VOYAGE from LESBOS The Psychoanalysis of a Female hlomosexual VOYAGE from by Richard C Robertiello, M. D. p. The Citadel Press New York FIRST EDITION Copyright © 1959 by Richard C. Robertiello, M. D. All rights reser\'ed. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 59-11134. Manufactured in the United States of America. Published by The Citadel Press, 222 Fourth Avenue, New York 3, N. Y. Dedicated to Dr. William V. Silverberg, a great analyst and teacher of analysts — for his help with this patient and with many other things CONTENTS Introduction by William V. Silverberg, M.D. 9 Preface i^ 1 Connie's Background and Motivation for Entering Analysis 21 2 Hostility Towards Women 2j 3 Unconscious Wish to Change Homosex- ual Pattern ^1 4 Female Genitals Regarded as Ugly and Dirty ^^ 5 Relationship With Alice: Displacement From Mother and Sister 39 6 Feelings of Deprivation 45 7 Fears of Exploitation by Men 49 8 Attraction to Married Men 53 9 First Overtly Heterosexual Dream 61 10 Violence and Resistance 65 11 Fear of Death or Disfigurement Heterosexuality 69 12 Trouble With Alice IS 13 Crush on Liz 81 14 Connie Wants to Escape From Analysis 87 15 Anger With Men 97 16 Female Genitals Regarded as Defective 10s 17 Women Regarded as Inferior uy 18 High School Girl Friend's Death Causes Guilt ^23 19 Fear of Lack of Control in Sex 127 20 Themes of Incest and Competition With Sister in Dreams ^37 21 Early Observance of Parental Intercourse Shown in Dream HS 22 Connie Begins Resolving Oedipus Complex '53 23 Mother's Rejection 161 24 Marriage Seen as Unpleasant '73 25 Father's Abnormal Interest in Connie '79 26 Sees Heterosexuality as Taking Father From Mother '95 27 Heterosexuality Viewed as Lacking in Oral Satisfaction 201 28 Possibility of Real Love From Man Seen ^'5 29 Connie Quits Analysis ^3' 30 Connie's Return; the Shift Has Come 239 31 Summing Up 249 Introduction Strange as it may seem, there is a great paucity of case-histories in the Hterature of psycho- analysis. Freud wrote five of them, but only three of these concerned patients personally in treatment with him. One was based on a book of memoirs whose author Freud never met. Another was the psychoanalysis of a child whom Freud saw only once while the treatment was in progress; he had frequent communication, how- ever, with the child's father, who was in the role of actual analyst. Apart from these, few case-histories, as such, have been published. This is not to say that there has been a dearth of clinical material in the literature. On the contrary, there has been a very considerable amount of it; but it has been relatively brief and fragmentary, and the pur- pose in publishing it has been mainly to illustrate or to give evidential support to the theoretical points that the book or article was attempting to establish. Dr. Robertiello's book, being essentially the narration of a case-history, is thus rather unique. Case-histories, de- tailed and complete, have an obvious and great value in any branch of medicine, and psychoanalysis is no excep- tion. I recall that A. A. Brill, the great pioneer in Ameri- 9 can psychoanalysis, complained on numerous occasions that none of the younger men seemed aware of the value of publishing case-material in and for itself; that they all had the ambition to be innovators in psychoanalytic theory. This book, a simple and unpretentious account of the psychoanalytic treatment of a young woman, will deserve a place in the literature of psychoanalysis because it is just that, if for no other reason, and it will, as such, fill a need of candidates in psychoanalytic training and of recent graduates from such training. This would be true regardless of the specific psycho- logical issues involved in the case-history. The fact that the book concerns a patient with a homosexual problem adds greatly to its scientific importance. Though the homosexual patient is a clinical commonplace in the practice of most psychoanalysts, there is wide disparity among them as to the nature, the psychogenesis and the psychodynamics of homosexuality. Consequently there is little agreement as to how to treat such patients, and likewise little agreement as to what the prospects are for "cure" of them. The practising psychoanalyst sees a fairly large number of patients whose chief expressed purpose in seeking help is the "cure" or alleviation of overt homosexuality or, at the least, a better adjustment to it than they have thus far been able to make. Psycho- analysts commonly see numerous other patients whose presenting difficulty is not homosexuality, but who, in the course of treatment, become aware of having had all lO along a homosexual problem of which they were pre- viously never conscious at all or only dimly so. Since so many psychoanalytic patients present such problems, whether overtly or covertly, it becomes a necessity for the psychoanalyst to have a deep and thorough under- standing of these problems and how to deal with them. Clinically, we see fewer Lesbians than we do male homosexuals. The reasons for this are not clear. It may be that, statistically, there are fewer overt female homo- sexuals among the population than there are males. Or it may be that, since society places less in the way of opprobrium and legal penalties upon the female homo- sexual than it does upon the male, the Lesbian, as a consequence, feels less pressure towards seeking a remedy for her condition than does her male counterpart. If we may roughly categorize Lesbians into predomi- nantly active ones — those who are clearly "mannish" in dress, manners and behavior and who prefer the "male" role in homosexual activity, — and predominantly passive ones — those who do not endeavor to dress or behave "mannishly" and who prefer the "female" role in homo- sexual activity, — then we must realize that a distinction has to be made as to the psychodynamics of the two types. Dr. Robertiello's patient was of the latter — the passive — type, and his account of her treatment throws light upon the psychodynamics basic to this type. He has, of course, nothing to say about the "mannish" type, since his book concerns only one patient and is not intended as a treatise on homosexuality, male or female. 11 The essential psychodynamic point in his patient was a conflict about heterosexuahty, with both desire for and fear of such activity. The element of desire in this con- flict is something that we regard as biologically based and instinctive; we tend to take it for granted and to be- lieve that it requires no further explanation. The element of fear is quite another thing and may take any of several different forms, though it appears chiefly as a fear of male aggressiveness; the instrument of this aggressive- ness, the penis, being regarded anxiously as a ruthlessly attacking organ that invades the female "victim" and can inflict physical damage, pain and, at the least, humilia- tion. This fact is clearly shown by Dr. Robertiello, as well as the reasons why his patient had arrived at such an unconscious assumption. For this assumption is what chiefly differentiates his patient from other, non-homo- sexual women, all of whom have to encounter the same prospect of genital penetration by the male. I had the pleasure of supervising Dr. Robertiello's work with this patient during a portion of the analysis. His qualities as a psychoanalyst, which became evident in the course of our work together, will also be apparent to readers of his book: his sensitivity to what his patient was experiencing; his alertness to clues presented by the patient as to her underlying emotional attitudes and her unconscious assumptions; his consistent grasp of the psychodynamics in the process of their unfolding; his in- tellectual honesty and his unpretentiousness about his role as therapist; his great patience and willingness to 12 persevere, despite all the ups and downs of the process, as the patient now advanced towards self-understanding and change, now retreated from it; and, above all, his un- failing and warm good will towards his patient through- out all these vicissitudes. I hope that Dr. Robertiello's book will, as it deserves to do, find many responsive readers, who will both be en- tertained by the drama of a person afflicted voyaging towards a desired destination and instructed by his clear exposition of how and why the voyage proceeded as it did. William V. Silverberg, m.d. i-j Februaiy, 1959 1? Preface The main reason I have written a book about homosexuahty is that it is a subject which is grossly misunderstood by the layman, the physician and, in many instances, even the psychiatrist and psycho- analyst. There is a shroud of mystery about it just as there is about many other sexual subjects. The point of view of society is almost universally one of condemnation, which leaves little room for understanding and objec- tivity. Homosexuality is still considered a crime in almost all states and a person caught in a homosexual act can be prosecuted and imprisoned. I hope that, after reading this book, the layman will see that it makes about as much sense to punish a person thus for homosexuality as it does to take him to court for having pneumonia, tuber- culosis or coronary disease. Homosexuality is the symptom of an illness. Certain traumatic experiences in childhood cause anxieties in the homosexual that do not allow him to express his sexual feelings towards a member of the opposite sex and at the same time compel him to express them towards a member of his own sex. It is not a matter of choice but of compulsion. Most homosexuals are unhappy, suffering 15 people. Some of them may rationalize that theirs is the best life — at least for them, but all of them have an inner dissatisfaction with their method of adaptation. This dis- satisfaction is not only reflective of society's disapproval, it is also based on an awareness of the basic lack of ful- fillment and the compulsive pattern connected with their activity. Most homosexuals are fine, upstanding, moral and pro- ductive people. They certainly should not be condemned or imprisoned. Many attempts have been made to treat homosexuals by psychoanalysis. There are a number of things that I believe will be- come evident on getting to know the patient whose psychoanalysis is described in this book. One is that a homosexual is not "queer" or biologically different from anyone else. There is no physiological or hormonal prob- lem involved. It will also become evident that any person, despite the finest inherited mental and physical equip- ment, can become homosexual if exposed to certain en- vironmental conditions in childhood. One can truthfully say about any homosexual, "There but for the grace of God go I." If one can divest oneself of prejudice and look at homosexuals calmly, scientifically and objectively, ideas of their immorality, weakness or degeneracy be- come ridiculous and completely untenable. Certain facts about the patient have been changed so as to disguise her and protect her from recognition by family and friends. But I have tried to do this in such a way that the basic reasons for her illness remain clearly 16 demonstrated. The quotations from the interviews are practically verbatim. What I describe is literally what happened. Of course I have eliminated some of the material that was repetitive. But otherwise this is all fact — not fiction. Without any further ado, I would like to introduce you to Connie. Let us go back to the first day she came to my office and go on from there. 17 VOYAGE from LESBOS Connie's Background and Motivation for Entering Analysis 1 Connie called for an appoint- ment after having been referred by another analyst whose schedule was filled. She arrived on time for her first appointment and I invited her into my office. She was quite an attractive girl of twenty-nine with dark hair and dark eyes and a good figure — just the slightest bit on the plump side. Her navy blue suit was simple and inex- pensive; her white blouse neat. Although she wasn't "whistle-bait," she was a pleasant-looking girl and seemed possessed of a fair amount of social poise. Now she ap- peared a bit anxious, but not markedly so. I invited her to sit down; asked for her name, address and phone num- ber, which I took down for my records; and inquired about her problem. She was very matter-of-fact about telling me that she was a lesbian and that she had been very depressed for the past seven or eight months after splitting up with her steady girl friend. Obviously, she did not expect a shocked or disapproving response from me. Since the break-up she had been having trouble getting to sleep at night, and 21 although she didn't have difficulty making friends, she hadn't found another steady girl friend with whom she could settle down. She was currently having an affair with a girl named Alice, but it did not look as if the relationship would develop into anything permanent. There had been other involvements, too, but things never went as well as they had with her first girl friend, Jo, whom she had met when she was 21 and with whom she had lived for eight years. During those years she did not have sexual relations with any other girl. }o was a year younger than Connie, but she was more forceful and seemed more mature. An attractive, small brunette, she was lively and popular, although she was unusually sensitive and the other girls had to make a special effort to avoid hurting her or making her angry. Jo and Connie both worked in an office where it was the custom for a group of girls to get together after hours and take in a movie or go bowling. It was during these outings that Connie became aware of Jo's interest. Jo would make it a point to sit next to Connie at the movies and took to holding her hand. This Connie enjoyed, and it did not occur to her that Jo might be homosexual. One night they were out late and Jo asked Connie to stay over night at her apartment. After they got undressed and got into bed, Jo began to kiss and fondle her much as a man would do. Although Connie was surprised, she enjoyed it and became more aroused than she had ever been before. She was essentially a passive participant in the sexual play. After this, they spent more and more 22 time together, and finally Connie moved into Jo's apart- ment. Their relationship was a stormy one, despite the fact that it lasted eight years, which, incidentally, is a very long time for a homosexual relationship to last. Of course there were brief periods when things were quiet and they appeared to be getting along. During these times Connie did most of the cooking and taking care of the apartment. Jo liked to be babied and taken care of and she, in turn, would sometimes do the same for Connie. However, she was extremely jealous and possessive of Connie. They spent all their free time out with other lesbians at "gay" bars and parties, and whenever another girl paid any attention to Connie, Jo would be furious. Connie also had her jealous moments, and much of their time alone together was given over to accusations and counter-accu- sations. Frequently the fights became physical. They would hit each other, pull hair, throw things and really become violent. After it was over, they would be most attracted to one another sexually. Then there would be a gradual falling off of interest until the next fight. At this first session she told me that she had had one very brief sexual affair with a married man a few years before while she was living with Jo. They had had inter- course no more than two or three times before deciding mutually to end the relationship. This had been her only sexual involvement that led to intercourse with a man, and during it she had felt absolutely no emotion nor ex- perienced any sexual pleasure. Almost all her friends were 23 homosexuals, male and female, although she had one "straight" girl friend whom she saw a few times a year. As she spoke she showed little emotion, but she was very pleasant and certainly seemed cooperative and sin- cere in her desire to be helped. It was clear that she was somewhat depressed. That day she expressed no desire to change her sexual pattern; she felt no real sexual attrac- tion for men and was perfectly content to remain homo- sexual. Her immediate motivation for seeing me was in order to conquer her depression and insomnia. All of this came out slowly and deliberately. Her man- ner was even blase. It seemed apparent, however, that she was above average in intelligence. Her secretarial job involved more than simple typing or stenography; she worked as a sort of "Girl Friday" in a business firm. She had been born in New York. In response to my questions I learned that her parents were German immi- grants, that her father owned a grocery store and her mother was a housewife. Connie had finished high school, one year of college, and one year of business school. Her grades had been above average. She had always done well in her jobs except one in which she had to supervise other girls. This was a role she couldn't handle, and she had been fired. She had held her present job three years. I asked Connie to tell me more about her parents. She said that they were now about 65 years old — both of them simple, unsophisticated people with few interests. They didn't argue much, she told me, but they were not really very close to one another. Although her mother was well- 34 meaning and superficially generous, she had never been able to give Connie much affection and had openly favored her older sister. She had done little to encourage Connie's social or sexual interests and had often created embarrassing situations when girl friends or boy friends were brought to the house. She would whisper about them to Connie in their presence or subtly criticize them. At this time Connie saw her mother as being cold, critical of her, and somewhat possessive of her. Her father had always taken more of an interest in her than had her mother. Still, he, too, did not give her much affection. He was described as a rigid, domineering man who had always tried to dictate to Connie. As a child, she was always being dragged from doctor to doctor by her father. It seemed to Connie that he was constantly trying to prove that she was sick. Connie was the youngest of four children. She had two brothers each of whom was considerably older and with whom she had little contact. They had married young and left the home early, whereas her older sister always lived close to home because of her illness, a rheumatic heart condition. Even after her marriage she was still part of the family circle and lived in a two-family house with her parents. She died at the age of 24, leaving a baby son who was brought up by Connie's parents. Connie had been nine at the time of her sister's death. A strikingly beautiful girl, this sister had been the family favorite. Her beauty was so outstanding, Connie told me, that people were always saying that she could have been a 25 movie star. The sister's husband died when Connie was twenty. I asked her if she had had any dreams recently. She described one about faUing out of an airplane into the water with her father and feeling that he was deliberately trying to drown her. I noted down the dream, but didn't press for any associations or attempt interpretations at this point since it was too early, but I urged her to make an effort to remember her dreams. The session was drawing to a close. I said that I would like to see her three times a week for fort)'-five minute sessions and told her my fee. She said she wasn't sure she could manage it financially, but she would try. I gave her a time for her next appointment and she left. 26 Hostility Towards Women Connie sat up for the first few weeks, but after that used the couch. The next few months in analysis were spent finding out more about Connie and especially discussing her hostility. She had come in with the feeling that she was a very hostile person. The breaking up of her steady relationship had aroused tremendous anger in her toward her girl friend. There had been much shouting and even physical outbursts on both parts. Since the breakup she had been involved in three or four brief homosexual relationships. Though they were brief, they were steady while they lasted. Connie had never been promiscuous. The cessations of these rela- tionships also were marked by a good deal of strife and violence. What upset Connie primarily was that she could feel such violent hatred, which was always directed at her homosexual partners. She never experienced any similar feeling towards her boss, or, indeed, any other man, or even toward another girl with whom she was not in- volved sexually. It became clear that the major reason for her depression was that she turned this anger towards 27 other women back to herself. When she was depressed she would not be angry. When she was angry, she would not be depressed. Also she felt a good deal of anxiet)- about how angry she might get. There was the fear that she would lose control and actually hurt one of these girls. Much of her anxiety was traceable to this fear and was expressed as insomnia. But aside from these occasional outbursts of anger, Connie's character was predominantly submissive. She was very easy to get along with, unusually cooperative and even showed a tendency to let other girls take ad- vantage of her. She came to see that her submissiveness was a defense against her fear of losing mastery over her anger with women. With this understanding, Connie's depression and insomnia eased a bit, and she began to be a little more assertive. The pattern of her homosexual relationships began to emerge also and to be understood by Connie. There would be a feeling of great love and sexual attraction at the beginning, and then the sex would gradually fall off until both girls would come to express really intense hos- tility towards one another. Arguments would be fol- lowed by physical fights. There would be marked jealousy and also attempts to provoke jealousy in the partner. Finally things would become so chaotic that the rela- tionship would end. Connie came to see that her de- pression essentially was connected with her anger towards her homosexual partners. She brought in many dreams. Almost all of our ses- 28 sions were spent analyzing her dreams. Many were heterosexual in terms of their symbolic content and fol- lowed a pattern. She would meet a boy and become sexually interested in him but then become very anxious and in one way or another break up the relationship. She had one dream which caused her so much anxiety that she unwittingly came at the wrong time for the next two sessions. She dreamed of a towel rack that had been pulled out of a wall, leaving an ugly, gaping hole. The towel rack itself was a beautiful color in contrast to the ugly hole in the wall. She associated the hole to the vagina and the towel rack to the penis. The dream seemed to show that she preferred the penis to the vagina and regarded the vagina as ugly. Although she was not conscious of it, she had a basic wish for men and heterosexuality which was overpow- ered by the anxiety aroused by the wish. The reasons for the anxiety were not yet discovered. The other important theme that recurred in her dreams was her anger towards women. In loving women and submitting to them sexually, she was masking and controlling this unconscious hostility. When a relation- ship would falter and she would be temporarily without the defense of a loving relationship with a woman which would gainsay the hostility lurking beneath the surface, or when she experienced discomfort in her usual sub- missive role in relation to women, she would turn the hostility inward against herself and the result would be depression. 29 This may sound as if we had come a long way in our understanding at this early point, but actually we were just beginning to scratch the surface. Connie was a con- scientious, hard-working patient, however, and we did make progress right from the beginning. She never will- fully missed a session or came late, and she brought in a good deal of dream material. 30 Unconscious Wish to Change Homosexual Pattern About nine months had passed in Connie's analysis. Aheady it was clear to me and it was becoming increasingly clear to her that she at least un- consciously wanted to change her sexual pattern and that there could be no satisfactory solution to her prob- lems until she did. One day she came in, lay down on the couch and started right off telhng me the dream she had had the night before. "I was starting on a vacation. I couldn't get where I was going because the bridge was washed out. I had to go back and I found myself in Jo's apartment. I was annoyed that she was expecting me and had set a table for two. I made another attempt to go. I got to a resort hotel, but I couldn't stay because I had no reservation. I started to go back home and ran into a carnival. There was a pretty dark girl who looked very hungry — as if she hadn't eaten for days. The girl I was with gave her a sandwich. I was very moved and felt very glad the girl had gotten something to eat." Connie associated the vacation spots and the carnival atmosphere with places she had spent the summer in her teens, especially the beach and the social life and 31 some of her early experiences with boys. She remembered when she was 15, a 16-year-old boy had come into her bath house "with a hungry look in his eyes" and made a grab at her. I pointed out that she used the concept of hunger in the dream, too, and that perhaps "hunger" in the dream stood for sexual hunger. Connie said, "Oh, I see. Then the dark pretty girl who's hungry must be me. I remember when the bridge collapsed in the dream. I wondered whether they were going to fix it or not — whether they were going to fix it, or just show why the mechanism broke, I guess that must refer to my analysis: are we going to fix up my sexual problem or just show why it got to be the way it is." I pointed out to Connie that sometimes in a dream a bridge is a sexual symbol because it connects two bodies of land just as sex connects two people. Connie said, "I remember when the bridge collapsed and I had to get back, the element of time was very important. I remem- ber wondering if it was too late for me to ever get back now. I wonder now if it's too late in my life to change my sexual pattern and get back to heterosexuality." I asked her to try to put together some of the symbols she had associated with the dream and try to analyze it. She said she was trying in the dream to go back to heterosexuality, but the bridge that would take her there collapsed. She wondered whether she could ever get back to it, whether it was not too late for her to achieve it. She also wondered whether the analysis would 32 help her get back to it or just show her why she had re- treated from it. Then in the dream she went back to the homosexual situation with Jo. She resented it and tried again to go to the resort — a heterosexual symbol. Again it didn't work, but she headed for another heterosexual symbol, the carnival. She recognized her own hunger — a sexual hunger — and her lack of real sexual fulfillment in homosexuality. In the dream she gratified her wish to be satisfied, though it was expressed in an oral (through food) rather than a sexual way and was granted by a woman rather than by a man. Of course, a good deal of her homosexual gratification was achieved orally. In other words, Connie was seeing more clearly her wish to go in a heterosexual direction. She recognized that homosexuality was not really her first choice, but she felt it was something she would have to settle for be- cause of some anxiety that prevented her heterosexual fulfillment. She also expressed her dissatisfaction with homosexuality. There were many dreams which, upon analysis, demonstrated this discontent and led to her recognition of it. She came to realize that her basic wish, like the wish of any woman, was for a man. However, there was something that had blocked her from attaining this and had compelled her reluctant acceptance of homosexuality as a second choice. She had to have some satisfaction and, being blocked off from men, she turned to women. Now, of course, this was not the whole story by any means. First of all, what was it that blocked her off from 33 anen? And secondly, assuming she was blocked off, why did she turn to women? Why not to masturbation or some sublimation of the sexual drive? But at least Con- nie was getting to see that homosexuality was something she had had to turn to. It wasn't that she basically wanted it; she had no choice. 34 Female Genitals Regarded as Ugly and Dirty 4 The next few sessions brought up some important material that helped clarify some of Connie's fear of heterosexuality. She had a dream about a man and woman of the future. She thought they were supermen and very attractive except for the kinky black hair on the women. She had another dream about going to a movie and seeing a nude girl on the screen. When the camera showed the women's breasts Connie thought she looked very attractive. When it focussed on her genital area, Connie became very anxious and left the theatre. To the first dream Connie associated the feeling that heterosexuality seemed to be in her future. She connected the black kinky hair with pubic hair. Both this and the next dream made it clearer to her that she associated disapproval with the female genitals. She saw them as being ugly and dirty and thought that men especially would view them in those terms. During the next session she described another dream in which she had felt that a woman's hair was unattrac- tive. Then she referred again to the dream about the man and woman of the future. 35 "I didn't mention that the woman was half nude when the man came in. I was vety annoyed. I felt she should cover up in front of him. I remember that a cousin once told me not to run around in panties in front of men. I thought she meant that men didn't like the female body because it wasn't pretty." I told her that it wasn't very likely that that was what she meant. She laughed and said that, of course, she understood that now, but that this had been her interpre- tation at the time and that it must have been ver)' firmly implanted in her mind that the female body and espe- cially the genitals were ugly and would repel men. I brought her back to the dream about the towel rack and the hole in the wall which seemed to be saying the same thing: 'The penis is beautiful; the vagina is ugly." She said she remembered seeing women nursing their chil- dren and feeling it was disgusting that they were exposed. "I remember when I was a kid," she said, ''that dirty jokes I heard were first about urine and defecation and then later about sex. I seem to be comparing the two in terms of dirtiness. Also I remember the only feeling of sexual arousal I had was when I got up at night and had to go to the bathroom. I was just thinking about an ex- perience I had when I was about 12. I was sitting in a room with my cousin when he opened his pants and showed me his erection. He scared me right out of the room. I'm thinking right now I wish I could have scared him back in the same manner. I couldn't do anything but be scared." This thought certainly confirmed the fact that Con- b6 nie wished that she had a penis. She continued, "In quite a few instances I can remember the males in my family referring to the females as being dirty. Even my nephew asked me to teach his wife feminine hygiene. I thought, why doesn't he teach her himself?" After these sessions Connie went through a typical period of "resistance." During these sessions she would unconsciously and indirectly — often through quotations from other people — bring up objections to psychoanaly- sis. She would talk about how it had not worked on this and that friend and how it was too expensive for her, or she would subtly cast doubts on my ability. I would ex- plain to her in these sessions that she was bringing up these doubts because the material she had just been dis- cussing was threatening to her and she was unconsciously motivated to get away from it by looking for evidence that either analysis, or the analyst, was no good. After this was pointed out to her and I had redefined for her what we call "unconscious resistance" — the mechanism by which the mind attempts to hide unpleasant things during therapy — she would pick up the thread again. For instance, at the end of the session during which I explained the resistance phenomenon, she immediately began discussing a woman about whom she had earlier spoken — a woman with body odor who came into her office frequently. The mind works very logically and systematically to uncover the roots of the problem. Everything the pa- tient says in psychoanalysis is predetermined. The pa- tient, if she feels completely accepted by a non-con- 37 demning therapist, will automatically dream about and discuss the very problems which are at the root of her illness — except at those times when there is "resistance." Resistance occurs when a patient goes too close to the heart of something she fears. Then she will pull away from it and either be silent, discuss inconsequentials, or attack the analyst or the analytic method. At these times, the analyst must point out that there is a resistance and also let the patient know at what point it arose and why it arose — to block out what particular material. Then, usually, the patient will resume the analytic line again. Sometimes, however, the resistance may persist for several sessions even if it is correctly interpreted. The feelings about the woman's genitals being thought of as ugly and dirty by the man comprised one of the main reasons behind Connie's symptoms, as we shall see. When Connie first came upon this in the dream of the towel rack, she missed two analytic sessions — her resist- ance was so great. Now the resistance to this particular unconcious conviction was much less. She came, but she brought up anti-analytic material. However, when her resistance was interpreted, she went right back to the theme again. Two sessions later Connie came up with another memory connected with this. She had been about twelve at the time. She was swimming and a boy told her she had a hole in the genital area of her suit. She had felt insulted and that he was pointing it out because he thought her genitals looked so ugly. 38 Relationship With Alice: Displacement From Mother and Sister The next important development was that Connie began to examine her feehngs towards her mother and sister and the way she displaced them tO' other women. This theme first appeared in a dream about her current landlady. She said: "She was out to do me no good. She was older than I, but she was more competitive than motherly. Since she was older, she should have been more understanding." When I asked Connie who the landlady might represent, she replied, "Maybe my mother. Maybe I still feel she's competing with me. I don't know why I used the word 'competing.' We weren't competing for anything in particular. We were out for ourselves. I expected her to give more than I." What they were competing for and why Connie spontaneously used that word was not understood by her at the time. There was quite a bit of resistance during the next couple of sessions, although Connie did say something about her mother's not preparing meals the way she 39 wanted them and that she always used to complain about it. She told me more about her girl friend, Alice, whom she described as a slim girl with a very sexy figure and vivacious to the point of being wild. She was always the life of the party. She got attention because of her looks, but she was always talking, laughing, and joking until it seemed she had a compulsive need to occupy the center of the stage at all times. Sexually she was completely uninhibited and very much the aggressor, though not in a masculine way. A creature of moods, she was happy one moment and sad or angry the next. She had a vio- lent temper and could become vicious when aroused. Connie felt very attracted to her and interested in her — there was never a dull moment with Alice. At the next session Connie told me that she had never been so angry with people. She was finding fault with all her girl friends. She described her relationship with Alice, as "sweet on the surface, but a bomb under- neath." Alice was lazy, inconsiderate and nasty, accord- ing to Connie, and she didn't appreciate her efforts or give her enough sympathy or attention. Connie spon- taneously connected this with the way she had felt about her mother in the past. This session was followed by one in which she dis- cussed her submissiveness to her homosexual partner. She had gone to a great deal of trouble to knit Alice a fancy sweater. She really did not want to do it and she resented doing it, but somehow she kept right on with it. 40 She said: "That's what makes me so angry about my re- lationship to her. I actually hate her in general and yet I have this compulsion to try to please her." I asked her whether this recalled anything in the past. She connected it with her feelings about her mother^ her sister and many of her girl friends in high school. She always picked beautiful girls with whom to go around. She was jealous of them, but she always played a submissive role with them and tried to please them. She tried to feel as good as they by joining them and pleasing them, but actually she always felt jealous of them and inferior to them. The idea was "if you can't beat them, join them," but it was never very satisfactory because down deep she always wanted to beat them. The pattern of masking hatred and jealousy with submission became more and more clear to Connie as the pattern she adopted with her sister, her high school girl friends and her homosexual partners. She noticed that when somebody else said something derogatory about them she became very upset and understood that it was only because unconsciously she wanted to say those things herself. She began to see how her relationship with each part- ner followed a cycle. At first she would be very interested in and attracted to her; then she would become disin- terested in sex with her and would begin to reject her and try to make her jealous; next the hostility would come to a head and there would be a violent argument and often physical battles. After this, she would again feel interested and sexually attracted to her. It was essen- 41 tially the same pattern she had followed with her beau- tiful sister and her high school girl friends. Loving them had been a way of covering up being jealous of them and hating them. When the hate came up it would erupt with such tremendous violence that Connie would be afraid of it and cover it up with a pseudo-love. Most homosexual relationships contain these cycles. Since the relationships are fundamentally a fraud and a way of disguising envy and competition, they are usually very unstable and full of strife and violence. They very rarely last a long time. It was only Connie's extreme submissiveness that kept her with Jo for eight years. Jo was always teasing Connie and flaunting her affairs with other women. It was only Connie's fear of the eruption of hostility that kept them together. And their relation- ship was always a stormy one. Connie said that she was stuck in a groove like a broken record that plays over and over again. She went through the cycle repeatedly with Jo and now was going through it over and over with Alice, just as she had with the other girls between them. It was the first time she had really seen this. But see- ing it is one thing and getting out of it is another. And exposing the pattern and showing Connie her basic feel- ings of hostility to other women made her increasingly anxious. Also she got into some really hysterical rages with Alice which would culminate in sex and making up. When something repressed is made conscious, it isn't easy for a patient. It is the anxiety about something that 42 causes the repression in the first place. When you re- verse the process and make something conscious, the patient often feels extremely anxious for a while. During this time, despite her anxiety, Connie reported that people were saying that she had changed a lot dur- ing her analysis. They told her she was more aggressive, wittier and more interesting. With some consciousness of her problems and the reasons behind them, she was becoming increasingly assertive. 