Women playing with their hair on approaching stoplights

In an Internet site where I banter with my classmates from my medical school, one of them raised the following question.

why women play with their hair when they approach stoplights ?

And he answered it himself, of course as a joke, Unlike men they do not have b---- to scratch.

While he meant it as a joke the fact that he had noticed this phenomena, and had found it humorous enough to quip on it, and then had associated it with - rather had  found equivalency with - touching of genitals, points to the presence of some psychological riddle here. 

First of all we have to decide whether it is a phenomena worthy of psychoanalytic investigation by which I mean that it is a distinct behavior present not just as a quirk in one particular person, which would be a manifestation of his or her individual neurosis, but a universal neurosis, present in all of us, ready to emerge as a defense mechanism if the circumstances demand; a repetitious behavior arising from our phylogenetic past as a response to the experiences of countless generations that have left genetic imprints in all of us, and whose raison d'etre remains shrouded in mystery because the underlying motives and processes of the phenomena have become unconscious due to repression. 

There is little doubt that some women under stress do reach for their hair - usually the frontal locks - and run their fingers through it as if searching for something hidden. On being questioned they dismiss it as just a habit or as simple straightening of hair and may even get irritated as to why one would nitpick over a little extra grooming.  

Now superfluous grooming is a sign of obsessional neurosis. In a subset, the compulsion to clean and groom reaches ridiculous proportions. The patient, especially in the mornings, may literally spend hours in front of the mirror, straightening hair, looking for flaws on the face, clothes and other aspects of one's appearance, as if one has to wipe out every trace of what may be construed as offensive by others, before leaving the house. Trying to put the hair in order seems to be a specially favored aspect of this ritual, as if these individuals are having a-bad-hair-day everyday, and they may accumulate an impressive array of shampoos, gels, conditioners, sprays, and shaving paraphernalia as counter measures against these (unconscious) harmful impulses. 

And here we cannot help but reflect whether patients who suffer from trichotillomania - a malady where the person compulsively pulls out her hair in clumps sometimes to the point of going completely bald - are not taking this fear to an extreme.

Now sometime back on this blog I discussed a case of trichotillomania: "A childhood screen memory of penis envy and its connection with trichotillomania" (April 16 2011). There we saw how the patient, under the sway of penis envy, wanted to pull out anything that reminded her of the difference between the sexes and the underlying motive was to equalize the playing field between the two.

Could it be possible that such apparently purposeless playing with hair under stress is just an embryonic trichotillomania?

We do know that trichotillomania is another manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder. To the patient the hair feels as something alien and hostile that one must get rid of. Anything out of place, anything not fitting in with rest of the pattern; littered pieces of papers, dirty linen dropped on the bathroom floor, magazines thrown haphazardly upon the coffee table, hair in the bathtub, they all have to be put in the general scheme or yanked out altogether, so goes the reasoning of the obsessive, and hair become another object in the series.

What surprises us, and fills us with not a little fascinated horror, is that here what the obsessive is finding incongruous is not something external but part of his own self. But a little reflection tells us that  feeling and treating part of oneself as a foreign object is perhaps not all that strange but quite common. We just do not see it that way and therefore it unpleasantly surprises us when somebody brings to our attention as to how we can treat part of our own body as something vile and foreign. In fact picking upon pimples and other flaws of complexion is almost a rite of passage in adolescence; women in throes of post partum depression may consider their own child - which just so recently was part of their body - as incarnate of evil, the devil himself and kill it;  and in psychotics it is not all that rare to actually castrate themselves or enucleate their eyes [where eyes symbolize the penis]. Those suffering from psychogenic pruritis can relentlessly dig their own skin convinced that under it lie bugs or other contaminants, and psychogenic poludipsics are known to gorge themselves with gallons of water in order to wash out the impurities of the environment that has got lodged inside their bodies. Recently a patient of mine, who for years had been digging her skin and her torso and arms were puddles of sores, stopped doing it, when her Remeron (Mirtazapine) was stopped. She was perhaps feeling the side effects of Mitrazapine as something foreign inside her. A mechanism that I will not be surprised is common across the board in causing psychogenic polydipsia in patients on psychotropic medications.  

