The Theory of PsychoanalysisJung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Science
The Theory of Psychoanalysis
Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Neuroses; Psychoanalysis; Psychology, Pathological; Sex
Eleventh interview. The next sitting was occupied with the spontaneous
infantile theories about fructification and child-birth. The child
thought that the urine of the man went into the body of the woman, and
from this the embryo would grow. Hence the child was in the water from
the beginning, that is to say, in urine. Another version was, the urine
was drunk in the doctor’s syrup, so that the child would grow in the
head. The head had then to be split open, to help the growth of the
child, and one wore hats to cover this up. She illustrated this by a
little drawing, representing a child-birth through the head. The child
again had still a smaller child on the head, and so on. This is an
archaic idea and highly mythological. I would remind you of the birth of
Pallas, who came out of the father’s head.
We find striking mythological proofs of the fertilizing significance of
the urine in the songs of Rudra in the Rigveda. Here should be mentioned
something the mother added, that once the little girl, before analysis,
suggested she saw a puppet on the head of her little brother, a phantasy
with which the origin of this theory of child-birth might be connected.
The little illustration made by the patient has remarkable affinity with
certain pictures found among the Bataks of Dutch India. They are the
so-called magic wands or ancestral statues, on which the members of
families are represented, one standing on the top of the other. The
explanation of these wands, given by the Bataks themselves, and regarded
as nonsense, has a marvellous analogy with the infantile mental
attitude. Schultz, who wrote about these wands, says: “The assertion,
that these figures represent the members of a family who have committed
incest, were bitten by a snake, entwined with another, and met a common
death in their criminal embrace, is widely disseminated and obviously
due to the position of the figures.”
The explanation has a parallel in our presuppositions as to our little
patient. We saw from the first dream that her sexual phantasy centers
round the father; the psychological condition is here the same as with
the Bataks, being found in the idea of incestuous relationship.
Still a third version is the growth of the child in the intestinal
canal. The child tried several times to provoke nausea and vomiting, in
accordance with her phantasy that the child is born through vomiting. In
the closet she had arranged also pressure-exercises, in order to press
out the child. Under these circumstances, we cannot be astonished that
the first and principal symptoms of the manifest neurosis were
nausea-symptoms.
We have come so far with our analysis that we are now able to throw a
glance over the case as a whole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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