Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/146

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that he did not love her. He did nothing to correct this feeling.

If you will recall our normal stages of development for the growing child, you will easily see that when marriage time came around Patricia Agnew had not touched first, second, or third base. She had appeared to be growing normally, excelling in schoolwork, playing the role of the dutiful daughter, going out on dates. But in the emotional and sexual spheres she had been arrested at a very early stage.

So severe had been her repression of her childhood sexuality that when the glandular changes which usher in puberty occurred she failed to have the resurgence of sexual feeling and the development of psychological characteristics normal for that period. For that reason she omitted her adolescent phase of development, too, the period of young love's long and lovely dream which prepares the girl for the activities of love sexually and psychologically. How could she have had such a dream? It depends on the development of a true and normal sexuality. The door had been locked on her sexuality in infancy and the key thrown away.

Psychologically, too, she was an infant. The need to excel, to master one's environment is of course normal for the latency period. Nature has arranged this period, sagely put sex out of the way for a few years so that the ego may have a chance to grow, to prepare itself for the sexual storms and stresses of puberty and adolescence.

However, since in a very real sense she could not pass through puberty and adolescence, she had remained psychologically in the latency period, the non-sexual, competitive, father-worshiping childhood period.

Patricia really had two distinct attitudes toward her husband. The first was expressed in her quarrelsomeness, her belief that he was selfish, unattractive, and unlovable. This attitude was based on the fact that, very literally, her heart