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The analysis of a woman's fear of the street revealed that impulses to promiscuity experienced when she was in the street caused her to fear pregnancy and, as restitution, to determine to bear a child. Her symptoms began shortly after the birth of her daughter a year after marriage and for a short time confined her to her room. The death of a previous analyst had made her symptoms worse.
At the age of four she saw a man visit her mother in the room next to her own. She was intensely seductive toward both her analysts. She feared loss of her mother's love, however, and therefore for a time was unable to talk in the analysis. She unconsciously thought of her husband as like her mother and tried to make him jealous, just as she had herself been jealous of her mother's relationship with the other man. She wished to have an illegitimate child; this wish was derived from the mother's affair and also from the birth of a baby sister when she was four or five. The emotions she had had then contributed to the outbreak of her neurosis when her own child was born. She fantasied that an illegitimate baby might come from the union of her mother and the stranger. Her wish to have a child from her father was increased but her sense of guilt necessitated repression of this wish. The analysis helped to rid her of her symptoms.
The defense mechanisms of this and another patient are described. The wish of both patients to have a baby by a stranger expressed the Oedipal rivalry with the mother and the urge to make restitution to her. This type of nuclear conflict is compared with those in neurodermatitis and asthma.
AUTHOR'S ABSTRACT