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Bergler discusses some special cases of the unconscious misuse of genital sexuality for the expression of infantile repressed aims. One patient became impotent when his wife finally and reluctantly consented to becoming pregnant at his insistence on having a second child. The impotence was intended to prevent him from having that second child, which was desired in order to cause deprivation to the first child, as the patient himself, a first child, had been deprived by his younger sibling. The patient wanted to repeat actively what had happened to him passively. His aggression was a boomerang, with libidinization of guilt (masochism). The erectile failure of another patient was due to his identification of his penis with his sister's admired breast: in imitating her breast, he trained himself to have no erection.
A man who married a semiprostitute 'to rescue her' became completely impotent with her. His marriage constituted a 'magic gesture', a reproach against his parents for their divorce which left him an 'orphan'; and the impotence symbolized the parental incompatibility, at the same time that it punished him for his reproach of them for their divorce. Other unusual cases are described.