If, and in so far as, the phantasy of re-entering the mother's womb represents a desire to escape from the difficulties and trials of life into the condition of peace and protection which the pre-natal period of life afforded, the idea of re-birth would naturally seem to give expression to the tendency to emerge once more into the conflict of life and to emancipate oneself from the protecting influence of the mother. Such a meaning is indeed, as Jung[56] and others[57] have shown, actually associated with the phantasy in very many cases. In this sense, then, the desire to attain to individual independence and freedom from the parents finds symbolical representation as a repetition of that process whereby we first acquired the status of an independent organism distinct from that of the mother who bore us. [Sidenote: Spiritual regeneration] In other cases however the symbolism is of a rather more remote kind, the idea symbolised being that of moral or spiritual regeneration[58]. The reality of this significance of the re-birth phantasy cannot well be doubted, being vouched for as it is not only by the results of psycho-analytic enquiry but also by the stereotyped phraseology of many religious formulae and by the nature of many of the ceremonies connected with moral or religious conversion. Thus the rite of baptism, as is pretty generally recognised, consists, in one of its principal aspects, in a symbolic representation of the act of birth, and the same is true of many of the initiation ceremonies performed at puberty in all parts of the world[59]. [Sidenote: Physical regeneration]