[20] According to my psychoanalytic experience children who cling so to inanimate things see in them either sexual symbols or those things were once objects of their secret sexual enjoyment. It may happen, for example, that such a child falls in love with the furniture, the walls of the room, yes, even a closet, stays there by the hour, kisses the walls, tells them its joys and sorrows and hangs them with all sorts of pictures. One very often sees children talking with inanimate things. They are embarrassed and break off at once if surprised by their elders. If there were not something forbidden behind this, there would be no ground for denying what they are doing, the more so since in fairy tales beasts, plants and also inanimate things speak with mankind and with one another without the child taking offense at it. The latter first becomes confused by the same action when he is pilfering from the tree of knowledge and has something sexual to hide. Hug-Hellmuth has convincingly demonstrated the erotic connection of the child's enthusiasm for plants as well as the different synesthesias. (See her study, "Über Farbenhören," Imago, Vol. I, pp. 218 ff. Abstracted in Psa. Rev., Vol. II, No. 1, January, 1915.) "With Maria's seventh year perhaps, the tendency to play and purposeless dreaming, which is always bound with such lively, mobile phantasy, gave place, to the astonishment of all, to an exactly opposite tendency. From this time she began to take root in life with all the intensity of her nature. Already in her twelfth or thirteenth year she looked after the father's household, to the admiration of all who beheld her. A divine blessing seemed to accompany everything which she undertook; everything increased under her hands. She could in passing enjoy herself well in the idealistic dreams of the poets and of her acquaintances, but her own peculiar element was reality." What had produced this sudden turn about? I cannot escape the conjecture that here the death of her mother had a decisive influence and with it the necessity to take the place with her father of his wife. Her housewifely activity is noted first to be sure from her twelfth or thirteenth year. Yet I am of the opinion that she had already in her seventh year begun to play this rôle--in which year the death of her mother would be placed--only because she was too small it had been under the eye of a maid or housekeeper. My analyses of hysterics has taught me that so profound and sudden a transformation of the whole character always takes place upon definite erotic grounds and for a quite definite erotic purpose.