individual is of highly erotic temperament.  If there has been gratification, if the mind is filled not merely with desires but with joyous experience to which the body also has grown accustomed, then the struggle is longer and more painfully absorbing.  The succeeding relief, however, if it comes, is sometimes more complete and is more likely to be associated with a state of psychic health.  For the fundamental experiences of life, under normal conditions, bring not only intellectual sanity, but emotional pacification.  A conquest of the sexual appetites which has never at any period involved a gratification of these appetites seldom produces results that commend themselves as rich and beautiful.

In these combats there are, however, no permanent conquests.  For a very large number of people, indeed, though there may be emotional changes and fluctuations dependent on a variety of circumstances, there can scarcely be said to be any conquest at all.  They are either always yielding to the impulses that assail them, or always resisting those impulses, in the first case with remorse, in the second with dissatisfaction.  In either case much of their lives, at the time when life is most vigorous, is wasted.  With women, if they happen to be of strong passions and reckless impulses to abandonment, the results may be highly enervating, if not disastrous to the general psychic life.  It is to this cause, indeed, that some have been inclined to attribute the frequent mediocrity of women’s work in artistic and intellectual fields.  Women of intellectual force are frequently if not generally women of strong passions, and if they resist the tendency to merge themselves in the duties of maternity their lives are often wasted in emotional conflict and their psychic natures impoverished.[103]

The extent to which sexual abstinence and the struggles it involves may hamper and absorb the individual throughout life is well illustrated in the following case.  A lady, vigorous, robust, and generally healthy, of great intelligence and high character, has reached middle life without marrying, or ever having sexual relationships.  She was an only child, and when between three and four years of age, a playmate some six years older, initiated her into the habit of playing with her sexual parts.  She was, however, at this age quite devoid of sexual feelings, and the habit dropped naturally, without any bad effects, as soon as she left the neighborhood of this girl a year or so later.  Her health was good and even brilliant, and she developed vigorously at puberty.  At the age of sixteen, however, a mental shock caused menstruation to diminish in amount during some years, and simultaneously with this diminution persistent sexual excitement appeared spontaneously, for the first time.  She regarded such feelings as abnormal and unhealthy, and exerted all her powers of self-control in resisting them.  But will power had no effect in diminishing the feelings.