The Surplus Woman. Catherine L. Dollard

      Sexual overindulgence informed the Freudian understanding of hysteria as well. One of Freud's goals in describing the pathology of the disease was to “clear up the enigmatic contradiction which hysteria presents, by revealing the pair of opposites by which it is characterized—exaggerated sexual craving and excessive aversion to sexuality.”⁸⁹ An exaggerated sex drive among females was a perilous prospect, one that could be considered dangerous if single women were the ones doing the craving. Freud identified this link in the early sexual lives of people who would later be diagnosed as neurotics: “Their sexual life begins like that of perverts, and a considerable part of their childhood is occupied with perverse sexual activity…(usually before puberty, but now and then even long afterwards), and from that time onwards neurosis takes the place of perversion…We are reminded of the proverb Junge Hure, alte Betschwester [A young whore makes an old nun]’, only that here youth has lasted all too short a time.”⁹⁰ While Freud used gender-neutral language to describe the psychological evolution of these perverts-cum-neurotics, female deviance nonetheless was latent in the archetypal iconography of whore and nun. Even as he attempted to provide a scientific profile of the female psyche, Freud relied upon well-worn images that would resonate to his audience.

      Hermann Rohleder ruled out extramarital sex as a source of relief for the unmarried woman. In a 1908 article on “Abstinentia sexualis,” Rohleder asked himself rhetorically, “Are the consequences of abstinence so severe…that they warrant the recommendation of therapeutic extramarital intercourse among the unmarried?…Today I will again answer no…It is not the consequences of abstinence that have led me to this, but much more important things, prevention of a much greater unhappiness.”⁹¹ In this diagnosis without remedy, Rohleder sighed at the ill fortunes of those who suffered outside of marriage, yet the distanced air of resignation provided little alternative to a life without sexual companionship—other than getting married in the first place!

      Perhaps the “much greater unhappiness” Rohleder hinted at can be found in the work of August Forel. Forel speculated on the enormous, untapped female sexual appetite:

      Some women…from their first youth experience violent sexual desire, causing them to masturbate or to throw themselves onto men. Such excesses in woman take on a more pathological character than in man, and go under the name of nymphomania…Although in the normal state woman is naturally full of delicacy and sentiments of modesty, nothing is easier than to make these disappear completely by training her systematically to sexual immodesty or to prostitution. Here we observe the effects of the routine and suggestible character of feminine psychology, of the tendency of woman to become the slave of habit and custom.⁹²

      This description of the hyperaesthetic female offers a dichotomy: the nymphomaniac who is likely pathological and certainly abnormal, and the obedient woman who, as victim of her own malleable psyche, is led down a path of dissolution. Forel did not resolve this tension between nature and nurture, drawing instead a portrait of a creature both plagued by inherent aberrance and hoodwinked by her own weak character and the diabolical suggestions of others.