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In spite of these hints of moves towards independence, or perhaps even because of them, the battle over it became increasingly intense. Although saying she now had more security than ever before in her life, her dread of doing violence, either to herself or to a child, now became her central conscious problem. (She now hardly ever talked about her anxiety over blushing or mentioned the head-turning dread.) What she did continually want to talk about was the fact that she could not travel on the underground at all without her husband, and how she demanded that he hold onto her when a train came in because of the dread that she would throw herself in front of it.
Amongst the ways in which I was seeing this symptom was the idea that actively throwing herself under a train would be an attempt to by-pass the dread of being passively in the power of the inner mad-white-horse-me; as if a self-chosen death, in time and place and method, was preferable to the continued dread of feeling destroyed from inside.
Undoubtedly, therefore, there was much more work to be done on the meaning of the mad white horse.1 For instance, I was constantly bearing in mind, and trying to sort out, its double aspect: first, its meaning as an expression of her battle with her instincts, its meaning both as an attacking breast created out of the projection of her own feeling of being devoured from within, by the pangs of unsatisfied hungry loving, as well as out of the projection of her wish to do the devouring herself; but secondly, its meaning as a symbol for that aspect of the ego process that I have postulated as basic to all creative activity, that aspect by which the ego seeks its own temporary dissolution, whether in the orgastic experience of sexuality or in its equivalent in psychic creativity. Thus I was seeing the