unresponsive and actively disliked the whole act. This had upset her. She had thought this would pass in a week or two, but it had not. The fear that she may have lost her capacity to love or at least to love her husband had brought her to a psychiatrist.
Anne could not have been more mistaken about the significance of her unresponsiveness. She had underestimated the depth of the blow the birth of such a child can have on a mother. Grief and other profound emotions incapacitate the ability to love; one's entire confidence in oneself is shaken. It is perfectly normal under such circumstances to withdraw emotionally. In fact, it is even desirable. Wounded feelings must heal, and immobilizing oneself emotionally is good therapeutic procedure.
Time is the only anodyne for this kind of normal emotional pull-back. In this case Anne's child died within two months, as had been predicted. Her so-called situational frigidity lasted for three months after that and then disappeared entirely.
Since the sexuality of women, as we have seen, is so "psychological" in its nature, these temporary situational frigidities are probably quite prevalent, though there are no final statistics on them. They can be caused by a wide variety of circumstances and can last for a week or two to several months, depending on the severity of the circumstance. I have seen this type of temporary frigidity brought on by such disparate causes as the death of a loved parent, the illness of a child (even a relatively slight illness), a husband's economic worries, and a difficult birth, to name but a few.
One very scrupulous wife, who took great pride in her ability to drive a car, even had a sexual blocking for a few nights when she was given her first traffic ticket. She had parked too long on the wrong side of the street, and the
