ABSTRACT
The Little Chanticleer’ actually did undergo ‘castration’ when not quite three years old. Of course it was not castration in a medical sense, but another operation on the penis. At the first session it was unusually difficult to get the patient to talk. A revision of his sins backwards into his early childhood revealed only a few insignificant thefts; the most notable of these was the theft of a purse from his sleeping father's trouser pocket. The forced voice, the cursing, the flinging himself about was all nothing but the unconscious re-enacting the castration and his conduct during that act of violence. During less dangerous confidences the patient only felt the retraction of the penis as a suggestion of castration. The early psychic shock had occasioned a permanent psychic and nervous association between the injured part of the body and his affective life, so that his feelings could have been described as a scale of retraction and castration sensations.
