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12 KARL ABRAHAM ■
the feeling that something on her body swelled to an enormous ■,
size. The tendency of this sensation was obviously to delude j
herself that she possessed a penis. '
In other patients the symptoms do not represent the complete
wish-fulfilment in the sense of masculinity, but a corresponding j
expectation for the near or distant future. While the unconscious ,
in the cases just described expresses the idea, 'I am a male', it i here conceives the wish in the formula, ' I shall receive the " gift "
one day, I absolutely insist upon that!'.
The following conscious phantasy from the youth of a neurotic girl is perfectly typical of the unconscious content of many neurotic [
symptoms. When the girl's elder sister menstruated for the first ;
time she noticed that her mother and sister conversed together secretly. The thought flashed across her, 'Now my sister is certainly getting a penis' ; therefore she herself will get one in due course. ;
The reversal of the rea! state of affairs is here highly characteristic: the acquisition of the longed-for part of the body is put in place of the renewed 'castration* which the first menstruation signifies.
A neurotic patient in whom psycho-analysis revealed extraordinary narcissism one day showed the greatest resistance to treatment, and manifested many signs of defiance towards me which really referred to her deceased father. She left my consulting room in a state of violent negative transference. When she stepped into the street she caught herself saying impulsively : ' I will not be well until I have got a penis'. She thus expected this gift from me, as a substitute for her father, and made the effect of the treatment dependent upon it. Certain dreams of the patient had the same content as this idea which suddenly appeared from her unconscious. In these dreams being presented with something occurred in a double sense (to receive a child or a penis).
Compromises between impulse and repression occur in the sphere of the castration complex as elsewhere in the realm of psychopathology. In many cases the unconscious is content with a substitute-gratification, in place of the male organ and the fall wish fulfilment by present or future possession.
A condition in neurotic women which owes one of its most important determinants to the castration complex is enuresis noctuma. The analogy to the determination of this symptom in male neurotics is striking. I mention, for example, a dream of a patient fourteen years old who suffered from this complaint. He
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