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The lasting mental effects all through life (in the absence of analysis) of light physical blows and taps (heavy to the child) in early infancy, the writer may perhaps claim as a psychological discovery of his own. It would, in any case, appear to be one of great importance.
Although many people must have got very near to it, the writer does not remember having seen the point stated in any of the many psychoanalytical books he has read, which includes all the most important ones. Even in Professor Freud's writings—as far as the writer recollects—one meets with such phrases as “earlier tendencies are given up by the child owing to having become obnoxious in the light of later development“; and Ferenczi says (“Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality”—“Sex in Psycho-Analysis,” p. 266) : “The outstretched hand must often he drawn back empty, the longed for object does not follow the magic gesture. Indeed, an invincible hostile power may forcibly oppose itself to this gesture and compel the hand to resume its former position.”
Ferenczi, however, speaks only of a hostile power which merely compels the hand to resume its former position and says nothing of blows and taps upon the hands, the effects of which travel along the weak growing arms producing great pain therein with resulting very powerful and permanent effects upon the mind. The former wish, and wish tendencies, which the outstretching of the hands was intended to gratify, become repressed into the unconscious part of the mind as a result of this pain, and the “reaching out” and similar processes tend not to recur. This is, of course, the object of the blows or taps. The mere mental idea of the original wishes which caused these early “reaching out” processes then become highly “obnoxious” to the child owing to the persistent unconscious memory of the great pain—fundamentally as a result of the early taps—which resulted from the earlier attempts to gratify these said wishes.
The desire to keep the memory o