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The authors' thesis is that the obsessive fear of killing a child is the outcome of an unconscious masturbatory fantasy. In a rather loosely organized fashion they present clinical evidence, primarily from one woman patient, interspersed
with references to Freud's ideas and other theoretical assumptions and conclusions. At times when fantasies, sexual sensations and impulses all must be repressed, this patient felt a nameless agitation and restlessness, whereupon the impulse to hurt a child would appear. The content of the fantasy seemed to show that she was identifying herself with both parents. In a narcissistic condensation she wanted to hurt and be hurt at the same time; to play the male and female roles simultaneously. She wanted to hit a boy on the head; she was the boy as well as the aggressor; the hurting or killing had a special phallic sexual meaning and represented a sado-masochistic fantasy in a displaced and disguised form. Ordinarily only partial repression was necessary and she could permit some fantasy or feeling within her awareness. But when events reactivated the unconscious Oedipal fantasies with their genital anxieties and superego prohibitions, complete repression became necessary and the obsessive symptom appeared.