The Seductive Mother -- Sometimes a girl has a mother who is very seductive, and with whom competition is difficult if not impossible. Gail, a fifteen-year-old girl was brought to the hospital because of her dreams and fears that something might happen to the mother. The drawing in

figure 168 shows her preoccupation with the mother and the girl's thinly veiled destructive wishes.

Her ambivalence is paramount. The figure of the mother is the best-drawn figure. Details are explicit and the femininity is without question. However, the mother is placed in the most vulnerable of all positions. She is seductively lying on her back but is exposed to the lawn mower, to the croqueting malls, ball and even to the sun.

Many girls are unable to work through the normal process of identification, and frequently present complicated neurotic symptoms associated with this inability. Chris, an eighteen-year-old girl was brought to the hospital because of recurrent nightmares of cats attacking her. Chris was a very beautiful girl who was voted the most popular in her high school class. Her mother in contrast, was very much overweight and rather homely. However, in her drawing shown in figure 169, Chris tends to deny her own beauty and attributes all the beautiful characteristics to the mother.

The cat actually seems to be an extension of the mother, and is characteristic of the preoccupation with cats, that we have seen in girls having extreme ambivalence toward the mother. This may also be characteristic of a resurgence of Chris' unresolved oedipal feelings, so that her destructive hostile feelings toward mother, and her own anxiety about her sexuality, may very well result in the desexualization of Chris in the drawing and the over compensatory characteristics of the mother.

In figure 170, we see a seven-year-old boy that has separated his mother and himself from the other males, who are far away in the drawing with a building in between.

He and the mother are interacting in a growth process and the boy has captured the mother from the other males. One can speculate of course about the boy's preoccupation and anxiety around the struggle.

Castration Fears - The normal development in boys of competing with fathers or older brothers for the love of the female, and attempting to be the dominant male, can often be quite frightening to the boy. If perchance he has a very threatening, aggressive or destructive father, or if the older brother fits this role, then the boy's desire to be the strongest is unfulfilled and he becomes anxious about his competition. Figure 171 shows an eight-year-old boy, who is completely overwhelmed by the older brother.

He has cut himself off at the neck and is threatened by the cutting tool, the lawn mower below him. This is a typical drawing of boys, who in the family setting are fearful of the older males and fear castration.

Randy, who produced figure 172, has an alcoholic father, who had a violent temper when he drank.

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