I tore into his office madder than hell. He was sitting behind his desk. This time I was really going to tell him. He looked up and said, "What in hell do you want?" I just stood there and couldn't say anything. Then I turned around, but instead of walking away, I crawled away on my hands and feet with my ass up in the air.

This unbecoming simian like posture is a measure of his humiliation, but it is also something more. It is a symbol of "feminine" submission to the dominant male.

It reveals a new factor in the patient's unconscious conception of competitive relations between men. These relationships are placed in a male female context in which the weaker male is castrated by the stronger male and then forced to submit to him as a woman. This submission is generally conceived as a rape, usually anal, occasionally oral. For this reason, a competitive defeat, the result of a failure in assertion, can be misinterpreted by the defeated male as evidence of homosexuality even though the area of struggle may be completely nonsexual. The appearance of this symbol in the dream heralded for the patient an acute outbreak of pseudohomosexual anxiety. The most likely expression of this anxiety is in the form of a paranoid projection; that is, a fear of homosexual assault. This projection is more obvious in Dream Three, to be related later, and in the patient's associations to that dream. In his associations to Dream Two, just related, the patient spoke only of his humiliation. As with the previous dream he said nothing of homosexuality and, therefore, again, this subject was left untouched.

The unpleasant bottoms up image, provoked by the failure of his resolve, ushered in a period of resistance. He had many silences and complained he had no thoughts. He dreamt that the therapist was a criminal and the therapy was dangerous and ahead of him lay only disaster. Then, gingerly, he began to talk of his marriage, a topic he had assiduously avoided since the initial interview. He recounted the early days of the relationship between himself and his wife:

The patient was very much in love with his wife and she with him in the early part of their marriage. All went well at first. Even sex, in spite of his premarital difficulties, was no problem. Then he failed with the airline and seemingly overnight everything changed. He returned to school, and she had to get a job. It embarrassed him that she was working. It seemed the least a man could do was support his wife. He felt ashamed before her family and her friends and began to avoid them. At the same time he began to withdraw from her. Suddenly, he noticed all kinds of things about his wife that had never impressed him before. For one thing, she no longer seemed attractive. He had always thought of her as a beautiful woman, but now she ceased to look feminine. She took on a decidedly masculine cast. She had always had some hair on her lip and also around her nipples. This had never bothered him before, but now it repelled him. As soon as he got into bed with her all he could see was this hair, and he would have the thought it was like going to bed with a man. Then he felt a great hatred, and, of course, he promptly lost his erection. It wasn't long before the prospect of having intercourse with her became so unpalatable that he stopped even making the attempt. He noticed, too, that he was ashamed to be seen in public with his wife. He had been proud to show her off, but now he felt people wondered how he ever got stuck with her, although nobody ever said anything. It was during this period, while he went to school and his wife worked to support them, that he experienced a maximum sense of failure. Finally, he graduated from college and got a job, but this didn't seem to make much difference. He was glad to get it, but it lacked status, and worst of all, it paid so little his wife had to go on working.

It took several sessions to relate this story of his marriage. He terminated the account on a note of complete disparagement: He was without question the most inadequate male the world had ever seen.

At this point, the patient had another nightmare. (see A CASE STUDY OF PSEUDOHOMOSEXUALITY: DREAM THREE AND FOUR)