The Analysis of an Unconscious Beating Fantasy in a Woman1

The patient, as long as she was the younger of two children, felt that she was the beloved little princess of the family. Her self-centred contentment was bolstered by the illusion that both parents loved her more than they did each other. In this way, she postponed dealing with her oedipal conflict. But when she was 6 came the shattering evidence of an intimacy that excluded her. Her sister was born. She wanted to destroy mother and infant and have father to herself, but guilt, fear of retaliation, and the impossibility of attaining her aims caused these wishes to be repressed. Instead, she identified with her intended victims. She provoked attacks from her parents, became the harmless, innocent, injured girl, and in this way obtained, as Freud describes, both punishment and disguised libidinal excitation from her father. Regression to orality also occurred. By over-eating, she tried to obtain a substitute gratification for her frustrated genital urges. Obesity was a negation of her wish to be sexually attractive to her father and thus allayed guilt. At the same time, it probably expressed in oral terms a wish to be pregnant by him, but this has not been clearly established.

At 12, stimulated by her resurgent, pubertal sexuality, the mother's absence from home for the birth of the younger brother, and the father's sleeping in the same bed with her, her fantasy of replacing the mother revived, only to be frustrated again. The incestuous and destructive desires intensified in puberty were again transformed, as at the time of her sister's birth, into a need to be beaten. Now, however, the beating was not physical, as it had been in childhood, but psychical, and it was not administered by her father but by fate. She also elaborated an additional means of dealing with her oedipal mortification and guilt: she would become an intellectual boy, like her elder brother. By winning recognition in that way, she could assuage her injured self-esteem, deny competition with her mother, and still seek, in the guise of a boy, to win her father.