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These two cases scarcely call for a commentary. They establish without further analytic effort that the bitterness children feel about the expected or actual appearance of a rival finds expression in throwing objects out of the window and in other acts of naughtiness and destructiveness. In the first case the heavy objects’ probably symbolized the mother herself, against whom the child’s anger was directed so long as the new baby had not yet appeared. The three-and-a-half-year-old boy knew about his mother’s pregnancy and had no doubt that she had got the baby in her body. ‘Little Hans’¹ and his special dread of heavily loaded carts may be recalled here.² In the second case the very youthful age of the child, two and a half years, is noteworthy.

If we now return to Goethe’s childhood memory and put in the place it occupies in Dichtung und Wahrheit what we believe we have obtained through observations of other children, a perfectly valid train of thought emerges which we should not otherwise have discovered. It would run thus: ‘I was a child of fortune: destiny preserved my life, although I came into the world as though dead. Even more, destiny removed my brother, so that I did not have to share my mother’s love with him.’ The train of thought then goes on to someone else who died in those early days - the grandmother who lived like a quiet friendly spirit in another part of the house.

I have, however, already remarked elsewhere that if a man has been his mother’s undisputed darling he retains throughout life the triumphant feeling, the confidence in success, which not seldom brings actual success along with it. And Goethe might well have given some such heading to his autobiography as: ‘My strength has its roots in my relation to my mother.’

¹ Cf. ‘Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy’, (1909b)

² Further confirmation of this pregnancy-symbolism was given me some time ago by a lady of over fifty. She had often been told that as a little child, when she could hardly talk, she used to drag her father to the window in great agitation whenever a heavy furniture-van was passing along the street. In view of other recollections of the houses they had lived in, it became possible to establish that she was then younger than two and three quarter years. At about that time the brother next to her was born, and in consequence of this addition to the family a move was made. At about the same time, she often had an alarming feeling before going to sleep of something uncannily large, that came up to her, and ‘her hands got so thick’.