In the third dream she attempted to steal the penis from her father:

It was a long time ago when she was a child, although in the dream she appeared as an adult. She was in her father's room. She stole some money from his pants and stuffed it into a condom. In her haste, she dropped the condom and it rolled under the bed. She got down on her hands and knees and felt for it. She found it, but her hands got dirty. A policeman chased her. She feared the dirty hands would give her away.

The money stuffed in the condom attested to the adaptive value she placed upon the penis. The dirty hands represented her guilt for having stolen it. Here, again, as in the previous dream, the threat of retaliation from the male donor provided a new source for anxiety. In the fourth dream she appealed for a penis to a "phallic" mother:

She was pregnant and almost at term. She was working on her car. It had been in a smash up and was covered with blood. Her membranes broke and she began to go into labor. She began to bleed profusely and was afraid she was going to die. She ran into the house where she lived as a child and begged her mother to do something. The mother stuck an enema nozzle into her vagina. Her husband saw her and said, "What's the matter? Why is that enema stuck inside of you? I'll take it out." She screamed, "No! No! Leave it there."

Her associations dealt with the frequent enemas her mother had given her as a child. The infantile fantasy, therefore, was one of anal incorporation, but in the dream it was transformed and the penis was incorporated vaginally.

Gradually, as each reparative fantasy was analyzed, interpreted, and cut off, the patient's agitation began to burn itself out, but her depression became deeper and deeper. This was taken as a sign that unconsciously she had finally placed her major reliance on the breast and the dependency motivation had become primary. This conclusion was very quickly confirmed through an accident of fate that coincidentally occurred at this time.

Her mother suddenly suffered a mild stroke, and there was some discussion among the relatives of sending her to live with the patient. The thought of taking care of the mother was unbearable to the patient, and not only made her even more depressed, but also sent her into a renewed panic. The possibility that the mother would live with her prompted two dreams that form a complementary pair:

(1) She was writhing in agony because both her breasts were torn off. They had been eaten by her mother and by her child.

(2) Her sister came to visit her. She tore off the sister's clothes and began to chew off the sister's breasts.

These dreams reveal the archaic fantasies that under lie the depressive reaction. Object relationships are established on the basis of who eats whom. The patient conceived of dependency as a cannibalistic act in which the breasts of the dependency object were eaten by the dependent subject, and in this act the donor was destroyed. The patient became additionally depressed because her mother was helpless and, therefore, the patient could no longer be dependent on her that is, eat the mother's breast. The patient went into a panic because the helpless mother now wanted to be dependent on her that is, eat the patient's breast. The patient then cast about for another dependency object, settled on her sister as a substitute for the mother, and so dreamed that she ate the sister's breasts. The first dream also revealed a previously hidden reason for her rejection of her child. She refused to let the child be dependent on her, at least partially out of the fear of being eaten.

These two dreams marked a turning point in the analysis. The psychodynamic reconstruction of the central conflict was completed by their interpretation. This made it possible for the patient to begin to act in accordance with reality. At this writing she is still in therapy and is learning painfully, to be sure that it is possible for her to take care of herself, perform successfully, and meet her obligations to others without recourse either to the penis or to the breast. (see THE POWER MOTIVATION PART V)