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Over sixty years ago, Rado (1933) suggested that a woman could experience castration anxiety with respect to a fantasied penis. The following vignette is offered as a possible illustration of that phenomenon.
A woman in analysis reported a persistent trend in her sex life. She found that she was impatient to have her husband's penis—the penis, as she invariably put it—inside her vagina. During foreplay, she had a preference for attention to her nipples; once he had entered her, this was no longer important. After her husband's orgasm, she would again play with her nipples, or encourage him to do so. Rubbing her nipples was also a regular feature of her masturbation.
One of the curious characteristics of work with this woman was that when she referred to something I had said, she never attributed it to me. Sometimes she would claim it as her own; at other times she would refer to it as “the point” or “the issue.” I suggested that this might be connected to her way of using the phrase, “the penis.”
In the next hour, she reported a dream, in which she was “making love to” a woman. The actual imagery was not volunteered, which I pointed out. She then described it as being with a woman who sucks her nipple. There was some ambiguity about who was doing what to whom. As she pictured the action, she was struck by the size of the nipple and its erectness; it made her think of a penis. The dream shared an element with her masturbation fantasies, about which I had heard little before then: that her nipple is admired by a woman.
This work led to an elaboration of her sexual experience. She