Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/22

 276 MICHAEL JOSEPH EISLER

reminiscences were available in this connection. Primarily the stools became objects, exquisite to look at, to which the very value of a member of the body was attributed. It is the auto-erotic stage of development of this component instinct, in which but few associations have any influence. One gains the impression that the injury to the head alluded to was followed by a marked augmentation of anal erotism, determined partly by the turning away from the mother, and partly by the sexual enquiries that soon set in. All his childish fancies and experiences were grouped about this impulse, which like a magnet attracted all psychical activities within its sphere of influence. Sexual curiosity was directed in the first instance to the frequent pregnancies and parturitions of his mother ; and, in consequence of his massive dispositional tendencies, he lighted on the infantile phantasy of identity of child with faeces. This phantasy is to this day closely bound up in the patient's memory with the conception of fertility of faeces, actually in a form that I would term a *seed complex' {Frucht- kern complex).* A favourite occupation was to examine his own and adult's stools to see if any fruit-stones might be embedded in them. He made a note of situations in which he had left stools lying, and on one occasion discovered with intense wonder how a living shoot had sprouted from a cherry stone during the next spring. He was amazed that such a stone could still grow after the great heat to which he imagined it had been exposed in the bowel.^ Furthermore, he now took to the habit of swallow- ing fruit complete with stone, until at sixteen, when a painful mishap occurred, a pointed plumstone hurting his rectum during defaecation. The case of the extruded cherry-stone was not an isolated one ; in the yard of the family farm stood a tree which bloomed thanks to a similar chance, and was therefore called in joke by the father 'the filthy plum tree'. Only a few years ago, he heard in a letter from home that they had had to fell this particular tree. The significance of the seed-complex is evident moreover in other inclinations. Thus for example in the prepara- tion of plum-fool he has the stones cooked up with the rest, and than revels in the sweetened product. Again, he collects apricot stones, dries and skins them after breaking them open in hot

' Just as in eastern poetry and thought the pomegranate counts as a sym- bol of fertility on account of its abundance of seed.

^ These are obviously phantasies _of puberty, referred to childhood.