- yond any help she would have been if her irrational opposition
to her husband, to sex, and to real love between the sexes had been bolstered up, made to seem quite justifiable by a philosophy of life based on the feminist school of thought. From such a standpoint every one of her difficulties would have been considered perfectly normal!
Patricia, of course, represents frigidity in its most extreme form, the type in which there is almost a total lack of sexual feeling. To clarify this subject, recall our frigidity scale. On this scale total frigidity would needle around zero. A woman at the opposite end of this scale would experience a great deal of sexual excitement before and during intercourse but would be unable to have orgasm, or her orgasm would be so weak and unsatisfying that it would leave her very consciously unsatisfied. (Normalcy, of course, is a more or less absolute state and could not be described in terms of degrees.) We rate her near or at 100 on the frigidity scale, meaning she is close to normalcy. In between these two extremes there is every possible degree of sexual blocking.
Women who suffer from some degree of frigidity (rather than from a type of frigidity, such as our "masculine type") have personality problems similar to Patricia's. These problems become milder as they go up the scale toward normalcy. The underlying structure of their problem is also similar to Patricia's—it is based on a too strong and too early attachment to their fathers. This early attachment has survived into adulthood and, depending largely on its original strength, causes a greater or lesser degree of sexual and interpersonal problems in marriage.
But as we go up the scale toward greater sexual responsiveness the difference in degree seems almost to become a difference in kind. From roughly the middle of the scale upward, the essential sexual problem has little to do with withdrawnness or unbridled or unrelenting hostility toward
