22
KARL ABRAHAM
respect is thereby enhanced, and she may even be pleased at
being free from such inferiority. One of my patients who showed
a very marked aversion to men had the obsessing hallucination
of a very big penis at the sight of any man and in any situation.
This vision brought to her mind again and again that there is nothing
else in men than their genital organ, from which she turned away
in disgust, but which at the same time represented something that
greatly interested her unconscious. Certain phantasies connected
with this vision were of a supplementary nature. In these the patient
represented herself as though every opening of her body, even
the body as a whole, was nothing else than a receptive female
organ. The vision therefore contained a mbtture of overestimation
and depreciation of the male organ.
VI
We have already shown that the tendency to depreciate the
importance of the male genital underlies a progressive sexual
repression, and often appears outwardly as humiliation of men
as a whole. In neurotic women this tendency is often shown by
an instinctive avoidance of men who have pronounced masculine
characteristics. They direct their love choice towards passive and
effeminate men, and by living with them can daily renew the
proof that their own activity is superior to the man's. Just like
manifest homosexual women they love to represent the mental and
physical differences between man and woman as insignificant
One of my patients when six years old had begged her mother
to send her to a boy's school in boy's clothes; * then no one will
know that she is a girl'.
Besides the inclination to depreciate men there is also found a marked sensitiveness of the castration complex towards any situation which can awaken a feeling of inferiority, even if only remotely. Women with this attitude refuse to accept any kind of help from a man, and show the greatest disinclination to follow a man's example. A young woman betrayed her claims of mas- culinity, repressed with difficulty, by declining to walk along a street covered in deep snow behind her husband and make use of his footsteps. A further very significant characteristic of this lady may be mentioned here. When she was almost a child she
