Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/21

 MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FEMALE CASTRATION COMPLEX 13

was in a closet and urinating with manifest feelings of pleasure when he suddenly noticed that his sister was looking at him through the window. When a little boy he had actually demonstrated with pride before his sister his masculine way of urinating. This dream ending in enuresis shows the boy's pride in his penis, and enuresis in the female frequently rests on the wish to urinate in the male way. The dream represents this process in a disguised form and ended with a pleasurable emptying of the bladder.

Women who are prone to enuresis nocturna are regularly burdened with strong resistances agamst the female sexual functions. The infantile desire to urinate in the male position is associated with the well-known interchange of urine and sperma, and of micturition and ejaculation. The unconscious tendency to wet the man with urine in sexual intercourse has its origin here.

Other substitute formations show a still greater displacement of .the libido in that they are removed some distance from the genital region. When the libido for some reason or other has to turn away from the genital zone it is attracted to certain other erotogenic zones, the particular ones being chosen as the result of individual determinations. In some neurotic women the nose achieves the significance of a surrogate of male genital. The not infrequent neurotic attacks of redness and swelling of the nose in women is conceived in the unconscious phantasy as an erection in the sense of masculinity wishes.

In other cases the eyes take over a similar r61e. Some neurotic women get an abnormally marked congestion of the eyes with every sexual excitation. In a certain measure this congestion is a normal and common phenomenon accompanying sexual excitation. However, in those women of whom we are speaking the condition is not simply a quantitative increase of the phenomenon for a short period, but a redness of the sclerotics accompanied by a burning sensation, while swelling persists for several days after each sexual excitation. In such cases we are justified in speaking of a conjunctivitis neurotica.

I have seen several women patients, troubled by many neurotic consequences of the castration complex, in whom this condition of the eyes was associated with a feeling of a fixed stare which , they conceived to be an expression of their masculinity. In the unconscious the 'fixed stare* is often equivalent to an erection. I have already alluded to this symptom in an earlier article dealing