Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/19

 MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FEMALE CASTRATION COMPLEX II

same tendencies after they have become repressed. The patient in the evening would place herself between the lamp and the wall, and then would hold her finger against the lower part of her body in such a manner that her shadow portrayed the form of a penis on her. She thus did something veiy similar to what the two years old child did with the cigar.

In conjunction with this instructive example I mention the dream of a neurotic newly-married woman. She w^as an only child. Her parents had ardently desired a son and had in consequence cultivated the narcissism and particularly the mascul- inity wishes of their daughter. According to an expression of theirs she was to become quite 'a celebrated man'. In her youthful day-dreams she saw herself as a ' female Napoleon ' ; she began a glorious career as a female officer, advEince^ to the highest positions, and saw all the countries of Europe lying at her feet. After having thus shown herself superior to all the men in the world a man appeared at last who surpassed not only all men but also herself; she subjected herself to him. Marital relations in real life were accompanied by the most extreme resistance against assuming the feminine r61e ; I shall mention symptoms relating to this later. I quote here one of my patient's dreams.

'My husband seizes a woman, lifts up her clothes, finds a peculiar pocket and pulls out from it a hypodermic morphia syringe. She gives him an injection with this syringe and he is then carried away quite weak and miserable.'

The woman in this dream is the patient herself who takes over the active rflle from the man. The possibility for this is afforded her by a concealed penis (syringe) with which she practices coitus on him. The weakened condition of the man signifies that he is killed by her assault.

Pulling out the syringe from the pocket suggests the male method of urinating, which seemed enviable to the patient in her childhood. It has, however, a further significance. At a meeting of the Berlin Psycho-Analytical Society Boehm drew attention to a common infantile sexual theory: the penis originally ascribed to both sexes is thought to be concealed in a cleft from which it can temporarily emerge.

, Another patient, whose neurosis brought to expression the permanent divorce between masculinity and femininity in most manifold forms, stated that during sexual excitation she often had