38.


Pathological Effects


This feminine craving for martyrdom, of course, often takes on a
downright pathological character, and so engages the psychiatrist.
Women show many other traits of the same sort. To be a woman
under our Christian civilization, indeed, means to live a life that is
heavy with repression and dissimulation, and this repression and
dissimulation, in the long run, cannot fail to produce effects that are
indistinguishable from disease. You will find some of them
described at length in any handbook on psychoanalysis. The
Viennese, Adler, and the Dane, Poul Bjerre, argue, indeed, that
womanliness itself, as it is encountered under Christianity, is a
disease. All women suffer from a suppressed revolt against the
inhibitions forced upon them by our artificial culture, and this
suppressed revolt, by well known Freudian means, produces a
complex of mental symptoms that is familiar to all of us. At one
end of the scale we observe the suffragette, with her grotesque
adoption of the male belief in laws, phrases and talismans, and her
hysterical demand for a sexual libertarianism that she could not
put to use if she had it. And at the other end we find the snuffling
and neurotic woman, with her bogus martyrdom, her extravagant