The animal phobias have not yet been made the object of careful analytical investigation, although they very much merit it. The difficulties of analysing children of so tender an age have probably been the motive of such neglect. It cannot therefore be asserted that the general meaning of these illnesses is known, and I myself do not think that it would turn out to be the same in all cases. But a number of such phobias directed against larger animals have proved accessible to analysis and have thus betrayed their secret to the investigator. In every case it was the same: the fear at bottom was of the father, if the children examined were boys, and was merely displaced upon the animal. Every one of any experience in psychoanalysis has undoubtedly seen such cases and has received the same impression from them. But I can refer to only a few detailed reports on the subject. This is an accident of the literature of such cases, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that our general assertion is based on merely scattered observation. For instance I mention an author, M. Wulff of Odessa, who has very intelligently occupied himself with the neuroses of childhood. He tells, in relating the history of an illness, that a nine year old boy suffered from a dog phobia at the age of four. “When he saw a dog running by on the street he wept and cried: ‘Dear dog, don’t touch me, I will be good.’” By “being good” he meant “not to play violin any more” (to practise onanism)[A]. The same author later sums up as follows: “His dog phobia is really his fear of the father displaced upon the dog, for his peculiar expression: ‘Dog, I will be good’--that is to say, I will not masturbate--really refers to the father who has forbidden masturbation.” He then adds something in a note which fully agrees with my experience and at the same time bears witness to the abundance of such experiences: “such phobias (of horses, dogs, cats, chickens and other domestic animals) are, I think, at least as prevalent as _pavor nocturnus_ in childhood, and usually reveal themselves in the analysis as a displacement of fear from one of the parents to animals. I am not prepared to assert that the wide-spread mouse and rat phobia has the same mechanism.”