But now comes the circumstance that the snake and the bad man also threaten him, there happens to him the same thing as to his mother in the next room. Thus he identifies himself with his mother and proposes a similar relationship for himself with his father. That is owing to his homosexual component which feels like a woman towards the father. What enuresis signifies in this case is, from the Freudian standpoint, not difficult to understand. The micturition dream throws light upon it. Let me refer to an analysis of the same kind in my article: “L'analyse des reves, Annee psychologique” (1909). Enuresis must be regarded as an infantile sex-surrogate; in the dream-life of adults too it is easily used as a cloak for the urge of sexual desire.
This little example shows what goes on in the mind of an eight year old boy, just when he is in a position of dependence upon his parents, but the blame is also partly due to the too strict father and the too tender mother.
The infantile attitude here, it is evident, is nothing but infantile sexuality. If now we survey all the far-reaching possibilities of the infantile constellation we are forced to say that in essence our life's fate is identical with the fate of our sexuality. If Freud and his school devote themselves first and foremost to tracing out the individual's sexuality it is certainly not in order to excite piquant sensations, but to gain a deeper insight into the driving forces that determine that individual's fate. In this we are not saying too much, rather understating the case. If we can strip off the veils shrouding the problems of individual destiny, we can afterwards widen our view from the history of the individual to the history of nations. And first of all we can look at the history of religions, at the history of the phantasy-systems of whole peoples and epochs. The religion of the Old Testament elevated the paterfamilias to the Jehovah of the Jews whom the people had to obey in fear and dread. The Patriarchs are an intermediate stage towards the deity. The neurotic fear and dread of the Jewish religion, the imperfect, not to say unsuccessful attempt at the sublimation of a still too barbarous people, gave rise to the excessive
