Richard Long - Anal Secretaries

Terri herself admitted that she rather enjoyed Madge’s periodic checks to ascertain the continued existence of the hymeneal membrane. Moreover, one cannot help feeling dubious about the good intentions of a stepmother who teaches a girl how to masturbate. Possibly there was something of the sexual exhibitionist in Madge.

Lacking the opportunity to probe more deeply into the psychiatric makeup of the family, we must concentrate our attention upon Terri herself. As is so often the case, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, provides the framework in which we can best understand Terri’s sexual development. Freud speaks of “the castration complex,” the discovery by little girls that they are not like little boys-specifically, they ‘lack the penis-and goes on to note, “very different is the effect of the castration complex on the girl She acknowledges the fact of her castration, the consequent superiority, of the male and her own inferiority, but she also rebels against these unpleasant facts. So, divided in her mind, she may follow one of three lines of development. The first leads to her turning her back on sexuality altogether. The budding, woman, frightened by the comparison of herself with boys, becomes dissatisfied with her clitoris and gives up her phallic activity and there with her sexuality in general and a considerable part of her masculine proclivities in other fields. If she pursues the second line, she clings in obstinate self-assertion to her threatened masculinity; the hope of getting a penis sometime is cherished to an incredibly late age and becomes the aim of her life, whilst the fantasy of really being a man, in spite of everything, often dominates long periods of her life. This ‘masculinity complex’ may also result in a manifestly homosexual object-choice.

Only if her development follows the third, very circuitous path does she arrive at the ‘ultimate normal feminine attitude in which she takes her father as love object, and thus arrives at the Oedipus complex in its feminine form. Thus, in women, that complex represents the final result of a lengthy process of development; castration does not destroy but rather creates it, and it escapes the strong hostile influences which, in men, tend to its destruction-in fact, only too often a woman never surmounts ‘it at all.” (Freud, “Female Sexuality,” reprinted in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, pp.’ 198-9, Philip Rieff, editor) Terri obviously rejected the first of the three alternatives mentioned by Freud. That is, she emphatically did not turn away from her own sexuality.

However,” she seems to have vacillated between the second and the third choices. The second alternative would obviously lead to the formation of a homosexual personality. As we have seen, there is more than a hint of a homosexual attraction between Terri and her stepmother. As we shall see in a later portion of her case history, a similar attachment developed between her and Amy, the wife of the assistant principal already mentioned.

It is the relationship between Terri and the assistant principal, Mr.

Harvey-though they were extremely intimate, she never referred to him by his first name-which must occupy most of our attention. Terri has already mentioned a more than superficial similarity between Harvey and her father, a comparison which naturally brings to mind the implication of incest. We think it is very possible that this likeness between the two men bad a great deal to do with Terri’s enthusiastic response to his advances: in fact, it would not be too much to say that, in making love with Harvey, she was actually forming a close physical tie with her own father, at least on the symbolic level.

The reader may already have noticed that, while Terri professed a great deal of admiration and respect for her father, so much so that she declined to allow her hymen to be ruptured in order not to disappoint him, she never said much about him as a person. We submit that this curious fact indicates, first, a very strong emotional attachment to her father, but, second, a strong reluctance to allow it to come out into the open. It is quite possible, in other words, that Terri subconsciously felt a strong physical attachment to her father but refused to reveal it. This attraction later surfaced in her very erotic relationship with a father-substitute, Harvey. Thus Terri took both the second and the third alternatives suggested by Freud! The death of Terri’s mother and her understandable inability to accept Madge as a full substitute contributed to this curious outcome, we can safely assume.

Dr. Benjamin Karpman, a noted authority, corroborates our suspicion that Terri saw in Harvey a substitute for her father. He also provides a clue to another development to be chronicled in a subsequent portion of her case history.

Karpman points out that “the patient, confronted with an incestuous fixation on the one hand and the incest barrier on the other, finds it necessary to affect a compromise that enables him to avoid or circumvent direct incestuous activities but nevertheless permits him to indulge his incestuous desires indirectly and perhaps symbolically. Thus, a man who has a fixation on his mother is terrified not only- at the idea of having sexual relations with her, but even at the idea of having them with any other woman, because every woman is, actually or potentially, a mother and therefore brings to mind a picture of his own mother. Since libido must find an outlet, he resorts to the expedient of indulging in sex relations that will completely exclude the vaginal orifice.

Consequently, he may indulge in fellatio, cunnilingus, pederasty, which to him, appears to completely remove the chosen activity from any implication of incest.” (Quoted in Capnio, Variations in Sexual Behavior, pp. 190-1.) We believe that Terri conforms to this pattern and that she eagerly accepted the injunctions to preserve her hymen. She did so because orthodox sexual intercourse would have seemed too much like incest and thus she sought recourse in other forms of sexual behavior. Thus, when anal- intercourse was suggested to her, she eagerly seized upon it as a way of having her cake and eating it too.

“Every time we got together, Mr. Harvey and me, he would ask me if I wanted to go over to his house to have our fun. For a while I wouldn’t go. I just couldn’t bring myself to do those things with him while his wife was look big on. Finally he convinced me by showing me some pictures someone had made. He was lying on a bed and some really gorgeous blonde chick was going down on him.

Right next to him was his wife-I knew her when I saw her-and she had her mouth full of cock! After that I believed him when he said that they weren’t hung up about doing things like that and so I said that I’d go along with him. We set it up for the next Saturday and that was that.

“When I got there Amy herself met me at the door. She was wearing a negligee that really showed off her body like the movies do, and she had a hell of a body to show off. And you could see that she was really turned on by it all.

“Come on in,” she told me, holding the door open. “We’re back in the bedroom getting ready. I’m sure you’ll have a wonderful time. You mustn’t feel self-conscious or anything. Just relax, make yourself comfortable and enjoy it.”

“What can you say to that? I mean, I’d come there to ball’ her husband and she rolls out the red carpet! Jeez, that’s some kind of hospitality! I beaded off in the direction she pointed, out — and she said she’d be along in a minute. I went on down the hallway and turned into the bedroom she’d mentioned. He was there, lying on top of the covers with his cock spread out across his tummy like a gigantic snake. I stepped into the room and just seeing him like that, it made me queasy all over.