The Importance of the Gelding

Since the publication of Freud's Little Hans, it has become a psychoanalytic commonplace that large animals, in the fantasies, dreams, and symptoms of children, are symbolic representations of parents.

In the days of Little Hans, horses were ubiquitous. Urban children of the present generation nevertheless have had opportunity from books, films, television, and the zoo to become sufficiently familiar with horses and other large animals to develop cathexes of their psychic representations. The persistence of such representations, in different times and in widely varying circumstances, attests the irreplaceable service to the unconscious needs of children that such fantasies provide.

A female patient was in analysis for episodes of depression accompanied by borderline schizophrenic decompensations. From the outset of treatment she had many dreams of horses. The fact is not unusual; but certain features of her symptomatology, her dreams, and childhood experiences merit recording.

During periods of narcissistic regression she often became obsessively preoccupied with the appearance of genitalia. Though married and the mother of several children, she could not bring herself to the conviction that all men have penises. As she looked at men on the street, solely in terms of her obsession, she saw their genital anatomy as a 'blank'. Her husband was for her uniquely male in this regard. Her father and all other men were fascinating and horrifying enigmas. Did they or did they not have penises? This ambiguity was, of course, incorporated in the transference, and in explicitly expressed wishes to see the analyst's penis.

About women she was less confused consciously, although her dreams were replete with imagery of girls and women who were equipped with penises. A compulsive masturbator, her fantasy of possessing a penis attained a degree of hallucinatory vividness during preorgastic moments. She confused mouth with vulva, and