Behaviour as an Expression of Mental Processes During Analysis

The patient of whom I write, a young married woman, has passed through a considerable period of resistance, during which the subject of enuresis had frequently appeared to be indicated without our arriving at anything definite. It then happened that, in one analytic hour, there emerged successive recollections connected with the sleeping arrangements in the patient's home, when she was in her fourth or fifth year, and certain structural alterations in the house were being made. She first remembered what it was like when the building was finished and she and a brother, two and a half years younger, slept with their beds one on each side of the wall dividing the two bedrooms. She used to communicate with him by knocking on the wall. She then recollected that, before the alteration in the house, she had shared a room and, as she now realised, a double bed with her brother. Next she recalled the fact that he sometimes wetted the bed and, further, that she complained of this to her mother. She had a mental picture of the wet bed-clothes being taken off.

I must add that one of the most prominent traits in this patient's character was her strongly developed castration-complex and penis-envy. For example, she never felt quite comfortable unless she was allowed to wear breeches, and she eagerly availed herself of every opportunity to do so—such as riding, climbing, ski-ing and fancy dress dances.

I at once conjectured that her reaction against her brother's enuresis was the result of her envy of his penis. It was a way for her to express the feeling that he was an inferior, dirty creature, who, although he had the advantage of her in possessing a penis, could not even control his urination. At the end of the hour I suggested this conjecture without going into any details.

The next day the patient began the hour with a hesitating account