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The case to be reported seems to merit attention not only because it explains symptoms of psychic impotence and compulsive alcoholism, but also because it shows how a patient congenitally endowed with an exceptional organ, if one may use the term in contrast to the organic inferiority idea of Alfred Adler, unconsciously utilized this very superiority as a basis for his neurosis. Although the organ had been 'superior' as long as the patient could remember, the neurotic symptoms which the patient displaced upon the member in later days, originated, according to my interpretation, in a sense of deprivation and guilt which had developed early in childhood.
The patient, a mechanical engineer, single, first visited me in 1915, at the age of 33, having been referred for periodic but noxious alcoholic debauches in which he had been indulging for ten years, and which he always undertook in solitude. He recognized the alcoholism to be associated with a feeling of depression, the origin of which remained obscure to him. Subsequent investigations showed that the depression arose in connection with a sense of loneliness, which in turn depended upon a feeling of inability to indulge in sexual intercourse, ascribed by him, curious as it may appear, to the unusually large size of his penis.
The concentration of all the patient's difficulties about his large penis impressed me as a striking contradiction to the organic inferiority theory of Alfred Adler. By this I do not wish to imply