women become pregnant by swallowing fruit, fish, and similar things?[1] In this way Anna sought to solve the problem how the children actually come into the mother. She thus enters into a formulation which hitherto had not been defined with so much clearness. The solution follows in the form of an analogy, which is quite characteristic of the archaic thinking of the child. (In the adult, too, there is a kind of thinking by metaphor which belongs to the stratum lying immediately below consciousness; dreams bring the analogies to the surface; the same may be observed also in dementia præcox.) In German as well as in numerous foreign fairy tales one frequently finds such characteristic childish comparisons. Fairy tales seem to be the myths of the child, and therefore contain among other things the mythology which the child weaves concerning the sexual processes. The spell of the fairy tale poetry, which is felt even by the adult, is explained by the fact that some of the old theories are still alive in our unconscious minds. We experience a strange, peculiar and familiar feeling when a conception of our remotest youth is again stimulated. Without becoming conscious it merely sends into consciousness a feeble copy of its original emotional strength.
The problem how the child gets into the mother was difficult to solve. As the only way of taking things into the body is through the mouth, it could evidently be assumed that the mother ate something like a fruit, which then grows inside her. But then comes another difficulty, namely, it is clear enough what the mother produces, but it is not yet clear what the father is good for.
What does the father do? Anna now occupied herself exclusively with this question. One morning she ran into the parents’ bedroom while they were dressing, she jumped into her father’s bed, lay face downwards, kicked with her legs, and called at the same time, “Look! does papa do that?” The analogy to the horse of “little Hans” which raised such disturbance with its legs, is very surprising.
With this last performance the problem seemed to be at
- ↑ Franz Biklin, “Fulfilment of Wishes and Symbolism in Fairy Tales.”
