A physician suffered from migraine when confronted with professional competitive situations. His migraine was 'a masochistic surrender to his father, who had punished him on the head. It was a displacement from below, from the penis, the organ required for coitus with mother.' He was a pronounced obsessive and a perfectionist. At the time of his mother's death, when he was sixteen years old, he had 'his first attack of migraine as the expression of his abandonment to the bad object'. He later became a skilled surgeon, 'as a genital sublimation', continually threatened with collapse when life became very exacting (as when his mistress abandoned him) or challenging (when he had to perform an operation on the wife of a great and powerful political figure in his country). The treatment was short because the patient stopped it.