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MY PREMISE IS THAT CERTAIN INDIVIDUALS develop a myth or fantasy that their own births have caused never-to-be-forgotten pain in their mothers; and among their attempts at reparation, they vow that they will never again be the cause of comparable damage to their mothers or subsequent equivalents—namely, all other women. Therefore, in the extreme, there is to be no sexual intercourse with women. No pregnancy. No childbirth. I believe such a myth (independent of the important factors that may have condensed and coalesced to produce it—overprotective mothers, absent fathers, excess castration anxiety, and the like) develops a life of its own and further cripples the individual, much as the phobic patient may be progressively crippled by his malignant "cancerous" phobia, no matter how or with what factors it was produced.
To illustrate this "myth," I shall concentrate on a series of dreams of a bisexual male seen in analysis, who told the majority of them to me during a two-month period following an hour in which he made a remarkable error that revealed a link between his observations of events surrounding his sister's birth, when he was six years old, and his circumcision. This condensation of events, the narration of which occurred after he had been in treatment for approximately a year, was revealed by his stating that he was six years old at the time of circumcision when, in fact, some months previously he had told the therapist he was 12 years old. The "error" was related during an hour when the focus had been on his sister's birth: At home, grandmother as midwife, mother