ing infantilism. The wish-tree grows on the grave of the mother (stepmother). The mother must die.
A woman of my acquaintance maintained the belief through her whole childhood, until she was about fifteen years of age, that she was a foundling; she held fast to the idea. It rested upon a remark of the mother: "Oh, probably some one picked you up on the street." This remark, of which the memory was perfectly clear, compels us to assume that the child had asked from where she came. The delusion built itself up on an adapted and strongly believed theory of sex. Mark Twain, with great psychological understanding, has somewhere said: "Faith insists on believing something that one does not believe." If the child was bad the mother would probably say: "Strange, she is not like anyone in the family." A fine wish-thought that nourished still further the delusion. At the same time the "bad" child felt that the mother did not mean well by her; so she could not possibly be a true mother to her. If we render "bad" with "egoistic" in the rivalry; when we note that the mother, after the death of the father, was especially solicitous to bring up a pleasing, well-mannered young woman with a good name, because gossip is much more apt to arise about a family without a father at the head, the vitality of this childish delusion becomes for us so much the more understandable. These "bad experiences" have, in a significant manner, taken refuge in the delusion, while in reality the relations between mother and daughter were very good.
This infantile delusion has thus made a bad stepmother out of the mother, and the fairy-tale does the same thing.[1]
Precisely in the fairy-tales of the persecuted beauty, in "Little Snow-White," this process is described with special detail in its beginnings. The beautiful queen, who becomes the stepmother, hates the still more beautiful "Little Snow-White." The fairy tale corresponds thus to a "dream" of the heroine, Little Snow-White, under the influence of the infantile material. So finally the meaning of this fairy tale is clear and also all others with a similar theme.
We are satisfied, for the time being, with this intimation, in order to sketch the great rôle of infantilism in fairy tales which
- ↑ I could give numerous examples of analogous delusions in young women who were well and in women with dementia præcox.
