fathers who allow their children no independent possession of their own emotions, who fondle their daughters with ill-concealed eroticism and tyrannical passion, who keep their sons in leading-strings, force them into callings and finally marry them off “suitably,” and the mothers who even in the cradle excite their children with unhealthy tenderness, later on make them into slavish dolls, and then at last, out of jealousy, destroy their children's love-life fundamentally, they all act not otherwise than this stupid and brutal boor.
It will be asked, wherein lies the parents' magic power to bind their children to themselves, as with fetters, often for the whole of their lives? The psychoanalyst knows that it is nothing but the sexuality on both sides.
We are always trying not to admit the child's sexuality. That view only comes from wilful ignorance, which happens to be very prevalent again just now.[1]
I have not given any real analysis of these cases. We therefore do not know what happened within the hearts of these puppets of fate when they were children. A profound insight into a child's mind as it grows and lives, hitherto unattainable, is given in Freud's contribution to the first half-yearly volume of Jahrbuch fúr Psychoanalytische u. Psychopathologische Forschungen. If I venture, after Freud's masterly presentation, to offer another small contribution to the study of the child-mind it is because the psychoanalytic records of cases seem to me always valuable.
Case 4.—An eight year old boy, intelligent, rather delicate-looking, is brought to me by his mother, on account of enuresis. During the consultation the child always hangs on to his mother, a pretty, youthful woman. The parents'
- ↑ This was seen in the Amsterdam Congress of 1907, where a prominent French savant assured us that the Freudian theory was but “une plaisanterie.” This gentleman has demonstrably neither read Freud's latest works nor mine, he knows less about the subject than a little child. This opinion, so admirably grounded, ended with the applause of a well-known German professor. One can but bow before such thoroughness. At the same Congress another well-known German neurologist Immortalised his name with the following intellectual reasoning: “If hysteria on Freud's conception does indeed rest on repressed affects, then the whole German army must be hysterical.”
