Some Factors Determining Fixation at the 'Deutero-Phallic Phase'1

In a recent work2 Jones discusses the problems connected with the phallic phase. He distinguishes as the 'deutero-phallic phase' the highly exaggerated and narcissistically cathected phallic phase of which a particularly strong motive is the warding off of the female genitals. This phase he holds to be a neurotic compromise. If it plays a leading part in the subject's later sexual development, it amounts to a perversion in Sachs's3 sense of the term and often results in homosexuality.

The case which I propose to discuss in this paper is particularly instructive in this connection. Not only does it corroborate Jones's hypothesis, but its structure throws light on certain factors which may lead to fixation at the phallic phase.

In the accounts of manifest homosexuality which are contained in psycho-analytical literature two main types have hitherto been described. In the one type the subject's mother-identification, with its narcissistic cathexis, causes him to seek for love-objects resembling himself: he desires so to love them as he himself would have wished to be loved by his mother. In the second type of the perversion the object-choice again follows the lines of mother-identification, but, owing to a greater passivity and a firmer anal fixation, the subject aims at passive surrender to his father. He desires to be loved by his father as his mother was loved. Freud has described yet a third form of manifest homosexuality, and this is deeply coloured by the subject's masculine identifications. In these cases rivalry which has been overcome and aggressive impulses which have become repressed are often combined with the typical conditions known to us.4 In this third type the masculine identifications play a greater part. In a certain sense it is to this type that the case now before us belongs. It