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The Feminine Type. Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Michelangelo's Moses.
The Homunculus. H. Silberer.
Homer's Youngest Descendant. H. Sachs.
The True Nature of the Child Psyche. Edited by H. v. Hug-Hellmuth. [Continued from Vol. III, No. 3.]—I. Lou Andreas-Salome. In the Between Land. H. v. Hug-Hellmuth.—II. God and Father. M. Eitingon.—III. The Child's Idea of God. T. Reik.—IV. Father Complex.—V. The Child and Death. T. Reik.
The Feminine Type. The writer introduces her subject by a little excursion into certain childish fancies of her own. They go back in memory to the playing with buttons of various colors and materials, which her phantasy conceived as precious stones toward which there was a sense of secret exclusive possession. Money she was early taught was something to be shared, “halved” with others, but the buttons belonged to a conception which also imagined wonderful secret jewels stored within the depths of the Jungfrau, which she had seen on an early journey to Switzerland. Fairy tales told of such precious possessions and she saw them also in the form of stalactites when with her father she visited some mines.
Buttons had probably taken on an earlier value from the mother's dress as the child sat upon her lap and from the nurse, where they were associated with the nipple. They also represent, the writer believes, the infant's interest in the anal product before there is yet a separation of the bodily excretions as something apart from the self. Money for this child took upon itself the growing interest in external things while the buttons served to absorb the introverted or self centered interest, taken
into the realm of purely erotic phantasy. The buttons offered a world controlled only by thought, where external reality could not enter.