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During the course of the past dozen years, I have more than once availed myself of the opportunity to point out the significant role that is played in man's psychic structure by his desire to cling to the mother's body. There is now sufficient material on that question to permit me to bring together what has until now been scattered in several different places, to supplement it, and to show the position of the pertinent facts within the structure of psychoanalytic theory. Here in Budapest, we have tried several times to arrive at an understanding of these phenomena and of what follows from them. Along with my own studies, there is the well-known conception of the female castration complex, as put forward by Mrs. K. Rotter (1934), as well as Mrs. Balint's (1933) description of the anxiety situation in early infancy: of being dropped [out of someone's arms]. Very recently, Róheim made a broad ethnological presentation of the same range of problems on whose psychic variations Mrs. Rotter threw light by way of new clinical material.
Two sets of data, from different sources, have served as the point of departure for this paper. One set consisted of clinical observations confirming the erogenicity of the hand (Hermann, 1922), (1923), (1925), (1926a); the other set had to do with the mother-infant relationship among apes (Hermann, 1923), (1926b), (1933).