Chapter 12. Book III: The Dawn of Oblivion. A Memoir of the Future

PRIEST What is the psychoanalytic view of original sin? Do you deny there is such a thing?

P.A. I hesitate to say I believe or disbelieve in something reported as a fact by someone else. I have been convinced that certain observations could be most easily explained if there were such a thing as original guilt.

ALICE You have often said this; I have no doubt about it.

P.A. A most unwelcome feeling – even to an infant. As I became aware of good psychoanalysis, even by myself, ‘faulty psychoanalysis’ was an inadequate explanation, so I cast around for some pattern other than our failings. Considering the great intelligence shown by some analysands, it was absurd to suppose that the intelligence sprang into being merely at the fact of physical birth. Surely, I thought, the offspring of gifted and intelligent parents might be as likely to be intelligent as much and as often as the offspring of stupid or handicapped parents might be expected to be stupid. In other words, the fetus must have inherent characteristics which sooner or later become apparent. If the fetus subsequently becomes an intelligent or wise or gifted man or woman, why should it not, as it approaches full term, show prototypes of the sort of behaviour expected of children and adults? It occurred to me that a fetus might hear noises, see sights, smell odours, in a watery fluid such as the amniotic fluid and meconium. The significance of this did not become apparent at once, but I felt that past experiences with patients would have been less obscure if I had dared to imagine that the emotions displayed might be prenatal. They were often expressed in a manner which differed from commonly accepted modes of expression.1

ALICE How did that differ from any other person?

P.A. That is what I asked myself. I wondered whether the highly endowed fetus might employ the mechanisms which psychoanalysis had made familiar in the treatment of children and adults, even