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Ms. B., a patient accepted by the Treatment Center, began her analysis when she was twenty-one and a senior in college. During the next eighteen months she graduated Summa Cum Laude and obtained a graduate degree. At the time her analysis began, and for several vears thereafter, she lived at home with her mother, her father, and her brother, who is two years older than she.
The patient, who had never been in treatment before, sought help because of severe obsessional symptoms, anxiety, and depression. She had several obsessions, all relating to her sexuality. Most disturbing to her was the thought that she had “an unresolved complex—a sexual desire for my father.” Others included the fear that she was homosexual and a fear of incestuous feelings toward her brother and many other members of her large extended family, both male and female.
In addition, she described a sadomasochistic relationship with F., her boyfriend of five-and-a-half years. F., who was related to the patient by marriage, had been violent and sexually abusive with her, insisting on oral sex in the hall and intercourse in her room with her parents in the house. She had been terrified but was afraid to refuse for fear that he would leave her. She was unable to have orgasms during intercourse except by manual clitoral stimulation, which she described as “just fancy masturbation.” Also, the patient, who excelled as a student, was bothered by her boyfriend's intellectual inferiority.
Ms. B.'s parents were born in the United States; her grandparents were born in Europe. Her father, a retired blue-collar worker incapacitated by a chronic illness, was described as an