The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 20, 1951; No. 2: William N. Evans. 'Simulated Pregnancy in a Male.'

With the purpose of augmenting the sparse clinical contributions on this theme, this paper gives a case history account of a male's wish to bear a child. Evans describes a thirty-year-old man's re-enactment, during analysis, of his childhood theories of pregnancy and birth. His wish to have a child was acted out during treatment in hysterical seizures which imitated his conception of a witnessed parental intercourse. A marked tendency to reverse words, numbers, and images was in part determined by his having had two views of the primal scene, one reversed in a mirror. Repression and distortion of his scopophilia contributed to this tendency. In this analysis, he played out the drama of intercourse-pregnancy in reverse, a process which Freud described as a feature of the analysis of hysterical attacks. Abdominal pains, coughing and fear of bursting during delivery were dramatic features of his pregnancy fantasy. At the end of a forty-week gestation period he came to term in an unfruitful, and disappointing childbirth. In this, his identification with his mother was faithfully preserved even to significant dates. Pregnancy and childbirth also represented castration.