43 Feelings of Deprivation Connie had stolen a hat from a department store and was miserable about it. She told me she had stolen things now and then all through her life and that she felt very guilty about it. I told her to try to understand what was behind it rather than judge herself. She accepted my attitude as non-condemning. Connie spontaneously said that she got a feeling of being deprived and felt compelled to take something to make up for it. Then she drifted without thinking into discussing her relationship to Alice. She said that when she got angry at Alice she felt like depriving her of sex and also tying her down so that she couldn't have it with anyone else. I pointed out to her that she had used the same word ''deprive" in connection with taking the hat and also in connection with sex with Alice. "Oh, I see," Connie said, "Alice represents somebody depriving me, so I want to deprive her to get even. And my stealing the hat is a way of making up for feeling deprived. I guess it must have been by my mother." Then she paused for a long time. "It's funny," she said, "every time I start talking about my mother I can't think of anything else to say." 45 The next session was a very revealing one and con- tinued some of the themes Connie had brought up. She started with a dream similar to one described earlier. She was trying to go towards heterosexuality as symbol- ized by a resort and had all kinds of difficulties along the way. A significant aspect of the dream was that she had to have her clothes along to go in a heterosexual direction. Also she repeated the theme in the earlier dream of not having enough time to get there, which we had interpreted as her feeling of being too old to change. She understood this much about the dream to start with. I asked her what she thought about the emphasis in the dream on her needing her clothes. I asked her whether she thought it had anything to do with the theme of the woman appearing ugly if she was exposed. She said she thought it did and that her having to expose herself to a man was a big stumbling block in the way of heterosexuality. She said, "I just thought of the time I saw an old girl friend of mine getting undressed in front of her husband and how it upset me. I remember when my sister un- dressed in front of my brother-in-law it annoyed me. I felt with clothes on she's as good as he is; without clothes she's inferior in physical appearance. When a man exposes himself, I feel he's being show-offy. When a woman exposes herself I feel she's putting herself in an inferior, unattractive light." I asked her why she felt this. "Because she hasn't got a penis. It's funny that I'm 46 saying this. For years I've been hearing about 'penis envy' and laughing it oflF. But I admit everything I say seems to point to that." I agreed with her and reminded her of the dream about the towel rack, the dreams about kinky hair being ugly, the ideas about women's genitals being dirty and the dream of her walking out of the movie when the camera went down to the girl's genitals. "I have these erotic day dreams," she said, "of women making love to men by caressing their genitals and the men forcing them to do this. I guess I feel it's better that way because men's genitals are cleaner than women's. I don't mind women being exposed from the waist up, but from the waist down I always get a feeling about its being dirty. When people used to tell me I was sexy, I felt insulted — as if they were saying I was dirty. Now I feel flattered. I remember I always thought a man takes a less unattractive position urinating than a woman does. All of a sudden I feel terribly nervous. My nerves are turning raw." After Connie had brought out so clearly all this ma- terial about "penis envy" she became very anxious. I thought that perhaps part of her feeling of being de- prived by her mother might have been connected with the idea that her mother had deprived her of a penis. However, there was no proof of this, so I filed it away for future reference. After all the uncovering of repressed material in this session and the overt, conscious anxiety that followed it, 47 I knew I could expect resistance in the next session and the prediction came true. The next time I saw her she immediately remarked that she hadn't felt like coming and proceeded to talk about non-essentials — obviously to evade the material from the previous session. I pointed this out to her and her resistance lessened. She told me that she was still amazed about having "penis envy" — something she had known about for years and never re- motely associated with herself. We connected her feel- ings of being unattractive to not having a penis. She also continued the theme of the male body being attractive and the female one unattractive. She recounted a fantasy of being in a hospital and yelling for the nurse to bring her a bed-pan. The nurse didn't come in time and she messed up the bed. The nurse bawled her out, but she felt it was the nurse's fault. Through her associations, she concluded that the nurse must stand for the mother (mothers nurse their children) and that she was blaming her mother for her being dirty — that is, having female rather than male genitals. Then she made the connection herself in this session about feeling she was deprived of a penis by her mother since her mother had created her. 48 Fears of Exploitation by Men 7 In the next few sessions Connie kept referring to the word "exploit." From her dreams it appeared that she saw a heterosexual relationship as one in which the man used or exploited the woman. From the past material it appeared that Connie thought that men considered women ugly, dirty, smelly and geni- tally inferior. Looking at them in this way there was cer- tainly no possibility that they would love them. So she brought out that she felt the only relationship she could expect from a man was one that involved exploitation. However, she had one dream which referred to a couple she knew. In reality, she had always seen the husband in this relationship as tender and considerate of his wife. Through this dream she began to cast some doubt on the concept of the relationship between men and women as necessarily exploitative. "It was funny," Connie said, "right in the dream I thought about you and I had the feeling that I had a crush on you." I asked her if she had had any similar feelings about me when she was awake and she said she hadn't. She had another dream in which a man took her for 49 all her money. This reminded her of a recent episode with a magazine salesman. He was so good-looking and charming she bought more than she could afford to. It was around this time that the idea of being at- tracted to me kept coming up in Connie's dreams. Also she was continually aware of the cost of her analysis and kept wondering if she could continue it. What was hap- pening was that she was beginning to bring into con- sciousness some of her heterosexual feelings, but she was warning herself that men were just interested in taking her money. And as far as I was concerned, her feeling was that if she let herself get attracted to me, I would keep her in analysis in order to take her money. Of course, Connie didn't acknowledge this consciously, either to me or herself. Nevertheless, the idea kept in- truding itself into her thoughts and her dreams. It was clear, though, that Connie was beginning to move in her dream life in the direction of heterosexual- ity. Consciously she still had no particular desire to change. Still, whereas before she had dreamed about a movement toward heterosexuality in a symbolic way — like going to a resort — now there was a much less dis- guised feeling, like that of having a crush on me, in her dream. None of these feelings were fully conscious as yet but these rumblings in the dreams were noteworthy. A night after this dream series she had a dream of going up in an elevator and getting off at a floor that was too high and having to come down to a lower floor. This was Connie's way of saying she had gone a little further 50 in a heterosexual direction than she could afford to with- out anxiety and she needed to retreat back to her former level. The greater consciousness of heterosexual feelings and the dangers they brought up of rejection and exploi- tation by men brought up anxiety which was followed by a period of resistance. Another theme that began to appear at this time was that of homosexuality being a prison or a cell that kept her from men. With this idea came the thought that in a homosexual relationship one girl was actually tying the other one down and in that way keeping her from being successful with men. 51 Attraction to Married Men 8 Within a few sessions Connie said she had been having vague fantasies of seeing her "straight" (heterosexual) girl friend more and maybe going on dates with men. But these were pure fantasies, she said. She would certainly not go through with such a thing and get into trouble. Along with this she con- tinued to feel that Alice was imprisoning her. An important point came up in one of the sessions during which she manifested marked resistance. I kept pressing her to tell me what she had been thinking and feeling about me. She said, "Whenever you bring up what I feel about you, I always think of this girl I know. She's a straight girl and very pretty and has a reputation of being a husband-stealer. They describe her as a girl who likes men who belong to other women, plays with them, and then gives them back." I asked her what she thought this had to do with her. Connie said, "All I can think of is I envy her and I wish I could do the same thing. The one man I did go to bed with was married. I guess I used to be attracted to married men here and there dating way back." Then Connie was silent for a moment. "The thought of my 53 father pops into my mind. My parents would have so many arguments. He would always tell my mother to go to hell. He would side with me, I would feel very angry with him and very guilty for putting my mother in such a position," I didn't analyze the trend of thought to Connie at that moment, but I felt sure that this was the beginning of Connie's going into the material about her Oedipus Complex — her wish in childhood to take her father away from her mother. The trend was so clear. She had sexual feelings about me; she connected them with the girl who was a husband stealer; then, without any seeming con- nection, she brought out the memory of her father favor- ing her over her mother and the guilt she felt about it. Why guilt? Because unconsciously as a girl she must have wanted to take her father away from her mother. Now she seemed to be repeating these feelings in rela- tionship to me. At the beginning of the next session Connie imme- diately began to describe a dream. "I dreamt about Queen Victoria. She was in the center of this big recep- tion. She was talking in a loud voice. I thought she wasn't lady-like and didn't have good breeding. I was looking for defects in her speech and I thought she wasn't worthy of being where she was. I could tell she wasn't as good as she pretended to be, but the others couldn't tell. She was on the borderline of giving herself away." That was the end of the dream, but Connie continued with her associations. "I remember people saying, 'Your 54 mother's a wonderful cook/ I remember thinking she wasn't as good as they said. I always thought it was tasteless and wasn't prepared right. She used to knock herself out getting people to like her. She'd give gifts to people and then complain about them. The picture of her being admired for certain things and my feeling that she isn't as good as they think she is, is just like the feeling about Queen Victoria in the dream." In this session, too, Connie brought out that she had noticed more sexual awareness of men, but that she was particularly aware of married men. Also in this session she related a dream in which a beautiful movie star was doing a dance and Connie suddenly took her place and continued the dance. I didn't interpret this at the time, but it certainly sounded as if Connie was bringing up material about competing with mother (or sister) and wanting to re- place her. The next session she began talking about feeling as if she was in the middle, in the way, of a relationship be- tween two "gay" girls. She felt that if she stopped her friendship with both of them, they would get along fine. From this she spontaneously went on, "My mother and father get along much better with each other since I've left. I have the feeling that something about me keeps people apart. Then when they get together, I have the feeling I was keeping them apart. When they get to- gether they've seen through me." She had a dream in which she was making love to one girl, not because she 55 wanted to, but because she wanted to beat out a third girl for her affection. I pointed out to her that this dream might mean that unconsciously winning the competition to her was more important than winning the prize. At the next session Connie began talking about a girl she knew who married a doctor. She felt that she would be dominated by him and that he would always look down on her as inferior and never really accept her. She also felt that the doctor who referred her to me had re- jected her whereas he took on her girl friend. Connie understood without my interpreting it that she was really talking about her being attracted to me and per- haps in fantasy wanting to marry me. Along with this came up feelings that I would reject her because she was unclean or that, if I did accept her, I would dominate and exploit her. Shortly after this Connie surprised herself by inviting Jo, her former steady partner, and Jo's girl friend over. She felt nervous about doing this. On the surface it seemed a way of burying the hatchet, but Connie sus- pected her own motives. Connie said she felt good telling them that at this point she had been going to analysis for about a year. She said she told them she was begin- ning to feel like a human being, but that actually inside she had so many butterflies she didn't feel human at all. Nevertheless, she felt proud of herself for having invited them since she interpreted it as meaning she had better control over her hostility. At the next session Connie told me about an evening 56 she had spent recently with two male homosexual ac- quaintances. All during the evening she kept having the feeling that she was keeping two people apart, although there was no realistic basis for such an emotion, I re- minded her that this theme of keeping two people apart had come up in our last session, to which she replied: "I know. I always felt I was the basis for the arguments be- tween by parents. I remember once my father accused my mother of infidelity. I was so upset by that I didn't know what to do." She went on to tell me about a dream she had had. She dreamed she was in a restaurant where she stole something — perhaps food, but she wasn't sure. She re- membered that somebody had left some valuable gadgets in the restaurant that were like milk-dispensers. In the dream she said, ''My God, this is really wonderful to have in your possession," Without any pause she went on to tell me that the night before an obstetrical nurse had visited her apartment and been talking about a Mongolian idiot and a hermaphrodite that she had helped deliver. Connie said the milk dispenser reminded her of the hermaphrodite. She said the gadget didn't work too well but she thought she could get it to work. "The gadget must be sexual, but I don't know which sex. We talked about a child being born with two differ- ent sexual organs. It also had something to do with food. It was supposed to dispense milk, but it was detached and seemed to be dispensing water. But of that I'm not 57 completely sure — I mean whether it was dispensing milk or water." Connie also remembered a few more incidents of her stealing in connection with the idea of stealing in the dream. I asked Connie if she could put her associations to this dream in order and tell me what she thought it meant. She said she was confused about it. She knew it had something to do with a sexual organ but she wasn't sure whether it was male or female. She said it was also con- fusing to her whether it gave milk or water. She added that the whole dream must have something to do with deprivation and making up for it by stealing. That was as far as she could go. I told her she had done very well with it and that it was a rather confusing dream. The milk dispenser repre- sented two areas of deprivation that the patient had suffered. First she had been deprived of maternal love; in this context, the dispenser was a feminine symbol — a breast that was faulty in that it did not give enough milk. Secondly the dispenser represented a male symbol that gave out water. This, of course, was a penis that gave out urine. Of this, too, the patient had been deprived and also, as she saw it, by her mother. Now the way of mak- ing up for both of these deprivations was the part about stealing that was connected with the gadget in the dream. This dream actually helped explain some of the impor- tant psychodynamics behind her stealing. Also it showed that since it was the mother who had deprived Connie 58 of the milk (love) when she was an infant, Connie was more apt to blame her mother later for being deprived of a penis. Connie understood very well. She asked was it really milk she was deprived of by her mother or was it affec- tion. I told her we couldn't be sure at this point, but it might have been both. A rejecting mother is more likely not to respond to the infant's need for the breast and is also more likely to bring about an abrupt weaning. 59 First Overtly Heterosexual Dream 9 The next session Connie had her first overtly heterosexual dream. In the dream she was going to have intercourse with a man. She was lying in bed with him. She decided to get up and take a shower with the intention of going back and having intercourse with him. She felt very much attracted physically to the man. Then she started to go to the room of one of her gay girl friends but the door was closed. Right after this dream Connie had been nervous and had insomnia. This difficulty sleeping happened the next night as well. In response to this clear expression of heterosexuality in her dreams, Connie had naturally become increasingly anx- ious. She had gotten up with difficulty and it was only with great effort that she got herself to her analytic session. After telling me the dream, Connie was silent and I interpreted to her that this dream probably made her quite anxious and had brought up a resistance. After this heterosexual dream Connie had another dream which she related to me. This second dream es- sentially represented her going back to homosexuality but not finding it satisfactory. Connie said, "In the first 61 dream I could have left the door open to go into my gay girl friend's room after I thought of having intercourse with the man. But since the door was closed and, since I dreamt the dream, I must have wanted it closed. Then I guess I got scared and in the next dream ran back to homosexuality, but I didn't find it satisfactory." I asked her who the man was that she was in bed with. She associated him with one of her neighbors — a young married man. She said she thought the idea of tak- ing a shower was connected to her notion of the woman's being unclean. At this point she brought up the memory of what had happened at the time of her sister's death. She remembered her father lifting the sheet off her sister, touching her and saying, "She's still warm." Connie felt very upset about this and thought that this was an in- vasion of her sister's privacy. She had always felt that her father was too interested in private things about her and her sister. He always wanted to look at her bowel move- ment. He kept taking her from doctor to doctor and would always be there when the doctors examined her. Then Connie remembered how he had spoken to her in the car at her sister's funeral. He had told her that now that her sister was gone he would be nicer to her. She remembered a feeling of "smug satisfaction." Connie had unconsciously drifted from my asking her about who the man in the dream was into talking about her father and his being too personal and intimate with her and her satisfaction at his being closer to her when her sister died. I didn't want to push this interpretation with 62 Connie yet. I knew she would come to it soon enough herself and I didn't want to increase her anxiety. Right after talking about this, she shifted to talking about a girl friend of hers who was ''not out for her good." I pointed out that she had used these very words in talking about her mother. At this point Connie returned to the fact that the man she was in bed with was a married man and that this theme had appeared before. She said she wondered about these soap operas about old maids in love with married men. They never marry because they can't marry the person they really love. Again I thought Connie must be referring to her unresolved feelings about her father, but I said nothing. Then Connie started talking about the girl who had won Jo away from her. "If Jo repre- sented a parental figure I would try to reverse the situa- tion and win her back." I asked what parent Jo would stand for in this particular triangle. Connie said, "My father." Then she seemed puzzled. "But no one had taken Jo away from me when I went to bed with the married man," she added. "That is, there was no rival for Jo at the time." I suggested that perhaps the triangle referred to by this dream was one which had existed earlier in her life — much earlier. She answered automatically — not fully comprehending the meaning of what she was saying, "I remember feeling 6? very guilty every time my father fought with my mother in my behalf." At this point Connie had all the pieces of the jig-saw puzzle out and it was quite clear how they could be put together. However, there was still enough resistance pres- ent to keep her from seeing completely what was very obvious — namely, that when she was a child she wanted to win her father away from her mother. It was so obvi- ous that there was no need for me to interpret it. I knew that very soon Connie would get the message, if she had not done so already. 64 Violence and Resistance 10 They had started arguing at a party which had been attended also by Jo and her girl friend. The latter two quarreled also, and theirs erupted into physical violence. Alice accused Connie of making a play for Jo. Connie denied it, but they kept bickering until they got back to Connie's apartment. Then Alice let loose. She called Connie a "no good bitch" and in- sisted that she was still trying to "make" Jo. They screamed louder and louder, with Connie accusing Alice of giving Jo's girl friend the eye. Alice threw an ash tray at Connie, who retaliated by slapping Alice several times over as hard as she could. Grabbing a fistful of Connie's hair, Alice pulled her down to the floor where they rolled over and over, pulling at one another's hair, punch- ing each other and scratching. Finally Alice freed herself, and walked out, hurling curses at Connie. "I knew I wasn't making a play for Jo," Connie said, "but I always feel uncomfortable around her and her girl friend. I feel I'm not being honest." "I see myself as having two sides," Connie continued. "One side I see as being ugly, not sincere — as if I'm trying to put one over on people. Alice brought out the beast in 65 me last night. She said, 'I see you as you really are.' I got very upset. I was trying to keep the ugly side out of the picture. Last night it just exploded." In talking about homosexuality, Connie was partly motivated by a desire to get off the subject of her rela- tionship to her father and mother. However, this was not really a resistance, since there was a connection, which was in the process of coming out, between her past feel- ings about her parents and her feelings of insincerity and anger towards her homosexual partner. However, in the next session there was a real resistance. Connie couldn't remember any dreams and her free association wandered from one inconsequential to an- other. Also she was annoyed at me for a couple of minor things I had said. She said she was thinking about cutting down her sessions to twice a week. I pointed out all these various evidences of resistance to her. I told her I thought the anger towards me and the desire to cut down was just her way of avoiding talking about something important that had come up during the last session or two. Of course, this was completely unconscious and not a conscious unwillingness to co- operate. Connie understood well the meaning of resist- ance and almost always when I interpreted it for her, she would get back on the track. But she had completely forgotten the dream she had. Right after my interpreting the resistance, it came back to her. However, she didn't do anything much with it. I had to take her back to the exact point where the resistance began before she could 66 pick up the therapeutic Hne. It isn't enough to interpret to a patient that a resistance exists. You must show them exactly what brought up the resistance. I told Connie that the last important material seemed to be her frank sexual dream and her discussion of her guilt feelings about separating her mother and father. That did the trick. The resistance ended and Connie picked up from where she had left off. 'That's what must be disturbing me because I feel so odd about Jo and her girl friend. I'm sure that's the reason. It must be because I feel dishonest with them — as if I want to sep- arate them and get Jo for myself." She went on to say, "My mother had a nasty habit of saying, 'Don't tell your father or he'll just take it out on me.' I had to listen to her complaints about him, but couldn't do anything to defend her against him. Why should she do that unless she was exaggerating how bad my father was? It's clear I didn't feel my mother was being quite honest with me. It was annoying to be told by everyone how wonderful my mother was when I really didn't think so." I merely pointed out that Connie felt she had adopted some of the techniques of deception that her mother used. 67 Fear of Death or Disfigurement in Heterosexuality 11 The next session Connie started off with a dream. "It was something about my forgetting my pocketbook. I was rushing back to get it. I had left a wallet full of money in it. Then I went away for a week on vacation without having found it, and I was frantically worried about where I left it all the time that I was gone. When I found it, it was in front of the house where I was born. I had left it outside so that anyone could come along and grab it. I think at the end I found it intact. Nobody took it. Somewhere else in the dream I was wearing a coat and it was too tight. I couldn't close it — couldn't manage to button it." Connie's first remark after telling me the dream was a question asking me if a pocketbook in a dream always stood for the female genitals. This symbol had appeared in previous dreams and through her own associations she had discovered what it symbolized to her. She used it to symbolize the female genitals because of its shape, the fact that it is a void that something is put into, and the 69 fact that it is strictly associated with women (men don't use pocketbooks ) . I told Connie we would have to see where her asso- ciations led us. She began talking right away about being attracted to a "gay boy" she had met the night before. This was one of the first times she had consciously felt that attracted to a boy for many years. She described herself as "mentally flirting" with him. Then she said, "I wondered if the dream didn't have something to do with my being afraid of losing my homosexuality. My attitude was, 'How can I be so careless?' I was mad at myself for not watching my possessions more carefully. Oh, I see, the idea is I connect my leaving my vagina around for any man to pick up with the idea of my being attracted to men now. Then I get anxious because of a move in a heterosexual direction." I connected the tight overcoat which couldn't be buttoned with a v^dsh to be pregnant. I noted that she had left the pocketbook in the dream in front of her old house, presumably for father to pick up, but I didn't interpret that at this time. Connie acknowledged that for the first time hetero- sexuality was beginning to appear like a real possibility to her. She said she found herself looking at the man she met in terms of prospecting for a new bed mate. After these revelations, Connie immediately began to feel anxious and showed signs of resistance, of which she herself was aware. For instance, she returned to the theme of my exploitation of her. Even as we were talking 70 about her move in the heterosexual direction, Connie said, "I feel real frightened just now telling about it." I reassured her that her fears were unrealistic and that we would discover what she was frightened about. Nevertheless, the resistance continued for the remain- der of this session. She manifested resistance during the following session also. However, after I had interpreted it for her, Connie said, "Long ago I used to think that when I married I wouldn't enjoy the physical relationship with my hus- band the way other girls did, that I would be below average. In the first six months with Jo, I didn't experi- ence any physical sensation, but I pretended I did. And all the time with her I felt I wasn't getting as much satisfaction as anybody else was. I got more satisfaction with Alice than with Jo, but I still feel it isn't enough. It isn't like the rest of the world gets. Lately I've been trying to get on the good side of Jo's girl friend. Do you suppose I'm trying to break up their relationship?" There was a silence; then Connie said, "I just had a horrible thought. It was about an electric heater falling on a bed. Everything caught fire. I was either disfigured or dead." I asked her what she thought about it. "I thought it had something to do with sex. It's so screwy, but it seems as if the heater falling on the bed equals sex. So having sex will lead to my being dead or disfigured. How distorted can you get? I have to think about that. It might have to do with my feeling below par sexually." 71 I told Connie that, if sex represented something to her unconsciously that could lead to her death or dis- figurement, it would follow that thinking of herself as subpar sexually or even sexless would be a good defense against anxiety. At this point in her life Connie wanted very much to break up with Alice. Alice was following her around, calling her up in the middle of the night, insulting her, and generally becoming a nuisance. Connie was getting angrier and angrier at her. In her analysis she continued to develop this new and important theme about heterosexuality leading to death or disfigurement. During one of our sessions she de- scribed a dream in which she had tried to light a stove, but was unable to do so. I helped her see the connection between the stove and the electric heater. Connie said, "I guess the stove was me. It's sort of as if my mechanism broke down and I can't lead a normal sex life." During this same session Connie began to develop another theme that was destined to help us understand her fears of sex. She had a dream in which she was in bed in a room in her family's house. She was trying to take a nap. There were two other people in a bed in the room, but she could not remember whether they were male or female. She remembered that her mother and father had something to do with the dream, but she could not remember what exactly. Something was said about an invasion of privacy. She also remembered an- noyance at being awakened from sleep by these two 72 people. In her associations to the dream she recalled being annoyed at her parents for arguing at night and keeping her awake. Then she began talking about how her parents used to say that, if her sister hadn't gotten married and had a child, she would have lived longer. I pointed out the connection between this and the idea she had expressed of heterosexuality leading to death. I didn't interpret anything further to Connie at this point, but I considered explaining the connection of the theme about sex leading to death with these other themes — invasion of privacy, annoyance at being awak- ened by parents' arguments, sleeping in the same room as a couple. To me it all added up to one thing: Connie must have been awakened one night as a little girl when she was sleeping in her parents' room and witnessed intercourse. Through a child's eyes, intercourse looks as if the father is hurting or even killing the mother. This is why, it seemed to me, this material began to come into focus at the same time that the idea of sex leading to destruction appeared. At the next session Connie related two dreams. In the first dream she was looking at a couple who were in an apartment across the street. The other reminded her of a recent attraction to an older man with a foreign accent who seemed to her domineering, harsh and dictatorial. Again I felt she was following along on the same theme in these two dreams. I thought the first referred to an early witnessing of parental intercourse and the second referred to her attraction to her father at the time this 73 occurred and the accompanying view of him as a harsh and damaging person. I still did not make either of these interpretations to Connie, however, because I was aware that she was not ready for them at the time. She was putting up a good deal of resistance. Moreover, it was clear that she, herself, was going in the direction of these insights, so I saw no point in pushing her into a position where her resistance would be increased. There followed a couple of sessions which were char- acterized by especially strong resistance despite the fact that I didn't make these interpretations. Then in the next few sessions Connie recounted dreams which re- peated former themes. There was a dream about the female genitals being ugly and there was another about a girl trying to break up a couple, Connie called this girl a despicable home-wrecker before she realized that the girl in the dream stood for herself. She remembered as a child that she felt unaccountably and secretly pleased when a cousin of hers got a divorce. 74 Trouble With Alice 12 Connie was having a lot of trouble with Alice, and she detoured slightly off the dream material to tell me about it. "I have a raging hostility against Alice this morning. I can't think of anything else. She follows me, spies on me, waits outside my door. Last night something snapped. She followed me home. I de- cided not to let her get away with it. I kept asking her to go. She said, 'You can't drop me just like that' Her hostility frightened me. I tried to shut the door in her face. She forced her way in and threw all kinds of insults at me. She said how cruel I was. It ended up in a physical fight again. She said she would kill me. Later she called to apologize. This morning I woke up in a rage. I feel I want to kill her. I don't want to let her get away with this persecution. She finds just the words to hit my weak spots. She said, 'You're so obvious when you go after somebody.' I don't like to be considered obvious. She said Jo left me because I was mean and cruel and in- capable of feelings. There's a complete lack of sympathy and understanding. I was afraid Alice might really kill me. I had visions of my lying dead and a big scandal; Alice in prison and my parents disgraced." 