Molly, though she had certain superficial pretensions to being an intellectual, was not one by any means. But she was an intelligent girl. She had a position as a researcher on a weekly trade paper, and her work had put her in line to become head of the research department. Her job represented the “respectable” side of her life. However, despite some uneasiness of brief duration in college, she had never seriously questioned the “rightness” of her sexual conduct. Each time she had had an affair she believed that she was in love and she never had more than one affair at a time. When the current love was over she always experienced feelings of relief. If Molly had come from an environment where a free attitude toward sexuality had prevailed, her actions might not have seemed so inexplicable. But her home environment could not have been more conventional. She had come from a small New England city near Boston. Her father was the president of the leading bank in that city and had been active in church and civic affairs. Her mother, too, had been a church leader and a member of the school board. Her parents’ marriage had obviously been a good one; the domestic life was serene; they rarely quarreled; their civic duties were most often shared enterprises. And they genuinely loved their three children. There were two girls older than Molly, and they had led most conventional lives. They had married after college and each had had two children. What, then, had caused Molly’s rebellion against her environment? And what was at the root of her inability to form a relationship? What was the cause of her psychic frigidity? A psychiatrist familiar with this kind of case considers the possibility of an early seduction of some kind. It had indeed occurred. Molly was unwilling to discuss it at first. And this was followed by an unwillingness to ascribe any particular significance to the event. She believed it was an isolated occurrence that had had no particular or permanent effect on her. Actually, as the matter unfolded, it became clear that this event was the very nucleus of her later difficulties. It had happened when she was six. Three houses down from her there had lived a man in his early sixties. I shall call him Mr. Brown. He was a well-to-do person whose wife had died some years before and who now lived alone. He was very friendly, she remembered, with everyone, and often her father, out for an evening stroll, would drop in on him and spend an hour or two chatting on Mr. Brown’s screened-in veranda. Occasionally he would come to Molly’s house for dinner. She found out later that he was a director in her father’s bank. He was certainly, as far as her parents or any other grownups were concerned, above all suspicion.