ABSTRACT
I have a very intelligent patient with a mixture of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. The strongest of her compulsive thoughts is that she must be crazy; she also has washing-compulsion. She was for a long time a fervid onanist, also after marriage. She always practised onanism with scruples of conscience because (as a child) her mother had threatened her that she would be (as a result of masturbation) mentally imbecile. Her present neurotic illness coincided with her abandonment of onanism. A few dream analyses convinced me that the compulsive thoughts of being deranged took the place of a mixture of perverse phantasies. To become deranged = to commit mad, foolish, imbecile acts, naturally of a sexual nature. 2 She produced a mass of prostitution phantasies; the unconscious sexual phantasies were concerned with her parents, which in part she replaced by her children. She loved her little son and called him ‘little father’ (in Hungarian not an extraordinary thing to do); the daughter she treated severely, and called her ‘little mother’. But the point worthy of notice in the case is that she varied the washing till at length she provided herself thereby with genital gratification. At last she masturbated with the nozzle of the irrigator and rubbed her vulva with a stiff brush. Thereby was her conscience quieted; she only washed herself and did not practise onanism. Professor Freud’s presumption, that compulsions which ought to be precautionary measures against onanism are really roundabout ways to onanism again, finds in this case an irrefutable confirmation.
