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The author describes three male patients who urgently desired to appear normal. To do so, they denied many psychoneurotic and somatic symptoms and an overwhelming orality. The urethra in these patients served as a sucking and ingesting organ. Each had dreams of a woman with an external hollow tube in the public area; the tube represented the urethra and was a reassurance that their own urethra could serve their orality and receive a penis without annihilation. By a reversal of the more commonly described body-as-phallus fantasy, the phallus represented the body. The urethral opening was a weak point for possible penetration and destruction of the body.
Circumstances in the lives of all three patients had made them tend to use denial. The mothers of all had been orally dependent and ungenerous women who had had gastric resections for ulcers; but they had been pictured to the patients by both parents as devoted and maternal. Their fathers, for whose gifts the patients unsuccessfully competed with the mothers, were like nurses to the mothers, were castrating figures to the patients, and were aggressive and domineering in business.