Masturbation and Death or a Compulsive Confession of Masturbation

Felica, a child of eight or nine, is in the pangs of the struggle against masturbation. She succeeds in suppressing it, through fear of death, her nurse having threatened her that if she continued, it would kill her, as in the case of a young man she had known who had died of consumption.

But once the masturbation has been given up, obsessional symptoms arise in the latency period. Felicia is compelled to ask her nurse endless questions in which the word "button" is always included. For example: "Has such and such a lady eight or ten 'buttons' on her coat?" She has to ask such questions over and over again, and is never satisfied with any answer. She reiterates the word "button" with the utmost anxiety, as if it scorched her lips. But the anxiety would be far worse, more abiding and cruel, if Felicia were to keep these questions to herself. When she has asked them often enough, she feels relieved, for a time, until some new question rises in her mind, in which the word "button" must again be included, and which she must compulsively express to her nurse.

It was found in analysis that the "button" was at first a most fascinating object to Felicia. She had witnessed a primal scene in broad daylight and had displaced the representation of the round glans penis unto the round fly buttons of the man (association by resemblance and contiguity). Then, in masturbation, she had identified her small phallic clitoris with a "button," as felt by her small fingers.

Thus, when the temptation to masturbate arose afresh, in the latency period, it awoke the substitutive representation of a "button" on clothes. As usual, however, it was severed from the original representation of the flesh "button" which it replaced, but acquired the negative anxiety affect now inherent to it. To utter the word "button" in whatever context was like exhibiting to the forbidding nurse the object of the temptation,