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The patient, Mr. B., is a 38-year-old married engineer with one child who sought treatment following a paradoxical reaction to an important promotion at work. He became depressed and behaved so provocatively toward senior members of his firm that they eventually asked him to resign. It is also noteworthy that just after Mr. B. was promoted, his father had a mild heart attack. It had become clear over the course of Mr. B.'s lengthy analysis that the work promotion represented a forbidden triumph over his father.
Mr. B.'s father had been away in the Navy from the time Mr. B. was 6 months old until he was 4 years old. This led to a relationship with his mother which was exceedingly intense. Mr. B.'s mother treated him in extreme ways. She overstimulated him, was harshly critical of him, and thwarted any attempts to separate and establish a sense of independent selfhood. When Mr. B. grew up he became an engineer like his father. His mother currently works at father's firm in a nonengineering job. In the course of his own work Mr. B.'s firm shared projects with father's firm and this brought Mr. B. into frequent professional contact with mother, at which times the feelings aroused in him seemed little different from what they were in his younger days.
We had learned in the course of the analysis that the glue holding his psychopathology in place was his tremendous rage at his mother. He had not yet, however, fully felt the primitive violence of his feelings toward her. In the period of the analysis preceding the session to be presented we had learned that maternal overstimulation in childhood had often focused on Mr. B.'s anus. There were frequent enemas, various bathroom rituals centered on bowel habits, and rectal