at rest on that matter. She was not at all homosexual. That symptom is a very severe one, of course, and not always amenable to treatment. It always implies that the woman prefers women to men; she falls in love with objects of the same sex. She has no conscious interest in men sexually.
Our little nurse's "homosexual" dream simply meant that she was having a disturbing time with her husband sexually and wanted a "mother image" to protect her from her difficulties, help her through them. She got one in me, of course, and her need for such a mother was probably why she selected a woman psychiatrist in the first place.
Her early sexual play with another little girl is perfectly normal. Not all children indulge in this kind of play, but many do, and unless it continues into adolescence it is generally harmless.
The reasons behind this delusion of homosexuality are complex. They lie in an early confusion of the clitoris with the male penis, as I will illustrate later. But you may be certain of one thing—you are not going to discover that your problem is based on homosexuality as it appears in the difficulty called "lesbianism." To hold onto such mistaken conceptions is to frighten oneself with self-told ghost stories after the fashion of young children.
I wish here to cover just one more attribute of the woman whose sexual feelings have become fixed on her clitoris, one which, if she is forewarned, she will and should be suspicious of. It is the tendency to look for solutions for her problem in directions where no solutions lie.
I have treated women who have tried everything under the sun in their search for an easy resolution of their clitoridal problem—drugs, surgery, even yoga. One of the most widely used evasions can be found (and how often it is!) in the many popular manuals written, ostensibly, to tell one how to achieve a happy marriage. Such books, for the most part
