Dream Three. An airport ramp with a large airplane on it. I am pushing out a small biplane, tail first. Suddenly, I see the large plane has its wing in such a position I won't clear it. I yell, "Heads up!" Too late! My tail hits the wing of the bigger plane, but no damage is done.

The dream underlines the father's invulnerability to competitive attack. This symbolization through penis size of the capacity for assertion is typical of the power driven but inhibited male and can give rise to magical reparative fantasies of oral and anal incorporation of a stronger man's penis. No such fantasies appeared during the treatment of this patient, but in all likelihood they were present and perhaps could have been exposed had treatment continued for a longer time. These fantasies are concerned motivationally with the gratification of dependency needs and are based on the equation, penis = breast. The development and operation of this sort of reparative fantasy are described in the first chapter. The symbolic significance of the tail in the above dream was not yet clear to the patient.

The next dream focused more sharply on this symbol and for the first time brought the castration theme very close to conscious awareness:

Dream Four. I was playing ball on the high school athletic field. I had a premonition of disaster and looked into the sky. A fighter plane was coming down tail first. It was having engine trouble. Just before it hit the ground the tail came up and the plane smashed flat. The pilot climbed out unhurt. I thought to myself, "It's better to make a belly landing if it will save your tail."

The competitive tone of the dream is set by the athletic field. This dream restates the earlier bottoms up thesis but makes use of different symbols. He says, in effect, it is better to submit to the superior male than to risk retaliation, in this instance, castration. The patient's associations included the following: "The tail is the directional and guiding instrument of the whole airplane. I'd rather get my wing shot up any day than my tail. Boy, you lose that and you got no rudders, no nothing! You're finished!" Substitute "penis" for "tail" and a major reason for his competitive anxiety becomes obvious. The castration theme emerged without disguise a few days later in a harrowing but extremely graphic dream. The stimulus was a chance incident in the night. He had gone to bed as usual but was awakened shortly after he fell asleep by the romantic yowls of a tom cat trying to attract a mate. Suddenly there was a shot, then silence. He returned to sleep and had the following nightmare: (see A CASE STUDY OF PSEUDOHOMOSEXUALITY: DREAM FIVE)