Now coming back to the analysis of these obsessive patients who are forever trying to get rid of the incongruities in their environment or in themselves. At the deepest level they are fearful of contamination of others by the bad aspects of themselves. Incongruities in the environment is just a reminder of their own unacceptable impulses, and they are forever straightening out the environment to banish from their sight everything that will provoke further activation of their own incongruent/evil/extruding impulses. And these extruding impulses show themselves to be the intimate aspects of themselves that should be hidden from the environment. While immediate examination shows them to be arising from the anal-sadistic phase of sexuality - we recall here that the fear of leaving the house is associated with not being cleaned and groomed enough - at the deepest level they arise from the fear of the destructive power of the phallic impulses. The fear that one's anal-sadistic impulses will show is but a regression from the fear that one's phallic/genital impulses are out of control and will be seen by people/society. 

Why the penis and the impulses originating from it are felt to be destructive? 

Sexual drive is often felt as evil and incongruous with the rest of the self; an anomaly, something gross, physical, material, smelly, crude and not refined or spiritual enough. 

And with good reason. People who are so dignified in every other respect when under the sway of the sexual drive can behave most incongruously. A man huffing and puffing in the act of sex looks ridiculous if not outright animal. There is nothing dignified about one human being mounting and humping another. And the phallus/penis is the most visible manifestation of this drive which turns us into such a coarse being. In women there is further fear of it being a harbinger of cooties - diseases - if not outright pregnancy, which is the beginning of the destruction of one's own body and ultimately death. No wonder people often develop neurosis in order to suppress/escape from this coarse drive. We cannot help but reflect here that in the Hindu Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva the latter is symbolized by the penis and is attributed the function of both the procreator and its exact opposite the destroyer.

But what exactly is the connection between women playing with their hair on crossroads, trichotillomania and fear of getting touched by the penis, you want to ask me. 

This question cannot be answered directly and instead I will take up two instructive cases. The first one is actually not even a case but someone I worked with 25 years ago. He was a Jewish doctor who stammered quite badly; a malady that I could see had arisen as a mean to control his inordinate ambition which must have begun as an excessively powerful aggressive drive. Coupled with this was his habit of relentlessly twirling and untwirling a lock of hair that he still had upon his balding head. The underlying psychological mechanism behind the obsession was easy to discern. His extreme competitiveness wished nothing less than castration for anyone who even hinted of crossing his path. But living in society and hampered by its rules  and unable to do anything of the sort even with words, for stammering would arise to block the discharge of aggression through speech, he wanted to do it with his bare hands. But the danger involved in laying his hands upon others had deflected the impulse to find discharge upon his own self and in the form of twirling and untwirling his hair - castrating and uncastrating himself, symbolically of course.

The second case is that of a woman who was in early thirties, eager to settle down but unable to do so because of undischarged anger towards men, stemming from growing up in a divorced household where the mother was absent and the girl was dumped with the responsibility of taking care of the father and her brother, both of whom had lorded over her because she was the girl. Her relationships were predictable. After a brief  period or romance, she would lapse into continuous arguments with whoever she was courting.  All her lovers after a few months of honeymoon would metamorphose into her brother behind which lay the image of her father. Her life was a series of her old battles with the new incarnations of her brother and father. 

And her brother gave her fresh justifications to do so. She had a regular job while her brother, older than her, was more or less of a bum. Whenever she talked about him she showed contempt for his inability to hold down a job and this would be followed up with expressions of outrage that he still remains their father's favorite. And she knew that the only reason  this was happening was because he was the boy and she was the girl. "If only I had a penis," in her unconscious she reasoned, "I would have been my father's favorite." 

Now whenever she talked about her brother in this fashion, and additionally whenever she felt I was putting her down through my 'interpretations' of her psychological conflicts, she would get excited and start playing with her hair. And the way she played it looked like as if she was searching for something there. The movement of her fingers through her hair would remind me of how homosexual hair dressers fiddle with their clients' hair fetishistically as if they are searching there for something as well.  Now one of the most common subtype of homosexuality occurs in those who cannot forgo the idea of the lack of penis in their love object. These homosexuals love everything about women and their beauty but cannot tolerate the dread of the missing penis in them. They often turn to feminine looking youthful boys for their love needs. And it is this type of homosexuality that marks the hair dressers who cannot give up the idea of finding the penis in the tresses of the hair while grooming and straightening it out. The facial expression and behavior of this girl was so similar to those homosexual hairdressers, the unconscious motives behind such playing with hair became easy to fathom. "You jerk," she wanted to say, "You are shoving those interpretations down my throat with such surety because being a man, and possessing a penis, you consider yourself naturally superior to me. Now I know that I too have a penis. It is hidden somewhere, deep inside me, perhaps hidden behind these lock of hair of mine. And if only I get hold of it, which will place both of us on a level field, I will teach you a lesson as to who is better between the two of us."