75 After telling me about the real situation, Connie told me a dream. "I remember dreaming about a man. I sus- pected he was tr}ing to harm me. I became afraid as he approached me, and when he got to me I pleaded with him not to hurt me," Then Connie continued with her associations. "The man might have resembled you or my father. He was dark and had on a leather jacket like a working man. I was a little frightened when I woke up from the dream. I felt I might have avoided this man, but I was careless." Connie didn't associate this dream with the recent material about heterosexuality causing death or disfigure- ment, so I pointed out the connection. Also, although I didn't mention this to Connie, the fact that she asso- ciated the threatening male with her father indicated to me that here might also be a connection with the ma- terial which pointed to an early witnessing of parental intercourse. Connie said she had been thinking about the idea of getting married but felt she would be tied down and resent the responsibility. "How easy gay life is," she said. I said it didn't sound so easy to me, referring to the ma- terial about her argument with Alice. The problem with Alice got so severe that Connie became utterly taken up with it. She couldn't analyze in the next session or do anything but talk about it. Alice had phoned her, telegraphed her, hung around her office and home, and kept threatening to kill her. Once she put her hands around Connie's throat and almost choked her. Connie was very worried. She didn't want to call the 76 police because she figured it might come out that they were homosexual. I didn't give any advice because I felt that Connie was capable of handling the situation. In the next session Connie told me a dream about a big fish swimming in the water. He was a big bully and scared everyone. This, of course, was a continuation of the theme of Connie's fear of being hurt by men. The fish is often used in dreams as a symbol of a penis be- cause of its shape. However, I didn't interpret this to Connie at this time, and she did not make the connec- tion herself. The situation with Alice was still very bad. Friends had found her hanging around outside her apartment and insisted that she should be taken to the police, but Connie wouldn't let them. Meanwhile, Connie was be- coming increasingly nervous over the situation. She was also very angry at Alice and was now sometimes over- come by the sort of depression and insomnia that had brought her into therapy originally. In talking about Alice, she said, "Now I feel this per- son I was struggling in vain to get affection from is turning against me in such an aggressive way. If I so much as say she doesn't really care, people will say I'm silly. I think she's not capable of caring for me the way I want to be cared for. She's using me for her own needs. It sure sounds as if I'm talking about my mother, doesn't it?" I said it did sound like some of the things she had said about her mother and I asked her to go on. "I have a nasty habit of blocking every time I mention 77 my mother. Why did I feel that way toward my mother? All I can think of is her trying to turn me against my father, always telling me my father was no good. She would get me angry with him, then she would say I shouldn't tell him what she said. Why did she tell me then? She was using me for something. She wanted me to dislike my father. Who knows what she told him about me? She was playing one against the other. All my troubles are her fault." Obviously there was provocation for Connie's anger with Alice. However, it was also clear that all of the anger was not simply derived from the present situation. Part of it was a displacement of her past anger with her mother, and it was this that was particularly upsetting to Connie. I explained this to her, commenting that this understanding might make it easier for her to handle her feelings. At the next session Connie reported that Alice had let up on her. Now Connie felt that she needed Alice and she began to desire her very much physically. She also saw once again the cycle she was in with Alice and her other homosexual partners: the strong sexual attraction, the loss of sexual interest, then mounting hostility usually culminating in a physical fight, and the revival of sexual interest. Connie saw the cycle and was disgusted with it. She felt it was absolutely necessary to break it. She de- scribed a dream in which she was on a stage and poured a bottle of champagne down the front of her bathing suit. It ruined the suit and she looked terrible. Connie thought that the act of pouring the champagne onto the bathing suit symbohzed sexual intercourse. The ruin of the suit and her appearance referred to the idea of sex leading to disfigurement. She associated to the dream the notion that women lose their figures and their at- tractiveness after they get married and have children. At the next session Connie brought in another dream about being disfigured or damaged by sex. She dreamed she had a penny with a prong on it stuck in her and it was mutilating her. She quickly associated "penny" to "penis" by the sound and saw she was repeating the theme of fear of physical injury by men. Now she was narrowing down the injury in terms of its being inflicted specifically by the penis. This was the idea I had had about the dream of the fish that was a bully. Connie had come easily to see it for herself with this dream about a penny. She continued this theme in her next dream. In this dream she had a baby and was worried about her body being disfigured. At this time she had a tremendous urge to try to see Alice and to be with her sexually, but she kept fighting off the urge. This situation was resolved when Alice left town. Meanwhile, however, Connie had begun to get interested in another girl, Liz, who was liv- ing with someone else. Connie recalled in connection with her fears of being killed that she had a very traumatic tonsillectomy when she was a child. She hadn't been prepared for it and was very frightened. 79 Crush on Liz 13 Connie came in wearing a pink sweater at the next session. This was very unusual for her, since she usually wore dark suits and white blouses. She talked spontaneously about wanting to wear less tailored, more feminine clothing. She also said that she had accidentally spilled a bottle of perfume over her clothes that morning. Both Connie and I considered this a slip that was unconsciously motivated. I asked her what she thought it might mean. She said she felt women who used a lot of perfume were cheap and that she should be ladylike. She said it was whorish, like a prostitute. She said, "Maybe I think that if I let loose, I'll be cheap and whorish." I pointed out that the slip about the perfume in addi- tion to the pink sweater might indicate an unconscious interest on her part in me, but that she looked at this interest as being cheap and whorish. She seemed a little anxious at this suggestion and was silent for a few mo- ments. Then she talked about her mounting interest in Liz now that Alice had left town. The crush on Liz had led her to plan to go to Liz's apartment for the weekend and go to bed with her. Liz was the prettiest of all the girls she had ever been involved with, according to Connie. About Connie's height, she was very warm and pleasant and had a soft, motherly quality. She had blue eyes and blonde hair and looked like an All-American girl. Her figure was sturdy but excellent. She came from a family that had been rich and socially prominent at one time but had lost its money. Connie said Liz looked like a golden goddess to her — clean and fresh and strong. Yet she felt cheap about going with her, she said. It was all right, she felt, for a man to be promiscuous and want sex, but it was bad and cheap for a woman to want it. She knew this attitude didn't make sense, but she was aware that it was a strongly held conviction of hers. There was a good deal of resistance during the next session, undoubtedly because Connie had expressed her heterosexuality somewhat with the pink sweater and the perfume. Nevertheless, she related an interesting dream. She dreamed she was on vacation with two gay girls. They had to go to the bathroom, but the bathrooms were either too dirty or else the plumbing was defective. Also they had to eat, but they couldn't find a place to eat. Then someone in the dream mentioned picking up some turnips. Connie said she had been eating turnips as a potato substitute as a way of losing weight and that she had been getting a little tired of them. She said that in the dream there was an "obstacle against performing natural functions." This she thought might refer to her block 82 against having intercourse. In the dream it was connected with something being dirty. Thus, the first part of the dream seemed to mean that she was blocked from having intercourse because of anticipating rejection from the man since he would view the female genitals as dirty. The last part of the dream and its connection to this Connie saw well. "The idea of the turnips and my asso- ciation of getting tired of them as a substitute for po- tatoes must mean I'm getting tired of homosexuality as a substitute for heterosexuality. Eating potatoes (hetero- sexuality) leads to having children and getting fat and ugly. Eating turnips (homosexuality) leads to frustration but there is no physical disfigurement." Connie was obviously dissatisfied with homosexuality unconsciously and to a great degree consciously. How- ever, her fears connected with heterosexuality were much too strong for her to do anything more than have dreams and occasional fantasies in that direction. At the same time that she was talking so much about heterosexuality in her analytic sessions, she was developing a stronger crush on Liz. Connie said herself that this feeling for Liz seemed to be "a protection and a protest" against the dangers connected with heterosexuality, but that knowing this didn't subdue her feelings. She talked about how pretty Liz was, what a beautiful figure she had, how the other girls had approved of her choice. Connie began thinking more and more of breaking up the relationship between Liz and her girl friend and getting involved with Liz. She said that Liz wanted to be "the complete 83 and only man" in the relationship to her, that Liz was the aggressor and that Jo had been like that too. She seemed to bear the closest resemblance to Jo of anyone that Connie had met since their breakup. Then Connie said spontaneously, "I guess what I'm saying is that it's closer to a heterosexual kind of rela- tionship than any others I've had since Jo. That's because Jo and Liz are closer in their personality and even in their sexual behavior to being like men. I guess the closer I come to playing the feminine role, the better I feel — except if there's a real man on the other end of it." Meanwhile, during this courting period with Liz, there was a good deal of resistance. Connie remembered fewer dreams and she spoke mostly about Liz. She said she consciously didn't want to continue analyzing herself because it might spoil their relationship. She was getting so much enjoyment out of her feeling of being loved and loving that while she was already beginning to under- stand that all homosexual experiences and relationships would ultimately lead to strife and unhappiness, the im- mediate physical and emotional pleasures outweighed her desire to understand herself. Nevertheless, she no- ticed and admitted that she was more easily aroused sexually after a fight. Her role with Liz was essentially a passive one, just as it had been with Jo. Liz was the aggressor and practiced genital kissing. In her relation- ship with Alice the roles had been more interchangeable, Connie taking the active role at times. She preferred the kind of relationship she had with Jo and Liz. 84 At the next session Connie told me that Liz was con- templating leaving her girl friend and moving in with her. The girl friend stormed into Connie's apartment and made a hysterical scene, accusing her of taking Liz away from her and refusing to leave. Finally Liz arrived with a group of girls who succeeded together in evicting her. However, there was a lot of argument among the girls about who was right. All these arguments and fights made Connie nervous, but she said they didn't terrify her the way they used to. Actually, Connie realized, she got a secret pleasure out of the suffering of Liz's former girl friend. She said, "I still have it in my mind about breaking up couples. I don't know what this thing is with me. Does it have anything to do with my mother and father? That is, the part that I enjoy this? Does that mean I wanted to do this with my mother and father?" I said it sounded logical. She continued, 'Then my mother and I must have been in competition. It seems to be more important to enter into the competition than to get the winnings." I asked her what they were competing for. She said, "For my father. But I have the feeling it was more im- portant to win the competition than to actually get my father. I guess that must mean that it was more important for me to express my hostility to my mother than to win my father. It makes me feel guilty to say that. I'm not really sincere in what I seem to be trying to do. Suppose I was competing with my mother for my father and I 85 didn't want my father, then I'd feel miserable about being a low character." Thus Connie followed up the leads she had brought up in past dreams and associations and got to under- stand the triangular situation herself. However, in addi- tion, she saw that it was not just a simple triangle. Because obviously she had hostility to her mother that went beyond the triangle and that must have originated prior to the development of the sexual triangle. Also she realized in her next few sentences and from what she said about not wanting the prize as much as the victory that, insofar as her feelings about her father were con- cerned, there was something more than a simple un- complicated triangle. Her feelings about her father were not uniformly positive; there was present a good deal of fear of him and anger towards him. 86 Connie Wants to Escape from Analysis 14 All this was followed by a strong resistance reaction. She slept through the next session and did not appear at all. Meanwhile, Liz — apparently fearing Connie's analysis — kept telling her that analysts cared only for money. Connie told me about a dream in which she opened the door to the apartment of a gay boy she knew. He was standing nude but he had no genitals. The whole area was smudged out in the dream. Then she talked about not feeling sure she was being sincere with Liz. She felt that some day she might be "straight" and here she was getting involved again. She said, "I try to be sincere and let her know not to plan on the future, but I can't. I act like there's a future, at the same time that I say there isn't." She identified herself with the gay boy in the dream in terms of his being insincere and "bitchy." When I asked her what she meant, she said, "Like pre- tending to offer something — only you haven't got it to offer. Is that what I'm doing to Liz? I have a general feeling that I'm a phony." I told her that the dream seemed to indicate that she 87 felt she was pretending to Liz that she had a penis when she really didn't. That was what made her feel like a phony. She didn't understand this too well, but she looked up at a painting in the room of a woman holding a sickle. She said, "I don't know what that woman is holding, but it looks like a witch's broom." I pointed out that the witch with the broom was another way of her saying the woman with the penis. I explained to Connie that I thought that the reason she had missed her last session v/as because she had brought up the material about competing with her mother for her father. She said, "I feel like I'm pushed to the point where I have to face things and be respon- sible. Every once in a while I have to retrieve — I mean go back." I asked Connie what she thought this slip meant. Why had she said "retrieve" instead of "retreat"? She said "Well, 'retrieve' means to get something back that you lost. It must be that I'm trying to get back my penis." I told her that this would certainly fit in with what she had been saying. She had to pretend to have a penis and make love to women when her anxieties about heterosexuality grew too strong. But in doing this she felt like a phony because, of course, she didn't really have a penis. At the next session Connie talked about Liz. "I guess I'm in love again. She said she wanted to live with me. I'm tempted, but I'm not going to. It's a struggle, 88 though. Certain times we're friendly and intimate. Then sometimes we're hke strangers. Sometimes I feel she doesn't like me and I feel the same way about her. Last night I was compelled to tell her I felt very deeply to- wards her because I was afraid something might be going wrong. I've always been preoccupied with how soon they'll get tired of me. This time I wonder about myself — how soon I'll get tired. What bothers me is that I might be a phony and I feel I could change any mo- ment." I pointed out to her that she was supposed to be at the height of her love and courtship at this time, which made it curious that she should have such conflicting thoughts and feelings. She realized that she always felt this in- security in her homosexual relationships and wondered if it was love or just an obsession or infatuation. In the next session Connie described a dream about being at a cheap Mardi Gras in a place like Coney Island. Alice was looking for her and she was trying to escape. Then she saw Frank Sinatra. He was dying. She wanted to help him and went into a neighborhood ice cream parlor to order some food for him. The woman who ran the place made her wait a long time and she became very angry. Finally she got back to Frank Sinatra and Alice left her alone with him, but it was too late. He had died. Right after telling me the dream Connie told me that she was really "hit hard" by her feelings for Liz. Then she told me about a movie she had seen in which a girl's 89 whole life was ruined as the result of being raped. How- ever, in telling me about the movie Connie made an- other slip. Instead of saying "raped," she said "muti- lated." I encouraged her to associate to the dream. To the Mardi Gras part, she brought up the idea that it was phony — that everyone was pretending to have fun but they really weren't. Connie connected this with homo- sexual life, which was a pretense and not as "gay" as its name. She remembered that she had had a previous dream about Frank Sinatra and that she had associated him to me in a number of ways, one being that we were both Italian. Also, she had been reading about him and his fiery temper. She realized that she was trying to get away from homosexuality in the dream as repre- sented by Alice and the Mardi Gras and was trying to allow her feelings to come out again toward me. The owner of the candy store she associated to her depriving mother who made her wait for food. So it was the mother figure in the dream that was impeding her es- cape from homosexuality and standing in the way of her moving toward me. The fact that she had me dying in the dream showed that there was so much anxiety at this point (perhaps connected with the mutilation idea) that she had to cut off her heterosexual feelings. Actually, this paralleled the real life situation, for Connie became more and more deeply involved with Liz. She continued to talk about how Liz was the best partner since Jo and how she got more enjoyment out of 90 their sexual relations than she had ever had before. She described herself as "bursting out sexually," and told me that she had several orgasms in one night with Liz, who played pretty much the dominant and aggressive sexual role. Liz would kiss Connie passionately, get on top of her and press her, and fondle and then kiss her breasts, her body, and finally her genitals. Liz made every effort to give their bodies complete contact, keeping their genitals as close as possible. She would take Connie in her arms and repeat the kissing process until Connie achieved an orgasm. It was difficult for Connie to dis- cuss what her sexual activity consisted of, but she was a bit freer this time and was able to respond to my ques- tions about it. During this period Connie brought in no dreams and there was a general resistance throughout the sessions. Temporarily at least homosexuality was satisfying. I was continually told how thoughtful Liz was, how she spent a lot of money on her, how attractive she was, etc. Connie felt that she had nothing to talk about and asked again if we couldn't cut down the number of ses- sions to twice a week. I told her that I didn't think it would be a good idea for her to make such a decision while she was in a resistance period. Then she asked me whether I didn't think she could be a well-adjusted homosexual. I replied that she hadn't seemed to feel very well-adjusted to it up until now, but we would have to see about the future. Nevertheless, she continued to talk about wanting to live with Liz. Of course, I didn't 91 advise her one way or the other. Although she wanted to, she was restrained by the fear that hostihty might build up between them and that there might be a repetition of the pattern that had characterized her previous relation- ships with girls. During the next session she recounted a dream about living with another girl. She described herself as being smothered by the relationship and losing her individual- ity. Moreover, the setting was one of poverty, deprivation and uncleanliness. Once again apparent was the con- trast between her conscious wish for a homosexual rela- tionship and her unconscious distaste for it. I pointed out to Connie that this dream was very similar to the dream she had had about camping out with the gay girls, having to eat turnips, and being without toilet facilities. It was at the next session that Connie related a dream in which Alice had her confined to a mental institution. Connie asked for a pill which would knock her out. Later she escaped, but she was followed by a ''horrible man," whose design it was to return her to the institution. Con- nie associated the institution with analysis and the man who was following her to me. She associated the knock- out pill to her wanting to forget about her problems and avoid having to face them. To the fact that Alice had sent her to the institution she associated that it was her relationship with Alice which had prompted her to seek analytic help. (It was shortly after she met Alice that she began analysis.) Obviously — as Connie herself real- 92 ized — she wanted very much at this point to get away from analysis and me. "I guess I must be blaming you for wanting me to go straight," she said. '1 have a feeling that leading a good homosexual life conflicts with my therapy." I reminded Connie that it was only at the last session that she had described homosexual life as being a pov- erty-stricken, deprived, dirty situation in which she was smothered and lost her individuality. This demonstrated that it was not I who was pushing her away from it and towards heterosexuality, but forces inside herself. Con- nie acknowledged this. She also associated the dirtiness and loss of individuality to her mother, who had always made her feel as if she wasn't a person and couldn't get along on her own. Moreover, her mother had never kept the house neat and clean, according to Connie. Despite these insights, however, while Connie was falling more and more deeply in love with Liz, she continued to put up a great deal of resistance and there were few new in- sights. After about four sessions, however, the resistance broke, and Connie began to get back on the track again. She told me a dream. "I dreamt that Liz went back to her old girl friend. I saw them together and I felt tre- mendous hostility to Liz. Her attitude was that she was through with me and that I had already served my pur- pose. Her former girl friend looked very smug. I grabbed a hold of her face and I was trying to disfigure her. When I saw she was in pain I stopped. In another part of the 93 dream I got a new red car. I parked it in the middle of God knows where. I was careless with it. When I left, there was a mix-up and some boys stopped me from using it. Then I started to worry about the car being dirty, unkempt, unprotected and uncared for. At one point I was thinking of parking it in a safe place, but I never got around to it." Connie started associating to the dream. "In the first part I had hostility towards both of them, Liz and her girl friend. It's the same sort of dream I used to have about Jo when we were living together. I remember I used to feel that Jo was exploiting me and also that she didn't want me to be successful or on my own. I wonder what the red car symbolizes. I was annoyed because it was becoming old and second-hand and I didn't even get a chance to use it." I agreed with Connie's insight that she seemed to be having feelings about Liz similar to those she had had about Jo in terms of Liz's using her. I asked her what came to her mind about the car. "Well," she said, "red is a sexy color. Maybe the boys in the dream are Jo and Liz; they look like boys sometimes. They are trying to prevent me from using the car. Red stands for fire, too, and fire is sex." I helped Connie to see that the car must stand for her vagina and her own sexuality. She not only had said that red was a sexy color, but she had also described the car as dirty and unkempt, and she had many times in the past referred to female genitals in these terms. Also, 94 the idea of the car being unprotected and in danger had previously been expressed by Connie as characteristic of the female genitals. She apparently felt that in tying herself up with Jo or Liz she could never gratify her feminine sexual desires. Tliis was what her associations about the car going to waste before she could use it meant. Thus, by putting together the two parts of the dream, it appeared that Connie was expressing a great deal of anger at her homosexual partners for exploiting her, tying her up, and keeping her from expressing her- self sexually with men. 95 Anger With Men 15 The next session ushered in a new trend. Connie stopped talking about her relationships with women and began to discuss her feelings about men. She spent most of the session talking about how angry she was at her boss. She had been sick and called in that she could not come into work. The boss had been nasty and implied that she was faking and ought to get back without further delay. She came to see me right before going back to work. She said, "I dread going in this morning. I'm loaded with hostility. I think I could spit in his eye. I've been angry and upset for the past three days since I talked to the boss. He had no right to talk to me that way. Who the hell does he think he is? Why should this upset me so much? I feel highly justi- fied in being angry at him, but this is lasting three days." I told her I agreed that this situation must have touched on some past resentment or it probably would not be so marked or so prolonged. She continued, "He doesn't care whether I live or die as long as I don't in- convenience him. He shows me no personal considera- tion at all. I feel I'm just being used. I'd have to drop dead to convince him I was sick." Then she continued 97 spontaneously and without pause, "I called my father and told him I wouldn't be down to see them because I wasn't feeling well. His voice got very solemn. I hate to call up and tell him I'm sick. He jumps at the chance to hear that I'm sick. He kept taking me around from doctor to doctor when I was a child until he finally found some quack who told him I was sick. When I tell him there isn't anything wrong with me, he acts like an un- dertaker going through a routine. He overplays the part of the concerned father. It's too dramatic. He always makes you feel as if you're ready for the hospital or the grave." I pointed out to Connie that she obviously felt his concern was not sincere and that in overdoing it he was giving away his basic lack of interest. He was overcom- pensating. I indicated that she must have picked this up as a child. She continued, "It seemed to me as if he was more concerned with keeping me sick than keeping me happy. If he wanted to make me happy, he wouldn't have had that undertaker face. I felt he preferred me to be sick. He didn't treat me like a human being, much less his daughter. I felt I was being used again. He wanted me to be sick and in bed maybe because he thought he couldn't control me otherwise." I pointed out how Connie had shifted spontaneously from talking about her anger with the boss to talking about her anger towards her father. Though the surface reaction they showed was different — the boss was incon- 98 siderate whereas her father was overconcerned — essen- tially, in her eyes, they were both using her for their own needs and not caring for her as a person. Connie started the next session by telling me about an argument she had had with her boss. She had also quarreled with her father when she went home for a visit. Then she told me a dream. "I was walking in the street. I saw some airplanes and zeppelins flying around. People were talking about dropping bombs. Something indistinguishable dropped from one. I said. My God, the A-bomb or the H-bomb. I lay face down in the street. I was sort of resigned. I said, 'I hope it comes and I can get it over with quickly.' " Connie said she had had a dream like that before but she had felt more nervous in it. Then she told me another dream. "I was showing some kind of toy like a gun to a little boy about nine or ten. I had to insert something into the gun. The ob- ject plus the gun in the dream were supposed to be sug- gestive or symbolic of a penis. I knew it and the little boy knew it. He looked on interestedly." Connie's first association was that after the last ses- sion she had gone to Liz's apartment, lay down and felt like having sex. In the middle of their sex play, there had been an air raid alert and Connie had felt very nervous. Her first association to the second part of the dream was, "It was almost as if I was trying to show the boy how to use his wicked little toy. I think I was try- ing to excite him sexually." Since she had told me that the gun stood for a penis, 99 I suggested that it was as if she were playing with the young boy's penis. It was similar to some of the fantasies she had about men that she had told me about pre- viously, I asked her why she thought it was a little boy in the dream. Connie said, "I guess little boys aren't as dangerous as men." I then brought Connie back to the first dream. She said, "I was resigned to my fate. There was something horrible about dying, though. I was going to be disin- tegrated in a couple of seconds." I asked her about the airplanes and zeppelins. "They seem like male symbols, penises. It seemed as if I was going to be killed by heterosexual sex, but that was my fate." I said, "Perhaps in the second dream you found a way of having heterosexual sex without its being dangerous." Connie had obviously returned to the material about her anger towards men, her expectation of exploitation by them and especially her fear of damage by the penis. The second dream showed that she was reducing her fear by enjoying playing with a little boy's penis. The danger must, therefore, have been at least in part connected with the size of the penis. Perhaps, also, playing with it manually rather than having intercourse meant there was danger connected with its insertion into the vagina. As I anticipated, tlie next two sessions were character- ized by a great deal of resistance. Whenever Connie had touched on this fear, she had always dropped it rapidly and gone into a period of resistance or a switch to less charged material. Along with the resistance there was lOO an intensification of her homosexual feehngs, a desire to stop analysis, and the other usual concomitants. She even forgot completely major parts of the previous ses- sion, I pointed out the resistance to her and went over the material in the last session that seemed to have brought it up, but the interpretation didn't bring about an end to the resistance. During the following session, Connie said that she just didn't feel like talking. How- ever, she did tell me that she had seen "The Pit of Lone- liness," a French movie about homosexuality. It had upset her greatly; she said she thought the title was very appropriate. "There's no fulfillment in homosexuality," she said bitterly, "but lately I can't find fulfillment in anything." At the next session Connie told me that she had had her first big fight with Liz, who had become jealous of another girl's attentions to Connie. She also described a dream about having a tremendous hemorrhage vaginally. It appeared to both of us that here was another expres- sion of her fear of being damaged through intercourse. This dream was followed by one which concerned her having to give away a great many very feminine clothes. We agreed that this dream probably referred to a wish to renounce her heterosexual feminine wishes because of the possibility of being damaged if she took the feminine role. In this way the two dreams were connected. But despite the dreams and our interpretations of them, the rest of that session and the next one were essentially con- tinuations of the resistance. 101 I pointed out to Connie that in the dream about the zeppehns and airplanes it was what they dropped that was dangerous, namely: the atom bomb. Translating the symbolism, this would correspond to the male ejaculum. I also pointed out to her that one of her main complaints about homosexualit)' was of being deprived in it, which, paradoxically, she connected to food deprivation and with her mother; so that although what she felt deprived of in homosexuality was a lack of substance, the sub- stance was regarded as dangerous in heterosexual rela- tions. "I had never thought about that being important," said Connie. "Why should ejaculation be so terrifying to me? On the one hand, Fm lacking it; on the other hand, if I had it, it would terrify me." Later in this session Connie talked about babies and how cute they were. She also mentioned how she liked her little kitten and liked to feel it snuggle up to her in bed. Still later she said she found she could get more out of people by being coy and coquettish than by being de- manding and described how she had recently got some- thing out of her father that way. She said she couldn't remember being like that before. I explained to Connie that she was actually telling me that being a mother and having babies was beginning to sound pleasant to her and that maybe men weren't so dangerous — that if you knew how to handle them, you could get what you wanted out of them. This was the beginning of Connie's correcting some of her previous 102 distortions and beginning to look more favorably upon heterosexual life. During the next session she told me that she was getting very interested in sewing and that she was busy fixing up her apartment. She said she was thinking how nice it would be to get into a domestic life again. She spoke of getting a rotisserie. The role of the housewife was beginning to look a little more appeal- ing to Connie. 