Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 3, 1955, No. 2: George Gero and David L. Rubinfine. 'On Obsessive Thoughts.'

The fear of hurting or killing a child is the symptom selected for examination here. This obsessional thought is the result of an unconscious masturbatory phantasy. In general the masturbatory phantasy and the temptation underlying the obsessive fear are unconscious, but this does not imply that patients suffering from such obsessive fears never experience masturbatory excitement or never become aware of certain aspects of the sexual phantasy. The essential point is that the connection between the phantasy and the sexual sensations has been disrupted. The history of a female patient is presented in which the content of the unconscious masturbatory phantasy is reconstructed. In it the patient identified herself with both parents. In this way she could play both male and female rôles with the aim of achieving the wish to hurt and to be hurt at the same time. The hurting or killing represented a sado-masochistic phantasy in a displaced and condensed form. The obsessive thoughts of the patient could be divided into two groups: (i) obsessive fears of harming herself, and (ii) the fear of harming others. These fears arose from the unconscious masturbatory phantasy, noted above, in the following way. The highly condensed phantasy in which the patient played the parts of both parents simultaneously was split into two components. The sadistic drives activated the fears of hurting women and children, while the masochistic drives determined the fears of injuring herself.

In male patients suffering from obsessional ideas unconscious feminine masochistic phantasies can be revealed during psycho-analytic treatment. The unconscious phantasy which lies at the root of such obsessive thoughts as the fear that the penis has been injured has a similar structure to that of the fear of killing a child seen in the female patient.

The authors devote the last part of the paper to some general considerations of obsessive symptoms and further, to the relationship between obsessive