pleasant sensations on her labia. She had nothing approximating an orgasm.
Actually she was a very fine woman, but she was totally confused about this area of her life. "If I could only break through this silly little block," she told me, "our marriage would be ideal." I could get no further real facts from her. She insisted that she and her husband had "a whole community of shared interests" and two "wonderfully normal" children. I asked to see her husband.
I got the real story from him. He was, he told me, quite worried about his wife and about their marriage and had been for a long time.
She had always, he said, been an extremely competitive woman, but since his promotion from associate professor to full professor four years before, this characteristic had become almost unendurable. "I hardly dare to open my mouth any more," he told me, "because I know she's going to contradict me." Quarrels had become extremely frequent, and their oldest child was definitely showing neurotic signs. I inquired about her reactions during her pregnancies, and he told me that she had been constantly ill physically and, while she would not admit it, had clearly been deeply frightened of the whole experience. Indeed, after the birth of the second child she had become severely depressed for over two months. He told me that yes, indeed, they had had a community of interests for the first couple of years of their marriage but that her competitiveness with him had become so pronounced that any mutuality, from his standpoint, was now almost impossible.
Any psychiatrist knowledgeable in such matters could have guessed from the woman's description of her sexual problem pretty much what I learned about her from her husband. For, as I have pointed out, the kind and degree of frigidity a woman may confess to are also an open state-