103 Female Genitals Regarded as Defective 16 Connie started the next session right off with a dream. "Last night I had a dream about a snake. People always dream about snakes and finally I did, too. This was like a toy snake. It was very long and thin like a rope. It had red eyes. I treated it like a play- thing. I said. Isn't it cute? People thought I was crazy. The snake seemed to be performing for people to notice it, like a child. Then I remember I was in a crowded bar. There were a lot of unsavory 'gay' girls around." Connie then started talking about a cousin of hers. She was 30 years old, had four children, a college degree, made her own clothes and helped in her husband's busi- ness. She then said, ''If I did as many things as she did, I'd be dead." Then Connie talked about cutting her hair short and finding it easier to manage that way. I told Connie that it appeared she was talking admiringly about heterosexuality but also saying that it was too dangerous for her. She had underlined this when she said that short hair — in this case actually meaning homo- sexuality — was easier for her. Connie went on, "The snake had the proportions of 105 a rope. A rope is something that would tie me down or strangle me. I know the classic symbol of what a snake is supposed to represent — a male organ. This is a sort of immature snake. The women at the bar were big and strapping. The snake was immature. It's supposed to be the other way around." I asked her what that meant to her and what her asso- ciations were to the red eyes. She hesitated and then said they reminded her of women's breasts. I pointed out to Connie that in her last dream about a penis, it was also immature and belonged to a small boy. Here, the female breast symbol in the eyes of the snake also emasculated it. Again Connie had made the penis immature and less frightening in the dream at the same time that she made the homosexual women big but unsavory. While she was defending herself against the danger of the adult or erect penis, she was also expressing her disapproval of homo- sexuality. At the next session Connie had two dreams to report. In the first one a man wanted to go to bed with her, but she turned him down because it seemed like too much trouble and also she felt it was immoral. In the other dream she had represented herself as unattractive. Again she was expressing a heterosexual wish in the first dream, but her anxiety prevented her gratification of it. In the second dream she was using the defense of think- ing herself unattractive to avoid heterosexuality. Of course, both of these were defenses Connie had used a great deal in real life as well. One might ask why consid- 106 ering heterosexuality immoral was a defense rather than representative of the way she really felt. The answer would be that she had never applied this idea of im- morality to homosexuality. Not that I would consider homosexuality as necessarily immoral, but one would assume that Connie would be consistent in applying the same yardstick to both forms of sexuality. It is always easy to say you'll stay away from doing something be- cause it's immoral when you'd be afraid to do it anyway. In the next session Connie told me she had spent the week-end with Liz at the home of Liz's mother and had had a pleasant time. She told me the following dream: "I suddenly developed a bad heart condition. You and other doctors told my parents my heart would go an\ minute just like that. I had to give up exertion and smok- ing. I was rather fatalistic about it. It was very depress- ing. I tried to catch a bus, but then remembered I would drop if I ran. Everybody was telling me to stop smoking and I didn't pay any attention. Then you told me and that confirmed the whole horrible thing." Connie said, "I guess this is a giving-up kind of dream. It seemed kind of suicidal. I think it must be in response to all this talk about my having heterosexual desires." I agreed with Connie and indicated that I also felt that the idea of her dying was the same one expressed in the dream about the atom bomb. This dream, however, meant that she was heading steadily toward heterosex- uality but saw this as inevitably leading to her death or destruction. There was the same quality of resignation as 107 in the atom bomb dream. Nevertheless, it was interesting that her sexual drives were pushing her into a situation that unconsciously conflicted with her self-preservative drives. In the next session Connie had a very interesting dream to report. She said, "I had a rather unpleasant dream the other night. I dreamt I visited another planet, underground from the earth. It was as if you lifted the top of a teapot and then went in. I had all sorts of fas- cinating experiences on the new planet. There were several modern ways of traveling, like escalators and walkaways. When I returned from the planet — this is the unpleasant part — I discovered I had a penis, only not one but two. One was very tiny, the other was still small but bigger. One of them was badly inflamed and fully erected and was bothering me. The other one was slightly urinating — as if it couldn't hold back. I was an- noyed. I was waiting for the condition to go away. I was thinking that the excitement of visiting the new planet was too much for me and caused this condition." Connie was silent and I asked her what came to her mind. She said, "The night before the dream Liz and I were talking about fixing my apartment over and having her come to live with me. I was tired and sleepy and un- enthusiastic about it. The next morning I was very en- thusiastic about it." Connie was telling me that homosexuality looked a lot better to her after the dream than before it. After this she was silent again and I had to encourage her to tell 108 me what came to her mind. She tried to think of some- thing in connection with the teapot but she couldn't. I pointed out that she was blocking. I asked her what came to her mind about the idea of a new planet. ''Didn't I dream about that once before? I don't re- member what it was supposed to be." I asked her to associate to it. "It's as if I went to some place pleasant, but the after-effects were unpleasant," she said. "As if I couldn't really enjoy it. Like eating too much candy and feeling sick afterwards." I asked her what she thought about the new ways of transportation. "I guess that must be heterosexuality," she said. "It's pleasant but I'm afraid of the after-effects and it's new for me. The escalator reminds me of one I saw on a trip we took when I was three. I was scared to death of it." Actually she had used a similar idea in a dream before to represent heterosexuality. That was the dream about the man and woman of the future. But now Connie blocked again. I asked her to tell me what she associated to the part of the dream about the penises. She went on reluctantly, "It was very unpleasant. I came back with two penises. One was very tiny; the other one was small but bigger. One was babyish and one adolescent. The adolescent one was all inflamed and erected. The other one was urinating but trying to hold back — as if I couldn't control my bladder because of my illness. I had kidney trouble as a little girl. I had pyelitis at the age of five or six. Also I was a bed wetter. I still 109 have trouble. I don't wet the bed, but I have to get up once or twice in the night. I wet the bed at a much later age than I was supposed to. Once I did it when I was four- teen. The little penis was attached to the side of the big one. The big one was in its right place. The little one was sick before the big one was sick. They were part of one family." I pointed out to Connie that the idea of being sick had come up in her recent dream of having heart trouble, too, and that there probably was a connection. I ex- plained to her that in both of these dreams she had a physical defect. In the heart dream it hampered her ag- gression and made her vulnerable. In the first dream it was symbolized as a cardiac defect but in this dream it was clearly a genital and urinary defect. She said, "I guess to me they were the same. The fact that I wet the bed so much would make me feel phy- sically defective, as if I wasn't up to par." I explained to Connie that this dream tied in with a great deal of past material. First of all it was linked in with the idea of the female genitals being dirty and not admired by the male. Secondly, it tied in with the ma- terial about "penis envy" and her wish for a penis. Actu- ally, it seemed as if Connie unconsciously thought that if she practiced heterosexuality, she would have to expose her genital and urinary "defect" to her sexual partner. This would produce a reaction of revulsion in him that would cut off all possible feelings of love. As a conse- quence of this he would think of her as an object to no exploit and would therefore feel no compunction against hurting her. Connie said, "Well, why wouldn't I feel this in a sexual relationship with a girl?" "Because," I answered, "she would be equally de- fective." "And why in the dream should I have a defective male organ?" said Connie. "Why not a defective female organ?" I reminded Connie that she had made a reference to age three in her associations. At that age when some of these concepts formed, she probably felt that the male organ was the only sex and urinary organ and that all female genital organs were defective ones. The reason for the two penises in the dream was that one repre- sented the sexual one and the other the urinary one. This brought us to the end of an important session which tied together many questions that had been raised previously. Connie was late for the next session and, as with most sessions that followed an important and revealing one, there was a good deal of resistance. However, we were able to go over some of the material of the last session and clarify it. After I interpreted the resistance, Connie proceeded to tell about having just secured a driver's permit for the third time. She had twice before failed to take her driving test after getting the permit and was now very anxious about taking a third one. She said, "I feel I'm in- 111 ferior. I can't learn to drive as easily as anyone else. There's always a feeling about being different and being inferior." I pointed out to Connie that she was again talking about the same essential idea that had come up in the dream about her having heart disease and in the dream about the genito-urinary defects. She felt in the driving situation as if she had a physical defect that blocked her from expressing aggression effectively and that it would be exposed in the driving test, making her vulnerable to attack or rejection. This was why she felt anxious about taking this third test and probably was the reason she had failed to take the previous two tests. I explained to Connie that at age two or three most little girls feel in- ferior to boys because boys can direct the urinary stream and use it aggressively whereas girls are unable to do this. Connie unconsciously viewed the penis as the only genital and urinary organ and saw herself as having one, but a defective and inferior one. After I had finished this explanation, Connie blocked and said that my interpretation made her feel anxious. She veered off the topic and told me about a big fight she had had with Liz. She said spontaneously, "It seems to me it's almost necessary to have a big fight in order to have an enjoyable sexual experience afterwards." The next session began with Connie's telling me about a driving lesson she had taken the night before. It had been 100% better than any she had ever taken. She then went back to the theme in her dream about the 112 modern means of transportation. She had been having other vague dreams around this theme. The new means represented big advances over present conditions; but though there was improvement, they were still all dan- gerous. "I'm usually left at some tremendous height in the middle of nowhere. I can break my neck or get killed," she said. I reminded her that the "modern advance" was con- nected by her with a change from homosexuality to heterosexualit}^, which was inevitably linked in her mind with the idea of physical damage. The modern methods of transportation were represented as elevators, esca- lators, conveyor belts and the like — all conveyances in which the passenger was passive. What Connie was re- ferring to was that it was the passivity in the feminine role in heterosexuality that leads to the danger of dam- age by the penis. At the next session Connie described a dream about the plumbing in her apartment being all disordered. Again she was alluding to the idea of having a defective genito-urinary apparatus. During the following session she recounted a dream about taking her driving test. She ran into all sorts of obstacles on her way to the test and ended up by not making it. Here again she was express- ing the fear that her lack of aggressiveness (or her lack of a penis) might be exposed, so in the dream she avoided the test. The next session was an important one that tied many loose ends together, so I will report it in detail: 113 Connie came in fifteen minutes late and seemed up- set. She lay on the couch in silence for a couple of min- utes. I asked her what she was thinking about. She said, "I had a dream last night. Vm not sure it was my father in it, but I think it was. There was some plan either to land me in jail or kill me that was instigated by my father. I was supposed to open up this drawer and find something in it that would incriminate me. Some un- known person said that if I had witnesses while I opened the drawer, it would be all right. I did that and averted a catastrophe. I opened up the drawer and found a gun in it. I think my father expected it to go off and kill me or else it was incriminating evidence that I had killed somebody else. Tm not sure." Connie began to free associate after the dream. "I remember feeling hostile to everybody over the weekend. I blew my top at a girl for making me the butt of her jokes. I'm not sure, but I think that's the night I dreamt that." Connie continued, "I had another dream the night before last. I remember showing this teen-age boy in the building some golden bullets. I asked him if they were worth anything. He said they weren't worth much." I asked Connie what she thought about these dreams. She said: "Isn't that the same idea that I talked about a long time ago — that, if I allowed myself to be really ag- gressive, something terrible would happen?" I asked Connie about the idea of her father instigating the plot. She said, "It looks as if he's the one who saw to it that I got punished unfairly in the dream. I wasn't 114 guilty. I wish I could stop feeling so hostile to everyone. When I was a kid I had a dream about my father trying to kill me. I had another dream about his trying to drown me." Actually Connie's first dream in analysis was about her father trying to drown her. I explained to Connie that from the dream and the other material it appeared that she had feared aggression, including sexual aggression, from her father as a child. If she showed witnesses the gun in her drawer — "the penis in her drawers" — then the catastrophe of being damaged as a woman would be averted. On the other hand, if she had a penis, she would think of it as a weapon of aggression; so that when she fantasied that she had a penis, she feared her own aggression. Her fear of the driving test originated in her fear of being en- dangered should she fail at something she interpreted as aggressive and manly. This tied in with her dreams about heterosexuality leading to death and destruction. It also tied in with her fear of exposing the lower half of her body. If the man discovered she didn't have a penis, she would be at his mercy and vulnerable to his attack since he would then know that she had no defense. I asked her about the dream about the teen-age boy and the golden bullets. "The neighbor is more of a boy than a man," she said. "I get the feeling I'm not as afraid of him as I am of men in general. I guess the bul- lets stand for penises again, but small ones — bullet-sized. I was asking him what they were worth. He was saying not much, hardly anything." I explained to Connie that since only a boy was in- volved, she wasn't too afraid. She needed only a small penis to defend her, and actually she didn't put too much value on it. She was saying in the dream that she did not actually relish her defense of thinking of herself as having a penis. If she needed it as a defense, she had to have it, but it wasn't by choice that she kept it. So actually Connie was fluctuating between her fear of being killed in the passive feminine role and her fear of her own aggression in the male role she adopted in fantasy as a defense against being killed. It sounded like a rather precarious balance and a pretty uncomfortable position. 116 Women Regarded as Inferior 17 In the next session there was quite a bit of resistance at the beginning. After inter- preting it to Connie, I finally got her moving again. The first thing that came to her mind was that her drawers weren't neat. She talked about how sloppy and disorderly she felt. Another dream about guns was described and she told about her shock at finding they were real guns rather than toy ones. Then she continued to talk about her disorderly drawers. Liz, she said, was very neat while she was sloppy. After this, she brought up how masculine Liz was in her ideas and personality. I interpreted to Connie that she actually was talking about the other kind of drawers and was repeating the theme of the woman's genitals being dirty. When she thought of Liz's as being clean, she considered her mas- culine. The other dream, of course, again dealt with her fear of the adult penis in contrast to the child's. Actu- ally, Connie's bringing up the idea of the dirtiness of the female genitals was her way of saying that, even if she accepted the fact that the man would not hurt her, 117 he would certainly reject her because of the dirtiness of her genitals. Connie's next session was right before her driving test. She said she had butterflies in her stomach. She said she knew she could drive well enough and that, if she failed, it would be because of nervousness. No dreams were brought in, and she could talk about little besides her anxiety. Before her music lessons and examinations in school, she had experienced similar feelings, she said. We went over the source of her anxiety as brought out in the last few sessions, and Connie then told me she was afraid the inspector would find her sloppy because she had spilled something on her application. Again she was repeating the theme of the last session. She also went back to the idea that her drawers were not neat and she was sloppy. It was her mother who was responsible, ac- cording to Connie; she had not been properly brought up. This theme continued until the end of the hour. I wished her luck on the test. When Connie arrived for the next session, she told me she had done pretty well on her driving test and that she thought she had passed. Then she told me a dream about her figure being unattractive. There was also some- thing in the dream about a defect in the plumbing in her apartment. Here again Connie was stating that she felt unattractive because of having a defective genito-urinary system. In her associations she returned to the theme of her sloppiness. Then she began to talk about her relationship with 118 Liz. "I've been thinking about her and I get depressed. It's hard to put my finger on it. There have been little disagreements here and there. I'm so touchy if she gets irritable and speaks sharply. The frustrating part about our quarrels is that they're forgotten without being set- tled. Nobody admits they're wrong. There shouldn't have been any quarrel in the first place." Later in the session Connie had a day dream. She was kissing her male music teacher. Then she was walking and she went past an open door to a men's urinal. Con- nie was expressing her heterosexual wishes in the first part of the fantasy, but they were blocked in the second part by her idea of urinary inferiority. At the next session Connie told me she had gotten her driver's license in the mail and that she felt great about it. I congratulated her. She picked up the theme of the previous session, her dissatisfaction with homo- sexuality. "It seems like all these gay relationships are neurotic. Every gay person I know has these difficulties. Liz and I have so many fights. She's definitely moved in with me now. After the fights are over, I feel great — as if I have to let the whole thing run its course. The argument just has to run its course. I can't seem to pre- vent it before it starts and I can't seem to finish it with- out having a big climax. I feel as if I'm living from day to day. Lately I get such a raging hostility toward every- one, it's terrible, it's enervating. When I get mad, I get too mad. I'm afraid to show my anger. I'm never sure whether I'm right or wrong." 119 By her last remark Connie was alluding to her con- fusion as to whether her hostility in any given situation was appropriate to the situation, was a reenactment of some past hostility or was a defense against some uncon- scious fear. Connie went on to say that what angered her most was not being respected and not being treated with consideration. She applied this especially to Liz but also more generally. In the next session she continued the development of her dissatisfaction with Liz on this score. Then she said, "Liz impressed me as being like a man in many ways. She thinks like a man. She gets moody or depressed whenever anything comes up about my past life. She hates the idea of my ever having been with anyone be- fore — like a man wanting to marry a virgin. She always expresses the wish to be a male or to have a male organ, so we could have a sexual relationship. Jo and Alice did the same thing. But Liz seems most hep on it. She con- stantly brings it up. The first part — about her not want- ing me to have been with anyone else — really upsets me. It makes me feel guilty for having had any sort of sex." At the session following Connie reported a dream about a movie actress. In the first part of the dream the actress was sexy and brunette, but Connie felt she was unattractive. In the next scene she was blonde and not so sexy, but Connie thought she was very attractive. In her comments on the dream, Connie indicated that she had always felt she saw women as they really were — unat- 120 tractive, and it confused her that others found them attractive. She said that Liz was always telHng her how sexy she was. Finally Connie, who is a brunette, said, "I have the feeling that being sexy-looking is not being at- tractive. Blondes are more clean-cut looking than bru- nettes. It's funny, I just thought about how I felt when I first found out how the sexual act was performed. I said, 'I won't do it.' The main thing that was on my mind was the idea of exposing myself. I have difficulty even now exposing myself to women. I can't do it un- less they keep reassuring me how attractive I am." Of course, Connie was repeating again, in her re- marks about sexiness being unattractive, her feeling about the female genitals being dirty and unattractive. I pointed out to Connie that she had the same genital organ as half the people in the world. She laughed and said she knew her ideas on this were ridiculous and, of course, she didn't believe them intellectually. Connie then shifted to talking about how she wasn't taking good care of her cat. In this, she was bringing up another objection to heterosexuality. She was saying that she couldn't be an adequate mother. 121 High School Girl Friend's Death Causes Guilt 18 Connie arrived upset for her next appointment. Sarah, her high school girl friend, had just died of tuberculosis. She had spoken a good deal about Sarah before. Actually her relationship with Sarah was in many ways the prototype of her later homosexual rela- tionships even though there was no sex involved in it. Sarah was the class beauty, much like Connie's sister was. Connie had attached herself to Sarah, followed her around, and basked in her glory. On the surface she idolized and admired her and felt greatly inferior to her. Underneath, of course, she felt competitive and hostile towards her. We had spoken of this mechanism operat- ing in relationship to her dead sister also. Connie spoke about her feelings of guilt and fear when she went to see the family, describing her emotions as similar to those she had experienced when her sister died — as if the ghost would come back to haunt her. I pointed out to her that her guilt as well as her anticipa- tion of being hurt by the ghost were results of her un- conscious hostility and competition with both her sister and Sarah. This was ground we had gone over and Con- 123 nie understood it well, yet she continued to feel upset for the next week and kept imagining that she would get tuberculosis and die the same way. It is not uncom- mon for a person to develop a fear of getting the same disease that caused another's death when the deceased has been the object of unconscious hostility. It is the law of the Talion: "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" — or "tuberculosis for tuberculosis." The reason for this is that the person feels that it was his uncon- scious wish that produced the disease in the other person. Connie also noticed resentment in herself of the mem- bers of Sarah's family when she went over to visit them. Sarah's mother was blaming the death on her last preg- nancy; it was just what Connie's own mother had done when her sister died. There was also the annoyance with the family because of the fuss they made over Sarah. "It's like having to compete with them even after they die," she said. I pointed out to Connie that in some ways it was even harder to compete for parental love with a dead sib- ling than with a live one, because the dead one is always idealized; the good is remembered and the bad is for- gotten. At the next session Connie brought in this dream: "Me in my childhood and me today were in the same room. Me today looked at the little girl and at first thought she wasn't very attractive. Then I decided she was cuter than I thought she was." Connie could now take a brighter view of her own at- tractiveness. In part of her feeling unattractive was a 124 mechanism to deny her competition with her sister, or later, Sarah. Now that the reaHzation of this competi- tion was more conscious, she could afford to drop par- tially her defense of feeling unattractive. Connie's next dream bore this out. Somebody in the dream said some- thing flattering about Alice, but Connie silently dis- agreed. From here she went on to talk about her feeling that she would get much angrier at Liz if she didn't feel inferior to her. Actually her inferiority feeling was a de- nial of her hostility and competition, so it did serve the purpose of reducing her anger. Connie went away on vacation and I did not see her for two weeks. When she came back she reported that she and Liz had gone through the same cycles of fight- ing and making up. The cycles continued during the next two weeks of analysis before my vacation. At one session, Connie told about a dream in which she ex- pressed her anger toward Liz by denying her sex. Then at the next session, she said that she was enjoying sex with Liz more than ever. Liz was using street language while making love to her and this aroused her tremendously, but left her feeling guilty afterwards. Again she remarked that their sex relations were most satisfying after a fight. She also noticed that she got especially aroused now when Liz said she wished she were a man. I told Connie that I was glad to hear that she was freer sexually and getting more enjoyment out of it. Actu- ally it did represent a step in the right direction for her to achieve greater pleasure out of sex. It was also signifi- 125 cant that she found herself more responsive to Liz's as- sumption of a mascuhne role, such as her using street language or expressing the wish to be a man. Connie wanted a man, but still had to accept a substitute at this point because of her fear of the real thing. This was confirmed by a dream about embracing a teen-age boy. Meanwhile, her anger at Liz continued to flare up sporadicall). For the first time Connie expressed a wish to break up with Liz. However, she didn't feel ready. She kept going over the same fears about heterosexuality in her dreams. Although it was apparent to her now that hostility was inevitable in a homosexual relationship, she still needed to maintain her relationship with Liz. She said, "Liz gets mad. I get mad. Then she reverts back to being sweet. Then we go through it again. It's like a silly routine — a comedy act." 126 Fear of Lack of Control in Sex 19 I came back from my vacation and Connie came in to see me after a gap of about a month. Two years of her analysis had now been com- pleted and the third was beginning. She said she had been feeling quite well up until the past few days, which followed a bad fight with Liz. She brought in a dream about driving a car and having trouble using the brakes. There was someone on the side giving her instructions about how to stop it. She was going to ask him to do her a favor — something ex- tra, but she was afraid he would be annoyed so she de- cided to do it herself. In another part of the dream a man was driving the car she was in. They were going down a steep hill, and Connie was afraid. Somebody told her it wasn't so steep, that they could go around on a banking rather than straight down, but Connie felt the only way to stop the car was to turn left. Connie had used turning left as a symbol in a pre- vious dream to stand for going homosexual. Straight or right was heterosexual and left was homosexual. The steep hill was on the right and represented the danger 127 connected with heterosexuality. The one who reassured her that it wasn't so dangerous and the one who gave her instructions about using the brakes was I. The favor she felt embarrassed about asking me, she said, was that she wanted to cut down to two sessions a week and had been anticipating my annoyance. Connie had done very well interpreting the second part of the dream. The first part had to do with her fear of losing control of her anger when she was driving the car or in the aggressive male position. The second part showed her anxiety about being hurt when she was being driven by a man — in the passive feminine position. The way to avoid the anxiety in the second part was to turn left (be homosexual). It was interesting how the part about asking me for a favor came out in the dream. So many times a patient thinks of something and decides not to tell the analyst about it, only to have it come out in a dream. In the next session Connie told me another interest- ing dream. ''I had decided to go to Paris. I was all packed. I suddenly didn't have a passport. I went to a notary. He overcharged me. He told me it was my tough luck, that I needed it badly and therefore I should pay for it. Finally I had wasted too much time and I missed the ship. I decided to have an ice cream soda at the last minute and that was what made me miss it. I kept rush- ing and rushing in the dream. It was very tiring. Then I finally decided it was too late." Connie started her associations off by saying that I 128 must be the notary who was callous and was charging her too much. This might have referred to my not deal- ing directly in the previous visit with Connie's request via the dream to cut the sessions down to two a week. The place she was going, Paris, must represent hetero- sexuality; it was certainly a common enough symbol for heterosexual gratification. Then I helped Connie see the meaning of the dream. She had decided to become heterosexual. She was annoyed at the cost of analysis and at me for not considering more seriously her request to cut down her sessions to two a week. So finally she gave up the struggle, feeling it was too late, and went back to the oral gratifications in homosexuality (the ice cream soda). I discussed the financial situation with Connie real- istically. I told her I certainly didn't mean to be callous about it, but I did think it would be helpful to her in the long run if she could keep up the present schedule. However, I reassured her that, if she couldn't, we would manage as well as possible. At the next session Connie told me she had had a dream about Sarah, her high school girl friend who had recently died: "I dreamt Sarah was dead but I was flash- ing back into parts of her life. I was in an auditorium and she was supposed to sing. She got up from the audi- ence to go on stage. I looked at her and she looked very cheap. She had dyed blonde hair and cheap clothes. She had lost too much weight. When she got up to sing her voice was screechy. Then I thought she looked 129 like a certain movie star and then that movie star looked like my sister." Connie told me after this that Sarah really had had a good voice and once auditioned for an opera company, while her sister had won a beauty contest and had had a chance to go to Hollywood. In the dream Connie was definitely connecting Sarah with her sister and she real- ized this. Her father, she repeated, had told her he would be nicer to her on the day her sister died. She also realized that she must have been glad that her sister did die — at least partially. She added that she was putting off visiting Sarah's mother because of the feel- ing that she would be resented for being alive while Sarah was dead. I told Connie that there was no reason Sarah's mother should feel that way. Rather it must be Connie's own guilt feelings about her hostility to her sister and to Sarah that made her anticipate condemnation by Sarah's mother. An important reason behind Connie's homo- sexuality was that she had had to pick a glamour girl to whom she would feel inferior and submissive in order to deny her competitiveness with her sister. Because her sister had died when she did, Connie felt that it was her death wishes that had brought it about. Now, as in a previous session, she was working through the same problem in relationship to Sarah's death. Competing with another girl meant killing her to Connie — uncon- sciously, of course. The next session followed the same pattern that had 130 occurred when we first spoke about Sarah's death, Con- nie had had a dream in which she represented herself as more attractive. This certainly confirmed the impres- sion that her feeling unattractive was a way of avoiding competition with other women. And this in turn was related to her feeling of guilt about her sister's death, because she felt unconsciously as if it was her competi- tion with her sister that had caused her death. So now with this out in the open Connie could allow herself to feel more attractive. Along with this idea in the dream there was a scene in which Connie was associating with a girl who in real life maintained both a homosexual and a heterosexual life. She was married and had a child, but with her husband's knowledge and consent she also maintained a homosexual partner. Connie was talking to her in the dream about the construction of the penis. She did not feel any anxiety in the dream. This meant that Connie was again considering hetero- sexuality more seriously and was using this girl in the dream to represent a transition figure. In the next session Connie described another dream about being afraid to drive a car. She felt the car was defective. Again she was bringing up the idea of not having enough aggression to counter male aggression in sexuality. And this, of course, was based on her con- cept of heterosexuality in terms of the man hurting the woman. Connie went back again to the theme about her sis- ter in the next session. She had dreamed that a beauti- ful movie star took her into the back room of a bar and put her hands on Connie's breasts. Connie let her do it for a minute but then told her to take her hands away. The movie star felt rejected and later committed sui- cide, making Connie feel that she could have prevented the whole thing if she hadn't rejected her. This dream, too, showed that Connie felt that if she did not submit homosexually to the beautiful girl, Connie's hostility and competitiveness would come through and kill the girl (the suicide in the dream). Since it was Connie's dream, the suicide, of course, represented a death wish. The dream brought out beautifully how one of the main functions of homosexuality is to cover up hostility to rival women. The movie star, of course, was originally Connie's sister. However, Connie remembered that Liz had touched her breasts the night before and Connie had told her to take her hands away. Connie had a really interesting dream to report at the next session: "I had a dream about Phil, one of the men at the office. I stayed over with him in his apart- ment. I slept in the same bed with him, but nothing happened. I wished he wouldn't make a pass at me be- cause of the ugly scandal. There was another girl around. The next day people were discussing whether they'd ever been to bed with anyone. This other girl was there and she knew I had been to bed with Phil. I said jokingly, 'I slept with Phil.' She laughed because she knew nothing had happened. The next day I was in Phil's apartment. My cat was there. She got sick and 132 had diarrhea and was dirtying all over his floor and all over herself. I got very upset. I tried to get a disinfectant to clean it up. He was unperturbed." In her associations Connie talked about the fact that Phil was married. She also said that in the dream she was thinking, "If nothing happens, I won't have to feel guilty about it." The lack of control of the cat in the second part of the dream pointed to her association of sex with lack of control and with excretory function. The cat probably represented herself, she said. I told Connie that she was expressing a heterosexual wish which had been blocked by guilt. Also in the dream the fear of lack of control was expressed as well as an association of the lack of control in sexuality with the lack of control in excretion. During the next session Connie said that she still found the dream about the cat very unpleasant, espe- cially the part of associating the cat that dirtied up the room to herself. She said that she always had felt that she had less self-control than other children because of her bed-wetting. Even now, she confessed, she didn't feel secure about her bladder control. Whether it was physical or psychological, she didn't know, but when she had to go, she had to go, and in a hurry. I told her I thought it must be psychological since she never really had an accident. Also I explained to her that many patients have difficulty talking about excre- tion because of the disgust with it engendered by the culture, but I reminded her that there was nothing in- 133 herently bad about excretion and that she should feel free to talk about it if it came up. She amplified the discussion to include sex and ad- mitted that she had a tendency to brag about her control when she didn't indulge in sex. She vaguely remembered thinking as a girl that she would be a "hot number" when she got married, but she was always careful not to give that impression because she did not want to ap- pear promiscuous. I explained to her that there are many forces in the culture that make us feel that our sexual impulses can overwhelm us and make us lose control, but this does not have to be the case. They don't have to run us; we can run them. The prime example of this is that the male can have enough control to withdraw from the vagina right at the height of passion and im- mediately before orgasm in coitus interruptus. When parents demand bowel and bladder control of us at an age when we cannot have such control be- cause of insufficient development of the nervous sys- tem, we grow up with the fear that there is something wrong with us and we are the only ones in the world with this lack of control. Connie must have been ex- posed to something like this since she had been a bed- wetter. The bed-wetting often represents a rebellion against toilet training that is too strict or started too early. She must have experienced some trauma in the area of toilet training which had been extended to in- clude a fear of lack of control in sex. Another example of this theme was seen in Connie's 134 fear of losing control of her hostility; this toilet train- ing trauma must also have contributed to her fears in this area. Connie felt helpless and not in control in relation to excretory, sexual and hostile impulses. Connie continued this theme in the next session. She had dreamed that, if she fixed her right eye on any ob- ject and stared really hard, she could set it on fire. It had been a very frightening dream. Towards the end of it she had felt compelled to set the back of Liz's neck on fire. She remembered another dream. In this one Sarah had come back to life but was partially decayed. This dream, too, had been very frightening. "I guess I saw myself as some sort of monster. I feel as if I can't control my destructive instincts," Connie said. "In the second dream I felt as if I had to take care of Sarah, but I was disgusted and revolted. I remember I had that feeling about my sister before she died. I felt I should have taken care of her and been nice to her, but I was revolted by the changes in her that her sick- ness caused." Connie and I both understood that in addition to expanding the material about lack of control, she was also further clarifying the material about her uncon- scious hostility to her sister, Sarah, and now Liz. One of the primary mechanisms in her homosexuality was to say, "I love you" in order to deny "I hate you." Connie was quite resistant in the next session. For one thing, she talked about how great the responsibil- ities would be in marriage. I told her that she was a very responsible person on her job and had certainly demon- strated a great sense of responsibility in her analytic work, so that it was just a rationalization that she was not responsible enough to handle the role of the house- wife and mother. She also said that she had been to a burlesque show and had felt disgusted when one of the strippers exposed her genital organ. I pointed out to her that the men at the show had seemed to enjoy this rather than reject the girl or be disgusted, as she had al- ways unconsciously anticipated. She also vaguely re- membered a dream in which her mother was putting something over on her or else using her to put some- thing over on somebody else. Again she recalled the lit- tle intrigues at home and how her mother would tell her secrets and then tell her not to tell her father. 