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A patient whose analysis was moving slowly performed many symptomatic acts in relation to his analysis. He forgot to pay his bills, made errors in the amounts, and absented himself from treatment 'on business'. He always sat in the analyst's seat after the hour to make out payments, once explaining that this made him feel he was the analyst's equal and not mentally inferior as he thought the physician believed. The patient felt cheated and taken advantage of. He felt that he was too little to fight back directly, and so could only get back by subterfuge what was his. A forced, hasty marriage made him feel deprived of his freedom and good times, and he compensated for this by infidelities.
He had been thoroughly frightened as a child when, because he had sampled some candy in a store, he was harshly threatened with jail and reformatories if it became known that he took anything that was not his. Some elements in his current situation were displaced onto his acting out as well as concealed by it. His surreptitious manifestations of aggression and guilt toward the analyst repeated his childhood history. The acting out was used to bind anxiety; when the acting out was analyzed, the anxiety became manifest.