Evidently, too, the time has now arrived in this, our Freudian era, for Kronos to suffer again and as literally as before, notwithstanding the “frantic attempts” of modern parents to hold on to “whatever remnants of the ... _potestas patris_” remain. The newspapers certainly chronicle occasional incidents of this childish rebellion, if not of the frantic efforts which are being made to resist it. Freud even knows of a little girl--this one not yet three years old--who “tried to strangle a suckling in the cradle, because she suspected its continued presence boded her no good.”[84] So not the parents alone are in danger. In the case of his own children, “who followed one another rapidly,” he “missed the opportunity to make such observations,” the supplanted baby always being too young to be dangerous at the time when its nose was broken--another argument in favor of large families. He foresees, however, what is to be dreaded later, for he describes the predicament of a man of 31 who had a compulsion-neurosis which took such a pronounced homicidal form that he (the young man) was forced to lock himself in his room and to give the housekeeper the key for fear that he should one day commit a murder. The father in this case was dead and beyond the reach of reprisals, so “the obsessive reproach transferred itself to strangers.”[85] I do not wish for a moment to suggest that this case was unreal or to belittle its horror. I am dealing merely with a peculiarity of the diagnosis. You will observe that the blame is laid to a “reproach.” Had the patient never reproached himself he would have remained normal. Now if he was guilty of nothing but some childish fit of temper, and, because of some senseless system of early training, led to magnify it beyond all reason, the diagnosis may be sound. The danger comes from the attempt to elaborate from these instances of abnormality a general system of philosophy applicable to life in general. The implication that reproaches should give way and any sort of conduct spared even criticism, is inescapable. For example, Freud says[86] that “a compulsion-neurosis ... corresponds to a super-morality, imposed upon the primary character.” He chooses morality by name as the target of _his_ “reproach.” In the case under consideration, the patient remembered, under psycho-analytic treatment, that at the age of seven he had “expressed enmity” towards his father, and (still under treatment) at once “realized that the hatred lay much deeper still.” Remorse, awakened by the father’s painful last illness, had brought about that fatal “super-morality,” without which the son might have remained unrepentant, normal and happy. “Anyone,” Freud ominously adds, “capable of wishing to push his own father from a mountain-top into an abyss is certainly not to be trusted to spare the lives of those not so closely bound to him. He does well to lock himself into his room.”[87]