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adjustment, self-confidence, and socialized courage,
together with a well developed sense of personal
responsibility spiced with a sense of humour. At the
same time its solution is optional to the degree that a
man or woman may practically evade the problem
without becoming a social outcast. Sexual maladjust¬
ments are exceedingly common because of our inadequate
sexual education, because of our cultural over-valuation of
sex, and because the solution of the sexual problem
requires the highest development of human responsibility.
Some psychologists, notably the Freudian psychoanalysts,
consequently have made the mistake of believing that all
human problems derive from maladjustments of the sexual
life, but sexual maladjustments are but seldom the sole
basis of human inadequacy. The sexual problem is only
one aspect of the general problem of human adjustment to
the world in which we live.
The characteristic signs of the inferiority complex in
the sphere of sex are expressed in the complete evasion of
the sexual problem, evasion through the fiction of organic
inability, evasion through perversion, and evasion through
exaggeration of the importance of sex. In the first
category we find those individuals who believe that sex is a
sin and a curse, and thus le*ad a life of pseudo-saintly
avoidance of all sexual adjustment. The misanthropic
women and the misogynic men who maintain a position of
arrogant superiority to sex, or tremble with an equally
fallacious panicky fear of venereal disease, sexual
unhappiness, or sexual disappointment, seek to cover their
underlying fear of sexual adjustment with a thin veneer of
rationalization. The puritan and the prude exhibit their
inferiority complex as clearly as the critical male or the
romantic woman whose search is for an “ ideal ” mate.
Few confirmed old bachelors and few siccant old maids
are to be found among the leaders of human thought and
action.
Comparable to these deserters from the sexual problem,
and hardly more courageous, are those men who are
impotent or suffer from premature ejaculation in the