THE CASTRATION COMPLEX 195
complex. 1 However, the castration complex was not acquired on this occasion, but much earlier, i. e. at the transition from the first feeding-bottle which he accepted, to the second which was refused for unknown reasons (different smell?) and to which he reacted with anger and vomiting.
Every loss re-ecphoriates all earlier losses back to the very first, — namely, the disintegration of sucking'^erotism and of excremental desires. The most important contribution to the clinical phenomena of grief and melancholy (or mania) comes from the castration complex. When with an expression of contrition the melancholic admits that she will not eat "because she has eaten human beings, although she has not eaten them", this is a partly correct reminis- cence from the period at the breast, when she actually fed off her mother. If the censorship regresses to a lower level in melancholia and allows the ecphoria of the engram complexes of this period to pass without sufficient distortion, or if the over-charge of the remaining symbols in grief — also without regression — renders the work of censorship difficult, then these ecphoriae are unable to find suitable words for their proper expression. Their cultural splitting up goes only a certain distance, and their end-products, foetal position of the body or attitudes approximating to this, early infantile methods of feeding, new editions of already sur- mounted attitudes of conflict, partly prevail, and partly also en- counter and mingle with inhibitions that have not regressed so far, or are finally repulsed; but all this happens at the expense of psychic work which consumes all the individual's energy. In this the oral-erotism certainly plays the important r6le which Abraham (/. c.) has ascribed to it. Mankind has its cannibalistic stage not only phylogenetically; it is also repeated in the indivi- dual life of every human being who was fed at the mother's breast or the bottle.
In future all these things will have to be taken into consider- ation; the duration of the sucking, the abimdance or the scarcity of the milk, the kind of feeding bottle, even the width of its
> That is to say: the disturbance which is occasioned in the genital development of its (Edipus complex through the prohibition from outside, furnishes libido quantities to the castration complex, which represents another arm of the mother-complex. His compulsive habit of upsetting things filled with liquids is a surrogate for the forbidden (Edipus-erection. The accent is transmitted from the erection to the spilling of liquids which accompanied it.
■ i
