You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Most literature dealing with male impotence views this disturbance in relation to castration anxiety, or, like M. Klein (1946) and her followers, to early anxieties connected with fantasies of “attacking and sadistically entering the mother's body … which would also contain father's penis, and lead to the dread of the mother herself.”. Although classical Freudian formulations relating impotence to the fixation to incestuous fantasies retain all their validity, I think two questions require further attention. First, I believe there are many different forms of impotence: we are dealing with a symptom rather than with a specific psychopathological entity Second, I believe insufficient attention has been given to the usefulness of knowledge about the earlier phases of psychic development - when self and object are fused and undifferentiated - in the understanding of sexual impotence.
In a previous paper (1992) I presented detailed clinical material and attempted to show how the symptom was embedded in faulty processes of separation-individuation, and how it displayed itself in the transference-countertransference interaction. Here the focus will be similar but I shall also offer some reflections on aggression and the father figure. Following the case material I shall discuss masculine impotence from a more general and theoretical viewpoint, and refer to some socio-cultural changes that in my opinion contribute to the increased frequency with which we encounter problems related to impotence in our practices.
D, a 45-year-old foreign man, brilliant, sensitive, and insightful, came to analysis with the following complaints.