Your thoughts, anons?
Unlike the healthy cyclist, a person with the motorcycle syndrome literally needs his machine; without it, he has a sense of “something missing” and an “acute awareness of inadequacy.” As one patient told Nicholi: “If I got rid of the bike, there would be nothing but me, and that’s not enough.”
Occasionally Nicholi’s patients were promiscuous, but without pleasure; often they were impotent; always they worried about discovering that they were homosexuals. All the patients saw their cycles as extensions of their masculine selves. Said one: “The noise is all you hear. It’s masculine and makes me feel strong. I approach a girl on a cycle and I feel confident.”
Without their bikes, the students also lacked confidence socially and academically. Passive, apathetic and inactive, the afflicted students spent their non-cycling hours sleeping, talking aimlessly, drinking beer, or escaping reality in TV and drugs. When anxiety threatened to overwhelm them—often in the middle of the night—they took to their cycles for the illusion of “doing something and getting somewhere.”
All these symptoms are explained, Psychiatrist Nicholi believes, by the patients’ “tenuous masculine identification,” often caused by difficult childhood relationships with demanding, critical and successful fathers
