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.

Another more or less neurotic trait which acts as a cause of disharmony
in the marital relationship is the sexual anaesthesia which is not at all
uncommon in modern women. The absence of any erotic passion is held to
be a matter of physiological makeup by many authorities, but it is
probably more often due to the inhibition of natural tendencies in
accordance with concepts built up by social tradition. In order to
understand how social suggestion can have so powerful an effect upon the
reactions of the individual, we must revert once more to the principles
of behaviouristic psychology.

According to Watson,[4] whenever the environmental factors are such that
a direct expression of an emotion cannot