Internationale Zeitschrift fur Aerztliche Psychoanalyse.

A Child is beaten. Sigmundfreud.*

On a peculiar form of neurotic resistance to the Psychoanalytic Method. Karlabraham.

On Psychoanalytic Technique. S. Ferenczi.

A child is beaten. A contribution to the study of sexual perversions. The phantasy that a child is being beaten is encountered with astonishing frequency in persons who, suffering from hysteria or compulsion neuroses, seek psychoanalytic treatment. Because the phantasy is connected with autoerotic gratification and contains sadistic and masochistic elements of great importance for the later development of character, the author, in a series of six cases (four female and two male) inquired very carefully into its foundation. His analysis was confined for the most part to the female cases, first because they were the more numerous and secondly because certain peculiar factors entered into the phantasy in males which he proposed to make the material of a separate study. Though he was unable to arrive at clearness in regard to many points of the phantasy he gathered a certain amount of information valuable for the interpretation, in the form of discovery of the sex of the person administering the beating, the sex of the persons beaten, the presence of the sadistic and maschochistic elements.

In little girls this phantasy passes through three phases, of which the first and last are consciously remembered, while the middle phase remains unconscious. The first phase may be expressed in the sentence “my father is beating a child,” further to be interpreted “my father is beating a child whom I hate.” This phase may not be a phantasy at all, but an emotional interpretation of a scene really witnessed. It is doubtful also whether this phase can be called either masochistic or sadistic; it is perhaps the first manifestation of the material out of which later these perversions develop. The second phase is the most important in significance and consequences, but the exact sense in which existence is to be