If we take the Jewish doctor who played with the hair to symbolically self-castrate, and this girl's search for the hidden penis which would put her on equal footing with men, then we can extrapolate that perhaps many women when stopped at crossroads experience the situation as stressful and also deal with the anxiety by reaching for the penis that would put them on equal footing with men and make them not feel so vulnerable. 

But why would a woman feel vulnerable on stoplights? 

Here we run into the psychology of agoraphobia. Agoraphobia - which literally means fear of the marketplace - arises from fear of coming to harm in interacting with others especially in public places. Analysis reveals that behind the fear of interaction lies fear that one would be tempted to exchange one's goods - displacement from exchanging one's sexual goods - and would come out a loser. In the agoraphobic the give and take of life has gone sour. Iron has entered the soul especially in the matter of the most pleasurable of all exchanges - the give and take of sex.

What causes this fear and sourness?


Throughout our existence we are in search for somebody with whom we can exchange our bodily goods. The very process of life depends upon such exchange. In this love exchange, only in the beginning we are generous, and this more so the case in women. In her, if the culture and men has taken advantage of her, and given as to how exploitative cultures are towards women it is invariably the case, she may show increasing ambivalence towards this search for love. She may rather not exchange 'her treasures' with that of a man, or do it in a manner where she gives less and takes more. She may even resort to deception, ruse and tricking. It is these negative impulses behind her love that makes folks lament at the femme fatale and her enigmatic and unfathomable nature.

The woman's inner conviction that she has been shortchanged in life adds a further twist to this search for love.  Her sense of lacking something which she must make good and complete by getting it from a man makes her approach him with poor self esteem and trepidation and leads her to adorn herself with all kinds of jewelery, make-up, and other shiny trinkets that she hopes will be a match for that one jewel that he possesses. Women's endless shopping is also the search for that jewel that would deflect attention from her  great defect/wound  and would make the man believe that he is getting more than what he is giving. The term "turning tricks" for the act of prostitution perhaps arose from this attitude of exchanging and tricking the man into giving what she wants without his getting anything in return. For the prostitute convinces herself that she feels nothing and gives nothing in the sexual exchange and gets the man's money through just tricking him.  

But the attitude of tricking, deceiving, stealing, and in the more spirited one pulling it out as a tuft of hair, provokes the fear of retaliation and subjection to physical harm and other dangers as getting the cooties (venereal diseases) and pregnancy. The  revolt at the thought of playing the passive sexual role and a stranger's dirty organ penetrating one's body adds to the disgust and provokes further withdrawal from the impulse.

No wonder at the stoplights, in a situation to meet somebody - for crossroads are like a marketplace offering choices as to which direction to take and who to choose from amongst all the other stopped passengers - tempted and yet fearing the retaliation for her evil intention, she reaches for her hair and searches for the penis, which she has a conviction she does possess, and it is only a matter of searching. For if she is successful this time in that eternal search, she does not have to bother exchanging her goods with another; for what she so ardently desires she already has.

A childhood screen memory of penis envy and its connection with trichotillomania

A patient in her mid-fifties, who never got married because she wanted the world absolutely on her terms and thus could not make room in her life for a husband, recalled the following memory from her childhood:

As a child I would take a slice of Wonder Bread and squeeze that whole big thing into the smallest size, then eat it up. It never amazed me as to how I could squeeze all the air out of that big slice and turn it into such a tiny ball.


This memory emerged while the patient was describing her obsession with eating nothing but the healthiest food. Recently she is in a kick to eat rare grains and goes the distance to buy some exotic varieties. She does not quite enjoy their taste because of lack of previous exposure - for it is difficult to acquire new tastes in one's fifties - nevertheless she eats those grains [religiously] to enhance her health.

The childhood memory emerged as a contrast to her current health consciousness. As a child she cared two hoots for eating right, and the processed Wonder Bread which she now finds "so terrible for you" was a much sought after item.

Another contrast between then and the present is that as a child she was free as a bird, but now is bound up with all kinds of controls. She not only controls everything she eats - not a trace of any unhealthy food can go into her mouth - she controls all other aspects of her life as well.

A good example would be the way we struggle over scheduling her next appointment. If I suggest for her to come in 4 weeks she is bound to say how about 6 weeks. If  the suggestion is to return in 6 weeks, I can count upon her to pipe in I rather come in a month.

