The author defines sexual enthrallment as the state of spellbound subservience in which a woman is held by the phallic quality of the male to whom she attaches herself. This state is also found in men with strong feminine identifications (passive homosexuality and fetishism). In sexual enthrallment, the woman is often ambivalent, needing to live her life vicariously while struggling against her subservience to the male. This fascination with the idealized penis, and longing for union with it, has its roots in the intolerable differentiation of the infant-breast amalgam and the resulting loss of the infantile state of narcissistic impotence.

When the narcissistic self-esteem of the girl is threatened by her lack of a penis, the idealized penis is incorporated and assimilated into the ego ideal and, through identification with the penis, infantile megalomania is regained in the fantasy of being the manifestation of paternal omnipotence. Sexual enthrallment may exist in a definite character type or in phobias.