Collected Papers on Analytical PsychologyJung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Science
Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology
Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Psychoanalysis
I have not given any real analysis of these cases. We therefore do not
know what happened within the hearts of these puppets of fate when
they were children. A profound insight into a child's mind as it grows
and lives, hitherto unattainable, is given in Freud's contribution to
the first half-yearly volume of _Jahrbuch für Psychoanalytische u.
Psychopathologische Forschungen_. If I venture, after Freud's masterly
presentation, to offer another small contribution to the study of the
child-mind it is because the psychoanalytic records of cases seem to me
always valuable.
_Case 4._--An eight year old boy, intelligent, rather delicate-looking,
is brought to me by his mother, on account of enuresis. During the
consultation the child always hangs on to his mother, a pretty, youthful
woman. The parents' 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.
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