Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/42

 198 AUGUST STARCKE

hemispheres, the mammae. Also beyond the true sadism there is a certain affinity between hand and buttocks. The application to this region seems a matter of course in every thrashing. Without underestimating the influence of the neighbouring anal zone I prefer to see in this affinity a reflection of the infant's love and pleasure- touching of its first and greatest source of life by means of its little hands.

I consider it an advantage, that my hypothesis is capable of objective control, for cracked nipples are often well-remembered by mothers. The decision rests on the facts.

X

I might briefly allude to the possibility that in the repeated alternation between becoming one's own and not one's own, which occurs during lactation, there Ues a prototype for the child and a path for the later psychic process of projection, just as it must also give rise to a displacement of narcissistic quantities in the mother.

To recapitulate: Besides the removal of excrement it is in the situation of being suckled that there Ues a real basis for the wishes, strivings and dispositions that are comprised under the term castration complex. There is also the possibility that on the same basis is founded the infantile theory of the "woman with a penis", many symptoms of neurosis, details of incestuous object-erotism, particular forms of sadism, and that also the situation of being suckled plays a part in the origin of the mechanism of projection.

If I now ask whether the psycho- analytic therapy gains anything from all this, I am bound to confess that the discovery of less objectionable motives behind the sadistic - anal - erotic organisation, -which succumb so much to repression, is fraught with the risk of not sufficiently removing these repressions. And since the therapy aims at the removal of repressions it will be more interested in the later elaboration of the papillary-oral- erotic quantities which succumb to repression after having ex- perienced "displacement downwards". Nor is there any sense in creating a problem where it is not thrust upon us.

Because I maintain that the importance of the oral-erotic inter- pretation is not to be under-estimated I do not consider the analysis