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The case is presented of a six-year-old boy who suddenly acquired the faculty of adding instantaneously long columns of numbers of four to six digits. The correctness of his answers was all the more astonishing because the subject knew only the written number three at the time and had never had any schooling. No other talent was noted in the child; his other intellectual performances were average or even lower than average. The boy's talent in adding disappeared completely at the age of nine or ten, and when the author reëxamined the subject at the age of twenty-eight, he concluded that the subject was 'a well adjusted person of the mixed schizoid-syntonic type and personality' without any outstanding characteristics. After discussing the literature on mathematical prodigies, the author presents his own explanation of the phenomenon which, he believes, is a manifestation of phylogenic memory. Hering, Bleuler, Simon and Freud's last contribution on racial memory are quoted. Ontogenetic factors such as fixation to the anal-sadistic organization of libido, loss of beloved relatives and others are evaluated in the case he reports and in some historical cases such as that of Blaise Pascal.
The author evaluates this talent of the child not as an asset but as a serious obstacle in the child's development. He concludes that 'like the neurotic who is seriously handicapped in his adjustment to life because he has to cope with a fragment of his infantile sexuality in adult life, the infant prodigy is even more afflicted because for some as yet unknown reasons he has to cope with a fragment' of his phylogeny.