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[Göttingen] 23.v.28
Dear Professor,
I'm sure you'll excuse me having another little talk with you so soon for you asked a question in your letter regarding the K. case. I had not touched upon the connection between anal regression and masculinity-complex in order not to complicate my brief account. At the beginning, before I was able to consider the individual lovers closely enough in relation to their deviation from the father-image, I tried to explain the riddle of her uninhibited love-life despite anxiety-hysteria directly from the masculinity-complex: as though perhaps the girl on account of her highly feminine nature had paid all too little regard to the masculine component within her, and as if this component now sought to compensate for this by causing a certain degree of neurosis. For it is clear enough that an aggressive pleasure in carrying out something forbidden erupts in the flatulence-anxiety.
From the point where it was clear to me how much genital libido remained fixated on her father, although her strongly erotic nature permitted her to achieve other relationships, I became interested in the masculine component for other reasons. It was in line with some observations which I had made in the course of the years about the different way it expressed itself in hysterical and obsessional patients. Thus, for instance, in the case of K. there occurred a sharply defined period of roughness and tomboyishness in childhood—straight after the birth of the first son which coming after four daughters sent the parents into transports of delight. But the motive force in all this envious, jealous behaviour, with its imitation of the male, manifestly derived from her wounded love for her father, from the urge to possess him in this way, if not in the feminine-receptive way. It is a case of an identification through resignation due to failure, and not the type of identification of those girls who are driven by ambition in a masculine direction from the start, and who cli