Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 2.djvu/43

 THE CASTRATION COMPLEX 199

should end there; although the deepest meaning of many symptoms is to be found in oral-erotism and this meaning lies farthest back in the ontogenesis, still these factors need not be the most deeply repressed ones.

The experience we made in the Dutch Society shows that in the normal human being who is perhaps a smoker or sweet-eater the oral-erotic interpretation finds sufficient resistances.

XI

The analysis of a few dreams was the starting-point of -my views. These views have increased in ever-widening circles from this central point, like rings from a stone that is thrown into water. A final ring has yet to be described.

Von Uexkiill's useful views have led me to this final idea, and particularly where he throws light on the influence of the "struc- tural plan" on the outer and inner world of animals. "But even I the statement that the varying individuals of a species are more

) or less adapted [to their surroundings is a pure invention. Every

i varying individual is different in correspondence with his altered

structural plan, but at the same time is perfectly suited to his environment. The structural plan creates the outer world of the animal automatically and within broad limits" (Umwelt und Innen-

Iwelt der Tiere, S. 5). "It is not difficult to observe any given animal in its surroundings, but this does not solve the problem. The ex- perimenter must endeavour to settle what part of these surroundings act upon the animal, and in what form. Our anthropocentric mode of consideration has more and more to recede, and that of the animal alone becomes the deciding factor. Thus everything dis- appears which we consider self-evident: the whole of nature, the earth, the heavens, the stars, indeed all objects that surround us, and there remain as world factors only those influences which, corresponding to its structural plan, exercise an influence on the animal. Their number and their homogeneity is determined by structural plan. If this connection of the structural plan with the external factors is carefully investigated, then a new world, totally ■ different from our own, is created around every animal, its outer world.* The effects produced by factors of the outer world on > Later reaamed by v. Uexkflll, "Merkwelt".

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