Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/40

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196

AUGUST STARCKE

opening, all tliese are of importance and will find their place in the history of the mental illness. At this tender age the most trifling differences can have just as important a result on the mind as a microscopic amniotic thread, which cuts off a few cells from the germ, can have on the body.

VII

The infantile theory, the "woman with a penis", originates very simply from the situation of the infant at the breast. It is quite natural that the child whose first association with a woman is directly dependent upon her penis-like organ, the nipple, should retain a memory of this. It is the certainty and force of this memory that mainly support the belief in a penis in the woman. When the child learns later that a girl has not this organ, this knowledge is the first result of investigation which confuses the child an^ places before it the choice of disregarding either the memory, the observation, or the information. If the child is told the real facts, then on the basis of its experience it in all prob- ability considers it a lie, and thus feels justified in accepting later explanations with suspicion. Another way to solve the problem is doubt; the mother's sex is doubted. With regard to girls the information is accepted, but a special position is assigned to the mother; she has, so to speak, no sex, only jA^ remains "the woman with a penis".

VIII

Another important source of the mother-complex, therefore object-erotism, arises from the situation at the breast. If we ask how it is that such an important sphere of auto-erotism as the oral zone, which is at the same time one of the earliest discovered, occurs relatively infrequently in the history of patients, we may conclude that this probably results from the fact that its auto-erotic signi- ficance has become hidden through the object-erotic significance contained in the mother-complex. Every expression of object-erotic mother-erotism can at the same time contain auto-erotic sucking- erotism. The mamma can signify the mother as well as the breast.