Teasing can be defined as eliciting emotional responses against resistance. The teaser thwarts the initial response of his victim. Teasing is hostile as well as constructive. In two patients teasing served both as provocation of, and defense against, castration and masochistic orgastic reactions of Oedipal origin. One patient while teasing attempted to relinquish her body-phallus identification and to accept her femininity, and also to master the anxiety and guilt accompanying her sado-masochistic and incestuous impulses. In the analyst's office she presented herself silently and without emotion in expectation of being teasingly attacked as she had been by her father in her childhood.

The author discusses teasing among the Balinese, the Sioux, the Japanese, backward Negroes of the South, and in our own society.

Teasing starts with tickling in infancy, one of the earliest nonanaclitic activities between infant and adult. In the anal phase, expulsive and retentive