television set low until he was finished. Though she knew his homework was exacting, she took this to be a characteristic infringement of her "rights" and had a great deal of stored-up rage about it. She also had hidden rage at such commonplace duties as bringing his clothes to the cleaner, entertaining his business friends, cleaning his "filthy" study, etc.
We explored them all, one by one. Neither of us, however, felt that we had come to the end of the matter. There was something that eluded us. She as well as I felt certain of that. We persisted, therefore, and the hidden feeling at last showed itself. Returning to her first complaint, I asked her if she had ever been physically struck by her husband.
"No," she replied, "but I often feel that he is going to strike me."
Knowing her husband to be a kind person, I pursued the matter, and it soon developed that she had a very strong unconscious conviction that men in general had no compunction whatever about using their superior physical strength against women to obtain what they wanted. In other words, she not only felt that men were basically hostile to women but that they were potentially extremely violent.
This was a bizarre conviction, and my patient soon realized its irrational nature. Her picture of men was based on early memories of a truly sadistic father; he had frequently struck her mother. When she realized the pervasive importance of this only slightly repressed physical fear of men she was able to resume a psychological growth that had been severely impeded from the earliest age.
But the point I wish to emphasize is that she had to persist in her search for hidden attitudes. If she had assumed that she had gotten to the heart of her difficulty by uncovering the first few negative feelings, her self-investigation could not
