A man of thirty-five consulted for anxiety states, nightmares, "nervous" gastric troubles, etc.
He had been living since his twentieth year with a woman twenty years his senior, in fact, a friend and schoolmate of his mother's.
He called her Mama and she called him Sonny. While, according to his statements, their sexual life was absolutely normal and satisfying, the repressed incest-fear lurking in his unconscious betrayed itself thru a nightmare which disturbed his sleep with alarming frequency:
"I am at the foot of marble stairs. A female figure is standing at the top, a relative, perhaps my mother. She extends her hand to me to help me up the stairs, but that hand is so weak that it cannot hold me and then I am frightened by a powerful male figure, a man in authority, perhaps my father, coming toward me from the side."
Altho the man was physically satisfied, the split in his unconscious made him very irritable, restless and an unpleasant companion for his "mama" to whom he made endless scenes for trifling reasons.
King David. In Biblical days when King David grew old, [2] his ministers besought themselves of the following remedy: they found a young virgin and "let her lie in his bosom" in the hope that the dying man might be revived by her contact. Even that availed nothing.
In our days, however, we have come to prize human life and happiness more highly and young virgins shall not be sacrificed, being the new generation and the future, to the welfare of some modern King David who is the past.
The young women in our midst, virgins or others, whom a morbid obsession draws to the bosom of some King David must be saved from the winter chill that awaits them. Modern psychology holds the key opening for them the door to freedom and normal love.