Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/145

 compliments and candy upon her; he gave her anything and everything to express his devotion to her.

The consequence? The very strength of his love, its varied and aggressive forms, its unrelenting intensity, had a negative effect on the child. To put it most simply, his love overstimulated her budding sexuality. This powerful man's love overwhelmed her. Her small ego could not handle such powerful feelings; they frightened her. In order to cope with such feelings, therefore, she had had to repress them powerfully, deny their existence.

Children can do this, as you will remember from our discussion of the latency period of childhood. It is at the onset of this period, which occurs at about six years of age, that infantile sexuality is pushed under ground, to remain dormant until puberty. Patricia, under the influence of her prematurely strong sexual response to her father, had been forced to enter her latency period, we were able to determine, at the far too early age of four.

With sex out of the way, she was now able to indulge her worship of her father in complete "innocence." He was a man who believed passionately in success, and his ebullience, love of life, and high intelligence had won him a great deal of it. His young daughter felt now that to win his love she must achieve and achieve, endlessly. From the first grade of school through her last year at college, therefore, she bent all her efforts to excelling mentally. But her father was also a perfectionist; he expected top honors from himself and jeered at anything less in himself. Thoughtlessly he made the same demands on his daughter. Since she did not have his qualifications she was not always able to come up to his standards in every field of endeavor; few could have equaled his demands. When she did not achieve such top honors she felt that she was not worthy of her father's love and indeed