Joyce McDougall

“(..) it was reassuring to her to be ill, for then she had the confirmation that her body was indeed her own, that it had limits, that it was alive, and that she herself was a separate individual who was in no danger of losing her sense of subjective identity. While these were not the causes of her illnesses, they were, so to speak, secondary benefits.”
― Joyce McDougall, Theaters Of The Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness

“Let us suppose I have in analysis a patient who suffers from severe sexual impotence whenever he wants to make love. Once my patient's fantasy is brought to consciousness, we see that all women who interest him sexually unconsciously represent his mother. Immediately the woman in question becomes forbidden as an object of desire, and the men in the vicinity will be feared as potential castrators. It becomes understandable in these fantasied circumstances that he "needs" his impotence as a protective device. The patient, so to speak, castrates himself in advance. We might well consider such a symptom as an hysterical solution to neurotic conflict associated with the oedipal complex and its attendant castration anxiety.”
― Joyce McDougall, Theaters Of The Body: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Psychosomatic Illness