Contributions to the Knowledge of the Child’s Soul

A set of observations on the inner life of children, drawn from Spielrein’s memories of her own childhood and from two boys, Otto and Valli. She traces a childhood anxiety, which began with a vision of two black kittens soon after her father warned that fate would punish her, not to suggestion but to her burning wish to create a living being as God does and to a picture of the longed-for child as a dangerous illness; the same case shows scientific interest growing out of sexual curiosity. Otto, tenderly attached to his mother, feared being attacked from behind and dreamed of an old woman; Valli’s slip in telling his mother to call him “father” reveals rivalry with his father, and Spielrein warns analysts not to correct a patient’s words by their own judgement. All three children are intensely occupied with sexual problems and share a fear of being carried off; like dreams and primitive peoples, children know no “either–or”. Following Freud, she holds that pleasure turns into anxiety through repression and a triggering cause, and that the difference between the sexual and the asexual is merely quantitative. Closing remarks on clocks and toys, which children ruin and remake, and on an adult patient’s hourglass fantasy present death fantasies that are at the same time fantasies of birth.