This is a description of the interplay between masochistic suffering and masochistic pseudo-aggression in a marriage situation. There are neurotics who spend their emotional life in constant unconscious repetitions of the masochistic fantasy 'bad mother mistreats me'. They unconsciously choose wives who represent the mistreating mother or a caricature of her and consciously consider themselves innocent victims of unhappy marriages. There is, however, one form which Bergler calls 'the masochistic situation in reverse', an arrangement in which the husband, in pursuit of his pseudoaggressive rebellion, is confronted with the expression of the wife's martyrdom which