Page:The theory of psychoanalysis (IA theoryofpsychoan00jungiala).pdf/142

 Here again, we see that marvellous parallelism between mythology and the individual phantasies of our own day. This series of associations contains such an abundance of symbolic relationships, that we could easily write a whole dissertation about it. The child herself splendidly interpreted the symbolism of drowning as a pregnancy-phantasy, an explanation given long ago in psychoanalytic literature.

Eleventh interview. The next sitting was occupied with the spontaneous infantile theories about fructification and child-birth. The child thought that the urine of the man went into the body of the woman, and from this the embryo would grow. Hence the child was in the water from the beginning, that is to say, in urine. Another version was, the urine was drunk in the doctor's syrup, so that the child would grow in the head. The head had then to be split open, to help the growth of the child, and one wore hats to cover this up. She illustrated this by a little drawing, representing a child-birth through the head. The child again had still a smaller child on the head, and so on. This is an archaic idea and highly mythological. I would remind you of the birth of Pallas, who came out of the father's head.

We find striking mythological proofs of the fertilizing significance of the urine in the songs of Rudra in the Rigveda. Here should be mentioned something the mother added, that once the little girl, before analysis, suggested she saw a puppet on the head of her little brother, a phantasy with which the origin of this theory of child-birth might be connected. The little illustration made by the patient has remarkable affinity with certain pictures found among the Bataks of Dutch India. They are the so-called magic wands or ancestral statues, on which the members of families are represented, one standing on the top of the other. The explanation of these wands, given by the Bataks themselves, and regarded as nonsense, has a marvellous analogy with the infantile mental attitude. Schultz, who wrote about these wands, says: "The assertion, that these figures represent the members of a family who have committed incest, were bitten by a snake, entwined with another, and met a common death in their criminal embrace, is widely disseminated and obviously due to the position of the figures."

The explanation has a parallel in our presuppositions as to our