Some Observations on the Transformation of Instincts

A few years ago my curiosity was aroused by an apparently chance remark made by a woman patient in describing her reactions to coitus: she was telling of the disappointments to which her husband had subjected her for many years and said that she always cried immediately upon completion of the sexual act. It was the word always, used as if inadvertently, that attracted my attention. As the patient was relating her difficulties in attaining sexual gratification with her husband, who according to her frequently suffered from ejaculatio proecox, was otherwise 'too quick', or occasionally lost his erection during the sexual act, she wept. She was soon sobbing and it was between spasms of sobbing that she let slip the remark that she always cried after intercourse. She explained this crying as she did her sobbing in that analytic interview: she was disappointed, she said, and distressed because she was doomed never to experience true sexual joy, and she felt hopeless. While the explanation sounded reasonable, the word always gave it a tinge of incongruity, of neurotic repetitiveness, which cast a legitimate suspicion on the patient's conscious formulation.

This patient was the mother of three children. Her husband, some fifteen years her senior, had not always been afflicted with sexual inefficiency; yet, even during the years of his potency, the patient had also failed to experience a vaginal orgasm and had always cried following the sexual act. For years, particularly since she had noticed her husband's sexual strength failing, she wished to find a lover. Her social contacts were numerous and agreeable, many men were willing and ready to offer their attentions; yet she always recoiled from a