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A thirty-one-year-old woman with anxiety hysteria suffered for ten years from fear of insanity, fear of blushing, inability to eat with or mingle with other people, especially men, and occasional moments of depersonalization. The clinical observations selected for the report were chosen with the intention of emphasizing the remarkable conscious and unconscious relationship between the patient and her twin brother, the strength of her wishes for identity, and her resentment at being different.
In childhood her Oedipal wishes had been strongly stimulated, and she had sought to gratify them in her relationship with her twin. Their sex play was chiefly anal and phallic, however; she thus expressed a narcissistic preoedipal wish for the penis as a valuable possession rather than as a means to genital object relationship.
In her adulthood the desire for a penis represented more than the usual penis envy; it symbolized her wish to be exactly like her brother. She fantasied sometimes that she possessed him as in her childhood play when they had a pact that his penis 'should be hers to touch and handle every other day'; at other times she felt that he was her property, that her sister-in-law had no right to him. The wish to be a boy was strengthened by her mother, who took