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Recently, in an old volume of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, I came across a paper by Thomas A. Petty, “The Tragedy of Humpty Dumpty” (1953) which I had overlooked in the past. In this paper, the author shows how, in three clinical cases, the tragic fall of Humpty Dumpty had become equated with the older child's feeling of having been displaced by the birth of a sibling and having irretrievably and disastrously fallen from a previous exalted position. In the material presented by the author, this old nursery rhyme came to represent at the same time a reenactment of this trauma, an attempt to master it and an outlet for the older child's hostile wishes towards the younger one.
Interestingly enough, while the author focuses throughout the paper on the seriousness of the fall and the irreparability of its consequences as the origins of this equation, he glides over the fact that Humpty Dumpty was an egg. He writes, in other words, of Humpty Dumpty as if it were only any kind of extremely fragile and unmendable object.
This paper brought to mind a patient I saw in my pre-analytic days during World War II who presented me with a very interesting screen memory which showed some remarkable analogies to the patients described by Petty and which bore a relationship to the Humpty Dumpty motif. A brief description of the clinical facts in this case will enable us to broaden our understanding of the psychoanalytic meaning of this nursery rhyme and to discuss some of the psychological mechanisms which underlay this patient's screen memory.
The patient was a 26 year old European Jewish refugee