Newer Genetic Investigations on Impotence and Frigidity: Edmund Bergler. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, XI, 1947, pp. 50–59.

Bergler discusses the most difficult problems in impotence and frigidity and presents his psychodynamic views in a very condensed paper. He contends that the greatest lack of clarity exists in cases where oral regression plays an important rôle. He believes that the basic wish in those cases is a masochistic desire to be refused. These patients provoke their environment to refuse them as they provoked their mother in the preoedipal period. Bergler believes that most analysts confuse the superficial aggressiveness of these patients with the original oral aggressive impulses, and neglect the masochistic elaboration. Impotence, premature ejaculation and aspermia are generally pseudoaggressive denials of this wish to be refused.

Bergler then turns to the problem of frigidity and strongly attacks the concept of a clitoral orgasm. He believes that the sole criterion for orgasm in women is the presence of involuntary contractions of the pelvic perineal muscles at the end of the sex act. In frigidity, too, the most difficult cases are the oral regressed ones, where pseudoaggressive behavior covers the dynamically decisive masochistic wish to be refused. Unfortunately, the genesis of this masochistic wish is not amply elucidated in the paper.