ABSTRACT
The repressing function of Attis’ ego was not strong. He would recall events in his early and late childhood in detail and describe them without expressing affects. Once he informed me about seeing his mother’s vagina at the age of nine months. Obviously this was a fantasised “memory”. On other occasions he described his mother’s vagina when he saw it while she was urinating in a field after harvesting vegetables when her son was only three or four years old. Of course, I could not be sure if these recollections were real events or imagined ones. He could also recall certain wishes that most men do not possess or totally repress. For example, in his early teens Attis had wishes and dreams of having sex with his mother even though he considered such acts as frightening. In spite of his interchanging or mixing his fantasies, wishes, and dreads with realities, having delusions and hallucinations that I will illustrate later, and sometimes becoming preoccupied with uttering religious quotations, during the first year or so of our work together I was able to collect significant data about his real-life experiences and connect their impact on his adult mental state.
