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DISCUSSION: Dr. Phyllis Greenacre preferred to think of the father's actions as perversion with enforced submission rather than play which interfered with normal maturation. She thought the mothers seemed altogether too passive to be consistent with the other material available and wondered whether they might not be rather infantile women with strong penis envy, which had been converted into the demand for an infant for whom they had no further interest once the child was no longer physically dependent upon them. She saw the conflict as phallic rather than Oedipal or preoedipal. Neither patient had a capacity for love; both had heterosexual and homosexual contacts. Both genital and pregenital experiences seem to be used in the interest of aggression 'with the aim of completing the image of the self as a powerful man'. The emphasis in business venture and genital equipment is on size. 'The preoedipal disturbances were so prolonged and so binding that the fixation was dominant and the regression minimal. A full-scale Oedipus complex then could not develop'—a state of affairs characteristic for the development of perversion, which this may well be even if symptomatic perversion is not evident.
Dr. John B. McDevitt felt that Dr. Weissman went too far in eliminating