Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/267

, distinctly showed a painful feeling striving for expression.

Here we meet with a new and important feature in the little one’s life, that is, we meet with reveries, tendencies towards the composition of poetry, and melancholic attacks. All these things which we are wont first to encounter at a later period of life, at a time when the youthful person is preparing to sever the family tie and to enter independently upon life, but is still held back by an inward, painful feeling of homesickness and the warmth of the parental hearth. At that time the youth begins to replace his longing with poetic fancies in order to compensate for the deficiency. To approximate the psychology of a four-year-old child to that of the age of puberty will at first sight seem paradoxical, the relationship lies, however, not in the age but rather in the mechanism. The elegiac reveries express the fact that a part of that love which formerly belonged and should belong to a real object is now introverted, that is, it is turned inward into the subject and there produces an increased imaginative activity. What is the origin of this introversion? Is it a psychological manifestation peculiar to this age, or does it owe its origin to a conflict?

This is explained in the following occurrence. It often happened that Anna was disobedient to her mother, she was insolent, saying, “I am going back to grandma.”

Mother: “But I shall be sad when you leave me.”

Anna: “Oh, but you have the little brother.”

The effect which this produced on the mother shows what the little one was really aiming at with her threats to go away again; she apparently wished to hear what her mother would say to her proposal, that is, to see what attitude her mother would actually assume to her, whether her little brother had not crowded her out altogether from her mother’s favor. One must, however, give no credence to this little trickster. For the child could readily see and feel that despite the existence of the little brother there was nothing essentially lacking for her in her mother’s love. The reproach to which she subjects her mother is therefore unjustified and to the trained ear this is betrayed by a slightly affected tone. Such a tone if unmistakable, shows that it does not expect to be taken seriously and hence it obtrudes itself re-enforced. The reproach as such must also not have been taken seriously by the mother for it was only the forerunner of other and this time more serious resistances. Not long after the previously reported conversation the following scene took place:

Mother: “Come, we are going into the garden now!”

Anna: “You are lying, take care if you are not telling the truth.”