Page:The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis II 1921 3-4.djvu/94

 348 JAMES S. VAN TESLAAR

I ' Closed doors? That is claustrophobia. Open spaces? That is agora-

i.^ phobia, and so forth. Freud found that these fears have specific

.. meanings in every instance. That 'open spaces' and ' closed door ',

for instance, have particular meanings for the persons concerned f^. *, on account of which they play the role they do in certain in-

stances; that their role is always determined by what they stand i for in the subject's own mind — perhaps a meaning acquired in

connection with some actual experience, forgotten, or rather re- ji

t pressed, or a fanciful meaning derived symbohcally.

[ In other words, our fears, morbid dreads, doubts, feelings of '

[ incapacity and numerous other emotional handicaps have an inner,

E or subjective developmental history; their course must be traced

t. back to the earliest episodes in connection with which they have |

[: arisen, before we can expect to be completely freed of them. ,

[, Now, eliildhood has been compared to the primitive state ot '

[ mankind. Conversely, savage society is said to represent the

[ childhood of the race. This much was surmised here and there

[ even during the pre-evolutionistic phase of science.

Since Darwin, the comparison between childhood and primitive

' mankind as representative of the same developmental stages has

I achieved new significance. Darwinism has led to the theoretic

f, assumption that in our physical as well as mental development

[- we recapitulate the biologic history of the race. Herbert Spencer


 * has popularised this idea. It has led to the formulation of the so-

t called recapitulation theory — an idea which has been worked out

r extensively in embryology where it is associated chiefly with the

researches of Ernst Haeckel. Readers will recall the interesting

series of embryologic sections which were circulated years ago,

showing that during the various stages of its development the

human foetus resembles in form and functional arrangement one

after another various animal species from the lower to the

higher.

The recapitulation theory maintains that during the embryonic stage every individual repeats, in abbreviated form of course, many of the important stages through which the human race has passed in its ascent from the lower and more primitive forms. Countless centuries of unfoldment are thus condensed and recapitulated in the brief course of our intra-uterine existence. Beginning as an unicellular organism, a protozoon in all respects, the fertilised human ovum becomes a metazoon, assumes shapes and forms re-