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tioned against, ignorance of sexual psychology and conjugal hygiene often leads to harmful denials that are no less injurious than immoderation. Undue ascetic restraint accounts for far-reaching disturbances in the emotional, mental and physical make-up of married people.
The conflict engendered by physical intimacy on the one hand, and physical denial on the other, is provocative of violent nervous upheavals.
Balls-Headley came to the conclusion as a result of his observation in Australia of seven thousand cases of ailments of the generative system in women, that lack of satisfaction in the normally constituted woman is a fruitful source of disorder.
It is true that the monotony of household routine tends to create a neurotic background for many women. But when to this is added a sexually unhealthy life, the breaking point is hastened and the damage intensified, when it might have been retarded, or minimized, or even successfully overcome if the marital relations had been successfully harmonized.
The question of overwork in the ordinary modern household should not be a serious one. Freud struck a significant note when he said that the physician who informs a busy man that he has overworked himself, or an active woman that her household duties have been too burdensome, should have told his patients they are sick, not because they have sought. to discharge duties which for a civilized brain are comparatively easy, but because they have neglected if not stifled their sexual life while attending to their duties.
Cabot has said: "Love has to go to school like every other human faculty, and marriage is the only school where the sessions are long enough and continuous enough to break through the barriers just beyond which are the prizes."