forehead on the right side. He cried out loudly, but the mother too was horrified by her unintended act, and hurried towards him. She snatched the knife out of the wound, which she quickly washed; she then carried the weeping child into the living room where, as he exactly remembers, she laid him right across the foot of the bed.[1] While he was gradually quieting down, she took the little hat which showed where the knife had cut it, and sewed up the damaged place with red twine, as he can recall to this day. At his mother's request, he kept the whole affair from his father, who never heard anything of it. He continued wearing the mended hat for a long time.
The effects of this episode could be traced in many directions, and as an outstanding childhood experience it often led to most important orientations during the course of the analysis. Thus in the first place, one could assume that it had set a term to the brief period of infantile masturbation,[2] and was later further involved in castration experiences. We found above, moreover, that the first castration threat hailed from the grandmother, to which he attributed the renunciation of his oral libido. Here the woman comes up a second time as disturber of sexual pleasure. Perhaps in another field the psychic effects of the episode were even deeper and more persistent. It is established without doubt that the patient's narcissistic masculinity was precociously stimulated by the injury to his head. We must not regard this as an innate disposition, such as the anal erotism which is to come up soon, but rather as an accidental motif, which however became responsible for the first fixation of libido in the patient's development.[3] Such a state of affairs could be inferred from a number of diverse erotic attributes and character traits in the present condition of the patient. For the sake of completeness I will insert these here. The patient, a vigorous man who knew his mind, and had advanced views and interests, opposed in the most emphatic way any effort towards emancipation on the part of women, whose activities he wanted to see limited strictly to domesticity. He
- ↑ The place for new-born babes in the village.
- ↑ Cf. Freud, Sammlung kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 3. Folge, S.164, footnote.
- ↑ The possibility of such fixation on account of 'purely chance happenings in childhood' has already been emphasised by Freud (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, 1917, S. 418).
