marriage is a happy one, but the father is strict, and the boy (the eldest child) is rather afraid of him. The mother compensates for the father's strictness by corresponding tenderness, to which the boy responds so much that he never gets away from his mother's apron-strings. He never plays with his schoolfellows, never goes alone into the street unless he has to go to school. He fears the boys' roughness and violence and plays thoughtful games at home or helps his mother with housework. He is extremely jealous of his father. He cannot bear it when the father shows tenderness to the mother.
I took the boy aside and asked him about his dreams.
He dreams very often of a black snake which wants to bite his face. Then he cries out, and his mother has to come from the next room to his bedside.
In the evening he goes quietly to bed. But when he falls asleep it seems to him that a wicked black man with a sabre or gun lies on his bed—a tall, thin man who wants to kill him.
His parents sleep in the adjoining room. It often seems to him that something dreadful is going on there, as if there are great black snakes or wicked men who want to kill his Mamma. Then he has to cry out and his mother comes to comfort him.
Every time he wets his bed, he calls his mother, who has to settle him down again in dry things.
The father is a tall thin man. Every morning he stands at the washstand naked in full view of the child, to perform a thorough ablution. The child also tells me that at night he is often suddenly waked from sleep by a strange sound in the next room; then he is always horribly afraid as if something dreadful were going on in there, some struggle—but his mother quiets him, says there's nothing to be afraid of.
It is not difficult to see whence comes the black snake and who the wicked man is, and what is happening in the next room. It is equally easy to understand the boy's aim when he calls out for his mother: he is jealous and separates her from the father. This he does also in the daytime whenever he sees his father caressing her. So far the boy is simply his father's rival for his mother's love.