136 Themes of Incest and Competition With Sister in Dreams 20 Connie began her next session by telling me a dream. The essential thing in the dream was that she was going to marry her brother-in-law, the husband of her dead sister. In the dream also was a reference to Connie's getting burned. Another aspect of the dream was that in it Connie had left the "gay" girls and homosexuality behind. There was also a reference in the dream to a brother and sister being involved in a vaguely incestuous relationship. In her associations to the dream Connie said that her sister's husband had made many sexual passes at her starting with her pre-teen years. Connie had been disgusted by them and had never consciously liked her brother-in-law. She also remembered that, after her sis- ter died, a relative had suggested that she marry her brother-in-law and she was revolted by the idea. What Connie was expressing in the dream, however, was her unconscious wish to marry her brother-in-law. Despite her conscious feelings of revulsion, his passes at her in her pre-teen years must have been sexually arous- 137 ing to her. Also in the dream was expressed the danger in heterosexuahty in the idea of getting burned. Her previous dreams about a heater starting a fire in bed had the same meaning. The theme of incest could also be found — partly because relationships with one's brother- in-law can be construed as incestuous and partly because Connie's feelings about her brother-in-law paralleled those for her father. This dream about Connie's relationship to her sister and brother-in-law brought up a great deal of resistance. She accomplished little in either of the next two ses- sions and was twenty minutes late for the second one. In the third one she described a dream which expressed symbolically her not being able to put things in order through analysis. At the session following this, she re- lated a dream about being a twin. This brought back to her the memory of a favorite childhood fantasy of be- ing a twin. I told her that this was probably her way of expressing a wish to be equal to her sister rather than inferior to her in her parents' eyes. However, there was a great deal of resistance even in this session. I pointed out to Connie that there had been a marked resistance since the dream about her marrying her brother-in-law. She said, "I was revolted by the dream." In the following session there was still some resist- ance, but there was evidence that it was finally begin- ning to break. Connie had had a dream that symbolized her fear of my disapproval because of her sexual be- havior. Also in that session she recounted a dream about .138 marrying a dentist. She associated to it and decided that he probably stood for me. The next session was the most productive one she had had in a couple of weeks. She had several dreams to report: "I had another dream about Sarah. In the dream I knew she was going to die and it depressed me. Her husband and her daughter were in the dream. Then I dreamt I was on vacation, Jan was there [the girl pre- viously mentioned who was married and had a child, but also continued her homosexual life]. She told me I could travel on a steel girder that moved along the track. She was sitting very comfortably and balanced on it, but I kept almost falling off it. I was annoyed at her suggesting it." Connie was repeating again her death wishes involv- ing Sarah in the first dream and she associated spon- taneously that the presence of her husband and child probably stood for her wanting to take them over after her death. It also came to her mind that her brother-in- law and Sarah's husband had the same first name. In the second dream Connie was saying that Jan could take the heterosexual position (the vacation and the passive means of transportation that she had used to symbolize it before), but that she, Connie, still found it danger- ous. Still another dream was reported in this session. She had lost her pocketbook, but she found it and in it was the exact amount of money to pay for one analytic ses- sion. Connie was saying in this dream that she wanted 139 to resume a feminine heterosexual role (the pocket- book) and continue with analysis. The fact that she had lost and then found the pocketbook in the dream prob- ably referred to the recent period of resistance which had just broken completely. In the same session she reported a dream in which she had a baby. The next session began with Connie talking about the trial of Dr. Sheppard, a doctor who was accused and convicted of killing his wife because of another woman. She said that she somehow felt sympathetic to him: 'T guess I must identify myself with the other woman." There followed another interesting session. Again it demonstrated how, when a patient has some thoughts about the analyst and feels embarrassed about telling him directly, they may come out in a dream. Connie discussed a dream about being in the presence of a king and queen and feeling very hesitant about approaching them. She did not know if it was proper for her to do this. In her associations she said, "I met this fellow last night who told me he knew you and your wife. I wanted to ask about you, but I didn't think it was proper to go into your personal life. The queen was the more im- portant figure in the dream. I guess I have the most trouble approaching my feelings about your wife just as I did about my mother and sister. This fellow said your wife was very attractive. I was surprised you had an attractive wife. Everybody pounced on me and said, 140 'Why shouldn't he have an attractive wife?' " I told Connie that she should say anything that came to her mind during her sessions. If any material came up about me or my wife, it should be handled like any other material. During the next session Connie related a dream about driving a car. Again the brakes didn't work correctly. She brought it to a garage and got into an argument with the mechanic whom she suspected of overcharging her. In another part of the dream she was brushing her teeth and having a hard time rinsing her mouth out. It felt unclean. Connie associated that the dream must mean she was angry with me for charging her too much. I agreed with her interpretation, adding that she apparently felt she was coming to me to keep her hostility in check (keep her brakes in good repair). Connie associated to the part about the unclean mouth the feeling of distaste she had for the oral sexual activity in homosexuality. Coinci- dental with this she said that she was having a great deal of difficulty with Liz and was arguing constantly with her. During the next few sessions Connie continued hav- ing dreams and thoughts conveying her wish to become "straight." However, the big stumbling block continued to be her predilection to connect heterosexual feelings with incestuous figures or situations of great danger. Once she dreamed of a man in terms of a vicious panther that was chasing her. 141 She started one of these sessions with this dream: "There was a very Latin looking man. He found me sexually attractive. The odd part was that he said Liz wasn't so attractive. I thought he was crazy to say that. I thought it was wonderful that he should like me but that I might run into trouble and that she might be jealous of me. Then I had another dream. I had a cold. I was trying to get some drops for my nose from the pharmacist. He was explaining how to use a hypodermic needle as a dropper. He said it was better, I was worried because I didn't know how much to use. Then I remem- ber using the needle as a dropper. I was waiting for some disastrous results because I might have used too much." I asked her what came to her mind about the dreams. "A hypodermic is something a doctor would use. I could use a dropper myself. I was worried that I would use too much. In the first dream I'm seeing heterosexuality in a better light. The Latin man must be you. Tlie nose must be a symbol for the vagina. The needle is the penis that can hurt and that is associated with a doctor." This dream was very clear. In the first part Connie was expressing her sexual wishes toward me, but saw herself in competition with Liz for me. Whenever she thought of getting involved with a man, she always saw it as beating out another woman. This, of course, came from her unresolved past fixations on her father and brother-in-law. I explained that in reality there were plenty of men to go around now and that getting a man 142 did not necessarily mean defeating another woman to do it. The second part of the dream was even more interest- ing. She saw the sexual act with me as one that could hurt her. What she feared specifically, as in past dreams about the atom bomb, was the ejaculation, represented here by the drops from the needle. However, the needle itself, the penis, was also capable of inflicting damage. As usual, after these specific dreams about hetero- sexuality and damage there was a marked resistance. Connie talked about hating to think about getting into the rat-race of competition in heterosexualit}-. She al- ways felt unattractive there. Of course, there was com- petition in homosexuality, too, but this had never bothered her as much. Her feeling unattractive was a defense that was used much more in heterosexual than in homosexual situations. The resistance this time lasted through five sessions despite my interpreting it and bringing Connie back to its point of origin. Then Connie had another dream that was somewhat similar to the one that brought up the resistance: "I dreamt about my cat, Melba. A big tom cat came into the hall. I decided I should mate him with Melba. I was worried that she might not be in heat, but she was. So I let the tom cat into my apartment. I was worried about what Liz would think, whether she would approve or disapprove. I thought she might disapprove of the particular tom cat or of the whole thing in general. The tom was big and ugly and from the streets, but he had 143 the same coloring as Melba, so I thought they would have cute kittens. In another part the torn had my hand in such a grip that I couldn't get it away without being scratched." Here Connie had returned to expressing her hetero- sexual wishes though her cat. The difficulties were: (i) Liz's disapproval; (2) that men are big, rough and ugly, (3) that she might get hurt. This dream was followed by another resistance period that lasted through several sessions. During each Con- nie talked about her feelings that heterosexuality was immoral and that she would be a bad girl if she desired a man. I explained to her that this was a rationalization to avoid anxiety and, of course, Connie acknowledged this intellectually. During this period Connie had a ter- rible fight with Liz, a real fist fight wdth Connie doing most of the hitting. She accused Liz of running around with other girls. Then she spoke about her cat, saying it would be less trouble if she never got in heat — that she wouldn't have to have her fixed and she wouldn't have to find a torn for her. Of course, Connie was really talk- ing about herself — that it would be a lot less trouble if she had no sexual feelings. About this time Connie again brought up the idea of coming twice a week and was quite insistent about it. I pointed out that her bringing it up was partly a re- sistance, but that naturally it was up to her to make the decision. She remained adamant, and from this point on I saw her twice a week. 144 Early Observance of Parental Intercourse Shown in Dream 21 Finally the resistance broke and Connie began to get back on the track. She continued to have dreams pointing out her general wishes for heterosexuality and dissatisfaction with homosexuality. She wondered how she could hide her homosexual past if she did turn "straight." In one of her dreams there was a man lying completely nude. His organ was like a star fish. Connie wondered in the dream which part entered the woman. Then she decided it must be the largest part. Through this dream Connie was expressing her interest in men, and, moreover, there was no great anxiety expressed. She told me another dream with a similar theme: "I saw this gay boy, Jack. Despite the fact that he's gay, he's rather masculine. We were standing in the hall very close to each other. He put his leg between mine. I bit his shoulder passionately. He laughed and said he expected as much. I thought he really misunderstood, that I wasn't really passionate — it was just a reflex." Here Connie was expressing her sexual feeling for a 145 man, but trying to deny consciousness of it in the dream. Connie had a couple of dreams expressing her anger toward Liz, especially for not satisfying her sexually. Again she feared loss of control of her anger. This cor- responded to the real situation. Their relationship was certainly deteriorating and there was a great deal of mutual hostility. Then Connie had another dream about me: "I was walking toward the park with you. I was wondering what was going to happen. You were taking me into Central Park and you were my analyst. As we went further into the park I was feeling awkward. You were my analyst and we were on a walk. I wondered about your intentions. Just then the cat woke me up. I was so mad that she had interrupted this pleasant dream that I beat the hell out of her. It was a very nice ro- mantic dream and not frightening." In the next dream Connie went back to a theme she had touched on previously but had never worked through sufficiently. In the dream her father had made arrangements without telling her for her to leave Liz and to move in with her brother and sister-in-law. In the new apartment she felt there wasn't enough privacy. She was looking into the apartment from the street. The blinds were broken. Someone in the dream said to use other blinds, but they weren't as effective as the regular Venetian blinds. With this dream I thought Connie was picking up the theme about having observed parental intercourse. 146 The next session proved that my idea was correct. Connie told me this dream: "I was in a rooming house. There was confusion as to who slept where. There was a married couple. They had one bed. The rooms weren't separated. It was all open." I asked Connie what came to her mind about this and she said, 'Tm thinking about my parents having the room next to me. The rolling door between the rooms was always left open. I actually almost slept in the same room with my parents right up to my adult life." This was a very important revelation. I asked Connie if she had ever witnessed any sexual activity between her parents. She said she had not, that she could only re- member their fighting. Actually I felt sure that Connie must have witnessed some sexual activity if she slept in what amounted to the same room as her parents right up until she was twenty years old. The actual memory of it was repressed, but these dreams were obviously al- luding to something along that line as were the previous ones on this theme. In the next session Connie had a pretty severe re- sistance. But at the one following, she brought in dreams pointing out objections to homosexuality and she had another dream about me: "You and I were at a gather- ing at a house. You were showing me around. There were famous political figures there — Mahatma Ghandi, the Duke of Windsor and others. Again I felt somewhat awkward because you were friendly and we were outside H7 of your office. I remember complaining in the dream that your name was too long." Connie associated to the dream. "In over two years I haven't ever addressed you as anything. One of the rea- sons I give myself is that your name is too long. It couldn't be that, though. I call other doctors and den- tists 'Dr. So-and-so.' I didn't want to call you Dr. Rob- ertiello because it would be too impersonal. And I didn't want to get too personal by calling you anything else. So I ended up by not calling you anything. The political figures in the dream were all figures who should be treated with respect." I reminded Connie that she had had several previous dreams about feeling awkward at being close to me in an informal setting. I told her we had to understand more about the meaning of this. In another dream she had seen me as a king; in this one as a crony of im- portant political figures. Her idolization of me and put- ting me on a pedestal was probably a defense against see- ing me as a human being to whom she might get close. Connie's next dream was one about having a date with Marlon Brando. She had a sore on her lip and was worried about looking unattractive. She almost was late for the date but she finally made it. In the dream she said to herself, "Gee, I'm brave going out on a date with Marlon Brando." Following this series of dreams about men, Connie had a dream about being high up on a ladder talking to her mother. Everyone else on the ladder felt comfort- 148 able, but Connie was afraid of falling and being hurt. Connie was saying in the dream that she had made quite a few advances toward going heterosexual, but now she felt afraid of being hurt. Perhaps she also felt afraid, too, of being as high up as her mother was and, therefore, in active competition with her. Later in the same dream she was in the living room with a boy she knew in high school. She worried that her parents might wonder what they were doing. Then she said, "Oh, they won't mind too much. It's better than being homosexual." In this dream Connie was getting over the fear of the moral condemnation of heterosexuality by her parents. Two sessions later, after a resistance session, Connie described a particularly frightening dream about being suspended in mid-air on a passageway which moved by itself. She had been terrified of falling. The dream went on and on and Connie said she was holding on for dear life through it all. Again in this dream, like the previous ones about the modern means of transportation, Connie was expressing her great fear of being in the passive feminine position. However, during the same session, as in almost every session during this period, Connie kept bringing up her dissatisfaction with homosexuality both in her dreams and her associations. Connie was certainly back to the theme about her fears of being hurt in heterosexuality. I thought it was especially interesting and important that these dreams followed directly those which had alluded to her having witnessed parental intercourse. Through the eyes of a 149 child, intercourse is seen as an attack by the man on the woman. The only thing the child can connect in his experience with intercourse is two people fighting vio- lently. Witnessing parental intercourse can have very marked effects on a child's concept of sexuality. Cer- tainly it was one of the most important factors in Connie's seeing intercourse in the frightening light she did. That is why we psychoanalysts strongly advise par- ents not to sleep in the same room as their children. Connie's next dream elaborated her fear: "I dreamt that I was dying or at the brink of being dead. I said I hope it comes quickly so I won't have to suffer." Connie went on spontaneously to associate. "I kept thinking of the movie 'Carmen Jones' when he kills her by choking her. I also remember another movie where a girl was being killed. I got very upset at both movies. I'm sure I was identifying with the girl in both cases." Connie's next dream was an interesting and important one. 'There were a bunch of us in the car. My father was driving. Two people had to do the shifting — one in back and one in front. My father wasn't driving too well. I was nervous because I felt he couldn't control the car too well. There was a gay girl in the back handling the gear shift and doing the shifting. Suddenly we were parked and my father had to leave the car. A woman came over and removed a screw from the car. I was fighting with her with all my strength. She was just taking it because she needed it for her car." The first part of the dream followed the pattern of 150 symbolism that Connie had used in other dreams about cars. This time she was expressing fear of her father's aggression, including sexual aggression as she had in- terpreted it through having witnessed parental inter- course. In order to counter and check his anticipated aggression, Connie had become homosexual like the girl in the back handling the gear shift, who was rather masculine and aggressive herself. I then asked Connie about the second part of the dream. She said, "The screw was a very important part of the mechanism. Not having it would deprive him of the use of his car. The dream might mean that the woman was my mother and she was putting my father in a position where he didn't have the proper control t)f the family. I was fighting with my mother so he could have it." I asked her what she thought about the screw. "That's a sexual word. The idea is that my mother is taking away my father's masculinity. She always tries to undermine him. When I saw her last she told me his memory wasn't good. In the dream the struggle with the woman was very upsetting. I wasn't sure whether I would succeed, but I was struggling." Connie was pointing out in this dream and her asso- ciations that despite her fear of male aggression and her defensive masculinity, she did not approve of or use her mother's method of tearing down her father to counter the anticipated aggression. This was true of Connie's character structure. Despite her fears, she was not in the least a castrating woman. What relationships she did have with men, including me, were pleasant, at least on the surface. After this session there were two which were filled with resistance. 152 Connie Begins Resolving Oedipus Complex 22 In the next session Connie re- lated another of her dreams about two different worlds. She said, "I had a crazy, mixed-up dream. There was a barrier between two different kinds of worlds. One was a good world and one was a bad one. The idea was that in one world the people were sick and unhappy and in the other world there was no sickness. There was an in- visible barrier between them. I was walking back to the bad world with this woman who looked like a witch. As we passed the barrier, everything changed and was gloomy and morbid. I was in the bad world first, then the good one, and then back to the bad one. In the good world I remember being attracted to a man at the office and giving a motherly kiss to a little boy. I guess the good world represents heterosexuality and the bad world with the witch, homosexuality with Liz." Two sessions from then Connie told another interest- ing dream. She was in her neighborhood and was running down the street carrying her clothing with very few or no clothes on. The boys in the neighborhood were chasing her. She ran into an alley and put her clothes on. The 153 boys found her. One of them accused her of running around without her clothes and she denied it. She felt accused and condemned by them as if they were police- men. Connie was silent for a moment. Then she said, "I just had a vision of an insane murderer breaking down my door. I called the police, but they didn't get there on time. It's like a case I read about in the paper." Con- nie brought up two of her fears about men — that they would disapprove of her exposing herself and that they would kill her. At the next session she said that Liz had gone away for a weekend and she was nervous that someone might break down her door and attack her. This theme was continued in her next session when she told the following dream: ''I was in a neighborhood movie near where I was born. In the audience was a mechanical monster or Frankenstein. He was supposed to be under control. I went to leave the movie and I had to pass the monster. I was frightened because I didn't trust the fact that it was under control." When I asked Connie what she thought about the dream, she said, "The monster is supposed to be a man. It has to do with my idea of men being uncontrollable." I pointed out to Connie that since the setting of the dream was a movie, we might here again be coming across a reference to the fact that she got her initial impression of man's sadistic sexual role through a visual experience — witnessing parental intercourse. That same day Connie had had a long detailed dream 154 about her cat giving birth to kittens. She helped dehver them, washed them, and thought how cute they were. She said, "I guess it was my mother instinct coming out." During this period she kept telhng me how she was quarrehng with Liz and that she was thinking of leaving her. She also informed me that Liz had begun her own analysis. During the next few sessions through her dreams and associations Connie brought out more of her feelings about her mother and about women in general. She expressed her resentment against her mother for being bossy and favoring her sister. Again the theme of being deprived came into her dreams. In addition to this she said, "My mother was sloppy about the house and her person. It used to annoy me. She's a gossip and a com- plainer. I never could feel proud of her. She always gossips and finds fault with everybody and tells me all the family trouble. She's a martyr." Around this same time she had another dream conveying the idea that Liz really hated her and was her enemy. Then Connie brought in this dream: "I was in Italy. I was being shown around by this girl who looked like an Italian actress. I was trying to speak Italian to some man. He said it wasn't necessary because he could speak English. This girl took me to the house of this man. I thought I would get more attention because I was a foreigner, but I didn't. He paid more attention to her." Connie started out by saying she had heard my wife was Italian and that she looked like a famous Italian actress. She said, "I guess I feel my analyst prefers someone else to me. I guess it means that you prefer your wife to me. I know my referring to you as 'my analyst' is very impersonal, but I must want to keep our relationship impersonal." In this dream, Connie was competing with my wife for me, but she was also realizing the fact that she couldn't win, that I preferred my wife to her. This is the kind of dream a patient has when she is resolving the Oedipus complex. When a girl is about seven and she lives in a good family situation with par- ents who love one another, she comes to the realization that she can never take her father away from her mother and that he prefers the mother to her. Recognizing the impossibility of the fulfillment of her wishes, she gives up her sexual wishes for her father and turns them to- wards her contemporaries. This is known as resolving the Oedipus complex. However, where the parents do not get along, the girl feels that she has a chance of winning and her wishes towards her father persist in her unconscious right up to adult life. When the girl comes into analysis, she usually transfers her feelings about her father onto her analyst. Thus, in the analytic situation, she gets a second chance at resolving her feelings. It looked from this interview as if Connie was be- ginning to avail herself of this opportunity. One of the big advantages of resolving this complex is that feelings of competition with other women are greatly diminished after the resolution. For father there is competition since 156 he is the only important man in the house and sought after by the girl and her mother. However, for other men there is not that much competition since there are plenty of them to go around. Connie had just begun her attempt at resolution, however. Her next dream showed that there was still a great deal of sexual involvement with me. This was demonstrated in the following comments: "The night before last I dreamt my parents sent me to San Francisco by plane. The plane had difficulty rising off the ground, but it finally made it. I tried not to be nervous. It was cloudy, but there was a clearing. I thought — if only the plane got above the clouds, it would be a nice sunny day. Finally, I got to San Francisco. I made some friends and was adjusting pretty well on my own. Then I was at the house of a friend of mine in Riverdale. I said to her, 'How come I dreamed your house is in San Francisco when it's actually in Riverdale?' Suddenly I was back in my own apartment and I was trying to masturbate. I wasn't doing a very good job of it and couldn't seem to relieve myself." I asked Connie what her associations were. She said that she knew that I lived in Riverdale. Lately she had been reading about San Francisco in connection with Joe Di Maggio getting a divorce from Marilyn Monroe. I pointed out that he and I were both Italian and she thought of us as both married to glamorous women. In the first part of the dream Connie was leaving her homo- sexual life and moving to heterosexuality through me. She was feeling strong and independent. In the second part she was contrasting this with her lonely and sexually frustrating homosexual life. This interpretation of the latter part of the dream was confirmed by her remarks that her sexual life had been almost nil and she had little or no interest in it. She also confessed a vague curiosity about my home life. Did I ever argue with my wife, she wondered, and about what. I told her to be sure to tell me any thoughts she had about me personally. The next session Connie told me she had done some- thing very unusual for her. She had intentionally missed a dental appointment because of an irrational fear that he would hurt her. During the same session she described a wish-fulfilling dream about becoming pregnant. She said, "I feel in between. I don't want homosexuality, but I don't want anything else." At the following session Connie disclosed this dream: "A man from work was sitting on my piano bench and leaving stains on it. I tried to tell him tactfully not to do it, but he didn't seem to care whether he spoiled it or not. In the next part of the dream I was pregnant. I had to go inside of the hospital to have the baby delivered. I lay down and two men picked me up and put me on a stretcher. I was aware I was afraid of them, but even in the dream I thought to myself that analysis had shown me this was a neurotic fear. So I let them carry me in." She added: "The piano bench stands for a vagina — you either sit on it or store something in it. This fellow 158 was trying to spoil it. I have a feeling that underneath his happy-go-lucky exterior he's really very sadistic." So Connie in the dream started out with the idea of men being sadistic, but got pregnant anyway and then proceeded herself to revise her distortion about men in the course of the dream. This was a good sign; it meant to me that we were correcting some of Connie's mis- interpretations out of her past and that these corrections were becoming integrated into her thinking. She was thinking more and more of going straight, she told me. She had day dreams about William Holden and Marlon Brando. Before she became an active homosexual, she had been in the habit of constructing fantasies about being a movie starlet, and now she was beginning to in- dulge in these day dreams again. During the next session she told me that she had had two dreams about me. In one dream she was sitting in my oEce and suddenly felt her legs were too fat. They were much fatter than they actually were in reality. In the next dream she was sitting up talking to me instead of lying on the couch and was pleased about it. Her asso- ciations were: "One of the gay girls asked me if I felt warm toward my analyst. I told her a little more lately but not much. I always felt my legs were unattractive. Sometimes I wish I could sit up here, but I can't. It would mean the whole analysis would be on a more friendly basis. It also annoys me that I can't address you by any particular name. I guess I'm tired of being just a case history. I want the analysis to be on a more friendly 159 basis. What do your other patients call you?" I answered that it varied. Some called me Dr. Rob- ertiello, some Doc, some Richard and some Dick. "I don't know," she said, "nothing seems appropriate." Connie wanted to get closer to me and was moving in that direction, but she was still afraid. She was using her lack of attractiveness as a defense. Immediately following the above comments, she went on to talk about her fear of going to the dentist because he would hurt her. I pointed out to her that this was her way of telling me indirectly the reason for her fear of getting closer to me. She continued this theme with a dream the next ses- sion about her straight girl friend going blind; she was again connecting heterosexuality with physical damage. Yet there was evidence of correcting distortions as well. She had also dreamed of heterosexuality in terms of the atom bomb again, but this time when it went off there was just a lot of noise and no one had been hurt. The dream also referred to homosexuality as phony and un- gratifying and to the change taking place in herself in terms of an adjustment rather than a complete recon- struction. In her associations to the dream, she brought out that her father was never very considerate of her mother — that he was mean, arbitrary and authoritarian. He would say, "Do it because I say so. You don't need any reasons." 160 Mother^s Rejection 23 In the next session Connie de- scribed a dream in which her mother told her that she didn't love her. Connie kept insisting that she was only joking, but her mother repeated that it was true. The dream, Connie felt, was probably alluding to her grow- ing realization of her mother's coldness and lack of inter- est in her. She had felt desperate in the dream, Connie told me; it had been a real nightmare. She had been angry in the dream that her mother wouldn't change her mind. It hadn't seemed so much that her mother dis- liked Connie in particular, but that she felt this way about everyone. Connie said, "She's warmer to my father than to anyone else, but I only felt that in the last couple of years. You can't say she's cold. She's always doing things for people and being a martyr. She always calls to check if I'm all right, but it's as if she's anticipating something horrible has happened. I also realize she used to look at me in a hostile way and make me uncomfort- able." In the next session Connie said she had a very bad week. "I guess that business about my mother has been upsetting me," she said. ''I was feeling pretty good until 161 I had that dream. I was sensitive to every httle disagree- ment with Liz. I was feehng rejected, I told Liz that gay hfe was not for me and that I would go straight and either get married or be an old maid. She wasn't too shocked to hear it. I think she feels the same way. I dreamt about Queen Elizabeth. She was very attractive and charming. I felt that it was because she was respected that she was able to round out her personality. In the same dream I dreamt about an ugly looking bug. I think the bug stood for me. Lately I've had butterflies in my stomach and I'm sensitive to the slightest rejection ever since I had that dream about my mother not loving me. I feel ugly in disposition and angry at everyone. I guess I feel no one cares for me." I explained to Connie that when a child is rejected by her mother and not treated with love and respect, she gets to feel that there must be something v^ong with her to provoke this rejection. Maternal rejection always causes feelings of ugliness and unacceptability. A child can't say, "My mother rejects me because she's neurotic. There's nothing wrong with me." Rather the child feels ugly and unacceptable and thinks that she has provoked the rejection. That was what Connie was referring to in her dream about Queen Elizabeth and the bug. Queen Elizabeth was actually Connie's sister, who, she felt, was given love and respect by her mother and grew up emo- tionally healthy. Connie was the ugly bug that had been rejected and, therefore, grew up thinking she was ugly. Connie said, "Maybe I blame my mother for my being 162 gay. I'm really mad at her. I was just thinking of going around saying, 'My mother doesn't love me.' I think most of my friends love mothers that don't love them. I guess all gay girls' mothers don't love them." Connie continued this theme in the next session, saying she kept thinking about how her mother didn't love her. For the first time in her analysis she broke down and cried sev- eral times. "My mother doesn't feel I'm as accomplished as the other women in the family. She did a good job making me feel like a good-for-nothing." Along with the emergence of these feelings, Connie said there seemed to be a real change in her. She said she definitely couldn't picture herself as remaining homo- sexual. Now that her hostility to her mother was con- scious, there was less of a need for a defense and denial of it and this was one of the main roots of Connie's homosexuality. Connie seemed to be going through a kind of adolescent awakening of her sexual feelings about men. This was demonstrated by her fantasies about movie stars: "I had this pleasant feeling connected with think- ing about Marlon Brando. I keep having childish day dreams about Hollywood stars. I can't decide whether I should make William Holden divorce his wife and marry me or whether I should marry Marlon Brando. The part about William Holden seems wrong from the start. I feel I would foul up his family life and we would never be happy. If I marry Marlon Brando, William Holden is still in the picture. Now I'm having some morbid thoughts — that I'll get a horrible disease and die." .63 Connie's fantasy was interesting. It demonstrated her dilemma of being caught between her desire to detach her sexual thoughts from the married man (her father or me) and her feeling of not being able to. In her last statement, of course, she brought up again the danger connected with heterosexuality. She related a dream at the next session about feeling brave at the prospect of meeting Marlon Brando. In the same dream she was on a flying trapeze and she was thinking, "I'm brave now. I can swing on a flying trapeze just like anyone else can." She was annoyed because she woke up before she really got to meet Brando. At the next session Connie went back to talking about her mother. "I hate all mothers lately," she told me. "They feel as if they're doing you a favor by bringing you up. My mother always gives the impression of being self- sacrificing and a martyr. She always wanted the attention or the credit. She did what she was supposed to, but she did it for a selfish motive — to gain attention, especially in front of people. She gave the impression that I was a badly behaved child, I hardly did anything around the house. She made me feel that I was useless. She would never let me do anything for her. Everybody thinks she's grand and wonderful, but there's a certain amount of selfishness that's obvious only to me. If the mother does everything and doesn't let the child do anything, every- body thinks that the mother is wonderful and the child is a louse." 