The equilibrium between his aggressiveness in work and his passivity in marital life was upset by the new chief executive, who skilfully hemmed in his activity. Alexander remarks that it is impossible for a man who has struggled all his life against very strong unconscious homosexuality to serve under a strong man. The dominating personality arouses the latent attitude, and the subordinate must resort to special means of maintaining his repression. In the case of B, which we have previously considered, the means of restoring some sort of equilibrium was escape (by resigning), but when that became very difficult, he fled into a world of fantasy (a psychosis). J met the crisis by breaking through the sublimation of his heterosexuality, and taking a mistress as an outlet for his thwarted drives. Further than that, he vindicated his masculinity in a very dramatic way. He not only took a mistress, but he took the wife of another. From now on, he was dependent on both women to preserve the equilibrium of his personality. Previously the equilibrium had been maintained between wife and work; now it depended on wife, mistress, and work, for the aggressive, masculine component required the mistress to make up for the limitations imposed upon his working sphere. Alexander reports that in the course of a long analysis this remarkable split in the personality was traced back to early childhood. “At the age of four he was already the same person.” At the age of four he continued to drink milk out of a bottle, stubbornly resisting every effort to break him of the practice. But--and it was with an emphatic “but” that J produced the reminiscence--at the same time the boy was especially adventurous and independent, riding all by himself out on the highway. Here was the same antithesis that later expressed itself in his peculiar relation to wife and work. The child won the right to indulge his infantile, oral tendencies in one particular by exaggerated boldness in other respects. This solution was the prototype for his later life. The rôle of the bottle was later taken by his wife, whom he often treated like an inanimate object whose only function was to minister to his needs, while his work, and later his mistress, were the successors to the bicycle, by means of which he was able to prove his independence and his masculinity to himself and the world. The castration fear, which was aroused by the means adopted to break up his infantile masturbation, favored the oral fixation, and came into conflict with his strong masculine genital drive, laying the basis for this notable character split. * * * * *