'When I Grow Big and you Grow Little'

The fantasy of 'the reversal of generation' is frequently expressed by a child with a further remark, often, but not always, hostile in nature. A two-and-a-half-year-old girl was told by her aunt that she could not stay up longer to play with her cousin. 'Auntie', the child retorted, 'when I grow big and you grow little I won't let you play!'

Ernest Jones1 discussed briefly the possible connections of this fantasy with the growth of the child in relation to its size as compared with adults; in regard to the idea of reincarnation; and in regard to narcissistic ideas of immortality. What, however, he considered its chief motivation was a struggle between impulses of love and hate as it is observed in the usual pregenital ambivalence.

According to Jones, the most important consequence of the fantasy is the way in which it determines the later attitudes of adults toward their own children. The adult is himself the 'grown big child', and the child is the individual's 'grown little parent'. In its positive form it can influence the attempt to mold a child to become like a favored grandparent. An example of the negative form is a man's dread of having a son who represents to him the reincarnated (hated) grandfather.

A forty-year-old patient shuddered and said, 'I hate to think of people getting old and being taken care of by their children'. At this period in therapy she had been dwelling on her relationships both with her mother and with her own thirteen-year-old daughter. The patient had slapped and scolded this daughter, her only child, from infancy. During therapy, however, a year had passed without such an incident. She recalled her own childhood as a state of loneliness and fear from an early age when her mother became involved in a love affair and completely ignored her. The mother eloped with her lover, and the patient then lived for a time with her father.