- bility, cannot always be depended on completely. In Toni's
case I was fortunate to be able to check the veracity of her story. She had maintained a close relationship with her brother after they had grown up and, on Toni's insistence, I saw him. If anything, Toni had understated the degree of her father's withdrawn relationship to her and her mother. Even at that, the damage to Toni's ability to love might not have been decisive had her mother been a warm and feminine woman. But here, too, circumstances militated against the little girl. Her mother (perhaps as a reaction against her husband's personality but more likely because she, too, was essentially a masculinized woman) refused to stay home with the children after her son had achieved the age of three. She had opened a dress shop with a friend in the business section of Toni's home town which had been very successful, demanding all her time. It was a rare evening when Toni's mother got home for dinner. Between the ages of seven and fourteen the girl saw her mother little more than an hour a day on weekdays and half a day on Sundays.
It is not hard to see then that Toni's young world had little in it that supported feminine values. It was clear to her that only male activities, achievement in terms of male goals, could bring security. Even her mother seemed to subscribe to this, for hadn't she gone back into the world of male activity as soon as she could manage it? Indeed, judging the matter by her father's relationship to her brother, she very early reached the literal conclusion that in order to achieve love a woman really had to be a man.
If we were to examine the purely sexual side of Toni's unconscious identification with the male sex, we would only have to examine the dreams she brought to our sessions. At the beginning she would frequently have dreams in which she was dressed as a man or in which she was excelling in male sports. I have recorded one incredible dream, really
