High Blood Pressure as a Phallic Symbol

This paper is developed on the analysis of “Hedda,” a young woman of nineteen years coming to analysis on the advice of her physician, who could find no organic factor accountable for a persistently high blood pressure of some years duration in his patient. Of an athletic build with noticeably immature breast development, Hedda's general appearance was boyish, an effect rather heightened by a masculine hair cut and also by a certain austere simplicity of dress, being devoid of the usual feminine tendency to ornamentation. Hedda impressed one as an exceptionally calm and placid personality, expressing an entire acquiescence with the demands of her environment. A reserve at first difficult of penetration, was related to an extreme self consciousness, particularly pronounced when Hedda was in the company of more outgoing and buoyant members of her own sex, and then frequently coming to expression in blushing. With boys she was much more at ease. Hedda was very methodical in the arrangement and execution of her daily tasks, a tendency reflected in the neatly transcribed dreams which, duly numbered, were always forthcoming, whether or not the requisite associations later followed. For two years Hedda's almost sole companion had been a young man of passive and aesthetic moulding, who was accustomed to yield decisions to her. Affectionate demonstration between these two was confined to “heavy petting,” this latter leading to the development of certain anxiety symptoms born of frustration and which Hedda disclosed early in the analysis.

To summarize Hedda's early history: we find her the elder of two sisters by four years. When Hedda was five her mother divorced the father, and apart from a brief visit with him two years later she has not seen her father since. Her mother was a very forceful woman of high intellectual attainments, but of a cold and unsympathetic nature, who governed Hedda and her sister in a decisive way with complete detachment from any emotional display. S