You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Göttingen, 28 November 1917
Dear Professor,
Even if your letter had not just arrived—I thank you very much for your kind judgment of this by no means faultless essay—I would have written to you to enquire whether I might ask for a small piece of advice in a psycho-analytic matter.
It concerns a six-year-old girl, who was brought to me by her mother on account of pavor nocturnus, and I now feel more or less at my wit's end. The child was completely normal and ‘unnervous’ until a severe attack of scarlet fever two years ago, following which she had to undergo operations for inflammation of the ear (mastoid), drugs, etc. Since then she has had attacks of screaming almost every night, which have got worse rather than better, and which are often followed by uncontrollable weeping.
It is more than probable that it was the scarlet fever which provided the occasion, the pretext, for these alarms, but even such innocent observers as the parents were struck by the fact that the accompanying dreams, as far as one can get the child to talk about them, have a content which points in another direction: the fires, murderous attacks, blood, frogs or worms crawling up, being abducted and carried off by black men, are all typical ingredients of female sexual dreams. In addition the little girl has established a firm connection between beauty (she is very beautiful and people sometimes tell her so) and the danger of being killed, indeed of death as such.
The difficulty is that it has been impossible to find the slightest