Besides the differences in natural instinctive tendencies which make it difficult for many women to fit into a uniform type of sexual relationship, modern society, with its less rigid natural selection, has permitted the survival of many neurotic temperaments which find marriage a precarious venture.  The neurotic constitution, as Adler[1,2] has pointed out, is an expression of underlying structural or functional organic deficiency.  It is a physiological axiom that whenever one organ of the body, because of injury, disease, etc., becomes incapable of properly discharging its functions, its duties are taken over by some other organ or group of organs.  This process of organic compensation, whereby deficiency in one part of the body is atoned for by additional labours of other parts, necessarily involves the nervous mechanism in ways which need not be discussed in detail here.

In children the process of compensation, with its formation of new nervous co-ordinations, is manifest in the inability to cope with their companions who have a better biological endowment.  This gives rise to a feeling of inferiority from which the child tries to free itself by every possible means, ordinarily by surpassing in the classroom the playmates whom it cannot defeat on the playground.  The feeling of inferiority continues throughout life, however, although the mechanism of physiological compensation may have become so perfected that the functioning of the organism is quite adequate to the needs of the environment.  As a result, the ruling motive of the conduct becomes the desire to release the personality from this torturing sense of inability by a constant demonstration of the power to control circumstances or to dominate associates.

This abnormal will to power finds expression in the marital relationship in the desire for supremacy over the mate.  The domineering husband is a familiar figure in daily life.  The wife who finds it more difficult to rule her husband by sheer mastery achieves the same ends by developing a fit of hysterical weeping or having a nervous headache when denied her own way in family affairs.

By far the easiest way for the woman to satisfy her craving for power is the development of an interesting illness which makes her the centre of attention.  The history of nervous disease furnishes many cases of neurosis where this uncontrollable longing for domination is the chief factor in the etiology of the illness.  It is not at all unusual to meet wives who hold their husbands subservient to every whim because of “delicate nervous organizations” which are upset at the slightest thwarting of their wishes so that they develop nervous headaches, nervous indigestion, and many other kinds of sickness unless their preferences meet with the utmost consideration.  This tendency often becomes a chronic invalidism, which, at the same time that it brings the longed-for attention, incapacitates the individual for sexual and maternal activities and makes the married life an abnormal and unhappy one.