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The following sketch from an analysis of a case presents the rôle of actual everyday happenings outside of the analytic situation in reactivating and bringing into the analysis with unusual rapidity early Oedipal material.
The patient, twenty-five years of age, was the second of three children and the only girl. The oldest brother, who died three years ago, was four years her senior, and the youngest three and a half years her junior. Everyone in the family except the patient feared the father, who in spite of his pronounced inefficiency was intelligent. The mother, on the other hand, was despised by the patient, who justified her antagonism on the ground that her mother was stupid and ignorant, slavishly devoted to the home, and lacking in independence and in outside interests. The patient had never had any love affairs, and sought none because of her close attachment to the family, especially to her father—a fact which, however, she did not realize. Although a sickly child whose life had been despaired of due to her refusal to nurse and eat, she became self-reliant at the age of three and a half, immediately following the birth of her brother, and refused all help from mother. She allowed only her father to care for her when during her fourth and fifth years she was ill with measles and chickenpox and had her tonsils removed. At the age of five, she took over the care of her brother who was then only one and a half years old, vowing that she would give him all the love, care and attention she had desired but had never received.
From her fifth to her fourteenth year she was openly aggressive towards her mother and her older brother, but exceptionally tender towards her father, for whom she was glad to do everything about the house. During the period of the