Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/31

 MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FEMALE CASTRATION COMPLEX 23

had had a strong desire for mdependence, and in adolescence she was very jealous of the occupations of two women in particular : the cashier in her father's office, and the woman who swept the street in her native town. The cause of this attitude is ob- vious to the psycho-analyst. The cashier sweeps together money, the crossing-sweeper dirt, and both things have the same signifi- cance in the unconscious. There is here a marked turning away from genital sexuaUty in favour of the formation of anal character traits, a process which will be mentioned in another connection.

A characteristic behaviour of some children shows the strength of the disinclination, to be reminded of one's own femininity by any impression. In little girls it not infrequently happens that they give up in favour of the stork fable knowledge they have already obtained of procreation and birth. The rflle bestowed upon them by nature is distinctly unwished-for. The stork tale has the ad- vantage that in it children originate without the man's part being a more privileged one in respect of activity.

The most extreme degree of sensitiveness in the sense of the castration complex is foimd in certain cases of psychical depression in the female sex. Here the feeling of misfortune on account of their femininity exists wholly unrepressed ; these women do not even succeed in working it off in a modified form. One of my patients complained about the complete uselessness of her life because she had been born a girl. She considered the superiority of men in all respects as obvious, and just for this reason felt it so tormentingly. She refused to compete with men in any sphere, and also rejected every feminine performance. In particular she declined the female erotic r61e, and equally so the male one. In consequence of this attitude all conscious eroticism was entirely strange to her ; she even said that she was unable to imagine any erotic pleasure at all. Her resistance against female sexual functions assumed grotesque forms. She transferred her refusal to everything in the world that reminded her, if only remotely, of bearing fruit, propagation, birth, etc. She hated flowers and green trees, and found fruit disgusting, A mistake which she made many times was easily explicable from this attitude; she would read 'furchtbar' {'frightful') instead of 'fruchtbar' ('fruitful'). In the whole of nature only the winter in the mountains could give her pleasure ; there was here nothing to remind her of living