164 I asked Connie what she thought the motivation was behind her mother's behavior. "Do you think it had anything to do with my father?" she asked. "I guess she did it to get on the good side of him and to put her competitor in a bad hght." I told Connie that what she said imphed that her mother saw her as a competitor. I asked her what the field of competition was. Her answer was interesting: "About being a woman. And she was more interested in beating me out than in the object we were competing for." This certainly tied together a lot of things that Con- nie had brought up before and had not completely understood. Actually some of her competitiveness was a way of combatting her mother's competitiveness with her. When Connie first spoke about her mother she characterized her as competitive, but she didn't under- stand why she had said it. Moreover, Connie had ex- pressed the same ideas about herself that she did about her mother — that winning the competition was more important than the object of the competition. Connie asked how come her mother was so nice to her sister. I said that we couldn't tell about that, but that perhaps she wasn't as nice as Connie had thought she was. During the next session Connie felt depressed. It was partly because she was turning the anger she felt towards her mother back to herself. She brought up how both her parents would always break their promises: "They would just change their minds and not consider that 165 someone else might have depended on what they said." She added, "At least analysts can be relied on." Right at this point, Connie's mother fell and hurt herself. Her mother's misfortune was also unfortunate in terms of Connie's analysis; for even though the accident did not result in serious injury, it naturally stimulated deep guilt feelings in Connie, coming as it did at a time when she had just been bringing out her feelings of anger with her mother. Under the impetus of guilt, she turned even more of her anger back to herself and felt depressed, even though she realized that her mother was guilt- provoking with her attitude of martyrdom and self- sacrifice. Connie had been caught in a real trap as a child. Her mother had rejected her, which made Connie angry, at the same time that she provoked guilt, which made it difficult for Connie to face or express anger. "My mother is preoccupied with feeding her husband and her children," said Connie. "She's always in the kitchen. Lately I've been losing my interest in food. I'm never hungry. It seems as if I'm not accepting my mother's offering." I told Connie that many mothers who can't give love are preoccupied with stuffing people with food; they are trying to prove to themselves and the world how giving they are. Connie's being slightly overweight was prob- ably connected with her being deprived of love by her mother and trying to make up for it by eating. Soon after this material came out, Connie began losing weight and 166 has been able to maintain herself at her best weight since then. Meanwhile, she continued to feel some guilt about her anger towards her parents. She remembered having a dream as a child that her grandmother would kill her. Now she realized that her grandmother was a nice old lady and that she was probably using her as a symbol for her mother. She wondered whether she would ever be well-adjusted enough to raise children properly. In a later session Connie told me this dream: "I re- member a big house like a southern mansion with columns. It was just a front, a shell. There was nothing in it. Then there was something about two gay girls fighting." Connie said she felt the dream represented the lack of foundation and consistency in gay life. She said that she kept thinking about her parents' getting old and passing away and the idea upset her. Here she was bringing out her death wishes towards her mother, which, of course, aroused guilt. "I always wanted to live away from home," she told me, ''away from dis- approval. Teachers didn't help either. I remember having to stay after school in kindergarten and fighting with the teacher. All mothers and school teachers should be psychoanalyzed. Outwardly she's the picture of a won- derful, good, unselfish mother. But there's this business of doing what's supposed to be done rather than what the kid wants and needs. And there's the difference be- tween the way she treated the boys and the girls. She didn't think much of herself as a woman. She wanted to stay in the house and hide. She's afraid to compete. She 167 would always be in the kitchen. She never sat down with the others to dinner. They would always say Toor Ger- trude, she never has a chance to sit down.' She probably made everybody feel guilty and uncomfortable. I used to feel guilty when I saw my friends' mothers being served. I felt it was my fault that my mother didn't do that, but it wasn't. I was made to feel lazy and no good from an early age. My mother must have had hostility and guilt about it. She was constantly feeding us — as if, if she feeds us, she has done her duty." Connie continued to feel uncomfortable during this period. She was angry and anxious. Much of her anger with her mother was being transferred to her boss and she was having a hard time controlling her feelings about him. She told the following dream: "Alice was standing on a corner. I walked by. I felt like someone else. I had a trim figure and walked in a suggestive manner. She said, 'Once a slut always a slut.' In the next part I was in my old neighborhood. The bakery had just closed down. I walked down a dark, dismal street. There were two other bakeries, but they didn't appeal to me." Con- nie continued, "Is the bakery idea supposed to stand for mother love? Alice stands for my mother disapproving of my being sexual. She always has disapproved of the way I dressed. The bakery being closed meant my mother's love was not there for me. The substitutes might be homosexuality, but they were unsatisfactory." Connie was obviously pointing out in her dream that her mother had deprived her of affection (symbolized 168 by food) and had disapproved of her sexuahty. In her associations Connie said, "I'm thinking of that line in the song that goes, 'My Mama done tole me.' In the song she tells the girl that men are no good. Whenever I had a boy friend, she disapproved of him. She always made me feel I had to protect her against my father, ^he used to get me angry with my father but wouldn't let me say anything to him. She always made me feel he would deprive her or hurt her. That's what I can't stand about my boss. He complains about being mistreated, but he won't speak up for himself. When I volunteer to do it, he won't let me. I feel he and my mother are selfish. They're using me as sounding boards to com- plain to." At the next session Connie began with a dream about her mother and a scarcity of dishes. The atmosphere in the dream was very gloomy. "I guess it must mean the scarcity of love from my mother," she said. She had trouble saying anything more in this session. During the following session, Connie was fuming with anger at her boss: "I hate the boss. He's a miserable person. I know it's a transfer from my mother, but it doesn't help. I'm angry, anxious and depressed. The feel- ing is overwhelming me. He's like my mother. Everyone thinks he's wonderful but he isn't. Yet, when people talk against him, I feel guilty. The same thing happened when my sister-in-law talked against my mother. I feel like crying but I can't. I feel very sorry for myself. You're the only sympathetic person I know. I never could con- 169 fide in my mother. She would always say, 'Don't worry about it; it's nothing.' I was constipated this week. I guess I'm trying to keep everything in. I'm afraid to let it out. I've been trying to give myself an enema." The next time I saw Connie she said she felt even angrier at her boss. She wanted to quit. "I feel that the boss would like to step all over me and I can't permit it. I get much angrier now than I used to. I feel like I'm being used and I resent it. He feels he's overworked but actually I am. Also he tries to set me against other people. It reminds me of my mother trying to set me against my father. I wish I could stop being angry. Also they told me my boss was trying to get rid of me because his nephew needs a job. I've detested him since then. Both my boss and my mother don't like me and are trying to direct sympathy toward themselves. Both are miserable, frustrated people — never satisfied. I'm their sounding board. They have to have people like me. I feel I can't be nice to them without their taking advantage of it. My mother made me feel it was an ordeal for her when I got sick. I feel she didn't want to care for me. She was constantly competing with me, always trying to cut me out of my father's attention. She didn't want my father and me to be close." This last session was a very important session. Connie was really discharging her anger toward her mother. To be sure, some of it had been transferred to her boss, but that was to be expected. When a patient is bringing up some important feeling from the past, he almost invari- 170 ably finds a figure in the present, often the analyst, upon whom to discharge this feeling. This makes for a real emotional reliving of the feeling, not just an intellectual understanding. Connie was being really emotional in discharging these feelings. Sometimes people do things on impulse during periods like this, like getting married or divorced or quitting a job. When they do, this is called "acting out." It is important for the analyst to protect the patient at these times and keep him from making any irrational or irreversible move that might be a direct consequence of the transfer of some old emotion. For instance, if Connie had begun to act on her fantasy of quitting her job, I would have done everything in my power to stop her and to show her that her feelings about her boss were exaggerated because of a transference from past feelings about her mother. 171 Marriage Seen as Unpleasant 24 The storm of Connie's anger with her mother seemed to have subsided at the next session, at least temporarily. Connie said she felt better. Also she said that the boss had been nice and she felt less angry at him. She told me a dream: "I told this fellow at work, Bill, that I was tired of gay life. He made love to me. He was happy. I wanted him to marry me. I thought he was just happy because he could go to bed with me. In the next part I was walking down the street with Liz and another gay girl. Alice was behind us with some other gay girls. She was waving a butter knife around. I wasn't afraid of the knife. She said she'd get the cold shoulder if she talked to me. She did talk to me and I turned around and gave her the cold shoulder. She said, 'See, I told you so.' Then I was at a wedding. Some- body was saying something about the bride having made it on time." Connie associated to the dream: "Bill was trying to excite me rather than be affectionate to me. Sometimes, when I think I'll get married, I think I might marry Bill. He's single, but he never goes out with eligible girls. The butterknife must be a phallic symbol, but it's a dull 173 knife. I guess the part about the bride being on time for the wedding refers to my wondering if I'm too old to get married." The dream showed Connie's alternation between the heterosexual and the homosexual and the constant struggle that was going on within her. At the beginning she gave up homosexuality and had sex with Bill. But she felt he was exploiting her, and she went back to homosexuality and the gay girls with the idea that she couldn't get hurt by the penis there. Then she rejected Alice and homosexuality and returned to the idea of getting married, feeling that it would not be too late to make a change. Connie continued with some thoughts about her par- ents: "I saw a movie about the motherly instinct to pro- tect a child. It made me sad. I said to myself there was no motherly instinct. I was thinking that, if somebody had tried to take me away from my mother, I don't know what she would have done. I didn't visit my parents this week. I didn't eat the food my mother gave me last week to take home with me. It went rotten. I had to throw it out. Maybe my feeling in the dream that Bill was ex- ploiting me rather than loving me partly goes back to my feeling about my mother, too. I've had the same feeling about Liz when she makes love to me. The feelings spread to both men and women. What about my father, though? I don't feel it's as true about him. I feel my father cared for me more than my mother did. He would bring me shoes and take me out for my birthday. I was ,174 just day-dreaming I had lots of money, a big house and servants. I dreamt I had a lot of trouble with the cook. I wanted to go and make special dishes and she wouldn't let me. I was wondering whether I should fire her. I im- agined a lot of trouble with her. I guess the cook is my mother. That's my mother, all right. She would never let me do the cooking. She wanted me to dress in a feminine way, but she never really made a point of dress- ing me up. She gets real upset when anybody wants to do anything in the kitchen. When I tried, she wouldn't let me." At the next session Connie said, "I'm feeling better. I had some strange dreams. I dreamt I was supposed to be getting married to you. I was getting instructions on how to behave. It had to do with time, with getting in and out at an exact time. I was wondering if I could be so perfect and so accurate. The next night I dreamt about you again, but it wasn't too clear. I can vaguely remember we were being affectionate toward each other. Last night I had a dream that I could project myself about one hundred years into the future. I could fly to the future and fly back at will. In the future I was all dressed up and looked very glamorous. I didn't look like me at all. I was blonde and had upswept hair and was wearing a green sequined dress. Only something seemed to go wrong in the future, but I don't remember what." After telling about the dream, Connie continued: "The people in the ofEce turned on the air conditioners all at once. I think they ought to do it a little at a time. 175 Maybe I'm referring to me and heterosexuality — I want to do it gradually. I felt uncomfortable in the presence of Bill. I guess I thought there was a possibility I might really be attracted to him. The dream makes me uncom- fortable, too." I asked her about the time schedule in the dream about marrying me. She said she thought it might have to do with her being too old to get married. I suggested that it might have to do with the responsibilities of marriage and her seeing it in terms of a task or duty filled with drudgery. She said, "Yes, but that's an excuse, too. My mother was always complaining and tired. I guess my mother felt that being married was a task." She concluded the session with the remark that the dreams had been pleas- ant and that she was beginning to feel more relaxed with me. "But," she added, "I still don't know what to call you." The following dream came out of the next session: "I was in the hospital and a doctor was supposed to operate on my foot and leg. They were supposed to slice my leg length-wise. They weren't so sure what they were sup- posed to do for me." She said she didn't feel much like analyzing and that this dream was probably connected with the sexual dream she had told at the previous ses- sion. The dream of physical damage by me (the doctor) followed her sexual dream about me. "I guess I see you as Jack the Ripper," Connie said. "My mother might have given me that idea. She used to 176 say to be careful or my father would get violent." When she was nine, she told me, she broke her leg and shrieked in fear of the doctors. Then she recalled again her tonsillectomy at age four. Her mother had told her that her whole personality changed afterwards. She had been very frightened, both of the ether and of being pinned down. Afterwards, she was despondent for over two weeks. Her next session was the last before our vacations. She reported that she had gone to see her parents and had been able to confide in them more than she had in the past. There was now less embarrassment in talking about personal things in front of her father, and she indicated that she felt a little sad about not having spent more time with him. She had been able to accept some money from him without any qualms. In addition, her mother had been nicer to her, even a little affectionate. A lot of people think that you learn to hate your parents through psychoanalysis. Actually this is not so. After the angers of the past have been discharged, most people are able to achieve a more understanding attitude and often a closer relationship with their parents. It sounded as if this was happening to Connie. 177 Fathers Abnormal Interest in Connie 25 Connie's vacation and mine fol- lowed one another, so it was almost two months before I saw her again. She had now completed her third year of analysis and was beginning her fourth. We picked up right where we had left off. (I have seen other patients who have taken up at almost the precise point they left off after an absence of a year from analysis. ) The summer hadn't been too bad, Connie reported. She and Liz had had their share of quarrels, but there had been no major rift. The first dream she told me was at this first session: *1 had a dream about you. You were sitting with all sorts of jewelry pasted to your face and skin. I said, 'Who do you think you are, Leo Genu?' I was annoyed at all the jewelry. I guess I was kind of hostile toward you. I guess I've been mad at doctors in general. Leo Genu reminds me of someone who plays the heavy, the bad guy. I used to know a gay girl who pasted jewels on her face and I thought it looked stupid. I had another dream about an optometrist examining my eyes and my not having any confidence in him." 179 So here Connie was starting out by casting me in the role of villain. This negative feeling was probably being used in the service of a resistance. When a patient is away, she usually re-represses a lot of the material and is somewhat reluctant to get into it again. However, Connie went right on from there. She said that over the vacation she had been thinking a lot about "the bad mother busi- ness." Anyone's getting preferential treatment over her was invariably noted by her. She said that she had had several heterosexual dreams. A film she had recently seen had contained a nude bathing sequence and she reported her reaction. She had liked the girl and thought she was sweet until she got undressed, but then she thought she was dirty. "I guess I still see women as being physical messes," Connie commented. At the next session she related a dream about wetting herself. She said she feared she might have to urinate during an analytic session. Strangely enough, Connie actually de\'eloped a bladder condition at this time and one of her main symptoms was poor control. I referred her to a urologist, who diagnosed a chronic bladder in- fection. The thought crossed my mind that it might have a psychological origin, but it couldn't be proved either way. During the abo\e session, she referred to the then popular song which began, "Oh my papa — to me he was so wonderful." "Maybe I was contrasting him to my mama" she commented. She also had had a dream about her high school friend, 180 Sarah, in which she seemed to take a more accepting and less hostile attitude towards her. At the session following she told me a dream about her sister coming back to life. In the dream Connie was feeling friendlier towards her. In the same session she described a dream in which she was standing on the street with a young man who was her father in the dream. A building was supposed to cave in on them, and Connie was half hoping it would. In this dream she was expressing a sexual wish for her father but still seeing it as leading to her destruction. How- ever, she had gone from an atom bomb to a building collapsing, which seemed to indicate that she viewed heterosexuality as less threatening. Her cousin had called her, Connie told me, and said there was a boy she wanted Connie to meet. Connie said she would let her know. She didn't feel like meeting him, but she was annoyed with herself for not wanting to. She thought she should give herself a chance to get out of the rut she was in. "Maybe I'll call after the next fight I have with Liz," Connie said. "I'm still reluctant to break up with her. She was ready to leave after the last battle, but I couldn't bear the thought of her leaving and that depressed me more." At her next session she reported a dream which stated symbolically the idea that leaving Liz and homosexuality wouldn't solve her problems completely. Also in the dream she was angry at her father for letting things happen the way they had in her childhood. She felt her 181 mother couldn't have done anything to alter develop- ments in her life, but her father could have and hadn't. She said he was always saying to her, "Shut up; you don't know any better." At the following session she complained about Liz. "I feel stagnant and stale," Connie said. "I'm always think- ing about making plans that don't include Liz, but I can't manage it. I just can't get interested. I just mope around and feel depressed. Our relationship is no good for either of us. I don't know why we're hanging around each other. Liz was nasty and I couldn't figure out a reason. I guess she's generally hostile to me. I expressed some anger but not enough. I feel she spoils everything, but I put up with it so it's my fault. She doesn't really care about me or she wouldn't behave that way. She has a lot of anger that she directs toward me and it's unfair. Why am I putting up with it? I'm afraid, if I express anger, I'll be- come very violent. So I hold back. When I express it, I feel even worse afterwards. A lot of the anger is physical. I feel like smashing her face in." She recounted another dream: "I got an apartment in Riverdale even though I thought it might be too far from the city. The toilet was open and in the kitchen. My father came in while I was using it and I screamed for him to get out of there. This really used to happen. He would always walk in on me in the bathroom. In an- other part of the dream I was looking for hair spray to keep my hair in place but I couldn't find it." Connie proceeded to associate to the dream: "The 182 dream about the new apartment was depressing/' she said. ''My father always wanted to come in and examine my bowel movement when I was a little girl. It was al- ways disgusting to me and I used to get furious. Also he would want me to leave the door in the bathroom open when I took a bath in case I drowned or some- thing." I asked Connie if she had any ideas about the hair spray. She didn't. I reminded her that she had used hair in earlier dreams to symbolize pubic hair. In the dream Connie was expressing a wish to go in a heterosexual direction — toward Riverdale or me — but she was also expressing her fear of exposure. Again she was repeating the idea of the man finding her unclean or unattractive. That is why in the dream she hadn't been able to find the hair spray. This dream was followed by another which expressed the old need to consider herself unattrac- tive in order to avoid competing with her mother. Here was an example of a symptom being connected to two essentially different psychological roots. Usually symp- toms in a patient are multi-determined and have various trends leading into them. At the next session Connie said she was getting very tired of her relationship with Liz and with homosexuality in general. She asked me whether I thought she would ever go straight. I told her I thought there was a good possibility of it. She said, "I can't see myself remaining gay, so I agree. But I can't see myself plunging into heterosexuality either." She told me a dream she had 183 had about making love to a man. In it she had a strong feehng she was "straight": "He had hair hke my father — straight, dark, and with a receding hair Hne." I reminded Connie that this dream followed her other dream about competing with her mother, I went over the Oedipal situation with her. "You couldn't let your- self win the competition in the dream last time," I ex- plained. "If the competition is for your father, you can understand why you can't let yourself win. You view being heterosexual as competing with your mother for your father, and you would feel both guilty and anxious about that. All girls between the ages of five and seven go through a period of sexual interest in their father." "And why didn't I resolve it at age seven?" asked Connie. "A girl resolves it if her mother and father love each other and, if she sees that the father obviously prefers the mother to her," I went on. "This didn't happen in your childhood. Your parents never loved one another. And your father manifested this peculiar intimate inter- est in you and your body. So the feeling persisted. You used defenses of feeling unfeminine and not competing. Then you formed the relationship with Sarah in which you were denying competition by proclaiming love. These defenses were essential to you as a child. You couldn't cope with your feelings in any better way. But you don't really need them now. You're operating as if the past is still the present." Connie said, "Yesterday I saw a man on the subway 184 with three kids. I was attracted to him. He was certainly a father. I enjoyed the fact that he seemed to be inter- ested in me too. He kept looking at me. I was wondering if his wife was dead. I was getting rid of my competition. It would be nice if I could look with some interest at a single boy. Then I wouldn't have anything to feel guilty about. But aren't there other people with this problem who are heterosexual?" I said, yes, that this was a very common problem. But in addition to it Connie had the fear of violence from men, her competition with her dead sister, and many other problems that had pushed her in the direction of homosexuality. Then, too, she had happened to meet Jo right at an age when she was having difficulty coping with these problems. It was conceivable that, if she hadn't met Jo at that time, she might not have become overtly homosexual. At the next session Connie related another dream about her pocketbook. "I dreamt I misplaced my pocket- book. When I turned around to retrieve it, I noticed a gay girl had run off with it. The girl was unattractive. I ran after her hysterically yelling for her to give me back my handbag. I had difficulty getting it back but I did. After I got it back, I had a quick sexual experience with this girl." Connie associated to the dream: "Part of the dream says I'm playing the part of a homosexual but I'm not really one. I couldn't have cared less about going to bed with this girl. The handbag was attractive and a good 185 one; it must stand for my femininity. She was stealing it. Fm getting hostile to Liz now for no particular reason. Maybe I feel that she or homosexuality in general is de- priving me of being a woman, I felt that I had to have the affair with this girl; not that I wanted to, but because I thought she'd take the handbag away again if I didn't." Connie was bringing out very clearly the mechanism by which she felt forced to submit to another woman homo- sexually out of fear of her and in order to prevent the destruction of her femininity by her. In other words, it was better to be homosexual than to be rendered perma- nently unfeminine or asexual. Connie told me during her following interview that she had seen the movie, "Summertime." The movie had been engrossing and aroused a wish she could turn "straight." She said, "I figure if I met somebody like Ros- sano Brazzi I could turn straight fast enough." After the movie she woke up very frightened. She was shaking all over and thought she was blind. I pointed out to Connie that in the Oedipus myth the punishment that Oedipus received for marrying his mother was the loss of his eyesight. It appeared that Connie's fear of blindness was the same thing as her fear in the dream of losing her handbag. Both the handbag and the eye are female sexual symbols. Connie feared blindness as a punishment for taking away father from mother and the punishment was seen as being inflicted by the mother. She confirmed this interpretation by telling me she had 186 been having fantasies of getting involved with a married man she knew. During the next few sessions Connie continued to work through the Oedipus complex. She had other dreams about being attracted to men, each of whom definitely symbolized her father. A few sessions later Connie reported a rather amusing dream. She and Princess Margaret were drilling or punch- ing holes in blocks of wood as holders for candles. Con- nie remembered trying to fit two candles into holes and not succeeding. Princess Margaret asked, ''What the hell are you doing here?" implying she was royalty and Connie was nothing. Connie understood the symbolism in the dream very well. She said, "I guess Princess Mar- garet and I have something in common. She's trying to come to a decision about marrying Peter Townsend and I'm trying to decide about going straight." In continuing to associate to the dream Connie remembered that the candles were too small for the holes. Again she was re- ferring to being less afraid of a small penis than of a large one. In the next session Connie related five or six different dreams all of which dealt with different aspects of her problem. One of them was especially interesting and striking in its symbolism: "I was at an outdoor camp. I caught the woman at the head of the camp doing some- thing she shouldn't be doing. I was afraid I'd be killed or fired, but I accused her of it. I caught her trying to light a candle in a glass case. She wasn't supposed to 187 light the wick. It was an upsetting dream." Connie went on: "She wasn't supposed to hght the wick because it was dangerous and might cause a fire. The woman looked at me as if she wanted to kill me. I used to think my mother looked at me that way. I was talking about that recently. The dream must mean something about my telling my mother off and it being dangerous to do it." I asked Connie about the candle and reminded her she had used the same symbol in the dream about Princess Margaret. "It would seem as if she's trying to put the penis to work," Connie said. "It was like an awful secret and I was going to tell. It seems as if I might have caught my mother and father in the sexual act and I was going to tell on my mother." Connie was continuing to focus on her fear of her mother. In the ensuing sessions Connie continued to work through this material. She was getting along very badly with Liz and consciously wanted very much to become heterosexual, but she kept bringing up her fears in her dreams and associations. She had another dream about me. "I dreamt we were out on a date. We were rather close in age. I always feel afraid to tell you dreams about you, because I'm afraid something will come out. Any- way I remember you gave me a pat on the fanny. I couldn't make up my mind whether to be annoyed or not. Then I decided I was not annoyed. Then I woke up, I thought that, if a man on a date did that, I'd be very annoyed, but, if my father did that I wouldn't be so annoyed." Connie continued, "Liz and I had a violent quarrel over the weekend. We both decided she should move. I visited my straight girl friend, Sue, and decided I would see more of her and try to meet some men through her. But when one of the gay girls suggested that we go out and try to meet men, I didn't want to and I tried to find excuses for not doing it. Then Liz saw her analyst and decided she shouldn't move. I was glad she didn't move. I try to get out of my rut and then I get right back in it again." Connie continued talking about the dream by saying she would like to go out with someone like me because I was so understanding. She said she always thought of me as being much older than she was even though she realized I was actually her contemporary. She also said that she thought she would be furious if someone patted her on the fanny, but in the dream she had felt it was an affectionate gesture. I pointed out to her that hetero- sexuality in the dream seemed more pleasant and less threatening to her. She said, "A lot of things don't throw me that used to. My landlady screamed at me and I screamed right back. She used to terrify me. Also I'm beginning to really think of myself as being heterosexual, but I see myself as an old maid and that's beginning to bother me." As usual, after a big push like this in a heterosexual direction, Connie had an anxiety dream. It was a night- mare about a man letting a big black dog loose at her. She was terrified that the dog would bite her and 189 screamed to the man to protect her from the dog, but he wouldn't. Obviously, Connie was still quite terrified of being hurt by men. During the next few sessions Connie continued report- ing dreams which expressed her desire to leave homo- sexuality. She also talked at length of her conscious wish to, but said that she was waiting until it would be easy for her to do it. I explained to her that she couldn't really expect the initial steps to be easy. There were bound to be anxieties and setbacks when she made her first attempts to break out of the pattern. I told her it was not realistic of her to wait until it came easy because the first steps probably were certain to be difficult. She would have to make an active effort to start things rolling. Of course, Connie actually meant "easier" rather than "easy," and it was clear that her insights into the uncon- scious roots of her problems were deepening little by little as was her mastery of the problems. At the next session Connie announced that she had accepted her cousin's invitation to come to their house and be introduced to the young man they had been urg- ing her to meet. He sounded like a good prospect from what they said and he was interested in getting married, Connie told me. This made Connie nervous. She said she wished her meeting could be more casual and with- out the family being involved. At the same session she reported a dream about a man dying. She had cried bitterly in the dream. She associated the man to her father. The dream was similar to the one about Frank 190 Sinatra dying. She was trying to resolve her conflict by cutting off her feehngs about her father and men in gen- eral. However, she felt very sad about giving up her pros- pects for love with a man. At the next session Connie reported on her date. "Things didn't work out well at all," she said. "He was ugly. I was depressed before I got there and throughout the evening. I tried not to act depressed. My first reaction was sympathy for him for his being nervous. They built him up into something he wasn't. Also I might be magnifying his defects. He didn't seem to like me either. That was a relief. Anyway Liz and I are definitely plan- ning a break. I'm very upset about it. We had a violent argument the other night. The next day we made up. I have mixed feelings about leaving her. I feel like crying when I'm home. Yesterday my straight girl friend, Sue, and I went to a restaurant in Yorkville. I was hoping some man would ask me to dance, but no one did." Connie also recounted a number of dreams: "I had some heterosexual dreams. In one dream I was trying to put together the nude figures of a man and a woman made out of clay. The next dream was about you again. I dreamt there were a lot of us getting therapy together in a large group. You were the analyst. The therapy con- sisted of acting out the conflict. You were kissing me. You looked into my eyes and you said they were full of fury." Connie went on to talk further about the dream: "It certainly was a heterosexual dream. About the fury in 191 my eyes, maybe I'm angry at you especially for implying the change isn't going to be easy and I'm going to have to do something active if I want to change. I feel it's a duty. I have no enthusiasm. Before I met this boy I was looking at the nice aspects of being straight. After the date it's hard to look at it that way. I get angry at every- one who pushes me into heterosexuality lately. I feel if I must go out with a boy he should be more Bohemian and less conventional. It would be easier for me to take the step that way. Maybe I just don't want to get mar- ried yet. I have to start off easy — maybe like being a child and gradually growing up to being adult." Connie started off the following session by saying, "What's a quick cure for a nervous wreck? 'Ugly-boy' asked me out Saturday night and I accepted. I can't sleep. I'm in a shape like I was before I first came to see you. I have no desire to go out with that goon-face Sat- urday night. I don't like this guy. I think I would prefer somebody more youthful. You know — like we were say- ing about the difference between a boy and a man and a man being more of a threat. Then I wonder why he's still unmarried at his age. I wouldn't be proud to present him to my straight girl friends. I feel insulted that my cousin picked him for me." At the next session Connie said she was feeling better, but she was retreating. She had gone out with the man she had met through her cousin Saturday night and had had a pleasant evening but she still found him unattrac- tive. Meanwhile, she had decided she didn't want to 192 leave Liz. Liz had been sweet to her and they were getting along a little better. "I had a dream about a gun," she said. "Some man who was dangerous had a gun. Periodically I was able to get the gun away from him, but he would find it. You had to put caps in it to make the noise but it was a real gun. I tried to hide the gun from him, but I couldn't seem to manage very well. It was a real gun but the part about the 'caps' made it partly a toy gun. I guess it's the same idea that men are physically damaging. It seems like the only way to avoid the danger is fight fire with fire. Maybe that means going back to homosexuality." I agreed with Connie's interpretation. The gun was obviously a penis. Connie felt that she could defend her- self against the danger of being hurt by it by becoming masculine herself. Also there was an attempt to minimize the danger by making it a child's penis rather than a man's — a "cap" pistol rather than a real one. "That's right," said Connie, "but the attempt didn't succeed. The gun was still dangerous. Maybe I felt if this fellow was younger and better looking I'd be more attracted to him and I'd have more of a problem. I have little desire now to get in touch with Sue, my straight girl friend. I think I'd do better with Anita; she's a gay girl who's trying to go straight. I feel more assertive today. I remember vaguely some heterosexual dreams about a dark, good-looking man. I had another dream in which a colored man wanted to go to bed with me, but I was afraid of him. I played sick. He asked whether my private 193 had been injured or did it hurt. That seemed to be the only reason he'd accept for my not doing it. Colored men have the reputation of being big sexual wheels. The colored man stood for a real masculine man — more on the savage side. I was telling him I wasn't really a woman. I kept thinking of all the dead women I knew — my sister and Sarah. It was supposed to be dangerous for my sister to have children because of her heart condition. I remember a lot of talk about that around the house. She was much sicker and weaker afterwards. I remember when I first heard the details of the sexual act when I was a kid I said I would never participate in it." In the case of both Sarah and her sister, Connie had been led to believe that their having married and had children had been harmful to them physically and had led to their early death. Naturally, this increased her anxieties about heterosexuality. 