“Naturally, when you put it that way I see clearly that I was unfair to father. The letter was but an excuse for the great hatred. I recall with shuddering his last day. I had the feeling that father was afraid of me. He gazed at me continually with his great glassy eyes while holding on to mother’s hand. I felt something like jealousy over mother,—now I know that I was always jealous. My maternal body phantasy means, of course, that I want to be present at the parental love act. I want to replace the father in mother’s life. As a small child I loved him very devotedly and I suffered on account of his coolness. He was immeasurably loving and devoted; nevertheless I felt that there was something lacking.”
He looked for tendernesses from his father. To this day he indulges in two phantasies during his sexual acts. He is the boy watching his father during coitus. That is the particular lavatory phantasy when he watches elderly men. He permits himself to be used as a receptaculum seminis by a favored person. (Strong desire to carry on fellatio on his teachers or to subject himself to pederasty.) He is within the maternal body und wird vom Vater päderastiert oder felliert. Or else, he himself is the father, he identifies himself with the latter, and seeks young boys who in that case stand for himself.
But we see that these phantasies differ as widely as possible from reality. He is unable to secure his contact with reality, because he is continually under the sway of the maternal body phantasy, as shows by his peeping into lavatories.
His love for the father proves to be the strongest root of his homosexuality. He wanted to assume the mother’s place in the father’s life. In his phantasies he is either the father or the mother; he has not attained his own individuality. He loves himself either with maternal or with paternal feelings.
I record the following dream among many others. It shows us his typical attitude towards the mother:
Am going with mother to the country where we expect to spend a few days to recuperate ourselves. Locality: forest neighborhood. The journey, stopping station, roadway familiar partly from actuality partly through precious dreams. Wonderful woods with fragrant blooming flowers. But the blooms show numerous brown spots of decay, as after excessive rains. Elder bushes badly torn up by the weather and by plunderers. The path leads to an incline which offers a view of the numerous villas in the valley. I find that we have wandered off, in order to reach the place where we proposed to stay for a while; we should have taken the path to the right half way up the road.
This dream represents a love whose bloom is decaying. They have wandered off (note the double meaning of the expression, vergehen), and they are off the right path.
His past is illumined not only by his dreams. Among his youthful compositions he finds a poem which portrays clearly a paternal body phantasy and speaks longingly of the time when he was yet “unformed and rested quietly in his father’s loins.”...
The revelations in the course of the following days bring to light new associations. His reveries continually slight the immediate past and carry him back over a number of generations. He is a person of wonderful ancestry, he is not at all the son of his father, he is a child whom gypsies have changed in the cradle, he has fallen into the midst of his family by accident.
It turns out that two lives were much talked of at home and that has had a great deal to do with determining his life course and specifically his fear of woman. In the first place, there was his father’s life. The man had been previously married to a woman whom he caught in a breach of marital faithfulness and it led him to fight a duel. He carried a scar on his forehead as a memento. Then, an uncle took his life when he found out that his wife whom he considered loyal, proved unfaithful.