That exaggerated modesty is only one of the components of the neurotic
temperament has been well demonstrated by Adler: "The morbid modesty
of neurotics," he writes, "who cannot visit a public toilet, who are
unable to urinate in the presence of others, who avoid the society of
women on account of blushing or anxiety or heart palpitations, reveals
to us the strained manly ambition which supports itself against the
original feeling of inferiority.
"=The Masculine Protest= (craving for virility) of those patients,
insecure to the core, forces them into this arrangement whose
boundaries encroach upon those of bashfulness and awkwardness. Often,
in neurotics of either sex, one observes an inability to go to a toilet
in cases of great necessity if some one is looking at them. The greater
modesty of women, especially of neurotic women, in all relations of
life, originates from the fear which is implanted in them from the
earliest childhood that attention might be directed to their sex.
"I have often convinced myself that the behavior of girls and of women
is considerably influenced by this more or less unconscious factor,
indeed that the progress of their sexual development, like that of male
patients who feel unmanly, the formation of social and professional
relations and love relations, are immediately checked as soon as the
patient is allowed to play a real 'feminine' or subordinate part or
presupposes this expectation from others.
"This fact is in no way affected when repressed sexual stimuli come
to light as the present source of the checks of aggression. They are
similarly arranged and have the purpose of enhancing the fear of the
partner and of permitting the retreat decided upon in the plan of
life, to be entered upon with certainty; they are therefore acts of
foresight. The neurotic had already in childhood laid the foundation
of this foresight and in it is reflected the feeling of shame as the
guiding line of reassuring modesty and the prudery of civilisation.
"The previous history of the patient reveals an exaggerated modesty
and this is true at times of those who in other respects show a boyish
nature; the anxiety of nervous children on being exposed may be
observed in their conduct. They exclude every one from the room and
lock the door when they are going to undress. This conduct is also
observable in boys who have grown up among girls. In the prognosis
of neurosis, this expedient of cowardice is a bad symptom. It is the
equivalent of later castration thoughts and neurotic wishes, the wish
to be a woman, for instance, which expresses itself as soon as the fear
of the life mate becomes actual or a decision has to be avoided."
=Lack of Modesty=, when it assumes a morbid form, has, according
to Adler, the same meaning as prurient modesty.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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