failure due to frigidity in the female is softened by the possibility of concealment” (“Further Considerations,” p. 188, note). “Frigidity can be covered up to a degree which is not possible with disturbances of potency in the man” (“Further Notes,” p. 192). Also, the woman, in .her passive, submissive role, often gets her security by identifying with the power of the male; this overcomes theproblem of vulnerability by receiving delegated powers—both of the penis itself and of the culturalworld-view. But the male fetishist is precisely the one who does not have secure delegated powers from any source and cannot get them by passive submission to the female (Cf. Greenacre, “Certain Relationships,” p. 95). We might sum this all up by saying that the frigid woman is one whosubmits but is not convinced that she is safe in the power of the male; she does not need to fetishize anything as she does not have to perform an act. The impotent male is also not convinced that he is safe, but it does not suffice for him to lie passively in order to fulfill his species role. He creates the fetish, then, as a locus of denial-power so that he can perform the act; the woman denies with her whole body. Using an artfully apt term of Von Gebsattel’s, we could say that frigidityis the woman’s form of “passive autofetishism” (Cf. Boss, Sexual Perversions , p. 53).
‡ This explains, too, the naturalness of the connection between sadism and sexuality without putting themon an instinctive basis. They represent a mutually reinforcing sense of appropriatepower, of heightened vitality. Why, for example, does a boy masturbate with fantasies on such a gory story as the “Pit and the Pendulum” (Creenacre, “Certain Relationships,” p. 81)? We have to imagine that the fantasy gives him a sense of power that the masturbation reinforces; the experience is a denial of impotence and vulnerability. It is much more than a simple sexual experience; it is muchless than an expression of gratuitous destructive drives. Most people secretly respond to sado-masochistic fantasies not because everyone is instinctively perverse but because these fantasies do represent the perfect appropriateness of our energies as well as our limitations as animal organisms. No higher satisfaction is possible for us than to dominate entirely a sector of the world or to givein to the powers of nature by surrendering ourselves completely. Very fittingly these fantasies usually take place when people are having trouble with the stress of symbolic affairs of theeveryday world, and one may wonder why—at a meeting concerning business or academic strategy—he can’t shut outimages from Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour.”
§ Boss assigns an even more creative intent to sado-masochism, at least in some of its forms (see pp. 104 ff.). I don’t know how far to followhis generalizations on the basis of the few cases he cites. And I am a little uncomfortable with what seems to be his inclination to accept his patients’ rationalizations as really ideal motives. I thinkthis has to be weighed more carefully.
‖ Nowhere is this clearer than in Waite’s highly researched and carefully thought-out paper on Hitler (“Adolf Hitler’s Guilt Feelings,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History , 1971, 1, No. 2: 229-249), in which he argues that six million Jews were sacrificedto Hitler’s personal sense of unworthiness and hypervulnerability of the body to filth and decay.So great were Hitler’s anxieties about these things, so crippled was he psychically,that he seems to have had to develop a unique perversion to deal with them, to triumph over them. “Hitler gained sexual satisfaction by having a young woman—as much younger than he as his mother wasyounger than his father—squat over him to urinate or defecate on his head” (Ibid., p. 234). This was his “private religion”: his personal transcendence of his anxiety, the hyperexperienceand resolution of it.
‡ This explains, too, the naturalness of the connection between sadism and sexuality without putting themon an instinctive basis. They represent a mutually reinforcing sense of appropriatepower, of heightened vitality. Why, for example, does a boy masturbate with fantasies on such a gory story as the “Pit and the Pendulum” (Creenacre, “Certain Relationships,” p. 81)? We have to imagine that the fantasy gives him a sense of power that the masturbation reinforces; the experience is a denial of impotence and vulnerability. It is much more than a simple sexual experience; it is muchless than an expression of gratuitous destructive drives. Most people secretly respond to sado-masochistic fantasies not because everyone is instinctively perverse but because these fantasies do represent the perfect appropriateness of our energies as well as our limitations as animal organisms. No higher satisfaction is possible for us than to dominate entirely a sector of the world or to givein to the powers of nature by surrendering ourselves completely. Very fittingly these fantasies usually take place when people are having trouble with the stress of symbolic affairs of theeveryday world, and one may wonder why—at a meeting concerning business or academic strategy—he can’t shut outimages from Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour.”
§ Boss assigns an even more creative intent to sado-masochism, at least in some of its forms (see pp. 104 ff.). I don’t know how far to followhis generalizations on the basis of the few cases he cites. And I am a little uncomfortable with what seems to be his inclination to accept his patients’ rationalizations as really ideal motives. I thinkthis has to be weighed more carefully.
‖ Nowhere is this clearer than in Waite’s highly researched and carefully thought-out paper on Hitler (“Adolf Hitler’s Guilt Feelings,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History , 1971, 1, No. 2: 229-249), in which he argues that six million Jews were sacrificedto Hitler’s personal sense of unworthiness and hypervulnerability of the body to filth and decay.So great were Hitler’s anxieties about these things, so crippled was he psychically,that he seems to have had to develop a unique perversion to deal with them, to triumph over them. “Hitler gained sexual satisfaction by having a young woman—as much younger than he as his mother wasyounger than his father—squat over him to urinate or defecate on his head” (Ibid., p. 234). This was his “private religion”: his personal transcendence of his anxiety, the hyperexperienceand resolution of it.
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