Threat to Maim Is Alleged in Bobbitt Trial : Justice: Witnesses describe intensely jealous wife. Friend testifies about conversation relating to their reaction to spouses’ possible infidelity.

John Wayne Bobbitt’s friends and relatives took the stand Wednesday at his wife’s trial to paint a picture of an overly possessive and intensely jealous woman who once threatened to mutilate her husband if he ever had an extramarital affair.

During the trial in Manassas, Va., that has captured the nation’s attention, prosecutor Paul Ebert called on a host of rebuttal witnesses to describe a very different Lorena Bobbitt from the one that the defense has portrayed as a battered spouse driven temporarily insane by her husband’s abuse.

Lorena Bobbitt, facing up to 20 years imprisonment for cutting off her husband’s penis last June, also was described by a psychiatrist as a severely depressed woman who, while driven to mental illness by abuse, was still in control of her actions on the night in question.

Earlier, John Bobbitt was recalled to the stand for the third time to again deny that he had ever beaten, raped or forcibly sodomized his wife, as she has said he did throughout their four-year marriage.

He also denied having pressured his wife into having an unwanted abortion near the end of their first year of marriage, saying that the decision was mutual and based on the belief that they were not ready to have children.

The highlight of Ebert’s rebuttal came when Connie James, a friend and former co-worker of Lorena Bobbitt, testified about a conversation that she said they had had in 1990 about how they would react if they ever found out that their husbands were being unfaithful.

“We had a discussion about what we would do if our husbands ever cheated on us . . . (and) Lorena stated exactly: ‘I would cut his dick off because that would hurt him more than just killing him,’ ” James said. She added that Mrs. Bobbitt “appeared to be serious” about the threat.

James, who worked in the beauty parlor where Lorena Bobbitt was a manicurist, also described her as being “very possessive of John,” to the point of being “a little obsessive about it.” She said that Mrs. Bobbitt would pace the floor and try to telephone her husband “if he was even a minute late” in picking her up after work.

Lorena Bobbitt, in cross-examination last week, denied making the threat that James described. But she did acknowledge that she had been deeply disturbed to discover later that her husband was indeed having an affair.

While other prosecution witnesses also described Bobbitt as obsessive about her husband, most testimony as the trial wound down centered on the conflicting conclusions drawn by the psychiatrists who examined her.

On Tuesday, Dr. Susan Feister, a forensic psychiatrist testifying for the defense, described Bobbitt as an emotionally “fragile” person who, because of her husband’s abuse, suffered from a “constellation of psychiatric disorders”--including severe depression, anxiety and post-trauma distress.

Feister said that Bobbitt--worn down by four years of beatings, forced sex and other traumas--suffered a brief stress-induced psychosis June 23, when she says her husband came home drunk and raped her.

“Overwhelmed by her emotions,” Bobbitt succumbed to an “irresistible impulse” to strike out “against the instrument of her torture--her husband’s penis” by cutting it off with a carving knife as he slept, Feister said.

But two other psychiatric experts who followed Feister to the stand disputed her central legal conclusion: that Bobbitt had lapsed into a “reactive psychosis” and experienced an uncontrollable impulse to mutilate her husband.

Henry Gwaltney Jr., a clinical psychologist, said that Bobbitt suffered from severe clinical depression because of her husband’s abuse but was not psychotic or unable to distinguish “right from wrong” at the time of the mutilation.

His testimony reinforced that of Dr. Miller Ryans, a forensic psychiatrist, who told jurors that Lorena Bobbitt’s “act of retribution” did not qualify as an irresistible impulse because it was a “goal oriented” and not “totally random” act.

The conflicting psychiatric testimony illustrated what legal experts said was the most precarious part of Bobbitt’s defense.

Despite John Bobbitt’s denials of spousal abuse, the defense has presented what most observers agree is a convincing case that Lorena Bobbitt was a very battered and abused woman.

But for the jury of seven women and five men to find Lorena Bobbitt not guilty, it will have to believe not only that she was battered, but that the abuse induced a mental illness that in turn produced the temporary psychosis that led her to mutilate her husband on an “irresistible impulse.”

With only one rebuttal witness left to testify, the trial is expected to go to the jury today.