Page:The Power of Sexual Surrender.pdf/173

 and immediately launched into a bohemian social and sexual existence. She experienced no conscious regrets or qualms of conscience as, year in, year out, she continued in this mode of living, a mode so different from that of her parents. She was sustained by her pride in what she called her "healthy animality" and was fond of stating that most people led lives of great frustration and "of quiet desperation."

Her animosity toward her parents did not diminish when she grew up, and at the time she came to see me she had not visited them for two years.

The consequences of Molly's early seduction, as you can see, were grave. However, the psychological structure she had developed to cope with this seduction is not a hard one to understand.

Human beings are largely guided by the pleasure principle, and this is most clearly evinced in childhood. Molly had received a great deal of pleasure from her early sexual experience, but she had also experienced a great deal of guilt about it. When Mr. Brown departed she had entered her latency period. But when puberty, with its reassertion of sexuality, set in, the original sexual experience had set a mold for Molly's personality. She enjoyed and sought sex to an abnormal degree for her tender years.

In her unconscious life, however, she felt guilty for these feelings. Because of her precocious sensuality her problem then was to get rid of her guilt feelings so that she could indulge her sexuality. This meant, in effect, getting rid of her parents for, in childhood, guilt of this kind is always associated with parental prohibition. She did this by denying that her parents had any importance to her, by repressing all warm feelings toward them, by constructing a set of values in which they were, to use her words again, "stupid," "loveless squares," "without a drop of sensuality."

As Molly and I continued our examination of her life