it resumes its development when these attitudes change. It is as natural a move as the move from winter to spring. Gradually she finds herself allowing her new tenderness and concern for her husband to become a part of the meaning of her sexual embrace. She sees and feels the pleasure her sexual thawing brings him, and this process becomes circular, his increased pleasure giving her more pleasure. And with his pleasure in mind she now seeks out more and more those things that please him, and her exploration leads inevitably to the discovery that what pleases him most, outside of his own sensations, is her pleasure. This mutual spiraling of feeling ultimately climaxes in her unconscious decision to give him the greatest psychological pleasure of all, her total surrender to the delights he can bring her.
For many women the ability to surrender physically comes rather swiftly; to others it is a very gradual process, as though the unconscious mind needed to build up a reserve of reassurances before it felt perfectly secure. In either case, but particularly in the latter, they can be forewarned of one important thing: sexual thaw will not proceed uninterruptedly; there is no straight line from frigidity to true womanhood. I should like to explain this more fully.
When, in the sexual embrace, a woman allows herself to experience more pleasure as her physical sensations increase, a part of her unconscious mind very frequently takes alarm and causes her to draw back from any further immediate advance.
If you stop to ponder this point you will find it readily understandable in terms of our former discussions. The experiences and relationships upon which frigidity is based took place a long time ago, often in very early childhood. They occasioned fear in the child, fear of sexuality, of surrender to one's sensual impulses, or powerful guilt. Now, as one starts to move toward a resumption of one's sensuality,
