Speech and Castration: Two Unusual Analytic Hours

The patient, a young man, on entering my room for his usual sitting, signalled to me that he had lost his voice. He had come to me for treatment three months before on account of attacks of complete aphonia which had followed a fugue of twenty-four hours' duration about nine months previously. These attacks were quite temporary, only lasting a few hours, except the first, which persisted for several weeks. The aphonia always disappeared quite spontaneously. It was important for him to recover his voice on the present occasion as quickly as possible, otherwise it was likely that he would be discharged from his work, which he had only recently taken up again. I therefore gave him some paper and asked him the following questions, to which he immediately wrote replies. I must add here that he had been given no interpretation of the material he had brought out during the time he had been under treatment, and, further, he knows nothing of psychoanalysis or its findings. Castration ideas had not previously appeared. I will now give the account of the analysis in the form of question and written answer.