The patient gradually learnt to understand that she banished clocks and watches from her room at night because they were symbols of the female genitals. Clocks, which we know may have other symbolic meanings besides this, acquire this significance of a genital organ by their relation to periodical processes and regular intervals. A woman may be heard to boast that menstruation occurs in her as regularly as clockwork. Now this patient’s special fear was that the ticking of the clocks would disturb her during sleep. The ticking of a clock is comparable to the throbbing of the clitoris in sexual excitation. This sensation, which was distressing to her, had actually on several occasions wakened her from sleep; and now her fear of an erection of the clitoris expressed itself by the imposition of a rule to remove all going clocks and watches far away from her during the night. Flower-pots and vases are, like all receptacles, also symbols of the female genitals. Precautions to prevent them from falling and breaking during the night are therefore not lacking in meaning. We know the very widespread custom of breaking a vessel or a plate on the occasion of a betrothal; everyone present possesses himself of a fragment in symbolic acceptance of the fact that he may no longer put forward any claims to the bride, presumably a custom which arose with monogamy. The patient also contributed a recollection and several associations to this part of her ritual. Once as a child she had fallen while carrying a glass or porcelain vessel, and had cut her finger which had bled badly. As she grew up and learnt the facts about sexual intercourse, she developed the apprehension that on her wedding-night she would not bleed and so would prove not to be a virgin. Her precautions against the vases breaking signified a rejection of the whole complex concerned with virginity and with the question of bleeding during the first act of intercourse; a rejection of the anxiety both that she would bleed and that she would not bleed. These precautions were in fact only remotely connected with the prevention of noise.