Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/168

 themselves with the following play which was directed by the elder girl; they took all the newspapers they could find in their father’s paper-basket and stuffed them under their clothes, so that the imitation was unmistakable. During the night little Anna had another dream: “I dreamed about a woman in the city; she had a very big stomach.” The chief actor in a dream is always the dreamer himself under some definite aspect; thus the childish play of the day before is fully solved.

Not long after, 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 baby is coming out, now it is 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 idea 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, who stands in the relation of an especially beloved doll. One day, looking at a rose, she said to her grandmother, “See, the rose is getting a baby.” As her grandmother did not quite understand her, she pointed to the enlarged calyx and said, “Don’t you see it is quite fat here?”

Anna once quarrelled with her younger sister, and the latter exclaimed angrily, “I will kill you.” Whereupon Anna answered, “When I am dead you will be all alone; then you will have to pray to God for a live baby.” But the scene soon changed: Anna was the angel, and the younger sister was forced to kneel before her and pray to her that she should present to her a living child. In this way Anna became the child-dispensing mother.

Oranges were once served at table. Anna impatiently asked for one and said, “I am going to take an orange and swallow it all down into my stomach, and then I shall get a baby.” Who does not think here of fairy tales in which childless