NAME OF PATIENT: O
AGE: Late 20’s
SEX: Female
FREUD’S ANALYSIS:
From the first moment that O entered my office, I observed some strange markings on her body, like welts left from a whip; apart from the wounds, she was not wearing any underclothes, and when she sat down, she would not cross her legs nor fully close her lips, suggesting some kind of perversion. Her extreme subservient behavior, combined with these other aspects of the woman, allowed me to reach the expeditious conclusion that she wasn’t a case of simple hysteria. When she began to speak, I gathered that she was, in fact, the absolute antithesis of a hysterical woman.
In my past analysis of a case of hysteria, in which I named the patient “Dora,” I have been able to define a hysterical woman as a “person in whom an occasion for sexual excitement elicited feelings that were preponderantly or exclusively unpleasurable” (Freud Reader, 184). In this current analysis of the case of “O,” with that initial and definitive definition of a hysterical woman, the diagnosis of hysteria in O is innately discarded, for she enjoyed any sexual occasion that she was presented with.
The case of O is an extremely complex one; the woman herself is convoluted in the sharing of her ideas, her thoughts, and her memories, and although she does not share with me much of her childhood, I am able to identify the symptoms she clearly exhibits within the overarching psychological concepts I had previously discovered and proposed in my published research.
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I
ON THE ELECTRA COMPLEX
It is pertinent to first define the Electra complex. In the most elementary terms possible, it is fundamental in a child’s development. The Electra complex is manifested when a female child, through her increasing attachment to her father, begins to resent and hate the mother for being the main receptacle of her father’s attention. As the girl continues to grow older and develop, the unsatisfied sexual desire for her father and her dislike for her mother – due to the involvement of the superego – are repressed and instead, the strong feelings she was experiencing are reversed. In the case of a heterosexual female, she begins to identify with her mother and attempts to emulate her, admiring her for having gotten a husband like her father, and in hopes of her doing the same in the future. In the case of a homosexual female, however, she identifies with the father and emulates his masculine traits in hopes of getting a wife like her mother, as the feeling of hate towards her was transfigured into one of a repressed or dormant desire.
There is no doubt that, now that I have outlined the Electra complex, O’s interactions with the men in her life, René and Sir Stephen H., will be more comprehensible. The woman however, refused, in every session, to share with me any information or memories from her childhood, and by consequence, of her father. So I will do my best, as a psychoanalyst and physician, to ponder the possible scenario that caused her to behave this particular way.
René was the lover she first mentioned, as he was the one that introduced her to Sir Stephen, the most significant of the two men, but I will address the latter’s importance shortly. René was the first man she had ever loved, and she had done so desperately. She despaired over obtaining her lover’s affection, his approval, his passion. This all-consuming need for his esteem, and O’s measure of her own worth through her lover’s esteem, suggests that O’s superego was never able to truly repress her Electra complex, causing me to be suspect of O’s relationship with her father, the focus of her desire and affection as a child. This repression that O failed to accomplish is fundamental in a child’s development and their future ideals and concepts for relationships. Alas, causing me to speculate that O might have expressed her desire to her father and endured a brutal rejection, causing the severe break of her initial tethers of affection in her infantile development.
As she no longer had the possibility for her superego to completely assume the task of repressing the Electra complex, it was never able to fully repress it – both the complex and the memory of her father’s rejection, causing her to be constantly and desperately looking for that kind of authority figure that her father represented in her lovers. And herein lies the answer as to why Sir Stephen was the most significant of O’s lovers. Regardless of the fact that René was the first man she had loved, Sir Stephen was older, looked more mature, and was a lot less forgiving than René, becoming that authority figure that O had so desperately been looking for. The extremes to which she went to obtain their approval and affection, however, suggests that there is a need for further analysis, but without the full cooperation from the woman on the sharing of her past, I was regrettably unable to fully explore this aspect of O’s psyche.
I am, though, able to ascribe her a form of infantile anxiety. She confessed to me that when her lover was not there, she felt empty, scared, and insecure in her lover’s affections and feelings for her: “No sooner had René returned than, completely reassured by his presence, she recovered her taste for others and for herself, her zest for life itself” (Story of O, 286). As an adult, because she is in fact in the stage of adulthood, she has “become neurotic owing to her libido being unsatisfied behaves in her anxiety like a child: she begins to be frightened when she is alone, that is to say when she is away from someone whose love she had felt secure” (Freud Reader, 289). O’s unsatisfied libido is the consequence of her father’s rejection and the failed repression of the Electra complex by her superego.
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II
ON SEXUALITY
Through the continuance of the therapy, the woman shared with me some information that went as far back as her teenage years (nevertheless, she still refused to talk about her childhood and her father, allowing me to assume that what I speculated was, in fact, correct). She mentioned how when she was in lycee, she would have interactions of a sexual nature with other girls in her class, nonetheless maintaining her sexual attraction for boys. With her ‘contrary sexual feelings,’ O can be identified as an invert; more specifically, an amphigenic inverts, a “psychosexual hermaphrodite, ... as their sexual objects may equally well be of their own or of the opposite sex … The trait of inversion may either date back to the very beginning, as far back as the subject’s memory reaches, or it may not have become noticeable till some particular time before or after puberty” (Freud Reader, 241). In our third session, we uncovered when O’s trait of inversion became noticeable, for it was a very specific incident involving one of O’s older friends (also, once again, highlighting O’s constant search for an authority figure as she befriended much older people than herself). O was fifteen years of age at the time, and Marion, the friend, was thirty years old, fifteen years her senior. O recounted, and I quote, “What she was seeing in her mind’s eye, what she had never been able to forget, what still filled her with the same sensation of nausea and disgust that she had felt when she had first witnessed it when she was fifteen, was the image of Marion slumped in the leather armchair in a hotel room, Marion with one leg sprawled over one arm of the chair and her head half hanging over the other, caressing herself in her, O’s, presence and moaning” (Story of O, 262). With the discovery of this particular incident, it is clear how it is that O’s own inversion became apparent to her.
