Woman’s negative control in the erotic sphere results in the complete depersonalization of her body. § 136 Unconsciously as well as consciously she _wishes_ to find all pleasure in her honeymoon, and so strong is that wish that she is impelled to believe that all the several experiences of it are pleasurable. They _must_ be pleasurable or she must admit that at the start even, she is _not_ happily married. This is the state of mind of those who enter the married state with the most disingenuous sincerity. Those who marry with any initial conflict, such as feelings of guilt for any previous illicit sexual adventures, are more unfortunate. Those whose wishes for happiness are so strong as to interpose a rose-coloured glass between their eyes and their actual experiences are deceiving only their conscious selves. One cannot deceive the unconscious. Unconsciously they are disappointed in the lack of rapport between their own emotional erotic situation and their husbands’. They are in the position of a starving man looking through a plate-glass window, at a restaurant full of merry feasters. According to her bringing up she may repress all or a part, or none, of her natural resentment at this situation; and the resentment is going eventually to make her more exacting of her husband, if she is to surrender to him even her impersonal body. For impersonal her body does become even to her. She regards it as belonging by law to him and she will not virtually inhabit it when he is with it. At his approach she flees from it every time. And as this flight is an unconscious, though a real flight, we cannot blame her if her husband will not, or cannot, take enough care of it and its reactions to enable her to assimilate the necessary food of love. She will think: “He says he loves me, but I know only that he likes my body. I begin to hate it because it does not give me the satisfaction it does him. I can’t understand it a bit. It’s a strange world. But I suppose it’s got to be as it is. I can’t do anything about it.” And she cannot, if he will not or cannot. Is there any more powerful deterrent than despair to prevent a young wife from being able to produce in herself a relaxation of erotic tensions? Her usual course, when she begins to despair thus is to deny to herself that she has any sex feeling at all. Her husband then agrees with her and calls her frigid. This crystallization of her feelings not merely retards but annihilates whatever abilities she has to express her love in an erotic way. She fortifies herself with the compensating thought that sex is, as she has always heard, sinful, filthy, nauseating. Her face begins to become hardened, to develop a wrinkle or two and she is in a fair way to become an anti-something.