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The patient failed to experience any feelings of desperation or depression; they were 'somatically represented'. His depressive feelings, his death wish (for internal death), his castration fears, and his homosexual passive impulses were all hidden and substituted for by his obesity, which was the 'corporeal equivalent and representative of all these'. Therefore he was able to be witty and jovial. The patient never thought of his father as a father, nor was he aware of anyone as an authority. He made a seeming adaptation to these objects; he seemed good-natured and obedient; but this semblance was a deceit, a fraud, by which he triumphed over any father figure. The pleasure in his jokes was produced at the expense of the repressed affect; thus he effected a saving of psychic energy. Since he could not discharge his tensions he tried to abolish them, and therefore his death instinct became re-enforced. His humor and his obesity were reaction-formations against suffering, and they became also the vehicle of his intense death wish. 'His fat was no longer felt as nourishment and warmth but became "dead weight" and excrement … which diminished little by little any libidinal impulse.'