The next example demonstrates the disastrous effects of an imagined power failure incident to a change in sociobiological status. The patient was a very successful, power driven, professional woman, characteristically aggressive and domineering, who developed a chronic postpartum depression after the birth of her first child. The depression was of only mild severity, and did not seriously interfere with her capacity to work, but it was accompanied by ancillary manifestations that disrupted her relationships both with her child and with her husband. She showed no interest in the child from the moment he was born. She turned the infant over to a housekeeper nurse as soon as she got him home, and then proceeded completely to ignore him. At the same time she withdrew emotionally from the husband, became unpleasantly irritable, and except on rare occasions, refused to have sexual intercourse with him. Finally, after many months, the husband got fed up and insisted she seek psychiatric help. At first, she protested and would not go, but when he threatened dissolution of the marriage, she gave in and entered a psychoanalytic therapy.

It quickly emerged through a series of typical castration dreams that she had responded to motherhood as though it were a symbolic castration. It had undermined the illusion that she possessed a penis and had confronted her with the inescapable fact that she was a woman. This to her meant that she was deficient in adaptive equipment and no longer capable of effective performance. Her dreams were, therefore, dreams of mutilation and of impaired function. Thus, for example, she dreamed she had to compete against men in a swimming race, but lost out to them because her leg was crippled; or again, she dreamed repeatedly of damaged cars, many of them blood spattered, in which parts of the engine were missing, or the engine would not start. Her opening dreams were monotonous in their regularity, and almost all revolved around this single theme of castration and adaptive failure.

The most direct symptomatic expression of her plight was the depression. It indicated that she had lost confidence in her ability to recoup through phallic power and had begun instead to turn toward the maternal breast. The switch to a dependency solution, however, was not yet complete. This could be inferred from her other symptoms the rejection of her roles as wife and mother, by means of which she denied her femininity and tenuously held on to the fantasy that she was a man. She acted out this masculine fantasy in still another way through an additional symptom that she could not bring herself to mention to the therapist until long after the treatment had started. This symptom began right after the birth of the child and consisted of a change in urinary habit. She had previously always urinated sitting down, in the manner customary for women, but now she began to urinate exclusively in the standing position, just like a man, except that she straddled the toilet bowl with her legs, instead of standing in front of it.

It was not long before the patient became involved in an erotic transference. This set off an Oedipal trend that finally terminated in a nightmare in which she reenacted the infantile castration by her mother. The nightmare was the following:

A sadistic old crone was torturing a group of young women. She removed their eyes with a knife and left a watery space where each eye had been. Then she slashed their mouths from ear to ear. One by one she disfigured them. The patient was the only one not disfigured. Then the old woman began to threaten her. The patient shrieked, "Don't do it to me!" She woke up in terror.

This dream was the clincher. It had an emotional impact far greater than all the others. It was as though for the first time the patient really grasped that she had no penis. This insight unleashed a castration anxiety that could perhaps better be called a panic, and at the same time plunged the patient into a severe agitated depression. She now went into an adaptive paralysis that lasted for several months. She behaved as though she were in a daze. At home she became more uncommunicative than ever. She did manage to go to work each day, but it was only a holding operation, and she got very little done. She merely went through the motions. She insisted that she was helpless and could not function without the penis. Now that the fantasy was gone she felt revealed as a fraud. She, herself, had never really done anything. It had all been done magically through the fantasy, and she could take no credit for it. Not only were her past accomplishments reduced to naught, but she could never accomplish anything again. The situation was hopeless. She should never have come into therapy. At least, then, her fantasy would have remained intact and she could have maintained her previous adaptation. It might not have been the most satisfactory, but it had certainly been better than nothing. The therapist tried to support the patient through this crisis. He pointed out again and again that nothing in reality had changed. She was still the same person. She still had the same resources. The many things she had done before with the help of the fantasy she could continue to do now without it. But the patient would have none of this. Instead, she tried desperately through her dreams to retrieve the fantasied penis. (see THE POWER MOTIVATION PART III)