fear of castration. But whoever looks attentively through the history of little John will also find there abundant proof that the father was admired as the possessor of large genitals and was feared as threatening the child’s own genitals. In the Oedipus as well as in the castration complex the father plays the same role of feared opponent to the infantile sexual interests. Castration and its substitute through blinding is the punishment he threatens.[1]
When little Arpád was two and a half years old he once tried, while at a summer resort, to urinate into the chicken coop, and on this occasion a chicken bit his penis or snapped at it. When he returned to the same place a year later he became a chicken himself, was interested only in the chicken coop and in everything that occurred there, and gave up human speech for cackling and crowing. During the period of observation, at the age of five, he spoke again, but his speech was exclusively about chickens and other fowl. He played with no other toy and sang only songs in which there was something about poultry. His behavior towards his totem animal was subtly ambivalent, expressing itself in immoderate hating and
- ↑ Compare the communications of Reitler, Ferenczi, Rank and Eder about the substitution of blindness in the Oedipus myth for castration. Intern. Zeitschrift f. arzte. Psychoanalyze, 1913, I, No. 2.
