ABSTRACT
The criminal act to be studied is a habitual piece of behavior that falls somewhere between a perversion— an erotic neurosis— and a neurosis whose symptoms are not overtly erotic. For this patient the overt sexual act— arranging a “rape”— is devoid of erotic pleasure, while a nonerotic part of her ritual— breaking into a house— almost literally simulates intercourse without the patient’s conscious awareness, rather like the hysterical convulsions of Victorian days. The patient, who has been reported on extensively elsewhere, is a woman in her thirties who, until treatment (not analysis) ended, was usually extremely masculine, was intermittently psychotic with hallucinations and delusions, and suffered from trance states and multiple personality. In her teens and early twenties, she had indulged in numerous forms of criminal behavior—from bad-check writing to attempted murder—for which she was at times arrested and imprisoned.
