Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/275

 have a masculine doll just as the mother has a little boy. Some one threw Punch down into the closet; one often lets other things fall down into the water closet. It is just like this that the children, too, come out. We have here an analogy to the “Lumpf-theory” of little John. Whenever several scenes are found in one dream, each scene ordinarily represents a particular variation of the complex elaboration. Here accordingly the first part is only a variation of the theme found in the second part. The meaning of “to see the spring” or “to see the little flowers come out” we have already seen. Anna now dreams that she can make the summer, that is she can bring it about that the little flowers shall come out. She herself can make a little child, and the second part of the dream represents this just like a passage of the bowels. Here we find the egotistic wish which is behind the seemingly objective interest of the nocturnal conversation.

A few days later the mother was visited by a lady who expected soon to become a mother. The children seemed to take no interest in the matter, but the next day they amused themselves with the following play which was directed by the older one: they took all the newspapers they could find in their father’s paperbasket and stuffed them under their clothes, so that the intention of the imitation was quite plain. During the night little Anna had another dream: “I dreamed about a woman in the city, she had a very big belly.” The chief actor in the dream is always the dreamer himself under some definite aspect; thus the childish play of the day before is fully solved.

Not long thereafter Anna surprised her mother with the following performance: She stuck her doll under her clothes, then pulled it out slowly head downwards, and at the same time remarked, “Look, the little child is coming out, it is now all out.” By this means Anna tells her mother, “You see, thus I apprehend the problem of birth. What do you think of it? Is that right?” The play is really meant to be a question, for, as we shall see later, this conception had to be officially confirmed. That rumination on this problem by no means ended here is shown by the occasional ideas conceived during the following weeks. Thus she repeated the same play a few days later with her Teddy Bear, which functioned as an especially loving doll. One day, looking at a rose, she said to her grandma, “See, the rose is getting a baby.” As her grandma did not quite understand her she pointed to the enlarged calyx and said, “You see she is quite thick here.”

Anna once quarrelled with her younger sister, and the latter