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PSYCHOANALYSE UND HEILUNG EINES NACHTWANDELNDEN KNABEN.
By Gustav Graber. Baden-Baden: Merlin-Verlag, 1931. 63 p.
The first little book is a compact and useful study of the psychological reaction of mankind to the phenomena of conception, birth and death. It uses as method the analysis of myths dealing with these themes, together with excerpts from the author's analyses of children, and shows that the anthropomorphic myths of cosmic creation, for instance, manifest a striking correspondence with infantile birth theories. This correspondence the author explains by Ferenczi's theory of coenogenesis–namely that mankind retains an unconscious memory of its phylogenetic history; a memory to which cosmic myths give expression and on which the individual child draws in his account to himself of how he was conceived and born and how he is to die.
The birth theories of myths Graber ranges into four categories: inorganic, vegetative, animal and human, each corresponding to an evolutionary phase of the earth and the life upon it. His child patients show an interesting sequence of theories during analysis, frequent and constant enough to represent, according to the author, evidence for the validity of the psychological recapitulation theory.
Death, mankind understands only in terms of a wish to return to the earliest condition of peace, to intrauterine existence. Thus all myths on this topic treat of the anthropomorphized earth as returning to a previous state–the land which emerged from the waters is sunk in a flood, and this regressive dénouement in the evolution of the world is parallelled by the child's desire for reincorporation in the mother,–his intrauterine existence representing, according to Ferenczi, only a substitutive gratification for the water existence out of which all mankind evolved. These parallels between myths and analytic material give the study the value of a handbook for clinical usage.