We broke off all intercourse and though my brother has been several times in the same town where I have been, we remain strangers.  At this time my father died suddenly.  Last spring four suicides of friends in so many weeks had a very bad effect on my nerves.  I am now in Berlin in better spirits, but the cramp continues badly at times.

“To this I must add that since my fourteenth year, independent of any illness, I have suffered mentally and physically from menstrual pains recurring every twenty-eight days and lasting from six to eight days.  That these were the equivalent pains to a woman’s menstruation periods I could get no doctor to admit till I was treated for a length of time by a German nerve specialist.

“The physical pains begin abruptly.  Sudden congestions of blood in the brain and in the abdomen.  Sudden perspirations, heat and cold.  Great nervous pains in the small of the back, also in the nerve-centers of abdomen and stomach.  Sharp, shooting pains in the breasts and especially the nipples.  Sudden toothache which stops as suddenly.  The skin becomes darker, sometimes mottled.  I have the whole time a taste of blood in my mouth and often everything I eat tastes of blood.  I have great difficulty at that time in eating meat.  Physical longings for erotic adventure, counterbalanced by mental nausea at the bare idea.

“The mental symptoms are:  sudden feeling of deep depression, suicidal tendencies, alternating with sudden inexplicable lightheartedness.  Capriciousness and great dissatisfaction with myself and life generally.  Horror at my own incompleteness of sex and sudden fits of hatred toward women and a great longing to be loved by men.  This condition changes slowly back to the normal one.  It takes several days for me to lose my physical weakness owing to it.

“Physically I was developed at 16 years of age.  Mentally I was developed at a very early age, but I kept my inner life quite dark, always playing the innocent.  Nobody at home believed me to know anything about life.  They were at times very surprised when I fell out of the role I had planned for myself.  Up till I was 17 years of age nothing to do with other people’s morals was ever discussed before me.  I looked so pure, and do now, that people are always careful in front of me.  My father never discussed such things with me.  From my earliest childhood I loved men dearly, though I was always at daggers drawn with my father and brother.  I worshipped my mother then, as I do now.  My sister and I did not at all get on as children, though we are the best of friends now.  She and her husband as well as my mother have been kindness itself ever since they knew of my condition.  Not till I was over 30 years did I meet a man I loved as well as my mother, and he is heterosexual.  I must have loved my father and brother at first, but continual conflicts, incompatible temperaments