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After introductory observations about the principles of application of psychoanalytic method and findings to poets and poetry, Hitschmann devotes the second part of his paper to a childhood phobia of Selma Lagerlöf. He describes the part played by a bird phobia, its possible childhood origin, the way in
which it was overcome at a later age and what a very important part was played by the mechanism which Anna Freud has described as 'the transformation of the feared animal into a friend'.
The third chapter, Hitschmann has devoted to the poet's father and her relationship to him. The kind, gentle, humorous father was her greatest inspiration and the memory of his personality was of the utmost value in her creative work. A chapter is devoted to Selma Lagerlöf's mother, whose personality can be felt throughout the works of the poet. She is described as the model for the poet's ethical and religious superego. The repressed, negative emotions of the daughter for the mother are seen by Hitschmann in the different stepmothers who are represented as bad tempered, avaricious, treacherous and jealous. The poet's infantile compulsion neurosis and her childhood anxiety are also represented as expressions of her relationship to her mother.
In the following chapters, Hitschmann evolves the formation of the superego and the unconscious aggressions of the poet, maintaining that the greed, hot temper and obstinacy Selma Lagerlöf describes in her childhood memories are, in the adult personality of the poet, transformed into reaction-formations of compassion and tenderness. In her poems, however, in innumerable passages, these emotions regress to their original cruelty. The anxiety depicted in the poems is demonstrated by Hitschmann to be castration anxiety.
The author tries in the eighth chapter to explain the processes by which Selma Lagerlöf developed into a poet. He finds as a fundamental characterological basis a capacity, bordering almost on the pathological, for submergin