“Certainly! Do you know, I have never mustered enough courage to do something downright disloyal. But I was thinking, if I were a man, I could never remain true. I have always envied men. In fact, with my soul I felt myself more like a man.”
“What were your feelings during the time you were in love with your husband?”
“I had plunged headlong into love and forgot all about my liking of men’s clothes. During that time I felt altogether womanly. Especially when I became a mother. Then all my dreams about manliness disappeared.”
“That was also the only time when you enjoyed your relations with your husband?”
“I have never thought of the two things together. But you are right. For a short time during that period I was entirely womanly, until father died....”
“And your mother came to live with you!”
“Yes ... that is so.... Do you mean, that then I wanted again to be a man? Now, I can confess to you that I always envied father on account of mama. I used to think that if I were a man, I should certainly be in love with mama.”
The further analysis reveals interesting details. Repeatedly she dreams that she is a man and that she has a phallus. She dreams also that she urinates standing after the manner of men. She admits that, already as a child, she loved her mother passionately. She had also overheard a number of times her parents getting together in bed and once she watched them in the act of coitus, peeping through a key hole. She was deeply excited by what she saw and thought that her mother must have suffered great pain and that only the father found pleasure in the act. This infantile conception of male gratification has remained with her to this day. Her favorite expression: “If I should come again into the world I would want to be a man.” The homosexual attitude towards the mother deprived her of libido during her marital relations.
I suggested that she should separate from her mother but she resented scornfully this suggestion. She would rather give up her husband. Some time later she actually did so. She now lives with her mother. I was greatly surprised one day, when she called on me clothed in male attire. She requested from me a certificate to the effect that she was an abnormal person and should be permitted to wear man’s clothes. She had heard that in Berlin a number of women had been granted such a permit by the police on the strength of such a statement from a physician.
Upon being questioned regarding her sexual life she states that she now maintains relations with a man who, before the sexual embrace, puts on women’s clothes. This rouses great orgasm in her. Regarding her relations to her mother her answers are elusive. But I must not think, she adds, that she is a “Urlinde.” The thought of such persons only fills her with disgust. Her mother is now merely her dearest friend.