still belonged to Daddy. With her exaggerated childhood feelings toward her father, every other man suffered by comparison, seemed unworthy of her love. Her husband was an interloper who came between her and her ideal. Therefore, his normal need for her to love him, to be a good wife to him, seemed hateful to her, filled her with rage. Sex under such circumstances was a virtual rape of Lucrece, with the husband playing the role of the dark and frightening rapist, the father representing her true love, for whom she must preserve her innocence and purity.
Another deeper and more hidden attitude was the exact opposite of this, indeed contradictory to it. In this aspect of her mind her husband stood for her father. Thus sexual feelings toward such a person must be entirely taboo; she must repress them as she had in her earliest years and she must keep them repressed. Too, she must excel in all the things her father wanted her to excel in. To her husband she must primarily excel in her wifely functions, and this was the essential trap. For because she very consciously knew she was not and under the circumstances could not be even a passable wife, she was constantly inundated by feelings of inadequacy and inferiority.
You can see then what a complete trap Patricia was in. Actually, unless she had been strongly motivated to seek help, she would never have found an exit from her difficulties. Her periodic "breakdowns" were a simple and direct expression of the hopelessness of her situation. It was as if she were saying: "I am truly a helpless child; I can do nothing grown-up. I must be taken care of as a child is."
She did recover her lost sexuality and her lost capacity for happiness, and in a later chapter we shall see how the Patricia Agnews of this life can achieve such an outcome. But before we leave her I should like to make one further observation of a general kind: Consider how totally be-
