as convinced that he had won because the father left; his success had achieved the power of sole possessor of his mother. However, the removal of his father soon led to Mr. Z's mother engaging in extramarital affairs. Due to the nature of the boy's position as her sole male possessor, these other men introduced a threat to his security; therefore, the therapist saw the patient's defensiveness as a mechanism that shielded him against these rivals. Where the analyst went too far, discovered in the second analysis, was his assertion that the mechanism was being used against sexual rivals again in the oedipal sense, and additionally against fear of castration brought upon by awareness of his own competitive feelings towards the rivals, including his father (Kohut, 1979, p. 6). The castration anxiety, however, was no longer an oedipal victory but a defeat, for Mr. Z did not remain his mother's sole possessor; hence his anxiety was accompanied by depression.Similarly, the analyst attributed Mr. Z's recurring masturbation along with masochistic fantasies to an early warped sense of the nature of lovemaking (Kohut, 1979, p. 6). His in-depth explanation linked Mr. Z's dominatrix thoughts concerning women to his perception of a strong mother and a weak father. The castration anxiety accompanied by depression resurfaced in an additional oedipal defeat only now with the strong mother. She provided protection against the father as a castrator because she was more powerful than he was, but this then served as the basis for his masochism in his unconscious denial of the existence of people without penises (Kohut, 1979, p.7). In the second analysis, it was revealed that these masochistic fantasies actually initiated due to the domination factor at the root of Mr. Z's relationship with his mother. He possessed a defensive idealization of his strong mother as opposed to an oedipal conflict with her (Kohut, 1979, p. 26). His mother mirrored him...
