A young professional woman entered treatment complaining of an ocular tic of acute onset soon after she had begun to experience feeling of lassitude. Several months earlier, her most recent lover had left her for another woman. The patient also had a significant ego-syntonic character disorder. The presenting symptom initially

seemed related to the patient's childhood exhibitionistic masturbation and to the idea that she had been rejected by her mother because she was not a boy. Her father, too, had been emotionally distant; the exhibitionism, which had continued in her adult fantasies, seemed to represent a phallic identification with him. In only four weeks of psychotherapy the patient came to believe that she might harbor a wish to be pregnant as her mother had been pregnant with her. Her tic disappeared as soon as she connected this wish to the memory that her mother, too, had had an ocular tic. The patient has remained asymptomatic for nine years. Her love relationships continue to be brief and intense.