Now this kind of competition is sine qua non of obsessional neurosis. It is continuation of the oppositional defiance of latency age. In males its roots can be traced to phallic competition with the father. However, it is more a legacy of the anal-sadistic phase and continuation of anal-retentive struggles (anal defiance) over who has control over one's possessions (feces) parents or one self.

Just not scheduling she also wants to control what transpires in the sessions. What she talks in the office is  never free associations; never reporting of what is transpiring in her mind's eye here and now, but prepared material and mostly the notes she has made of educational TV shows on mental health issues, which she reads to me from pieces of paper and then comments upon them. There is no question of learning anything from me about her illness, just teaching me nuggets of wisdom she has jotted down from TV, Internet and magazines about neurobiology of OCD and ADHD, stigma attached to mental illnesses and other assorted topics on psychiatry. It is psychoeducation at its best and done to teach the analyst as to what psychiatry is all about. She would have made an excellent biological psychiatrist for they too cannot see anything beyond psychoeducation.

Her psychoeducating me is just a tip of the iceberg of doing good deeds and favors to others. But it is always doing unto others never letting others do unto her. She refuses to accept anything from anybody. Even I can never get anything to her about her neurosis but edgewise.

It is interesting too that while she is prolific with free advice - notes gathered from TV and the Internet which one get for free - she is niggardly in giving anything that is solid and has any material/monetary value. Her giving of actual things is as puny as the tiny ball of the Wonder Bread slice. She has equal difficulty in  parting with her money. For example on one Christmas she gave me the present of two packets of hot chocolate, which were bought from a dollar store and wrapped in an old newspaper.

Her inability to accept anything from others on analysis showed itself to be a compensation for inability to spend on others. It is a form of punishment. The reasoning goes: "If I am so petty in giving things to others then I should make up for it by accepting even less." She never ever accepts a cup of coffee from me which I sometimes offer my patients at the beginning of the session with an invariable, "No thanks. But you go ahead and please have one for yourself."

An example of her intense need to do favors is reflected in her regularly wanting to cut short her session with me so I can have a few minutes to myself. And she always adds that she won't mind a bit if I bill for the whole session. So as long as somebody else is picking the tab for her generosity she can spend. If I am running late, she is delighted at the prospect of offering to end the session early so I can get back on schedule.

However her extreme considerateness does not make one feel thankful but slightly irritated. As if her favors to you are done not for your sake but for the gratification of some internal need of hers. As if her goodness is not truly altruistic but to override a contrary impulse. Her analysis showed that behind this desire to do things for you there lies a powerful drive to snatch things away from you. It is this evil impulse which she has to constantly keep in check by doing just the opposite.

She is always grabbing magazines from my office, and though they are next to worthless, she makes a big show of it, as if  it is as big a deal as asking the moon from me. She gives an impression, at least to my analytic eyes, that she will violently take things away from others if that impulse is not kept under suppression by a forceful reaction formation of always doing just the opposite.

But this impulse to take something away from others by force does find an outlet in her, escaping the reaction formation,  in her neurosis/displacement. It emerges in her grabbing and pulling out her hair. She pulls them out in gobs and has practically no natural hair left. So the impulse has found an outlet but by turning upon her own self and in pulling out a valuable part of her. Herein lies the psychology of trichotillomania.

As for the analysis of her memory I made the construction that her squeezing the Wonder Bread slice was a screen memory for something momentous that happened to her at a very ancient period of her life [during the Oedipal phase].


Screen memories are disparate flashes of memories from early childhood, which seem to have nothing  significant about them. Snatches of memory with neutral and nothing out of ordinary content that makes one wonder as to why someone would keep them in the repertoire of conscious memories so tenaciously. Their importance lies in that they contain in shorthand something of great importance that happened during that period, or even earlier, the memory of which has been overtaken by childhood amnesia. The important memory undergoes repression and the neutral memory which seems to be without significance contains the content of the important memory in a coded form.

Then on theoretical grounds and because I knew her conflicts well from years of observing her added that the playing with the slice of bread and changing it from the big size to next to nothing was connected with solving the riddle of the differences between the sexes. It arose from the castration complex of Oedipal period. The little girl when she first sees the male genital, while playing with a brother or another child, quickly and decidedly concludes that she has been shortchanged on this most important matter.  Their reaction is to not  believe - rather refuse to accept - that they have been shortchanged permanently and often think that they did have genitals no different than boys, and that it either got lost, or taken away from them for some misdeed, and the tiny clitoris, whose pleasure giving significance they have just begun to appreciate from playing with it (childhood masturbation) will grow to the same size as that of boys or by some effort, trick, or maneuvering they will be able to get the right size genitals (clitoris/penis).