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III
ON FEMININE TRAITS
In order to understand the peculiar manifestation and transformation of O’s relationship and interaction with her feminine traits, I will first delineate these three traits. The “three most distinguishing traits of female personality” (Sexual Politics,, 194), are those of passivity, masochism, and narcissism. At the beginning of O’s account, there was a clear conflict between these traits, with passivity and masochism on one side, and narcissism on the other. In Roissy, O was lashed [with whips] and penetrated in every possible hole by different men. Masochism and passivity, the two most dynamically interrelated traits, as women are masochistic because of their inherent passivity because if a man was in that position [during sex] it (playing the passive role in coitus) would be deeply emasculating. The established understanding of these two traits allows me to begin to understand and get to the root of her pleasure at being beaten, especially since “abuse is not only good for a woman, but the very thing she craved” (Sexual Politics, 195). However, O’s pleasure at seeing the welts on her body was what created the conflict between those two traits and a woman’s narcissism, for a “female’s investment of her love in her own body or her self, treating it the same way as the male would respond to it” (Sexual Politics, 196). The wounds and bruises are something that is usually considered unattractive in a lady, but in the case of O, her lover found them deeply pleasurable, and in accordance with her all-consuming desire to be desirable to her lover, the complaint her narcissism at first provided for the welts disappeared, and instead began to consider them beautiful, proof of her lover’s love.
In order to fully understand O’s sexual excitement at being in pain, aside from understanding the effect that the failed regression of her Electra complex had on her development and the combined effect of the three feminine traits, it is also important to understand the beating-phantasy and the pleasure and death drives.
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IV
ON PERVERSION
In the chapter ‘A Child is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,’ within my published text From the History of an Infantile Neurosis, the beating-phantasy, which I had previously mentioned in passing, is explored. Within this particular perversion, there are three phases through which a child goes through in its development. Phase 1 is when the child first witnesses the father or another authority figure beating a child in front of them, and is characterized by the child’s thought of ‘My father is beating the child.’ This gives the child the sense that the father loves them more than they do the child they are beating, it gives them some assurance in their father’s affections towards them. The second phase, however, is elicited due to a sense of guilt, and thus the child becomes the beaten child, and the characteristic child saying: ‘I am being beaten by my father.’ “This second phase is the most important and the most momentous of all. But we may say of it in a certain sense that it has never had a real existence. It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious. It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account” (A Child is Being Beaten, 185). The third phase is mostly similar to the first phase; once again the child is looking on as the father, or another authority figure, beats a child in front of them, and the characteristic conclusion becomes: ‘I am probably looking on.’ The patient O, in the development of her own beating-phantasy became stuck in between the second and third phase. She experiences the pleasure, of a masochistic nature, described in phase two, but also experiences the sadistic nature of the pleasure described in phase three.
Now, the pleasure and the death drive become more accessible in their role in O’s psychical processes. However, it would be null to simply consider these two drives without also once again taking into consideration her interaction with the Electra complex, and how it applies to O in her pursuit of the affections of her lover.
In the case of O, it would be an insurmountable task to attempt to extricate the pleasure and death drive into two different and distinct concepts. However, the pleasure principle is defined as having a parallel to life; meaning that it does not concern all kinds of pleasure but specifically those that are life-affirming and life-producing. Whereas the death drive does not refer to suicide, but to self-destructive behaviors and pain that bring pleasure to the individual. Because O finds sexual pleasure in pain, the ‘life-producing’ behavior of reproduction is combined with the characteristic self-destruction and pain – either by inflicting on someone else or herself and O does both, the two drives are unable to disentangle from each other. Here is where O’s need to please her lover also have to be considered. O begins to experience pleasure from the pain she experiences at the hands of her lover, going insofar as to say: “She did not wish to die, but if torture was the price she had to pay to keep her lover’s love, then she only hoped he was pleased that she had endured it” (Story of O 132). Thus we see the indubitable effect of the failed repression of the Electra complex has on the patient herself, as well as the trauma of her father’s rejection. The rejection caused ripples so massive, that the superego failed to repress the complex and therefore heightened the feelings of desire for some kind of authority figure in substitution for her father. First René, and then Sir Stephen, became that substitute, and the motivation and basis for almost every single decision and act that O partook in.
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After about having sessions for two weeks, the woman stopped coming to see me. Even though I have been able to reach certain verdicts in regards to her psychical processes, it is impossible for me to draw a definite conclusion on the analysis of O’s convoluted and troubled psyche without the information that she was unwilling to share with me about her childhood – specifically her relationship with her father and that traumatic falling out, and her discontinuance of her treatment.
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