The dependent person aspires on the most primitive level to recapture the maternal breast. Such persons will have repeated dreams of food, all symbolic of the infantile desire to have one's every need gratified by an all powerful parent. The breast fantasy is the most direct reparative approach to the problem of dependency. There is, however, an alternative route; it is based on the equation, penis = breast. The root factors behind this equation are extremely complex and appear to originate in the concurrent development of multiple inhibitions in several behavior areas, each of which reinforces the others. In such instances, the inhibition of sexual behavior is central. The person who cannot perform sexually, unconsciously attributes his failure to genital mutilation (castration), the anticipated parental punishment for his sexual transgressions, real or imagined. He then generalizes this castration fantasy to include all failures of performance, nonsexual as well as sexual. Thus, to put it conversely, the penis becomes the symbol not only of successful sexual performance, but also of mastery in all other areas of behavior; that is, the penis becomes the symbol of total adaptive capacity. Once this has occurred, the person unconsciously conceives of any adaptive failure in terms of injury to his penis. A symbolic reflection of this idea is a concern with penis size: success is equated with a large penis, failure with a small one. The dream of a patient, a lawyer, plagued with fears of performing in the courtroom will illustrate the use of these symbols. The patient had the dream in anticipation of making a speech before the court. In the dream, he 'began his presentation by opening his fly and taking out his penis, a huge monster of an organ measured in feet instead of inches. He brandished this weapon in a threatening fashion, cowed all before him, and triumphantly delivered his speech amid great acclaim. Dreams of this kind in dependent males are typical. All revolve around success and failure couched in terms of the penis its size, integrity, and ability to function.

The unconscious ideation outlined above forms the basis for a magical reparative fantasy in which the penis is ultimately equated with the breast. The dependent person, instead of relying on the breast, may achieve the same effect by invoking a compensatory fantasy of oral or anal incorporation of a stronger man's penis, thus undoing his castration and making the donor's strength available to him. As we shall see, this equation as a solution to the problem of dependency is of major significance in the development of an anxiety about homosexuality.