Wilhelm Stekel

Wilhelm Stekel appears in the book not as a character in a continuous narrative but as a physician whose reported cases give particular form to its analysis of women’s sexual initiation, marriage, and emotional dependence. His examples trace how fear, family attachment, unequal expectations, and dissatisfaction within marriage can shape a woman’s experience. They serve as clinical testimony in a larger argument: bodily and psychological experience must be understood within a social situation, not treated as destiny.

Stekel’s Case Material

The book draws on cases Stekel reported to describe crises surrounding marriage. One concerns a young woman from a respectable family who is engaged and says she loves her fiancé. She develops vomiting, takes morphine nightly, has angry episodes, refuses to wash or leave her room, and eats in bed. Although she has yielded to her fiancé, the memory of his kisses repels her. In Stekel’s account, the symptoms are connected to her conflict over leaving home: as a child, she feared that her parents might have another child, and marriage now means separation from the family life to which she remains attached. She tries to make herself unacceptable to her fiancé, but her doctor treats her; when her mother continues to insist on the marriage, the young woman dies by suicide shortly before the wedding. The case makes the stakes of marriage anxiety stark, while locating the crisis in a specific conflict rather than presenting it as a simple aversion to intimacy.

Stekel also reports women whose illnesses become a way of avoiding marriage. Some grow desperate because illness prevents them from marrying a man they say they adore, yet the book argues that their condition may in fact help them escape a union they dread; one finds equilibrium only after ending her engagement. In other cases, earlier erotic experiences, fear that the loss of virginity will be discovered, attachment to parents or a sister, or reluctance to leave the family home contribute to resistance. Even women who marry under social pressure or because marriage appears to be the only reasonable path may retain an inward opposition that makes the early marriage difficult and can prevent them from finding a settled life together.

Sexual Initiation and Marital Expectations

In discussing the first sexual experience, the book cites a case Stekel reports of Mrs. H.N., who had been brought up prudishly and was frightened by the prospect of her wedding night. Her husband did not attend to her fear or allow time for her to feel at ease; she remained frigid afterward. The episode is used to challenge the assumption that sexual initiation can properly be imposed as a marital duty in a single decisive encounter. The book instead describes it as a process with physical and psychological dimensions, in which the circumstances and conduct of the partners matter.

A longer confession, obtained by Stekel from a woman raised in a cultivated household, complicates any simple contrast between desire and fear. She recalls being happy during her engagement and anticipating intimacy, but on the wedding night she felt ashamed and frightened when her husband moved quickly toward intercourse. The couple did not succeed at first; ten days passed before intercourse was possible, and the woman initially experienced disappointment. Her later account describes pleasure and orgasm in some encounters, followed by diminishing satisfaction after two births. She felt that her husband reached satisfaction before her, and she sometimes imagined other men during sex. Their intimate life remained constrained: he did not caress her, never saw her naked, and approached her only at night. The book adds that she was later happy with a lover, underscoring that her experience in marriage did not establish an inability to feel pleasure.

This case supports a broader distinction the book draws between mutual desire and the rights and duties imposed by marriage. It allows that spouses may develop intimacy gradually and that marriage can, for some women, remove the sense of sin attached to sex; some wives become satisfied during the early years of marriage. But Stekel’s reports also show how the expectation of lifelong sexual exclusivity can place a woman’s erotic future in the hands of a partner whose sexual manner she cannot know in advance. The book treats that uncertainty as a structural feature of marriage, not merely a private misfortune.

Marital Dissatisfaction and Dependency

Stekel’s cases also document the gap between sexual possibility and marital practice. The book cites a survey in which many American wives considered intercourse more frequent than they wanted, while very few wished it occurred more often. Against this evidence, it notes that women’s erotic capacities are not inherently narrow; the contrast suggests that marriage, when organized to regulate women’s sexuality through conjugal duties, may suppress rather than fulfill it. Stekel’s clinical material thus contributes to an argument about the institution, not simply a catalogue of individual symptoms.

Another case concerns a woman who was frigid during the early years of marriage and later developed an all-consuming attachment to her husband. She lived for him, depended on him to plan her daily activities, and could not bear to be alone or let him go anywhere without her. A second woman, married for seven years, stayed shut in her room for fear of going out alone and clung to her husband, although he had never been able to have sexual relations with her. These accounts distinguish emotional dependence from mutual intimacy: proximity and constant attention do not necessarily signal a satisfying or reciprocal marriage.

A further case, Mrs. Z.T.’s, presents a different struggle. She resents her cultivated husband’s superiority and begins studying his field in an attempt to become his equal, but gives up when the work proves too difficult. She remains sexually unresponsive to him, refuses his caresses, and mocks his writing and the students who admire him; he spends more time with those students, while she surrounds herself with young men. When he falls in love with another woman, she changes course, has an affair, and tells him about it. Although he accepts this, she refuses a divorce. Their long quarrel ends in reconciliation, during which she experiences her first intense orgasm. The sequence links sexual feeling to a conflict over equality, recognition, and the future of the marriage; the case does not reduce its resolution to a single cause.

Evidence and Argument

Stekel’s reports appear alongside the book’s account of bodily experience as something lived through consciousness and social conditions. Menstruation, for example, is described not only through physical changes but through the young girl’s fear and shame when she has not been prepared for it. In its larger discussion of biology, the book insists that reproductive functions and their effects are important elements of women’s situation, but rejects the claim that they alone define women or explain their subordination. The body’s significance depends on how the individual lives it and on the customs and institutions that shape that experience.

That framework clarifies the function of Stekel’s cases. They show varied consequences of sexual initiation and marriage: withdrawal, illness, suicide, unmet desire, dependence, resistance, and, in one case, a change in sexual experience following reconciliation. The book uses these reports to expose the danger of treating women’s suffering as an inevitable result of female biology or as a private failing. At the same time, its discussion of clandestine abortion places reproductive experience in a broader institutional context: where abortion is criminalized, women face risks created by the conditions under which the procedure must be performed. Stekel’s case histories are one strand of a wider analysis in which bodily life matters profoundly, but becomes intelligible only in relation to personal history and social arrangements.