194 Sees Heterosexuality as Taking Father From Mother 26 For the next two weeks I was away on vacation. "Nothing traumatic" had happened while I was away, according to Connie. She had refused a second date with her cousin's friend and had been having daily quarrels with Liz and with her boss. Now she was manifesting the usual amount of resistance after a break and was bringing up various objections to hetero- sexuality. One couldn't blame her for being discouraged. She had had to fight so much anxiety to bring herself to meet this man and then he had turned out to be un- attractive. Meanwhile, however, she had met an attractive gay boy whom she described as making quite a play for her. At the next session Connie related the following dream: "I was falling off a roof and was frightened to death. I was hanging. In the dream I said to myself I had to analyze it, so I wouldn't be so frightened. Then I wasn't so frightened and I jumped to safety." Connie went on, "Maybe I'm saying men aren't so dangerous after all. But I guess I still consider them 195 dangerous, since I'm not doing anything about meeting them. Also, though, in the dream I had to jump. I could have gone back into the house. The dream said I had to do something active about it and I did. In real life I'm not yet. I was at this party and a gay boy hit me over the head kiddingly. It really hurt. But I think I handled the situation pretty well. I realized he was an individual and not a symbol." Connie started the next interview with an interesting dream: "I dreamt that Sue, my straight girl friend, and I were on vacation. Marlon Brando and some other tough-looking fellows were there. I was wishing I could get Brando's attention. In one part of the dream I had gotten up in the morning and Sue told me Marlon Brando was looking desperately for a place to sleep and he had slept over in the twin bed next to mine while she slept on a cot. He had left before I woke up. She was apologetic. I didn't mind at all, but I still wished I could meet him. I found the idea very pleasant and exciting. I had a little hassle with Sue about what was suitable for me to wear at this resort. I was confused as to whether to wear a play suit or an attractive dress. The dress actually would have been unsuitable. Sue was telling me to wear the play suit. The dress had huge flowers on it, like a dress my sister had and like one I saw Grace Kelly in. I didn't like that t}pe of dress. That was the end of the dream. I just wanted a physical relationship with Marlon Brando and nothing else. He wasn't the type to have anything else with. I guess I must have had a doubt in 196 the dream about whether I could attract him. Did I tell you Sue is pretty sure she's going to get married? It made me feel a little old-maidish. Liz accused me of being in a bad temper because Sue was getting married and I felt I should follow suit. In the dream I was so close to having a heterosexual relationship but I didn't. As far as the dress goes, I thought about being attractive the way my sister and Grace Kelly were attractive, but it actually wouldn't be me. I feel that type of dress wouldn't be suited to me — wouldn't actually make nie more attractive." Connie's next session was a very clear, compact dem- onstration of the dynamics of Connie's Oedipus complex and her insight into it. She started it off by telling me a dream: "I met this man who looked like a television actor I saw last night. We were supposed to be interested in each other. We came back to where I lived, but it was as if I had moved into a new apartment that needed a lot of repair work. I had a room mate or girl friend there. I thought for sure he'd lose interest in me and be- come interested in my girl friend. I think it didn't turn out that way and he was still interested in me. Then I decided he reminded me of someone I had gone out with the week before. They were a little different but the same type. Actually the difference reminds me of the difference between my father, who has straight hair, and my uncle, who has curly hair. I was annoyed in the apartment because the storage space was so hard to reach and you had to stand on a chair to use it." Connie's associations and interpretations were quite 197 incisive. She said, "My taste has changed since the dream about Marlon Brando. I guess I was dreaming about my father since I associated my father and his brother to part of the dream. The part about my moving to a new apartment and finding things hard to reach refers to my moving toward heterosexuahty but finding it hard to reach. The repair work has to do with my changing from one hfe to another and my needing more analytic work. Then there's the part about me and the other woman. That's this business of competition. I feel shaky about it. I was afraid I'd lose my boy friend because of my room mate or whoever she was. If he stood for my father, she should stand for my mother. It seems to mean I'm winning my father away from my mother." I explained to Connie that the dream showed that she still saw getting a man in terms of taking him away from somebody and specifically as a repetition of the mother- father situation in her background. A marked difference from her previous pattern was that, at least in the dream, Connie let herself win the competition. Her former adaptation was to attach herself to an attractive girl who would always beat her out and thus abet her feelings of inferiority and unattractiveness. I told Connie she was allowed to compete with contemporary women for a man. There should be no real guilt or danger attached to it, as there had been in childhood in the Oedipal situation. At the following session Connie described another dream about wanting to go out with a boy but running 198 into all kinds of obstacles, including her feelings about Liz and her father. At the same session she reported a dream about throw- ing Liz off a building or out of a high window. Connie laughed and then commented, "I was afraid of being found out and being hurt. Then I remember something happening to my vision again— my right eye. Right means heterosexual. The eye is a sexual symbol. It means that I will be punished by loss of my heterosexuality for ex- pressing hostility and competition to Liz. What a lousy situation. How can I get out of it?" Connie had more heterosexual dreams to report during the next session: "I was with Liz in the neighborhood. I wasn't wearing any clothes from the waist up. This Negro man was enticed by my lack of clothing. Liz walked out. He came over and wanted to take me some place where we could be alone. At first I was hesitant, but the outcome was no. In the same dream I saw this girl I used to work with. She was always talking about wanting to get married. Finally she did. I dreamt that she was living in a very poor house with her husband and was very depressed by the poverty and unhappily married. I also dreamt about Marlon Brando again. I dreamt I wanted to go to bed with him. I got to meet him and introduced him to two gay girls. I said, This is Marlon You-know-who.' He was pleasant and friendly . . . I don't feel much like talking this morning. I know what'll come up is I have to do something about my heterosexual wishes and I don't feel like it." 199 Connie saw that here the Negro represented the mascuhne man and she refused to go with him. Then she was presenting marriage in a bad hght. However, she was recovering some of her positive feehngs about hetero- sexuahty in the dream about Marlon Brando, though she admitted that in the dream she was showing him off to her girl friends in a competitive way. During the next session Connie reported a dream about Liz performing an operation on her. She wanted Liz to remove her appendix at the same time but she refused, which made Connie very angry. "Something is remaining in me that I want to get rid of," Connie said. ''Do you think it could be a masculine symbol?" I remarked that an appendix has very much the same shape as a penis, and Connie said, "Yes, I know it does." I pointed out to Connie that in addition to what she had already said about the dream, it was of some im- portance that she had been passive; Liz had been the one who was performing the operation. It corresponded to Connie's inertia in her relationship with Liz, her hope that Liz would be the one to leave. This would eliminate the necessity of Connie's taking an active step. If Liz left, Connie could avoid feeling guilty about hurting her. Another dream about Liz dying and her feeling sad and guilty pointed up this conflict. 200 Heterosexuality Viewed as Lacking in Oral Gratification 27 Around this time Connie mani- fested considerable resistance. She had a dream about being in 2A, and in discussing it, recalled that she had been put in a slower class when she was actually in 2A after a prolonged illness. She said, ''Maybe I'm compar- ing analysis to school. In the dream I felt I was going to fail. The place was nice and the teacher was nice, but I didn't think I would make it because I was goofing so much. It seems I have my doubts about my analysis. I feel I'm going through a setback or being left back. I want to play and goof around — stay homosexual — but I realize I don't have time. I almost didn't show up this morning." Upon my probing for the source of the resistance, Connie brought out in her dreams and associations that she felt I was pushing her to do something and she re- sented it. She felt I thought she wasn't doing what she was supposed to and that I had a dictatorial attitude towards her and didn't treat her with respect, although she saw that here she was confusing me with her father 201 and ascribing his tyrannical tendencies to me. I pointed out to her that the push towards heterosexuahty came from within herself and not from me. Actually up to that point there had been very little, if any, pushing or even encouraging on my part. Connie realized that she was distorting things and transferring some of her feelings about her father onto me. Some of these impressions were confirmed by Connie during the next session. She started off by telling me that she heard there was an opening for a job that might be a bit more interesting than the one she then held. "I had a dream last night about leaving my job," she said. "The surroundings reminded me of the insurance com- pany job I was fired from. I was very sad about leaving in the dream. My boss' boss was there. I went with him into the drugstore. We were choosing lipstick and tooth- paste for me and he escorted me out of the place. I got the feeling he was telling me I was on my own. I got to feeling blue and nervous about being on my own. In the next part I was driving a car, but I seemed to be outside of the car. I had to go to the bathroom very badly. I was outside the car but I had the power to move it. I moved my bowels in the street and then pushed the car away in a hurry because there were some men around and I didn't want them to know what I did. That was the end of the dream." Connie went on, "I think that changing my job may represent changing my way of living. If I don't get the new job I'll be partially relieved. If I stay in my present 202 job, I'll be depressed. It seems symbolic of my whole life. Why did I dream it was the insurance company? I was fired from there. Maybe I'm wishing the decision was out of my hands — that somebody else would tell me what to do." I asked her who she thought the boss' boss stood for. "He stands for you, I guess. The lipstick would stand for being more feminine and attractive. The toothpaste has to do with hygiene or cleanliness. Maybe that brings us back to my feeling dirty again. And in the next part of the dream I do feel dirty. That seems to be an obstacle with me. It seemed to have prevented me from going on with what I was doing." I said that her associations to the part about being fired and having someone else making her decision and the part about feeling that the boss was telling her to go off on her own seemed to be connected with her feeling about me in the last session. She wanted me to push her and at the same time would resent it if I did. I asked her if she had any ideas about being outside the car and yet driving it and about the part in which she moved her bowels and didn't want the men to see. She said, "I think the part about the car represents the whole conflict, my ambivalence about going straight, taking the masculine or feminine role. The part about moving my bowels reminds me of my father insisting on examining my stool all the time. I resented it. I won- dered, 'Who does he think he is, a doctor?' I resented 203 his viewing my personal habits. It went on until I was maybe ten or eleven. I resented his playing the role of a doctor and then I resented doctors. I resented the fact that my father tried to make me into an invalid — as if I were different or inferior. I guess I got the impression that no man would want me since I was in such a state. When my father finally found a doctor who told him there was something wrong with my heart, it seemed as if that was what he was looking for. He was always afraid something was going to happen to me. When I took a bath, he wanted me to leave the door open in case I drowned, so he could save me. I guess it was related to my sister's being sick, but I resented it. I interpreted his interest as abnormal. It might have meant he had more than just a fatherly interest in me or a different kind of interest. I felt squeamish and disgusted." I told Connie that all this could certainly have intensi- fied her Oedipal situation. She said, "It might have made me feel more guilty. I feel so nervous now — like butterflies in my stomach. His over-concern and his finding me sick might have meant he really wanted to keep me for himself and not wanted me to get married or go off. Why else would he want me to be an invalid? Why should he behave like that? Be- cause he's nuts. No matter how ill I am I try my best not to let him know about it. He seems to have a need for me to be ill. Maybe he wanted a chance to prove how well he could take care of me. Maybe it's because he feels guilty that he didn't take care of me as much as he 204 should have. When my sister died he said he'd take better care of me than he had before." I told Connie that perhaps her father had felt guilty about having caused her sister's illness by being negligent with her. Then he would have become over-concerned about Connie to prevent a recurrence of this situation. But to Connie this seemed as if her father was sexually interested in her and this had made her anxious. I sug- gested that perhaps her father had been blamed for not calling the doctor sooner when her sister became ill and he was over-compensating for this in his relationship with Connie. But whatever his motivation, the important point was that Connie had interpreted his over-concern with her physical well-being as a sexual interest in her. In the next session Connie brought out one of the important unconscious convictions that kept her from becoming heterosexual. "I had a dream last night/' she began. "Liz and I were driving back from her home town to New York. I was driving the car. This time I had trouble with the horn and with the accelerator. The horn wouldn't blow loud enough. I asked Liz to help me with the accelerator by putting her foot on my foot. That's a switch; usually it's the brake I have trouble with. I couldn't push down on the accelerator hard enough. It seemed to be an emergency. I had to keep moving with the traffic. That's why I had to accelerate the car. All of a sudden Liz's brother-in-law was driving the car. He bought some candy for me at a candy counter. They were goober nuts covered with chocolate. Actually I'm 205 not too fond of that kind of candy. I won't eat it if there is anything else around. I can't remember any more of it. I know the first part is asking Liz's assistance in push- ing me in the direction I want to go. We were talking about breaking up again. She agreed that we should. I always bring it up and don't carry it through, I guess I wish she would carry it through even if I weaken. Going from her home town to New York means getting away from her. The horn not being loud enough means my attempt is weak. Last night we talked it over in a less angry way than before, but Liz cried and I got more de- pressed than ever." I thought Connie had certainly grasped the signifi- cance of the first part of the dream. I asked her about the part about Liz's brother-in-law and the candy. "He might represent the father," she answered. "He was the man of the house in which she was brought up. He was an unpleasant authority figure to her. About the Goobers, there was something unsatisfactory about them. I guess it has to do with the change being unsatisfactory in some way." I told Connie that it appeared she was alluding to a lack of oral satisfaction in heterosexuality, that she did not see the man as giving her nurture and support. Con- nie said, "I guess I feel that men are strangers. I see them as mostly concerned with satisfying themselves and their own needs. I always felt that men didn't care about the woman herself, just about having a family." She also told me that Liz had quit her analysis, so it 206 seemed unlikely that she would be much of a help in their breaking up. This theme was continued at the session following. Connie had had a dream about being in a gay bar and having a drink with a lot of delicious pieces of fruit in it. She was pointing out the possibility of oral gratification, being mothered and cared for, in homosexuality as con- trasted to heterosexuality. I pointed out to Connie that she was a responsible adult now, perfectly able to take care of herself. She no longer needed maternal care and support. If she got it, she would feel silly about accept- ing it and would feel that the one who gave it to her didn't respect her. Also her thoughts about men not being able to be warm and considerate were distortions from her childhood relationships with her father and brother- in-law. At the next session Connie told me, *1 dreamt about my mother. It had to do with serving food again. I kept arguing with her about her lack of attention to me. She set a place at a table for two and yet she didn't in- clude me. I was very angry." Connie continued, "I guess the dream has to do with oral gratification again. I guess it means I don't feel I'm getting enough oral gratification from my mother or women in general. About the third party in the dream, I'm sure I felt I was being treated like an unwanted third party, a third wheel." Here again, Connie was referring to her lack of moth- ering as a child. She felt unconsciously that she might 207 get some of this from another woman in a homosexual relationship (for instance, she could suck on a breast) but that she could get none in a heterosexual relation- ship. But in another dream she reported in this session, she had rejected with hostility an offer of oral gratifica- tion from a woman. I asked Connie whether she thought the mothering was genuine in homosexuality. She said she didn't think it was genuine either from a man or from a woman. I told Connie I agreed with her. No adult can really ever treat another adult as a child except for a short time in an emergency without losing respect for the other adult and resenting the demands made on him. Connie arrived fifteen minutes late for her next ses- sion. She said she wished she could stop analysis and see what happened; yet she definitely thought she needed it. I agreed with her that she needed it and told her that I thought her prospects were quite good, but added that naturally the ultimate decision was up to her. Then she described the following dream: "I had taken a plane trip to Hawaii. There was some difficulty about making the trip. I remembered I had made it once before. The at- mosphere was like a beach resort again. I was worried about my possessions not being safe there. I was afraid the landlord wouldn't be around to take care of things the way he was supposed to and see that everything was in order for someone to move in. Then Sarah appeared. It was very embarrassing. I had told everyone that she 208 had died. My parents were around. They had taken the plane trip, too, but I didn't actually see them there." Connie's associations led her, with some help from me, to the meaning of the dream. "It seems to be a hopeless situation," she said, "going through all this to make a plane trip and then finding Sarah there anyway. Sarah represents the girl I can't compete with or beat out. The trip is the trip to heterosexuality. The beach resort has meant that before. Also the idea that I had been there before refers to my one previous sexual experience with a man. The business about my possessions not being safe reminds me of my parents telling me all the time to be careful and make sure everj^thing I do is safe. It re- minds me of my father's remark that I shouldn't go to Europe because I would be kidnapped into white slavery there." I asked Connie about the landlord and she couldn't come up with anything. The landlord's not being around to take care of things, I suggested, might refer to her feeling that men weren't supportive or dependable. At this, she went back to talking about her father's warn- ings against venturing here or there because something terrible might happen. Connie reported no dreams at the next session. She said she had been thinking of going to some "over 28" club. On the other hand, she felt that the men who went there were looking for a bed partner rather than a wife. I said I wasn't so sure about that. In any event, Connie didn't feel free to engage in any activities with men 209 while Liz was around, she told me, adding that she didn't see any benefit out of living with Liz. She had sex only once a week or once every two weeks. Meanwhile, she kept thinking about sleeping with a man. The next session was an important one. As did most of Connie's sessions, it started with her telling me a dream. "I was married," she began. "Another wife was in the picture. My husband already had a wife. I remember feeling Yd have to cook every night whether I felt like it or not because I'd be expected to. He put his arm around me and I felt a pain in my side. He was feeling passionate, but I didn't feel well. It wasn't a very happy idea of marriage. When I woke I was still thinking about 'over 28' clubs and going with men. I remember I didn't like my husband in the dream. He reminded me of the teen-age boy who examined me sexually when I was a little girl, five or less. I remember I felt unpleasant and didn't enjoy it. I don't remember whether he touched me or not. He lived on our block for years. The dream seemed to be telling me what's wrong with marriage — the other woman, the responsibility, the feeling tied down and also the pain. I always think the physical troubles I have would stand in the way of my getting married. I felt I couldn't go through a sexual experience because of my physical discomforts. I felt I was lacking. But I didn't particularly like the guy in the dream." I explained to Connie that it was very important that she had brought up the sexual experience she had at age five. When a little girl has such an experience with an 210 older boy or man at that age, it increases her expecta- tion of the possibihty of having a similar experience with her father. It also tends to implant the idea that sex is connected with exploitation by a man rather than with love. So this experience certainly might have played an important role in determining Connie's sexual prob- lems. Also, remembered or not, there is bound to be some pleasure in such an experience that creates a wish for a repetition of it. So the main effects on Connie of this experience were: one, that it increased the strength of the Oedipus complex since it made sex with an adult male feasible; and two, that it created a wish for a repeti- tion of the experience or for sex with an exploitative, un- feeling man. Now the dream that brought up the memory had elements of all these things. First of all, the man Connie was married to already had a wife; he was an Oedipal figure. Secondly, the sex was connected with pain and discomfort. Connie went on, "I also had that experience with a male cousin who exposed himself. I told you about that. I was about twelve. He was fifteen or so. I think of him and that earlier man as being the same repulsive type." That same session, Connie went on to tell me another dream: ''I dreamt about my two nieces who are eighteen and fifteen. I dreamt of them as little girls. The older one was more dependent on the younger one. The younger one is actually surer of herself, more flirtatious and more popular. I dreamt the older one was very un- happy because she had to separate from the younger one. 211 I tried to reassure her that it didn't have to be, but I didn't succeed in giving her a good reason. These kids remind me of Queen Ehzabeth and Princess Margaret. There's the same age difference between them and their personahties are somewhat similar. In another part of the dream my mother was sick and she was lying down. She said she had decided to split up with my father. She told me I'd have to live with my father and she'd live with an aunt. It made me angry because they were split- ting up and, besides, even if they were, why should she decide that I should live with my father. I still wanted to be on my own. People in the office were there. It's funny, I've told everybody at the office my parents are dead. I can't exactly figure out why. Anyway in the dream I was afraid they would find out I really do have parents. I think the dream means the same thing about putting my mother out of the way so I can get my father. Then I get angry in the dream and wish the op- portunity wasn't there." I suggested to Connie that the first part of the dream sounded as if it had to do with her splitting up with Liz. She was older than Liz, yet dependent on her. She had described Liz as more attractive and popular. Although she recognized the inevitability of their breaking up, she felt unhappy about it. I also told Connie that in the dream it was after the part about splitting up with Liz that the blatant Oedipal material came out. Staying with Liz helped her to deny the competition with her mother and other women. When the homosexual defense 212 was removed, the competition with her mother came out in the open. I also told Connie that I thought her telling the people at work that her parents were dead was an effort to deny her whole conflict with her parents and make believe it didn't exist. 213 Possibility of Real Love From Man Seen 28 The next time I saw Connie she told me she didn't get the new job she had mentioned. Then she told me a dream: '1 had an interview for a job. The place was dark. There was little hope of get- ting the job. I was thinking that I didn't want it any- way. I remember going into the front office. People were saying I wouldn't want to stay with the boss all day. I finally went to the boss' office. He was young and good-looking. I had to reach for a steno pad and pencil to take a test. I was very awkward in doing it. I went into the outer office again and fooled with some gadget. It seems I created havoc with it. The whole world seemed to go topsy-turvy. Something was wrong with gravity and everything started flying into outer space. It was some sort of control gadget, but I turned the dial too far. It was as if I was deliberately doing all this. I was a little scared but I wasn't surprised. The night be- fore I had a dream about the Academy Awards in a place like Madison Square Garden. Sarah Vaughan got up to speak. She looked hard and cheap. I remember I was part of the audience rather than one of the celebrities. 215 I felt I couldn't get too interested in it since I could never have anything to do with it anyway. Last night I remem- ber getting up during the night and feeling very angry with my father. I felt he didn't give me enough self-con- fidence." Connie went on to interpret the dreams: "Your office is dark like the one in the dream. The boss was probably you. I probably look at you as giving me a chance to make a change in my life and my fouling it up, mainly by making myself appear incompetent. I guess there's a confusion about whether it's a change for the better since people were telling me it was no good. The control gadget was creating the end of the world. I think it means, if I tried to make a change, it wouldn't work; I would give up my old life and I wouldn't have anything. The dream about Sarah Vaughan probably means my girl friend Sarah. It had to do with the other woman getting all the glory. About her looking hard, maybe I see the female as basically hard, but appearing sweet on the surface to capture the glory. I said that about my mother; she was nice on the surface, but really not so nice." I told Connie that maybe being "hard" meant being "competitive" and she felt that this is the way she would have to be in heterosexual life. The gadget's going out of control if she became heterosexual might refer to her hostility and competitiveness getting out of control. Immediately at the next session Connie spoke again about quitting analysis. I brought her back to the gravity 216 control machine from the last session and asked her to tell me more about it. She said, "The gadget could be turned to slow, me- dium and fast. The gadget itself was hazy. When I turned the switch too far, it upset the boss. The boss seemed to be you. I kept turning it farther. Then every- thing turned topsy-turvy. I was disorganizing everything by not turning the sv^dtch properly. Something's going too fast — maybe my analysis. I think it has to do with my feelings about men in general. I've short-cut through the rest of the relationship with them and focused exclu- sively on the sexual." I agreed with Connie that it was very probably her negative feelings about men that were upsetting her. Even in the dream, by turning the gadget, she was de- stroying me. And it had been that same night that she woke up feeling angry at her father for not giving her enough self-confidence. Connie couldn't see anything good coming from a man outside of sex. She anticipated being exploited and used by him just as she had been in her childhood sexual experiences. The next session was another important and produc- tive one. Connie started as follows: "I had some other dreams. We were sitting around the dinner table. I was calling my mother a miserable, selfish bitch. She looked at me as if the feeling was mutual. She wasn't sitting at the head of the table where she should be, but was off in some corner. It reminds me of the dream in which I was deprived of food by my mother. My mother isn't 217 sfae siiOQld be nert to my father. It brings to mind my part in the disooid betvsieen my mother and tather. I was blammg mr mother. Then I had another dream. I was visiting Sue. She also had food prepared for me. She c^)ened the refrigerator \Hiiere there was some cold food — hois doemTes st\le. There was scHiie a s fiai a gn s there and scHne kind of unkno\^Ti delicacy. I v^-asn't able to eat it I had to leax^e, I didn't want to go there, bat the train kept going bad: to Liz's home town. I tboa^t it was Ae wrong station, but the train kept going back there. Tlie sequence in the dreams was x-ery meaningful and laltac&liM g. Connie ziz i linle difficulty mideistaiidiiig the dreams oo her own, ru: : : r ;d my in- tei'pietatiao of them. The £r5t p^jt \^'.is od.igus to Om- nk; ^e was angiy at hei mothei for dfr—Tog her of food or matrmal love. In the seooci 77:. Sue, her MiaiglH girl friend, was trying to sh: : that \"Ou can gpt some of this kind of lo\Te in a exual rela- ttrwrfiip The a spaiagus lepvesented a combination of a penis and an oral symbol It was the male as an affec- ♦Mnatf or s upycAlixt; hgnre. Cxmnie had to rqect this, and then against hex will found heisdf drifting bad: to Liz. I pcHnted oat to Comne that daring the last session dbe had been talking about seeing her idatknsh^ with a man in purely sesnal tcnns — not seeing any possibility of love or sn^iport in the rdarionship. Here she was cor- icctiiig this distortion and seeing the possibiKty of get- ting real kne tzzn a ~ir 2? vdl as -18 ■U^il ' ' llg came disgusted and discouraged. I was attracted to Borgnine in the dream and I was happy his wife was giving me a buildup to impress him. In the first dream I was going back home again, perhaps starting all over again. There was a conflict about its being desirable. About the colored men and the lack of privacy — well, our old neighborhood was near a colored neighborhood. Our back yards touched. Also I was thinking about get- ting annoyed at my father for never allowing me privacy insofar as moving my bowels and taking a bath. I guess the colored man might be my father." I asked her about the paint. "It reminds me of one time when we did have painters," she said. "I used to joke around with one of them. I guess I was flirting with him as much as my age would allow. I wasn't in my teens yet." I asked what color the paint was. "It was white and there was a fine splatter," she replied. I pointed out that this sounded like seminal fluid, the male ejaculation. She said, "I guess there's a fear of it because I wanted to get out of the way." I commented that there seemed to be a lot less fear of it than there had been in previous dreams where it was symbolized as an atom bomb. I asked her whether the couch reminded her of anything. "It reminds me of the old day bed in our house," she answered. "My father uses it to take naps on. It means I'm thinking about sex in connection with my father." Connie again had used a resort as a symbol for hetero- sexual pleasure and gratification and related it to a mar- 220 ried couple with children. So the first dream seemed to represent a heterosexual wish qualified by certain objec- tions, such as the lack of privacy, but with a lot less fear connected with it than had been the case in the past. I asked Connie what she thought about the second dream. ''It's still going in a heterosexual direction. It was a pleasant dream. Things were going fine. I was attracted to him. I seemed to be put through some sort of a test with that awful typewriter. I felt 'Oh my God, do I have to learn this? I don't feel like starting all over again.' " I pointed out to Connie that Ernest Borgnine must stand for me. He had been associated with a dark office and he was Italian. I told her that she hadn't seemed too upset about his wife or to feel particularly in- adequate; rather the prime deterrent had been her feel- ing of inertia — that it was an awful lot of trouble to start over again. Connie agreed that the wife had not seemed too big a barrier or a problem. There had been less of a need to compete with her and beat her out than was usually expressed. She had appeared rather as a friendly figure. Although Connie had been attracted to Borgnine, she had not felt compelled to win him away from his wife. I thought these dreams augured well. There was less of a fear of men and sex expressed in the first dream and less competition with women in the second. The dreams seemed to show that it was more a case of inertia now rather than actual anxiety that kept Connie from going 221 ahead. It was now a matter of stick-to-it-iveness and pa- tience. At the next session Connie said she had been having pleasant fantasies about Ernest Borgnine again. "I feel real jittery and hostile toward Liz and the other gay girls," she told me. "This gay life is for the birds. Maybe this jittery feeling is because I'm getting closer to taking the big step." I pointed out to her that Ernest Borgnine was cer- tainly a different kind of figure from Marlon Brando. She said she thought of him in his role of "Marty" and that it was true that he was quite different. "Marty" was certainly not a sexy kind of figure. He was a nice, warm, but plain, man. Connie indicated that she recognized this and that perhaps seeing men in this light would help her make the change. She went on to say that her father and mother were on vacation; her father had written to her, but her mother had not. In telling this she was implying that her father was more giving than her mother. She also told me that the man she had gone out with kept calling her, but she always refused him. The next session began with a series of dreams: "I was at a party with all girls. All my gay girl friends seemed to be there. All the girls were making a play for girls who were attached to somebody else. My former girl friend and my present girl friend in the dream were getting undressed and enticing each other. I was very annoyed with the whole party and went home. Jo came to my apartment and woke me up. She was angry be- 222 cause I had left the party. I got angry in return and told her I didn't care what she thought. We had a big fight. Then I woke up from that dream. I guess that dream is all about my disapproval of homosexuality and my hos- tility toward gay girls. Then I had another dream. I saw this group of two women and a man wheeling baby car- riages. It was a poor neighborhood and they were poor. We drove to this restaurant to eat and there was this masculine-looking girl there. Liz came into the restau- rant and I realized we had had a fight but we had made up." In the second dream Connie was back to the theme of the lack of oral satisfaction in heterosexualit}^ She had represented the heterosexual couples as poor and de- prived. Then she went to the restaurant where she saw a homosexual girl. This indicated a preference for homo- sexuality, emphasized by the reconciliation with Liz. Connie was saying that homosexuality looked good to her because through it she could get oral satisfaction whereas she would be deprived in heterosexuality. This dream was followed by one about the unpleasant side of homosexuality. The theme had been Alice's pur- suit of her. Connie reported a similar dream — yet one with a slightly different twist — at the next session. In the first part of the dream two "gay" girls were in bed and threw off the covers, completely exposing themselves, when Connie came into the room. They thought it was a big joke, but Connie thought it was very silly. Obviously, 223 she was restating her disapproval of homosexuaHty in this part of the dream. In the next part Connie had moved into an apartment house that was part of a small community. It had its own grocery store which was sit- uated very conveniently. She asked a clerk what time the store closed and he said at three. Connie thought it would be no good for her since she had to work till six. In this dream, as Connie realized, she was saying that the oral supplies were available only to housewives, the women who don't work. So this dream reversed the con- cept in her previous dreams. She was saying that there was more nurture in heterosexuality than in homosex- uality. At this same session Connie recounted another dream: "I used to fantasy that I was another girl, very beauti- ful and talented. I had a dream about this girl. This girl and Grace Kelly were supposed to do a dance together. This girl was supposed to direct the whole thing. Then she began having trouble because another director, a man, was interfering with her dance direction. She was fussing with him." Connie said that she thought the male director might stand for me, but she didn't understand why she dreamed of herself in terms of her former fantasy and why she was directing Grace Kelly. In this dream, I told her, she had placed herself in the superior position in relation to the prototype of the beautiful girl she envied and competed with. The gratification involved in the dream was in controlling and directing this girl, actually 224 tying her up so she couldn't get a man either. This is one of the main gratifications in homosexuahty. In the dream she was expressing her anger at me for interfering with this. Connie started the next session by telhng me she was discouraged about her analysis and wished she were through with it. I told her that it was up to her whether or not she would go on, adding that her continued com- ing demonstrated that a part of her wanted to work the problem out. In response to her asking me what I thought about her chances of