reacting to her clear aversion to the whole process. Indeed, she saw no justification for his shamefaced approach to her until she was well on the road to sexual health. It is usual in such cases for the wife to blame the husband for her failures, no matter how glaringly unreasonable and untrue her accusation may be.
After intercourse she was always depressed. She felt "dirty and used." Her husband's semen appeared to her to be disgusting. "All I wanted was to get to sleep fast and to forget the whole episode until the next ordeal became necessary," she said.
Under such circumstances it is difficult to understand how a marriage could exist at all. However, such marriages do exist in great numbers, and by far the majority of them do not end up in the divorce courts, as one might expect. Despite the bitter complainings, the struggle for power, the fear of love, and the dread of sex on the wife's part, I have found that there is usually a well-hidden but genuine bond of love between the couple. The husband seems originally to have seen in his now quarrelsome partner a part that can be truly loving, truly warm. It may show dimly and only in the interstices of the relationship, but it keeps hope alive in him that she will come into her true self one day; he warms himself as best he can, meanwhile, at her meager fires.
But now that we have seen a picture of the totally frigid woman let us examine the causes for it. I have stated that every kind of frigidity has its special cause. What was the cause in Patricia Agnew's case?
To understand the origins of her problem, we will have to explore her earliest history, particularly her relationship to her mother and father. She was an only child, and her father was clearly the dominant figure in the household. He was an extremely successful and lovable man. He abounded in all
