This paper contains a striking hypothesis about the one-and-a-half-year-old boy, described in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, who developed the game of throwing a spool into his cot and retrieving it by a piece of string tied to it as a reaction to his mother's departures. Freud was puzzled by the losing part of the game although he suggested the child was reversing roles, putting himself in the position of controlling the mother's coming and going. Capell assumes the mother had previously retrieved objects the child had cast out of the cot,