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The theme of blood and bleeding is forced upon the analyst with an insistent repetition sometimes in the analysis of the relation of daughter and mother. The author examines the theme as it is found in problematic menses, unexpected hemorrhages, nosebleeds, and self-inflicted bleeding and the various pathological conditions that result. This theme is the manifestation of a particular homosexual fantasy uniting mother and daughter and can teach us much concerning the origins and significance of this homosexuality. It not only concerns women; it is also found in male adolescent blood pacts as a declaration of friendship or camaraderie made by cutting the hand or wrist and allowing the blood to be intermingled. These adolescent rituals may represent a miming of feminine homosexuality, either supposed or imagined. The current concern about contaminated blood in transfusions or as instrumental in the transmission of certain diseases also reflects aspects of this theme.
French medical researchers have also described a syndrome of induced bleeding and call it the Syndrome of Lasthénie de Ferjol, after the heroine of the 1882 novel, A Story without a Name, by Barbey d'Aurevilly. These patients are predominantly women, many of whom are in a paramedical or medical profession or social work. They bleed themselves repetitively, in secret, to the point of putting their lives in peril, and they are known to hemotologists who frequently must treat them on an emergency basis with transfusions, so severe is the resulting anemia.