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In this paper Dr. Hermann gathers together the material of twelve years' special attention to the desire to cling to the mother's body, and seeks to give it its place as an instinct (together with its antithesis, searching) in the structure of psychoanalytical theory.
He takes as starting-points (1) the erogeneity of the hand and its connection with erection in an adult patient and (2) the relation between the mother and the suckling in the apes. As to the former, observation shewed the phenomenon of extreme finger tension during suckling as well as during obsessive sucking in older children; and the author points out that the instinctual drive of the infant ape to cling to the mother's fur during the first months persists in its later sleeping position and the important 'grooming' game. On these two factual groups Dr. Hermann bases the hypothesis of phylogenetic traumatic interference with the human instinctual urge to cling to the mother, or series of interferences, and illustrates his point by the mention of children who could not sleep alone without getting hold of something to suck or without having the hand held. (The typical sleeping position of the suckling he connects with this desire to cling rather than with the continuation of inter-uterine life, from which it differs in some ways.) Dr. Hermann accordingly devotes attention to the new-born infant's power of seizing and holding on (Greiftrieb) connecting it with the 'clinging-instinct', and thus providing it with a primary instinctual object—the mother. He attributes its comparative disappearance after the first three weeks to its atrophy through unnatural lack of opportunity; and finds neurological support for his views. Dr. Hermann next explains the fact that approximately the same finger and arm movements can be found in the infant in pleasure and in anxiety by the desire in both cases to gain more from the mother, more pleasure or more care; and regards castration anxiety as due in the first p