Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/149

 one's mate, or a feeling of being exploited sexually. It is far more closely connected with direct sexual frustration, with a kind of Tantalus-like feeling that one is terribly close to one's goal but cannot quite achieve it.

Here is an example of what I mean. I shall call this patient Joan. She was twenty-eight years old when she came to me, a pretty woman with an upturned nose, a generally insouciant manner, and a pleased-with-life smile. She had been married two years, she told me, and came directly to her problem. During intercourse she would become tremendously excited most of the time. It took little to stimulate her, and as the intercourse continued she would maintain her high level of excitement. But on most occasions, no matter how long the love-making continued, she would reach no climax at all. She was left with a frustrated, almost frantic feeling.

There were, however, occasional exceptions to this rule. In about one out of ten times Joan would achieve a climax of sorts during love-making. But it was weak and inconclusive and not by any means deeply satisfying to her, as it should have been and as she felt it could be. Here, however, is the most important point. Whenever she did experience this climax she almost invariably woke the next morning with severe back pains which lasted for two or three days and were clearly psychosomatic. And she would feel irritable and anxious. It was only on such days that she experienced personal difficulties with her husband. She would find herself arguing with him about trifles, being generally cross-*grained and countersuggestible.

"I should think," she said to me in puzzlement, "that it would be just the other way around; that I would be difficult with him when I didn't come to any climax and pleased and hopeful when I did, even if it wasn't the perfect orgasm."

But Joan was being merely logical in this assumption. The