angrily exclaimed, “I will kill you.” Whereupon Anna answered, “When I am dead you will be all alone; then you will have to pray to the dear Lord for a live baby.” But the scene soon changed: Anna was the angel, and the younger sister was forced to kneel before her and pray to her that she should present to her a living child. In this way Anna became the presenting mother.
Oranges were once served on the table. Anna impatiently asked for one and said, “I am going to take an orange and swallow it all down into my belly, and then I shall get a little child.” Who will not think here of the fairy tales in which childless women finally become pregnant by swallowing fruit, fish, and similar things.[1] Thus Anna attempts to solve the problem how the children actually come into the mother. She thus enters into an examination which hitherto has not been formulated with so much sharpness. The solution follows in the form of an analogy, which is quite characteristic of the archaic thinking of the child. (In the adult, too, there is a kind of thinking by analogy which belongs to the stratum lying immediately below consciousness. Dreams bring the analogies to the surface; the same may be observed also in dementia praecox.) In German as well as in numerous foreign fairy tales one frequently finds such characteristic childish comparisons. Fairy tales seem to be the myths of the child, and therefore contain among other things the mythology which the child weaves concerning the sexual processes. The spell of the fairy tale poetry, which is felt even by the adult, is explained by the fact that some of the old theories are still alive in our unconscious minds. We experience a strange, peculiar and familiar feeling when a conception of our remotest youth is again stimulated. Without becoming conscious it merely sends into consciousness a feeble copy of its original emotional strength.
The problem how the child gets into the mother was difficult to solve. As the only way of taking things into the body is through the mouth, it could evidently be assumed that the mother eats something like a fruit which then grows in her belly. But then comes another difficulty, namely, it is clear enough what the mother produces but it is not yet clear what the father is good for.
What does the father do? Anna now occupied herself exclusively with this question. One morning she ran into the parents’ bedroom while they were dressing, she jumped into her father’s bed, she lay down on her belly and kicked with her legs, and called at the same time, “Look! does papa do
- ↑ Franz Riklin.
