She was morbidly modest and wept bitterly once when a man whom she knew only slightly, pressed a kiss upon her lips. Withal her dreams revealed a violently erotic temperament.
Like all exaggerated feelings morbid modesty is the mask for the opposite feelings, passionate sexual cravings. The woman who allows every one to kiss her is aroused but little by such caresses. The woman who never kisses any one and pretends she does not like being kissed, is usually the one who knows that a kiss might cause her to lose her self-control and to abandon all modesty.
The puritanical male, paragon of modesty among his sex, is either an inflammable type who is afraid of his own sensuality or an impotent individual who protects himself against being put to any sexual test.
That exaggerated modesty is only one of the components of the neurotic temperament has been well demonstrated by Adler: "The morbid modesty of neurotics," he writes, "who cannot visit a public toilet, who are unable to urinate in the presence of others, who avoid the society of women on account of blushing or anxiety or heart palpitations, reveals to us the strained manly ambition which supports itself against the original feeling of inferiority.
"=The Masculine Protest= (craving for virility) of those patients, insecure to the core, forces them into this arrangement whose boundaries encroach upon those of bashfulness and awkwardness. Often, in neurotics of either sex, one observes an inability to go to a toilet in cases of great necessity if some one is looking at them. The greater modesty of women, especially of neurotic women, in all relations of life, originates from the fear which is implanted in them from the earliest childhood that attention might be directed to their sex.
"I have often convinced myself that the behavior of girls and of women is considerably influenced by this more or less unconscious factor, indeed that the progress of their sexual development, like that of male patients who feel unmanly, the formation of social and professional relations and love relations, are immediately checked as soon as the patient is allowed to play a real 'feminine' or subordinate part or presupposes this expectation from others.