The Power of Sexual SurrenderRobinson, Marie Nyswander
Science
The Power of Sexual Surrender
Robinson, Marie Nyswander
Frigidity (Psychology); Sex (Psychology); Women -- Sexual behavior
Despite all this, Molly maintained her scholastic record at a high
level and was admitted to college--another sign of the division within
her personality. In college her unremitting affairs persisted, as did
her selection of friends outside of her own social sphere. At one
point she had an affair with a Negro labor organizer, at another with
an Italian dock hand, at still another with the father of a college
classmate. It is not surprising, then, that as soon as she finished
college (and here, too, she maintained her good scholastic record) she
gravitated toward Greenwich Village and immediately launched into a
bohemian social and sexual existence. She experienced no conscious
regrets or qualms of conscience as, year in, year out, she continued in
this mode of living, a mode so different from that of her parents. She
was sustained by her pride in what she called her “healthy animality”
and was fond of stating that most people led lives of great frustration
and “of quiet desperation.”
Her animosity toward her parents did not diminish when she grew up, and
at the time she came to see me she had not visited them for two years.
The consequences of Molly’s early seduction, as you can see, _were_
grave. However, the psychological structure she had developed to cope
with this seduction is not a hard one to understand.
Human beings are largely guided by the pleasure principle, and this is
most clearly evinced in childhood. Molly had received a great deal of
pleasure from her early sexual experience, but she had also experienced
a great deal of guilt about it. When Mr. Brown departed she had
entered her latency period. But when puberty, with its reassertion of
sexuality, set in, the original sexual experience had set a mold for
Molly’s personality. She enjoyed and sought sex to an abnormal degree
for her tender years.
In her unconscious life, however, she felt guilty for these feelings.
Because of her precocious sensuality her problem then was to get rid of
her guilt feelings so that she could indulge her sexuality. This meant,
in effect, getting rid of her parents for, in childhood, guilt of this
kind is always associated with parental prohibition. She did this by
denying that her parents had any importance to her, by repressing all
warm feelings toward them, by constructing a set of values in which
they were, to use her words again, “stupid,” “loveless squares,”
“without a drop of sensuality.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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