Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/106

 or blame for it. You did not choose in any conscious sense to remain on this earlier and less "dangerous" plane of sexual development. Your body made the choice, if you will, but you had nothing to say about that. The strange dual sexuality of woman is at the base of the matter. It all happened because you misunderstood or misinterpreted certain early experiences. Or a grownup responsible for your very early training was ignorant or misinformed.

But now it will be the better part of wisdom and valor for you to face up to the fact that your method of gratification is an expression of immaturity, even if that immaturity was forced upon you when you were too young to know the difference. Don't subside into feelings of guilt and inferiority about the problem. Remember that you are not alone. There are probably millions of women who have the same problem. You can be one who achieves the joys that lie just beyond this. They are real and solid joys, and they contain none of the terrors you had thought they contained. Not one.

One of the things I have found helpful in motivating a woman with a clitoridal problem is to face her with its effect on her husband. Women with this fixation have a curious inability to see these effects or to face up to them realistically. I have found that even when such women know that their form of gratification is infantile and expressive of neurosis they insist that their husbands not only do not mind the manual manipulation necessary to bring them to climax but actually prefer this method of sexual contact to intercourse.

Such has never been the case in my years of clinical experience. Husbands mind very much indeed.

Here, very recently, is what one husband, whose wife has been able to move on from her clitoral fixation, told me: "I feel like a man again. No matter what anybody says, your wife's response is the most important thing, and it's got to be a response in intercourse. If she doesn't respond that way,