Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/16

 S KARL ABRAHAM

reaction on the part of the woman towards the man who has deflorated her. Living with the woman whom he has deflorated might therefore be dangerous for a man.

Psycho-analytical experience shows that an inhibition of the psychosexual development is manifested in phenomena which are closely related to the conduct of primitive peoples. It is by no means rare for us to come across women in our civilisation of to-day who react to defloration in a way which is at all events closely related to that 'archaic' form. I know several cases in which women after defloration produced an outburst of affect and hit or throttled their husband. One of my patients went to sleep with her husband after the first intercourse, then woke up, seized him violently and only gradually came to her senses. There is no mistaking the significance of such conduct : the woman revenges herself for the injury to her physical integrity. Psycho-analysis, however, enables us to recognise a historical layer in the motivation of such an impulse of revenge. The retaliation is connected with the recent defloration ; this experience undoubtedly serves as a con- vincing proof of male activity, and puts an end to all attempts to obliterate the functional difference between male and female sexuality. Nevertheless every profound analysis reveals the close ,

connection of the phantasies of revenge with all the earlier events -^

— phantasised or real — which have been equivalent to castration. &:

The retaliation is found to refer ultimately to the injustice suffered >

at the hands of the father. The unconscious of the adult daughter takes a late revenge for the father's omission to bestow upon her a penis, either to begin with or subsequently; she takes it, however, not on the father in person, but on the man who in consequence of her transference of libido has assumed the father's part The only adequate revenge for the suffered injustice — the castration — is castration. This can, it is true, be replaced symbolically by aggressive measures; among these strangling is a typical sub- stitutive action.

The contrast of such cases with the normal issue is evident The normal attitude of love towards the other sex is both in man and woman indissolubly bound up with the conscious or unconscious desire for genital gratification in conjunction with the love object On the other hand, in the cases just described we And a sadistic-hostile attitude with the aim of possession arising from anal motives, in place of an attitude of love with a genital