understand her problem, to see deeply into the nature of his wife and therefore of all womankind. This knowledge allows the husband to be of direct help in effecting his wife's release from the immobilizing grip of her frigidity. It helps him to be patient where he might have been irritable, tender when he might have been importunate; it keeps him from the major error of believing that he is to blame for her underlying condition and thus complicating the relationship by becoming defensive, as one unjustly accused would become—indeed, should.
The question then arises as to whether the kind of information a woman and her husband may receive during her therapy can also be helpful in book form.
I have given much thought to this question and have had many consultations with my psychiatric colleagues about it. We have come to the positive conclusion that a book on this subject can be of direct benefit to all women suffering from sexual frigidity.
I will go even further and say that the facts about frigidity that I present here—its origins, its causes, and its cures—must be known by every woman with a sexual problem if she wishes to be cured.
Frigidity is always rooted in incomplete knowledge gained in childhood and adolescence. We are not, as I have pointed out, far from the Victorian age. Any woman of thirty or more had, in all probability, parents who were reared in the traditions of Victorianism, which denied the sexuality of woman, connived with every available force to deny it, repress it, stop it at its source. These efforts were extraordinarily successful. And, too, any woman now in her twenties probably had parents who were deeply affected by the equally mindless and vicious protest against Victorianism which characterized this country from, roughly, 1920 to
