Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis III 1922 1.djvu/36

 28 KARL ABRAHAM

a diock, for instance, if a mother says to her daughter who is about to marry *What is coming now is disgusting'.

There are in particular those neurotic women whose libido has been displaced from tlie genital to the anal zone and who give expression to their disgust of the male body in this or similar manner. These women produce serious effects on their sans without foreseeing the result of their attitude. A mother with this kind of aversion to the male sex injures the narcissism of the boy. A boy in his early years is proud of his genital organs, he likes to ex- hibit them to his mother and expects her to admire them. He soon sees that his mother ostentatiously looks the other way, even if she does not give expression to her disinclination in words. These women are especially given to prohibiting masturbation on the grounds that it is disgusting for him to touch his genital organ. Whereas touching and even mentioning the penis is most carefully avoided by these women they tend to caress the child's buttocks, and cannot speak enough of the 'bottom', often getting the child to repeat this word; they also take an excessive interest in the child's defaecatory acts. The boy is thus forced to an altered orientation of his libido. Either it is transferred from the genital to the anal zone, or the boy is impelled towards his own sex, his father in the first instance, and feels himself bound to his father by a bond which is quite comprehensible to us; at the same time he becomes a woman-hater, and later will be con- stantly ready to make very severe criticisms of the weaknesses of the female sex. This chronic influence of the mother's castration complex seems to me to be a cause of the castration-fear in boys of greater importance than occasionally uttered threats of castration. I can produce abundant proofs of this view from my psycho-analyses of male neurotics. The mother's anal-erotism is the earliest and most dangerous enemy ol the psychosexual devel- opment of children, the more so because the mother has more influence on them in the earliest years of life than the father. *

To everyone of us who are practising psycho-analysts the question occurs at times whether the trifling number of individuals to whom we can give assistance justifies the great expenditure of time, labour and patience. The answer to this question is con- tained in the above exposition: If we succeed in freeing such a person from the defects of her psychosexuality, i.e. from the burdens of her castration complex, then we obviate the neuroses