Finally she confessed to me that there was one experience of which she had not thought before for a long time which she must tell me about. She wanted to tell me about it for some time but an inexplicable shyness prevented her. She was 16 years of age when she once heard her father leaving his study room to steal upstairs to the garret. It was the maid’s day out and her mother was lying down not feeling well. She took her shoes off and followed him quietly up the stairs. The door to the servants’ room stood open. The father was somewhat under the influence of drink and so was also the cook, who always managed to secure some liquor for herself on the sly. A candle was burning in the room and the stairway was dark. She could see plainly everything that was going on. She now saw _pater membrum suum in os ancillæ immisit_. The sight of his reddish face now distorted under the influence of passion was so repulsive to her and struck her so powerfully that she could never forget it in her life. Even to this day when she thinks of it she feels nauseated. (While she is telling the incident she is struggling against the impulse to vomit.) After that episode she developed a nervous complaint of the stomach, chiefly a nervous vomiting. Even during the year just passed there were times when she could not swallow a morsel of meat and she had attacks of uncontrollable vomiting. It was after that occurrence that she fell in love with her teacher. That episode was what had determined the course of her sexual development and what drove her to homosexuality because it made her look at all men in the light in which she had seen her father. Her inclination towards elderly married men (always platonic) is also traceable to her father _Imago_. She was aiming to find a nobler and more delicate father. Whenever a man tried to get closer to her it reminded her of the painful incident she had witnessed, which summed up in her mind all the misery in her home, the whole outrageous situation, the humiliation of her mother, and her father’s morbid passion. For her father who did have some splendid qualities and who enjoyed an enviable position in society she once had as great a love and as deep a respect as for her noble mother. Then she had to go through the disastrous situation in the house. That experience could but serve her as a warning against men, a warning and a lesson! It could not but implant deeply in her soul a lasting dread of man and of man’s terrible passion. She naturally shrank back from any close contact with man for there was always a picture before her mind which plainly carried the message: “do not trust any man lest you should go through what your mother did!”