ture. It is obvious that a woman endowed with a
strong erotic nature requires a kind of sexual relationship different
from one whose interests are predominantly in her children. And both the
sexual and maternal types require different situations than the woman
who combines the two instincts in her own personality for a normal
expression of their emotional life.

According to social tradition, sexual activity (at least in the case of
women) is to be exercised primarily for the reproduction of the group.
Thus the institutions of marriage and the family in their present form
provide only for the woman who possesses both the sexual and maternal
cravings. Contraceptive knowledge has enabled a small number of women
(which is rapidly growing larger) to fit into these institutions in
spite of their lack of a desire for motherhood. There have been a few
hardy theorists who have braved convention to the extent of suggesting
the deliberate adoption of unmarried motherhood by women who are
consumed by the maternal passion but have no strongly erotic nature.
Whether their problem will be solved in this manner, only the course of
social evolution in the future can show.

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.