Further Observations on the Clinical Picture of 'Psychogenic Oral Aspermia'

In a paper entitled 'Some Special Varieties of Ejaculatory Disturbance not hitherto described', 1 I drew attention to a certain clinical picture which displays the following complex of symptoms: the patients are capable of erection but never achieve ejaculation, in spite of long-continued friction in coitus. On the other hand they have pollutions and masturbate at times with ejaculation, which is also sometimes induced by manual friction by a woman. Total absence of ejaculation is confined exclusively to coitus. In my paper I described a specific clinical picture, distinct on the one hand from the familiar anal form of absence of ejaculation and, on the other, from the urethral variety2 of this psychogenic aspermia of which I have already given an account. The essential characteristic of the variety which I have isolated is that it is orally conditioned. I called this disturbance 'psychogenic oral aspermia'.

I showed that the cause of 'psychogenic oral aspermia' lay in the patient's incapacity to surmount the 'breast-complex', i.e. in the stage of pre-oedipal fixation to the phallic mother. In our joint work 'Der Mammakomplex des Mannes'3 Eidelberg and I explained that, normally, children master the trauma of weaning by reproducing