Analyst Talks On Boredom In Marriage

Inaugurating the first series of Lemann Lectures on contemporary relationships between men and women, Bruno Bettelheim last night once again outlined the frustrations an educated woman might feel if she let her marriage center on "puttering around the house and puttering around the children."

Forcefully reiterating his Harper's article of last October, Bettelheim warned that women cannot rely on their husbands to relieve the boredom of "busy-work" in the woman's home role. He urged that a woman have "a challenging, stimulating intellectual life of her own" so that she does not come to blame her husband for the monotony of her life and the resulting feelings of dissatisfaction.

"I don't want to scare you," Bettelheim said, "but the most frequent complaint of educated married women is that 'my husband doesn't talk to me.'"

Bettelheim touched briefly on the problems created by the fact that men and women are now, in the post-Victorian period, highly conscious of their sexual relationships. "Each is terribly anxious to give the other complete satisfaction," Bettelheim said. "If the woman does not reach this goal, she worries that she is frigid; the man fears that he is not masculine enough for her to enjoy sex.

"Sex thus becomes another area of competition, a contest to see who can make whom have the more satisfying sexual experience," Bettelheim concluded.

The second Lemann Lecture will take place this evening at 8 p.m. In the Radcliffe Graduate Center living room, at the corner of Ash and Brattle Streets. Mrs. Gerald A. Berlin will speak in place of Mrs. Endicott Peabody, as the fourth member of a panel discussing marriage.