other hand, holding that there is any fundamental objection to a scrutiny of early experiences or to helpful speculation about them. Sometimes, as in the case of an early seduction, or a rape that is remembered, early experiences can throw a therapeutic sidelight on one’s present feelings. However, the myriad details that go into the formation of everyone’s personality while growing up can be confusing if one tries to understand them all without the help of an expert guide; and it is not requisite for recovery to understand them all. So if self-examination of one’s early experiences does not seem to be immediately helpful, I would abandon it entirely; I would confine myself to a “feeling through” of my problem in the present, undoing the harm the childhood attitudes are still causing in the here and now.
The steps for achieving insight into one’s negative emotions which I recommend here are the most difficult steps one has to take on the road to maturity. If you can take them, the hardest part will be over. The remaining part of the process of recovery occurs rather naturally, is a matter of acquiring more information, allowing new feelings to grow and expand inside oneself, accepting guidance past a few possible pitfalls. You will see what I mean as we continue in the following chapters.
Chapter 15
THE MALE SEX: A NEW HORIZON
The self-exploration described in the last chapter results in the surfacing of hidden feelings, attitudes, and fantasies. Getting them up and out, exposing them to the bright light of reason and judgment, clears the psychological atmosphere almost miraculously.
The next most helpful step to take, I have found, is a re-evaluation of the male sex. The woman who suffers from frigidity has, by definition, very little knowledge of what men are really like. Since her attitudes toward men were formed in her distant past and have altered little through the years, she has a child’s-eye view of men. To her, as parents to a child, men are powers, not people. Projecting her own childhood fears and hopes and needs upon them, she has been calling that reality and acting accordingly.
This next step, the conscious revaluation of men, can be achieved by learning what the male sex is really like—how it differs from the female sex, what makes men think, act, and feel the way they do in everyday life—and by contrasting this knowledge with the negative attitudes and feelings she has now brought to the surface of her mind. In this way she will soon learn to understand her husband as he is, and thus achieve the ability to love him in all of his uniqueness and individuality.
The central characteristic of the male, and the one that most clearly differentiates him from the female, is his aggressiveness.
In the sexual sphere this shows itself most clearly in the fact that the man takes, for the most part, the initiative in wooing. He it is who is the pursuer, the girl the pursued; he it is who proposes and he it is who initiates sex.