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This revolt against castration or a feminine attitude has been torn out of its organic context by Alfred Adler. He has linked it superficially or falsely with the longing for power, and has postulated it as an independent ‘masculine protest’. Since a neurosis can only arise from a conflict between two trends, it is as justifiable to see the cause of ‘every’ neurosis in the masculine protest as it is to see it in the feminine attitude against which the protest is being made. It is quite true that this masculine protest plays a regular part in the formation of character - in some types of people a very large part - and that we meet it in the analysis of neurotic men as a vigorous resistance. Psycho-analysis has attached due importance to the masculine protest in connection with the castration complex, without being able to accept its omnipotence or its omnipresence in neuroses. The most marked case of a masculine protest with all its manifest reactions and character-traits that I have met with in analysis was that of a patient who came to me for treatment on account of an obsessional neurosis in whose symptoms the unresolved conflict between a masculine and a feminine attitude (fear of castration and desire for castration) found clear expression. In addition, the patient had developed masochistic phantasies which were wholly derived from a wish to accept castration; and he had even gone beyond these phantasies to real satisfaction in perverse situations. The whole of his state rested - like Adler’s theory itself - on the repression and denial of early infantile fixations of love.

Senatspräsident Schreber found the way to recovery when he decided to give up his resistance to castration and to accommodate himself to the feminine role cast for him by God. After this, he became lucid and calm, was able to put through his own discharge from the asylum and led a normal life - with the one exception that he devoted some hours every day to the cultivation of his femaleness, of whose gradual advance towards the goal determined by God he remained convinced.