The patient was a thirty-nine-year-old man who all his llfe had let himself be cheated, humiliated, and hurt by others, and who enacted a secret wish to castrate himself in order to avoid castration which he feared. He was deprived in his childhood, identified himself with three younger sisters, and was afraid of a seductive mother whom in fantasy he held responsible for the sex of her daughters. He compared himself unfavorably to his father and identified himself with his father who in his fantasy was castrated by the mother.