success, I told her that I couldn't guarantee that she would work it out, but I felt she had a pretty good chance. She described a dream about gambling at cards with a boy. In the dream the stakes were too high and she was afraid to gamble. She thought that it meant she was afraid to take the gamble of "going straight." I asked her what she had to lose. She said that if she lost she would be alone. I told her that if she did try and lost, she could always go back to homosexuality. At the next session she related a dream which developed this very theme. She dreamed she was going out with a good- looking young man who was supposed to be a ''heel." She was going to show him that she didn't give a damn about anything so he couldn't hurt her. He was sup- posed to be the type that flitted from one girl to another. She remembered telling herself that the worst thing that could happen was that she would go home alone, but she didn't like that idea too well. Apparently Connie was 225 afraid that, if she ventured into heterosexuaUty^ she might be faced with rejection and lonehness. There was quite a bit of resistance during the next few sessions. No dreams were brought in and Connie continued to be very discouraged about the possibihty of making a change. She brought up her concepts of men as exploiters of women and of herself as unattrac- tive and potentially rejected by men. At the same time she said she had been considering going to a dance or to a bar to meet some man. Quite a bit of anger with her father came out. She said that he always had a dreary attitude about life and created an unhappy atmosphere. He never considered that women had any right to make their own decisions, but felt they needed to be completely dominated and directed by men. I kept telling her that not all men were like her father. Finally resistance began to lift and Connie had two interesting dreams. In one dream she was telling a gay girl that she would wring her neck. In the other dream there was a baby elephant loose in a building. Connie was very frightened of it. She remembered running through corridors trying to escape from it. In her asso- ciations she said, "I always thought baby elephants were awkward. I liked them. It seems that it represents something that's cute or mild until it's aroused and then it becomes dangerous. The important thing about the elephant is the trunk. I guess it must represent the 226 penis." Connie was again bringing out her fear of the erect penis. Connie had another interesting dream to tell at her next session. "I had a jumbled dream that seemed to represent analysis, school and job all at one time. I think that besides being my analyst you were a teacher. I guess I was taking a course but I wasn't doing too well at it. I was sort of goofing. Then you lost interest in my progress because I was goofing. Suddenly I had to go home because I broke out all over with blister-type sores. I thought it looked like the measles but I couldn't tell. I went home and I figured I was surely going to lose my job. The family called the family doctor. I recognized him as a doctor I had when I was a kid, only he was all grey. He diagnosed me as having the measles. I wasn't sure whether he really knew much or not. Then I was thinking of staying home from work on account of the measles, but I decided to return to work or school. There was another woman there who was working with the measles. I felt I was probably babying myself by stay- ing home." Connie said that the first part of the dream obviously had to do with her feeling that she wasn't doing as well as she could in analysis and that I might be displeased. She also saw that there was some connection between the feelings and doubts expressed in her dream and a childhood situation. Measles is a childhood disease and the doctor in the second part of the dream was the family doctor she had had in her childhood. Connie said 227 it reminded her of the way she had felt about her father's over-concern with her health in childhood and his taking her to so many doctors. She had done what she was told to by the doctors, but at the same time hadn't quite believed that they knew what they were talk- ing about. Her feeling had always been that she was be- ing forced into something against her will. Now Connie was transferring this feeling to me. She felt as if I were pushing her to get well rather than as if she herself wanted to get well, and she was rebelling against me as the authority in the way she had rebelled against her father and the doctors as a child. I reminded her that many times she had brought up this idea that it was I rather than she who desired a change in her. I pointed out to her that this could not be the case since I had no personal stake in seeing her heterosexual, so that the drive for it must be in her. Of course, she was to some extent aware herself of this resistance and rebellion, demonstrated by her referring to herself in the dream as goofing off and babying herself. This meant that she knew she wasn't trying as hard as she could at the same time that she felt she was being forced or pushed. At the next session Connie described a dream about having to take a plane trip to Florida with her father. It was a very tiring trip and she felt she would never make it. There was a deadline in the dream. Connie saw that she was referring to the difficulty she was having "going straight." The time limit referred to her age and the necessity for a change soon if she was going to 228 have any children. The difficulty as brought out in the dream was that she still connected her sexual feelings with her father. She related another dream which was the counterpart of this one. She was in an underground organization behind the Iron Curtain. There was a group of young girls who were opposed to an older woman who was in authority, and Connie had to make a great effort to avoid being discovered as one of them. She put on an act and felt she was successful at it. In discussing the dream, Connie said that the act she was putting on was homosexuality. The purpose of the act, as indicated by the dream, was to hide her hostility to her mother, the older woman in authority. The hostility, of course, was connected with the sexual wishes for the father which had been expressed in the first dream. Connie had a rather amusing solution to offer to her Oedipal problem in the dream she brought in at the next session: "I dreamed this boy was kissing me. I found out he was a twin. He was going to marry me. Suddenly I found I was a twin too. My twin was going to marry his twin." Connie associated to the dream that her brother-in-law was a twin. She said, "The dream is pleasant, but the thought about my brother-in-law isn't. I think my twin must be my sister. I used to have a fantasy of being a twin. I think I told you about it. In the dream she has her man and I have mine. I guess it means I don't have to have somebody else's guy. It reminds me that my brother-in-law made passes at me." 229 I told Connie that this kind of magical wish was a commonly thought-of solution to deal with the Oedipal problem. By having two fathers (or brothers-in-law) Connie could win the taboo figure and at the same time avoid the competition by providing another one for her competitor. Since her brother-in-law was a twin, this solution must have occurred to Connie during her child- hood. This probably connected, too, with her fantasy of being a twin. 230 Connie Quits Analysis 29 I was away on vacation, so I did not see Connie for a month. On my return she said she hadn't been feehng too badly. She had been getting along about the same with Liz. As she did after almost every vacation, she felt discouraged about analysis. She said, "I'm feeling better in general but I'm having trouble 'breaking through the sound barrier' — going straight. I did feel attracted to a gay boy but nothing happened. I remember one vivid dream of wanting to get married very badly. Ernest Borgnine was in it again. I'm in favor of getting married. What do you think my chances are?" I said, "I still think you have a pretty good chance. You have trouble doing anything active about meeting boys, but I think if you ran into the right guy you would make it. And later you may be able to do more active things about it." At the next session Connie told me she had become more attracted to Jack, the gay boy. Unfortunately he was more interested in boys. Connie said that she had more feeling about him than she had had about any man since her one heterosexual affair. 231 At the following session Connie said, "Last night I told Liz I was fed up with her griping. She got violent, threw things, practically went insane. I feel worse than ever. I walked out and then she felt differently. I told her I was fed up with the whole relationship — that she didn't really care but was just dependent. She always looks unhappy and answers me in monosyllables. She resented my dancing with Jack and with other boys. I resent her attitude." The next time I saw her Connie again said she was thinking about quitting analysis. She felt she wasn't getting anywhere. Yet during the same session she told me that she was now more interested in gay boys than gay girls. She said she had been playing a kind of hetero- sexual game with the gay boys and especially with Jack. By the end of the session she had decided that she would continue with analysis. It figured that Connie might start her activities with men by going out with "gay" boys. They represented unthreatening men — the boys with the small penises that she had dreamed of so often. At her next session Connie said, "Jack keeps insisting that I go out with him. I've been feeling pretty well, but I have insomnia. Jack is very encouraging. I'm be- ginning to feel close to him and I think he's very nice. Of course he's gay and his boy friend is around. I used to think he liked Liz and me equally, but now I know he likes me much more. I've been very popular with the gay boys. I'm their favorite. I've been having a real good time." 1232 I pointed out to Connie that they probably responded to her because she was closer to being "straight." Also I told her that there was quite a big change in her. She was more responsive to boys and they were more in- terested in her. I noticed she called them "boys" in- stead of "men," which was probably no coincidence. I suggested that her insomnia was due to anxiety about all the heterosexual activity in which she was engaged. She said, "Yes, I think so. I've been feeling more nervous during the day too. Jack isn't completely gay. He's had some heterosexual experiences and he was interested in the fact that I had had one, too." Connie described a dream the next time she came to see me about losing some of her "gay" girl friends and then trying to find them again. She said, "I've been go- ing out with Jack and his boy friend. It's much better being with boys than being just with girls. My relation- ship with Jack will lead nowhere. It's a pleasant evening but that's all. I can see it going on and on. One change is that I'm having pleasant evenings and good times. It's obvious I have a better time without Liz. I don't like living with her. I should move out. But I still can't get over this guilt about her. She was just sick and is recuperating." I pointed out to Connie that she might be hurting Liz more by staying with her than by leaving her and asked her what she thought was the source of her guilt. Connie said, "My mother. She always tries to make me feel guilty. She tried to make me feel guilty about not being 233 home over the hoHdays, but I didn't really feel too guilty. The guilt is connected with competition. I feel good but guilty about Jack liking me more than Liz. It goes back to my father again. I hate that subject." I told Connie that a lot of it was connected with her sister too. Connie's homosexual partners were patterned more after her sister than her mother. She had reason to feel espe- cially guilty about her sister since she had died and her father had said openly that Connie would benefit from her death. At the next session Connie reported that she had told Liz she was going to leave. Meanwhile, however, Connie felt discouraged because she was attracted to another girl. I reassured her, telling her she was bound to have these feelings come up. She was making a big heterosexual push in her relationship with Jack and she was bound to have anxiety that would be countered by the homosexual defense. And now taking actual steps to leave Liz was bound to bring up guilt that would be countered by interest in girls. Connie said that Jack showed more concern for her than Liz ever had. I told her that Jack was a transitional figure. I also advised her to make a clean break of it with Liz if she was going to make a break. Otherwise there would be really vio- lent hostility generated between them. Two sessions later, Connie told me that she had started packing and moving out of the apartment she had shared with Liz. She said, "I think Jack is very cute even though my initial feeling has cooled down. If he 234 were straight, he'd make some girl a wonderful husband. If he asked me to go to bed, I wouldn't say no. I still notice that I get the most pleasure out of his liking me more than Liz. I haven't had so much fun in ages as I'm having now with Jack. I also notice, though, that I'm interested in another girl. I was looking for a physical outlet with her and I didn't get it — just some juvenile hard-to-get games. I'm three-quarters over this girl. I'm really very fond of Jack. He said, if he ever did get mar- ried, it would be to me. I couldn't jump in or he'd be scared and I'm not ready to get married yet either, I guess. I'm staying with some friends now. So far Liz is accepting my moving out gracefully. I'm really looking forward to living alone as a step in a positive direction. I've been doing wonderfully. I'm very popular. People are looking at me approvingly. I've slimmed down to my best weight. Everyone tells me I look good. People are always asking me to dance or to have a drink with them. Jack is always saying how good I look. The only trouble is I can't sleep at night." I agreed with Connie that things were going along well for her and assured her that it was natural for her to be anxious when she was in the middle of making such tremendous strides. During the next few sessions Connie said she was feel- ing much happier and more hopeful and accepting of things. She saw more of Sue and had been talking with her about going for a weekend to a place where they could meet some boys. I encouraged her to go, feeling 235 that a bit of a push from me might help at this point. I felt that Connie was really ready to take the final steps and had worked through her problems sufficiently to be able to do so without too much anxiety. At the session following Connie told this dream: "I dreamt about Fire Island, the hang-out for gay people. There was a storm. I was running back to the cottage from the hotel to get my things before the water rose. I was frantic. The owner had removed the walk from the cottage to the island and I couldn't get back. I was try- ing to get the attention of this girl. I'm not sure whether it was Liz or this girl I met last night. That was the end of the dream. I'm sure it's a rejection of homosexuality. The owner taking the walk away is like you telling me to go on a weekend to a hotel with Sue. It's like somebody precipitating a move for me. Also I notice it's like you said, that during this transition sometimes I feel more homosexual than ever. I slept over with Liz the other night. I like the idea of so many girls being attracted to me. When that happens I don't want to go away with Sue. In the dream I wasn't mad at the owner for remov- ing the walk. I felt he had to." Actually in the dream Connie was desperately trying to get back to homosexuality when she saw the way back was cut off from her. At this point she apparently wasn't reacting negatively to my encouragement, though she did bring it up in the dream. Connie had very little to say along productive lines during the next four sessions. It appeared that she might be reacting with hostility and resistance to my encour- 236 agement. I pointed out that I was merely allying myself with the healthy feelings inside of her. But Connie countered that she had no enthusiasm for going straight and that she was thinking about quitting analysis. For one interview she was twenty-five minutes late and thirty minutes late for the next one. She had had a nightmare about being shot at first by some women and then by some men. (The men in the dream were hoodlums and gangsters.) Both homosexuality and heterosexuality seemed dangerous to her. In another session she told about a dream in which she lost her handbag and was terribly depressed and upset about it. She felt that it meant she was giving up her feminine heterosexual role and felt very badly about it. It seemed in the dream that she had lost it a few times before. I explained to Connie that this meant she was going through a cycle, the same she had been through many times before. She would make a push in a heterosexual direction, then would have anxiety which would lead to a resistance, then go back to homosexuality, then get dissatisfied with this and make another heterosexual push. I explained that she had made a major move in a heterosexual direction and there was bound to be a reaction to it. Also, each time she went through the cycle she would be a little closer to being heterosexual. Connie found it very difficult to talk during our next interview. She told me she felt like quitting analysis. She had been staying with Liz again. I explained the dynamics of her feelings to her, but to no avail. The next day I found a brief note from Connie in the mail in 237 which she told me that she had thought it over and de- cided to quit. She thanked me for everything, but said that she thought it was no use and it was too painful to go on. I was disappointed and wondered if this could have been avoided had I adhered more closely to my analytic role. Although it can be helpful to encourage a patient to do something that both he and the analyst know is healthy, I thought that I might have miscalculated in terms of Connie's "readiness." The temptation had been great because it appeared that she had worked through her problems to the point where she simply needed a lit- tle shove in the right direction. At the same time it occurred to me that her leaving might be an inevitable show of resistance after taking such a big step, and that she might return. I replied to Connie's letter. I told her that I was very sorry to hear of her decision, but that I understood her feelings. She had been a wonderfully cooperative pa- tient, I assured her; I had enjoyed working with her, and if she ever wanted to pick things up again, my door would be open. I wished her every success and happi- ness. Connie had just about completed four years of analy- sis. While she was better in many ways, her basic prob- lems were still unsolved. I hoped that this was indeed no more than an especially strong resistance and that, for her sake, Connie would return to complete her analysis. 238 Connie's Return: The Shift Has Come 30 I didn't hear a word from Connie for five and a half months. Then one day she called my office. She sounded happy over the phone. She said there had been some promising developments and she wanted to see me. I was delighted and gave her an appointment for the next day. Connie looked radiant when she came in; there was no trace of that old depressed look. She told me that things had begun to fall into place for her during the past few weeks after attending a party at the apartment of a neighbor. Everyone there was heterosexual. She got a little high and one of the married men managed to get her outside and proceeded to "neck" with her. Right after this, Connie said, she "started putting the insight to use." The first thing that happened was that she broke up with Liz. This time she made Liz leave the apartment, which was actually hers before she met Liz. Then Con- nie became very interested sexually in men. She broke off with the gay crowd and began to see more of Sue, her "straight" girl friend. They went away together to the 239 country for a weekend and had a wonderful time, includ- ing a good bit of necking with some of the men she met there. She had been having many heterosexual dreams. A warmer relationship was developing with her mother and father, especially with her mother. Now she was thinking about getting married and was going to dances, planning weekend trips and a vacation to Canada. Her view of the future was optimistic. However, Connie noticed one thing about her attitude toward men — she tended to see them as either menacing or weak. Well, it had really happened; Connie had made the change. She actually had been emotionally ready for it and all she needed was something like the spark of a little heterosexual pleasure in necking. When it hap- pened, it happened all at once. She renounced her homo- sexual contacts and began living a completely hetero- sexual life. This didn't mean that there weren't still problems, but at least they weren't strong enough to maintain the homosexuality. At the next session Connie said that one of the men she met at the resort had called her for a date. She was seeing Sue quite a bit, but now it was she who was push- ing Sue. Connie was even beginning to think of her as more of a hindrance than a help and was considering going off on her own to resorts or dances. She described a dream: "I dreamt about this married man at my oflBce. We were attending a wedding and I was attracted to him. I felt very mellow. He put his hand on my fanny. I got annoyed and told him not to do that. I would have 240 preferred him to kiss me. I saw Jo at the wedding and asked her what she was doing there. She said she was interested in the proceedings of the wedding. That's all I can remember of the dream. I think I should take off for a weekend by myself. I think the dream is mostly about being attracted to married men. Jo being there made me uncomfortable. I was afraid her presence would give away my past to the other people around. I heard Jo is having a platonic relationship with some gay boy. Maybe the dream had to do with either watching a wed- ding or participating in it. I felt she could only watch. Maybe I was thinking about myself — I felt his touching me in the dream was a disrespectful gesture. I guess, when I think of men, I think of their not caring for me as a person, but just using me as a body. I feel like a cat in heat. When I watch a love scene in the movies I feel like getting involved in it. Right now I look at men as being bodies. I'm so easily attracted to everyone I meet. Other girls find men just to go to bed with, but I just can't do that. I want to be emotionally involved with a man, to get manied. I notice that sometimes when I'm with Sue I'm suspicious of whether she really wants me to succeed. My only trouble now is that I'm having dif- ficulty sleeping. I've had it since I broke up with Liz." Connie was bringing up some of her old problems — her attraction to married men, her anticipation of ex- ploitation by men and her rivalry with women. Never- theless, she had them well enough under control so that she could avoid calling on the homosexual defense. Her 241 sexual feelings that had been bottled up so long were coming out very strongly. Connie had a few dates with Dave, a man she had met at the weekend resort. She said, "I feel glowing today. My main problem is worrying what a man will think after I've had an affair with him. He wants to take me away for a weekend, but I'm afraid I would feel guilty. I worry about what Sue would think of me, too. He's a nice, understanding guy. He's been going out with an- other girl, but he sounds as if he's ready to leave her. I had a dream. I dreamt I went back to Fire Island, but this time I went to a hotel that was in the section for straight people. I saw two teen-age boys playing ping- pong. I felt they were too young for me, but I decided to stay there and do nothing rather than go back to the gay people. That was the end of it. It certainly shows I've turned to heterosexuality, but it means I didn't quite make a place for myself." I pointed out that Connie's fear that Sue might dis- approve of her going to bed with Dave was unrealistic. She agreed. Actually she was constructing the whole thing unconsciously in terms of an Oedipal situation in- volving herself. Sue, and Dave. Connie realized that in reality Sue wasn't at all competitive with her and was no strict moralist. Connie said, ''How am I doing? I'm really getting a new lease on life. A few months ago I felt miserable. I never believed you when you said there was hope for me." Connie started the next session by telling me about 242 her weekend: "I went away for the weekend with Dave. We slept together. This morning I got up as hostile as could be at him, but I don't feel that way now. It was a pleasant weekend. I enjoyed it. I feel generally good, but with a few doubts. He's not the kind of guy you could easily fall in love with. I wonder if he isn't just interested in conquests for their own sake and this is another one. I think I should see him, but see others, too. I've been attracted to a lot of other men besides him. I told him I want to get married eventually. He talks about other women sometimes and how much he likes his freedom. I guess I was angry this morning be- cause I felt exploited, and then I feel guilty about how much money he spent on me. Maybe I feel I'm exploit- ing him, too. I'm not sure whether sex with him is exploitation or an expression of affection. I didn't en- joy the actual sex act as much as the rest of it. I thought he was a little on the rough side. I had no great anxiety, though, and I wasn't too shy about his walking around in the nude. I wasn't too shy about being exposed my- self either." I told Connie that it was important for her to realize that if she anticipated exploitation she would be more likely to get it. If a man sees that a woman doesn't trust him and, therefore, cannot love or respect him, he may then decide to exploit her since he feels no mutual love relationship is possible with her. Connie remarked that she felt the difference between "straight" and "gay" relationships. In "gay" life every 243 little rejection seemed big; in "straight" life they didn't. She added that she was glad she had returned to analysis. At the next session Connie said that she had con- tinued to have difficulty sleeping and that she had been very high strung. "I can't relax. I think of Dave all the time," she said. "Mostly I feel good and excited, but I also feel somewhat nervous. Most of the time I'm glowing. I keep thinking in terms of marriage all the time, but of course it's too soon. I think he's afraid of wedding bells. But even though I have doubts and feel depressed sometimes, mostly I feel wonderful. Also I feel possessive. His other girl friend is still in the picture. I told him she had to go and then regretted being so possessive. Jack (her gay boy friend) asked me out, but I turned him down. He's attracted to me, but he's basic- ally gay. I'm enjoying sex with Dave more and more all the time. He told me he loved me. Maybe I should try to find other men, but I don't really feel interested. Dave said that I was the first woman he ever loved." At the next session Connie reported a rather amus- ing dream. "I gave this gay girl some food in the same bowl I feed my cat. There was still some cat food left in it. I thought it was a rather evil dream." Connie went on, "The first thing I think about in the morning is Dave. I really feel in love. It's always a nice warm feel- ing. I wait for his calls. Fve been thinking about mar- riage, but, even if it doesn't come off, I won't go to pieces. I don't think there are many men around like Dave. He has a lot of insight into what I'm thinking 244 and he tries to please me. It seems impossible that I'm falling in love so fast. Do any of your patients make a pass at you? People say you always fall in love with your analyst before you fall for anybody else. It always both- ered me that I didn't know what to call you. I felt our relationship was rather stilted — more than I wanted it to be. You always call me Miss M . I'd rather have you call me by my first name. I feel I want to be more buddy-buddy." The following session included more dreams: "I dreamt I was away with Dave for a weekend. While we were sleeping together, I heard a man's voice saying that I wasn't much of a girl to be sleeping with him and he would punish Dave by making him lose his job. I felt guilty and left the place. Some men down the road said smutty things to me. In another dream there were two boys who wanted to have sex with me and were being dirty-minded about it. They treated me like a prostitute. I felt I wasn't being lady-like. I guess the dreams show that there's a lot of guilt about my sleeping with Dave. Some women, especially elderly ones, would disapprove of my sexuality. A lot of men, too, would think of me as being cheap for going to bed with Dave. My mother al- ways said it wasn't right to sleep with a man without being married. She would die of shock if she knew what was going on." The next session Connie said, "Things are stormy. They're not going well. Two male neighbors dropped into the apartment while Dave was there and he got 245 annoyed. He wouldn't tell me why he was angry and then I got mad. I practically hung up on him this morn- ing. But despite the fact that things aren't going too well, I don't feel too depressed or despondent. I'm go- ing to Canada on my vacation. If things don't work out with Dave, I'll find somebody else." I felt that this was an important session because it showed that, even if Connie had a setback with one man, she wouldn't revert to homosexuality and that she felt confident about finding another man. I felt much more secure about the stability of her change after this ses- sion. During the same session Connie told me she had this dream during the period she was arguing with Dave: "I saw a sheep that was masculine and looked like a wolf. It was dressed up in men's clothing. It was burning from the inside out — really horrible. It must have been in ter- rible pain." Connie saw that she was expressing anger at Dave when she saw him as "a wolf in sheep's cloth- ing." She said that the argument with Dave had ended after the dream and that she felt much better. He was speaking very encouragingly about marrying her. Mean- while, Connie noticed that many men seemed attracted to her. She expressed how grateful she was to me and to analysis for the fact that everything was working out so well. She said she was finally beginning to realize how it felt to be well-adjusted. The only thing that really bothered her was her trouble sleeping. I told her she had 246 to expect some manifestations of anxiety for a while since she was in the process of making such a big change. She said that she actually felt very secure about Dave now. She felt sure she loved him and that he loved her and she could picture being married to him very easily. The feeling that he was exploitating her was waning. She said she was trying to help this other "gay" girl who was in the process of becoming "straight." For the first time she could say that she was actually happy, Connie told me. She felt less guilty about her parents and more ob- jective about them. No longer did she feel compelled to visit them; she felt she was weaning herself from them. Now she was looking forward to having a baby. I told Connie that I would like to write a book about her analysis. I said that of course I would disguise her so that no one would recognize it was she. I asked what she thought about it. She said that she would be very happy to share her experience with others and that she hoped the book might be helpful to girls with problems similar to hers. During this period she had a rather poetic dream. She was in her mother's house in a room which was filthy and neglected. But among all the dirt and insects there were beautiful butterflies. Connie said, "Lately I feel my mother is more a part of the past than the present. All the dirt, disinterest and decay is behind me. The beautiful butterflies must be the shining rays of hope for the future." 247 I thought that this would be a good note on which to | end the book. I kept seeing Connie and she continued I to work through her problems, but essentially she had reached the point of no return as far as homosexuality was concerned. 248 Summing Up 31 For the sake of clarification, I thought there would be value in enumerating and sum- marizing the basic mechanisms that led to Connie's homosexuality. One of her major conflicts was her unresolved Oedipal problem. Connie's heterosexual feelings remained at- tached to her father and brother-in-law. Thus, uncon- sciously, she saw any movement toward men as involving her in competition with her mother or sister. One of the main reasons for the persistence of her incestuous feel- ings was that her parents were never really close or affectionate. She did not see their relationship as a union that could not be dissolved. There were several incidents that led her to believe that an incestuous relationship might be possible for her. First of all she had a sexual experience with a teen-age boy when she was five. Secondly, about five years later, her cousin exposed himself to her. Thirdly her brother- in-law made overt sexual moves during her adolescence. Lastly, her father had a peculiar and exaggerated in- terest in her health and bodily functions. Her mother's competitiveness with her also stirred up 249 competitive feelings in Connie. She was constantly told what a terrible person her father was. Her mother seemed bent on keeping Connie and her father apart. The death of her sister coupled with the attempted seduction by the brother-in-law led her to think she could win out in such a competition. Of course, Connie was left with tremendous guilt when her sister died since it coincided with her unconscious wishes and her father compounded this by telling her he would give her more attention now that her sister was gone. Her competitive- ness had also been stimulated by the fact that her sister was obviously the favorite of the parents and apparently was a girl of outstanding beauty. Connie's homosexuality covered up her competitive- ness with other women. She professed to love them in order to avoid hating them and competing with them. In this way she could relieve her guilt feelings, especially about her sister's death, and also her fears of retaliation from rival women who might discover her competitive- ness. The pattern was begun in high school when she allied herself to beautiful girls and covered up her jealousy of them by being in their shadow. Her feelings of unattractiveness fitted into this pattern as did her so- called moral objections to heterosexuality. Another important component in Connie's homo- sexuality was her belief that women were essentially de- formed in their genital and urinary structures. This con- ception was based in part upon having been made to feel dirty in her toilet training by her mother. She 250 ascribed her inability to conform to her mother's wishes as being due to her lack of a penis. The enuresis she manifested later confirmed her in this feeling that she was dirty and lacking in control. Thus, she was con- vinced that women would be considered dirty, repugnant and inferior by men. And since Connie believed that men viewed women in this way, it was natural for her to assume that they would exploit them and use them and that they would be incapable of feeling any love or tenderness toward them. Her feelings about the sexual relationship between men and women were further influenced by having wit- nessed parental intercourse as a child. Although no specific memory became conscious during Connie's analysis, there was evidence that such had been the case, and she definitely saw the sex act through the eyes of a child — as one in which the man was damaging or destroy- ing the woman. This increased her expectation of ex- ploitation rather than love from a man. More important, it left her with the conviction that she would be dam- aged or destroyed by having intercourse with a man. Connie's toilet training, in addition to leaving her with the feeling of being dirty or inferior, also produced a fear in her that she had defective controls. This fear spread into the areas on sexuality and aggression and led to a general inhibition of her sexual enjoyment, even in homosexuality. It also led to a fear of expressing her anger, which she usually handled by suppressing it and being compliant; or she turned it on herself, with depres- sion the result. This fear also contributed to her reluc- tance to compete with other women for men and her submission to them in a homosexual way. Another important element in Connie's history was the deprivation of affection by both of her parents. This led her to wish for a situation in which she would be nurtured and cared for by a maternal figure and, thus, contributed to her homosexual pattern. It also deter- mined her stealing, her tendency to overweight, and her preference for the oral sexual outlets in homosexuality. Connie slowly and cautiously came to see what the anxieties were which had led her to adopt homosexuality as a defense, and she arrived at an understanding of the various roots of these anxieties and their childhood origins. But uncovering them was painful; every revela- tion from the past reawakened the anxiety which had originally accompanied it. When Connie became too anxious, an unconscious resistance would manifest it- self, which would block her progress temporarily while protecting her from the effects of more pain than she was prepared to bear. Then, after a pause, she would move on again. Most of Connie's insights were obtained through the interpretation of dreams, some through free association. Many repressed feelings became conscious, especially her heterosexual wishes and her hostility towards members of her family. After Connie had achieved insight into the basic causes of her homosexuality, it was still very difficult for 252 her to relinquish it. Every attempt to break away from it brought forth the anxiety which had caused her orig- inally to use homosexuality as a defense. Finally, when she was just about to make the break, she became so frightened that she quit her analysis. The catalyst that gave her the impetus to convert her insight into action was a mild heterosexual experience. This, in conjunction with her understanding of her childhood distortions and partial resolution of them, enabled her to give up homo- sexuality. Up to the point of publication — about two years after the last reported session — Connie has never once returned to homosexual activity. 253 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY Los Angeles This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.