Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/33

 THE CASTRATION COJIPLEX 189

scious, and unconscious, I find as conscious wishes my yearning for the sea and dunes where we spent our holidays when children, and the observation of birds of passage, etc. As preconscious I find trends of feelings of love and hate, life and death, death and sexuality, erotic wishes from all possible stages, envy and jealousy, and longing for justification, i. e. various expressions of the castration complex. Finally, as unconscious, incest phantasies, and the castration complex in its double meaning — namely, that of the penis which is lost through the incest phantasies (at the entrance of the cheese-store), and that of the mother's nipple which was taken from me. The latter is the older meaning and must be considered the primary one.

The connection between incest phantasies and the castration complex appears in this connection:

My penis disappears into my mother,

that is to say, my nipple (my mother's nipple in my mouth) is again lost in the "mamma".

IV

In order better to understand the importance ot these con- nections it will be necessary to turn our attention to the nature of memory.

The engram depository consists of a number of associated engram complexes, each one of which is derived from a whole situation of being stimulated and forms its residue. I^et us take as an example the situation of the child at the breast. In this situation occur feelings of pleasure, feelings of position and move- ment of the lips and tongue, the feelings awakened by the simultaneous touching movements of the little hands, etc., and these feelings later become separated in other combinations. The sum of these pleasure-traces forms an important part of the pos- itive personality of the child at the breast, namely, its sucking erotism, which later, in so far as it does not become active as such, virill be distributed over its positive narcissism and the object-erotic mother erotism.

The ego-impulse and the libido during sucking are active and are gratified in one and the same act, although theoretically they

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