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. If the frigid woman did not explore her irrational feelings in the manner I have described, any objective information about men, learned from whatever source, would be useless. Her _hidden_ feelings about men would still dominate. Now, however, with the hidden feelings up and out, she is ready to hear more about men as they really are, to contrast the reality to her projection upon it. We shall take that latter step in the next chapter, but before we do there is another, further insight into one’s feeling, which it will be very helpful to achieve. Women who suffer from frigidity often have, in addition to negative feelings toward the male sex, another very marked characteristic. They are subject to powerful _fantasies_ which militate against the recovery of their lost sexuality and their psychological maturation. It is extremely important that these fantasies be ruthlessly explored and exploded. If they are not, they serve the unhappy function of preserving the unhealthy conviction that one deserves a far better fate than that of being a beloved wife and mother.