You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this clinical presentation there is described the analysis of a phobia for dolls which existed in an adult male patient for as long as the patient could remember, at least from his fifth year. The phobia extended to any kind of three-dimensional figure, including such objects as dolls, manikins, puppets, pieces of sculpture, various objects d'art, etc., all of which were seen to exist with surprising ubiquity in our daily lives. In the complicated analysis of this phobic symptom the doll is pictured as the hub of a wheel. From the hub there radiate outwards numerous spokes, each representing an origin, a motive, a cause, or a historical determinant feeding into the hub doll. The various spokes also have interconnecting links, in irregular fashion, joining the various parts together into a network.
The symptom was, of course, greatly overdetermined, which accounted for its tenacity and long duration. The numerous individual etiologic streams or spokes were traced longitudinally through the life history of the patient. Playing a prominent role in the dynamic substructure, which evolved during the treatment and into which the roots of the symptom were seen to extend, were intense phallic, Oedipal, and masturbatory conflicts, with attendant severe castration anxiety, anal compulsive elements, and conflicts over passive homosexual and scoptophilic impulses. Among the manifold meanings with which the phobic object was endowed were the following: the doll represented, in turn and simultaneously, the patient's own penis, his stool, his body in toto, his mother, woman in general, the female genital, another man's (father's) penis, and the little girl's fantasied penis.
A postscript is added which describes the final course and termination of the analysis which was carried through to a successful therapeutic conclusion.
AUTHOR'S ABSTRACT