slightest task would seem too much and she would now start to have day-long bouts of weeping. During such periods she suffered from chronic insomnia, and when she was able to snatch a few hours of sleep she would often have repetitive, nightmarish dreams in which she was pursued by criminals.
At the beginning of our talks Patricia would become extremely guarded whenever I attempted to open any discussion of a personal nature. She had come for help with the express conviction that I, the doctor, should find a quick and easy solution to her periods of acute anxiety: drugs, a sea voyage, anything that did not entail looking inward, taking responsibility for her condition. This evasiveness, this desire to find easy solutions, is characteristic of all forms of frigidity in women, but it is sometimes extremely pronounced in the type of frigidity this patient suffered from.
However, as Patricia developed confidence and trust in me, the real facts gradually emerged. She had been married for ten years and had two children, six and eight. Her husband was socially prominent, financially successful, and (as I saw for myself later, when I had a few discussions with him) strikingly handsome, a slender, tall, dark-haired man with a gentle and charming manner.
During her entire marriage this patient had never had, she finally told me, "one solid hour of happiness." From the very beginning she had quarreled with her husband, and the domestic strife, at least on her part, had become truly bitter after the birth of their first son. She had felt that her husband was becoming increasingly cruel, selfish, demanding, and insensitive to her needs. She had believed that he was trying to impose his will on her in any and all situations and that it was an absolute necessity to struggle against this domination. "I felt as if he would shatter my integrity if I didn't put up a fight," she told me. "It was as though he wished to have me as a slave, nothing less; it was either he or I."
