You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It will be my endeavour, in this paper, to deal with some psychological aspects of menstruation and to show that the woman, during each menstrual period, regresses to pregenital levels in response to psychological experiences arising out of the hormonal onslaught.
The monthly bleeding with its physical and psychical accompaniments; the absence of any visible wound or apparent injury to explain it; the fact that it appears only in women; its occurrence in a regular twenty-eight day cycle during the entire median portion of a woman's life, and its disappearance at pregnancy; its final termination at the menopause; all this has given rise to a vast body of irrational concepts and superstitions, in both primitive and more highly organized societies (Frazer, Daly).
Many early superstitions concerning the mysterious power of menstruating women have survived through the Middle Ages to modern times. In the oldest existing encyclopædia, the Naturalis Historia of Gaius Plinius Secundus (A.D. 77), we read that menstruating women turned wine into vinegar, killed seedlings and bees with their touch, turned milk sour and crippled horses. Even in our own day we hear it said that such women must not touch flowers, prepare jam, cook or serve food, eat certain dishes, bathe, have sexual intercourse, and so on.
The regular recurrence of the catamenia has been a factor in adding to the already abundant speculations. From early times it has been associated with the lunar cycle, high and low tide, sunspots and other natural phenomena.
The popular belief that the menstrual blood contains unclean and harmful substances would seem to have found at least partial support in the theories advanced by Zondek. In his study of the physiology of menstruation, he denies the early medical assumption that the purpose of the menstrual flux is to eliminate the egg which had missed fertilization and thus become an unwanted guest in the uterus. Rather does he stress the part played by the hormone oestrog