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These two slight indications give us an idea of what the typical factor is which determines the negative side of the painter’s relation to his father. What he is rebelling against is his feminine attitude to him which culminates in a phantasy of bearing him a child (the nine years). We have an accurate knowledge of this resistance from our analyses, where it takes on very strange forms in the transference and gives us a great deal of trouble. With the painter’s mourning for his lost father, and the heightening of his longing for him, there also comes about in him a re-activation of his long-since repressed phantasy of pregnancy, and he is obliged to defend himself against it by a neurosis and by debasing his father.

But why should his father, after being reduced to the status of a Devil, bear this physical mark of a woman? The feature seems at first hard to interpret; but soon we find two explanations which compete with each other without being mutually exclusive. A boy’s feminine attitude to his father undergoes repression as soon as he understands that his rivalry with a woman for his father’s love has as a precondition the loss of his own male genitals - in other words, castration. Repudiation of the feminine attitude is thus the result of a revolt against castration. It regularly finds its strongest expression in the converse phantasy of castrating the father, of turning him into a woman. Thus the Devil’s breasts would correspond to a projection of the subject’s own femininity on to the father-substitute. The second explanation of these female additions to the Devil’s body no longer has a hostile meaning but an affectionate one. It sees in the adoption of this shape an indication that the child’s tender feelings towards his mother have been displaced on to his father; and this suggests that there has previously been a strong fixation on the mother, which, in its turn, is responsible for part of the child’s hostility towards his father. Large breasts are the positive sexual characteristics of the mother even at a time when the negative characteristic of the female - her lack of a penis - is as yet unknown to the child. ¹

¹ Cf. Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood (1910c).