British Psycho-Analytical Society

April 18, 1923. Miss Ella Sharpe: A psycho-analytical appreciation of the life and work of Francis Thompson. The paper dealt with: (I) The main events in Thompson's life. His relationships to father, mother, and sisters was correlated with the later friendships with the Meynell family. The significance of the poet's addiction to opium, of the derelict

years in London, and of the attempted suicide was elucidated in the further study of the poems. (2) The psycho-analytical study of the poems led to the following conclusions: a. The poet's almost complete feminine identification. b. The conflict between pagan (prostitute) and virgin identifications. c. These types illustrated as aspects of the motherimago. d. The comparison of imagery from different poems led to the inference of a strongly marked penis-nipple phantasy. e. The conclusion that weaning was the traumatic event which led to the building up of the castration phantasy. f. The poet's conception of the 'cyclic me', i.e. the Self as omnipotence.

The paper concluded with reference to different aspects of the poet's life in illustration of both the castration and omnipotent phantasies. The poems as productions express symbolically the poet's characteristic phantasies. They are symbols of castration; they are children; they are compared by the poet with God's own creation of the universe; they are the poet's immortality.

May 2, 1923. Dr. W. J. Jago: Boehm's papers on homosexuality. Boehm puts forward three views. That the greater the homosexual component the greater the inclination towards polygamy. That the homosexual attempts to have intercourse with the parent of the same sex through the intermediary of the parent of the other sex. That in every homosexual there can be found the phantasy that the woman has a penis which, like that of the horse, can be withdrawn into the body, and which can be protruded in order to grasp and so remove the penis of the man with whom the wom