The maneuvering by which they hope to get the right genitals has oral overtones. As if by eating something right they will be able to get what they want. [Patient's memory had emerged while talking about her extra carefulness in not eating something that is harmful to her. This obsession with not eating anything incorrect was counter measures against acquiring a penis (getting orally impregnated) through the oral route. The wish for penis and obtaining it by eating it or eating something that will get one one and its rejection.]
[One of my patient who was sexually abused at the age of 3 by his older sister, the latter would routinely make him hide his penis and testicles between his legs, so the distinction between him and her would disappear.
This impulse on part of the sister towards her brother is the same impulse that was being given an expression by the patient, who had no brother or sister, through playing with bread slice and making it almost disappear.

A more melovalent expression of this impulse to take away the distinction between the sexes explains the behavior of women who actually attempt to castrate men - recall the case of Lorena and John Bobbit - and I will not be surprised if the same impulse lies behind women who become serial killers - one is reminded here of the drama "Arsenic and Old Lace".
Also notice how in describing the screen memory she talks about snuffing out every bit of air out of the bread slice. ]


The construction to explain her screen memory was of course not accepted by the patient. Who far from being enlightened, or even amused, was outright turned off at my imposing such Freudian views on something which she claimed every kid in her street in those days at that age would have experimented with. She was not mollified by the explanation that the memory emerged with such clarity and exactly while she was telling about her dread of letting in any unhealthy food to enter her mouth - dread of oral impregnation - and therefore it is a "Screen Memory" and the psychoanalytic theory gives us no choice but to interpret it as a plastic expression of the desire to turn her genitals into that of a male or for the sake of equality/justice to turn the male genitals into that of female.

"That is sick. Don't interpret anything sick," she said.

Nevertheless the interpretation must have hit home for in the very next session she brought up a question followed by an observation which picked up the theme of "penis envy".

She began the session by asking,"How does a person adjust moving from a very warm climate to a very cold one, or vice versa, and how long does it take for the person to adjust to such a drastic change?"

I could not immediately get the significance of the question but as the session proceeded and she started talking about how she pulls out weeds in her garden, and how the flies circle around the pulled weed, wondering why did you take away my weed, and she wonders how they adjust to the loss of the weed around which their whole life had revolved till then, I could see that the question of how one adjusts from one climate to another was forerunner of the same theme. The theme being how does a girl adjust to the fact of the difference in the genitals between males and females, when she first discovers this, realizing that she is not the same but the contrast to male sex and that her penis has been pulled out, and how she will adjust to this new life [new climate] with the absence of this important organ.

While listening to her, I could figure out how her weed pulling, zit puncturing, magazine grabbing, and trichotillomania they were all in a series. This was not communicated to the patient. She was not ready for that interpretation.

The patient though was made aware of connection between the previous session of her fascination with making wonder bread from big to small to the point of disappearance and the theme of the disappearance of weed and the wonderment on the part of the flies and its overall connection with her psychopathology being closely related to her never getting comfortable with her gender and being afflicted with the impulse to pull out anything that reminds her of the difference between the sexes to equalize things.

Patient rejected any connection between the two and said that she has no fascination with male genitals, never had any, and has no desire to get one for herself, so forget about her wanting to be like them. "Forget about my wanting to copy you guys," she declared with disdain.

At that point I had some stomach rumblings (borborygmi) which was quite loud and could be heard across the room. The patient burst out laughing and said it is so loud and strange, I never heard you do it. You must be hungry, your stomach if growling.

I explained to her that stomach growling, and other intestinal movements, have very little to do with hunger but are an expression of nervousness.

She disagreed with that but was immediately afflicted with stomach rumbling herself.

She rejected my interpretation that it was a sympathetic response to my statement and very indirect confirmation of the correctness of the interpretation.

She said, "There is no psychiatric meaning to all this and I do not see any point in your reading meaning in my love for pulling out weed and things which one has no choice over. One got to keep one's garden clean. I do not see any disadvantage in lacking a penis. However, she immediately followed this by talking about how she does see disadvantage of being mentally retarded and how public reacts to the handicapped differently than to guys who are labeled as normal. She proceeded on to declare that how closed head injury patients are never treated the same after the trauma and how people avoid them.

These associations arose from the parallel that exists in the disadvantages suffered by women [in a male dominated society] and those suffered by mentally handicapped and closed head injury patients.