The interactions between the dependent woman and her social environment that generate the wish to be a man are best demonstrated through clinical material. The first example is that of a dependent young woman, who lacked confidence in herself, and, in spite of repeated efforts, was unable to find a job. She always made such a poor impression on the prospective employer that inevitably she was turned away. Her discouragement provoked a revealing series of three dreams. The first dream was the following:

She was lying in bed with a broken leg in a dingy apartment in a red light district. She went out to a grocery store to buy some food. The proprietress was a black haired, middle aged woman, who resembled her mother. She refused to wait on the patient and instead looked menacingly at her. The patient became frightened and ran out of the store. As she crossed the street, the same woman, driving a huge bus, tried to run over her.

This dream demonstrates the symbolic relationship between adaptive failure and castration. The castration is then characteristically explained as a punishment for sexual misbehavior. The punitive agent is the mother, who not only has castrated the patient, but also refuses to feed her and then tries to kill her. In her associations the patient insisted that if only she were a man she would have no trouble in either finding or holding a job. This was a blatant rationalization in view of the fact that every employer who had rejected her had advertised for a woman applicant to fill the vacant position. This sort of rationalization is typical of the dependent woman. She puts the blame for her failure on the accident of gender, and the lack of a penis, instead of facing the responsibility for learning to do better. The therapist pointed this out to her, but she did not accept it, and the next night in another dream again blamed the mother for her helplessness. She dreamed that the mother was arrested for the murder of a little boy, whom she identified with herself. A trial was held and the mother was sentenced to hang for the crime. The patient did not feel the least bit sorry. Instead, she awoke quite pleased with the dream. Now the mother had been punished for the castration that had transformed her from a supposedly capable male into a helpless female. The dream made her happy, but it hardly solved her problem. She still remained without a job. Her solution was a magical one, and it emerged in the next dream: She was an inmate of an orphan asylum in which her mother was the headmistress, but she was not her mother's child.

She was not able to get enough food from her mother, so she stole a goldfish and swallowed it. The fish belonged to a tall, thin man. He discovered it was gone and was furious. The mother told him the patient had stolen his fish. He demanded she give it back, but she refused and ran away. He chased after her.

She identified the tall, thin man as her father, and the goldfish represented his penis. The dream is ambivalently based on the good mother bad mother concept. She sees her mother as the bad mother and, therefore, represents herself as an orphan. She is convinced that the mother will not feed her, and so she attempts to solve the problem of dependency in another way, through the equation, penis = breast. She takes by stealth that which is denied her, but then she is left with a fear of retaliation. The dream demonstrates the oral incorporation of a penis. In this : manner, the patient magically repairs her castration and the donor's masculine properties become available to her. (see THE DEPENDENCY MOTIVATION PART III)