ABSTRACT

The traumatic experience occurred with rather surprising regularity either in the tenth or eleventh year. The child precipitated the trauma out of curiosity rather than out of physiological pressure. At the beginning of the analysis, the patient practised two types of masturbation: clitoral masturbation, often initiated by remembering at night in bed the trauma of the tenth to eleventh year. Masturbation in the bathtub which seemed to include both clitoral and vaginal stimulation and usually resulted in a vaginal orgasm. The greatest increase in anxiety and tension occurred, not with the prepuberty trauma, but with the intensification of the castration complex at the onset of the menstrual periods. While the prepuberty period is generally one of the more silent areas of analytic investigation, a particular group of cases is exceptional in the appearance in this period of fateful traumata which were part of the presenting picture of the neuroses when the patients came for treatment.