Baker report, 1968 congressional hearings

The patient was the youngest male and third youngest child among seven siblings born in Boston into a lower class urban
situation, during the Depression. His father, Irish by heritage, was an occasional bartender who was rarely home, paid little
attention to his children, and is best remembered as "scary" because of his violently angry outbursts at the mother when he
had been drinking. The patient's early memories include 1) a scene in which his forlorn-looking mother is bending over a
tub scrubbing clothes in an icy cold kitchen and 2) an episode in which his oldest sister snatched his doll away from him
but was later made by the mother to return it. It is that same sister whom he now visits during his vacations; she is married
but childless and still lives in Boston. He would like to live permanently with her, if her husband were better dispositioned.
His other sisters all have children, and it makes him nervous to be around them.
He says he always got along better with his sisters than his brothers and has not kept in touch with any of the latter. He has
never had many friends; even as a boy, he was a "loner" and a "homebody" who was more than once called a "mamma's
boy" by his peers. He didn't involve himself in school athletics or neighborhood games because he seemed to be so clumsy,
but did sell newspapers in another part of the city for several years for the sake of the family budget. His leisure hours were
spent reading and re-reading old comic books, making up stories about his adventures with Ali (a make-believe playmate
from whom he was inseparable until he was 12), and helping his mother in various ways.
It is still difficult for him to talk about his dead mother, although he says he thinks about her all the time. Painfully, he
revealed that he feels he was never a good enough son to her, that he had wanted to make up to her for all her hardships at
the hands of his father but that he had never been able to fill a certain void for her (despite his long-term devotion and
protectiveness).
He tends to blame himself in a sense for her death and says that it is his fault that she spent her final days so unhappily far
away from all her other children; apparently, he had insisted that she follow her doctor's advice and took her west for the
sake of her "asthma" condition. She had died on her seventieth birthday. He didn't know the cause. He had come home and
found her on the floor of their Tucson apartment near the phone (which was off the hook). It had been 7 PM when he had
arrived, having stopped for a couple of drinks at the neighborhood bar. He says he still gets sick to his stomach when he
thinks about how he was sitting in that bar while she was dying and trying to reach him.
He remained in Boston, unemployed, for six months after the funeral, during which time he slept a lot, ate little, and hit the
bars more often than usual. By the time he could bring himself to face Tucson and the apartment again, he had lost his
accounting job.
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For three months, he worked as a grocery store clerk (in order to pay his angry landlady for accumulated rent) but found
the work intolerably fatiguing and took a switchboard job which he did for the three years prior to going to the bank.
His bank work record has apparently been very good. He has taken only two sick days in the entire five years and is never
late. Frequently, he wakes up in the morning feeling as though he can't make it to work, but his respect for and sense of
responsibility to the institution itself (rather than to any superior or individual person) always win out.
He has no close friends where he works, although he occasionally takes lunch with one of the younger male tellers. His
female co-workers irritate him; they seem coarse and loud. Some of the single women tease him about having a mistress
(which he doesn't), but he doesn't know where they got that idea. In fact, he doesn't date at all and hasn't for several years
now. He guesses it's because he doesn't seen to come in contact with women who are his type (sweet, quiet, feminine). Nor
does he seek out partners for intercourse. With considerable embarrassment, he explains that while he was in the Army 13
years ago, he had tried on three separate occasions to have sexual relations with a girl he liked but had been unable to
sustain an erection. Part of the problem at the time seemed to be a preoccupation with his mother and how disappointed she
would be in him if she knew what he was doing with this girl. Since then, he has not tried to have intercourse again. He
says it is not because he is afraid of failure or embarrassment, but more because for him it is a dispensable activity.
The closest he ever gets to a woman is the back row in a local bar where he likes to watch the performance of a certain
belly dancer (his mother was half Syrian). He doesn't know her personally, but something about her arouses him.
Whenever he masturbates in his room (approximately once a week), he pictures her face and upper torso in his mind's eye;
at the same time, he imagines himself removing her round, plastic, chartreuse nipple covers, which seems to be the one
thing that will lead to his having an occasional ejaculation. He has felt very upset with himself for masturbating ever since
he first did it at the age of 16. This examiner and his old Army buddy are the only people to whom he has ever