One cannot win the battle to love if one minimizes it. The frigid woman, above all, must realize this and never give up her struggle. Indeed, a complete awareness of how important love is can be in itself a big step along the way to achieving the ability to love and to be loved. Now if we summarize what has just been said about love, what do we find is its essential characteristic? This: the ability to see the other person _as he is_ and to esteem him above everything else for his individual quality, indeed to love him (and so want to merge with him) for it. On the other hand, if we were to summarize all the case histories of the various forms of frigidity I have given and all the other pertinent facts I have adduced about frigidity, we would find just the opposite fact. The frigid woman, of whatever variety she may be, _never sees the man she wants to love as he is_. His individual and essential quality is entirely unknown to her and unknowable by her. He is a series of projections from her past. He is a composite of the fears, the errors, the misunderstandings of her infancy and childhood. The real union of love is therefore impossible with this quasi monster she has conjured up. Thus we can see that the major task of the frigid woman is to rid herself of these projections she makes upon mankind in general and upon her own man in particular. She must see through them and divest herself of them, come to see men in their true role vis-à-vis woman and her husband in all his uniqueness and with all his potentiality. That is step one. When she has done this there is another step she must take. If one thinks of the description of love I have given, one realizes that it implies a very great security within oneself, an acceptance of one’s own uniqueness and essential femininity. But the frigid woman fears and rejects femininity, as we have seen, feeling it to be a dangerous trap. She must learn to alter this basic and negative attitude entirely. She must see how childish and false, how utterly self-depriving this view of womanhood is and give it up. Thus we see that in frigidity the two main doors to psychological and sexual union--to love, in short--have been closed and locked. If these two doors can be opened again, the frigid woman will have resolved her problem. Just these two doors? Is this not an oversimplification? To these two questions I can give unequivocal answers: yes to the first and no to the second. These are the two roots of the problem. Attack them head on, resolve them, and the major part of the task has been done. _Chapter 14_ STEPS TO FREEDOM The resolution of an emotional problem is a process, a process with a beginning, a middle, and an end. To put this process in motion and to maintain it in motion, two distinct approaches are necessary. The first step is to grasp the problem _objectively_, to understand its nature, its implications, to learn all the _outside_ facts about it one can grasp with one’s intellect.