The Giant Mother, The Phallic Mother, Obscenity

It is a common experience that houses, places, remembered from childhood look amazingly small when seen again in adult life. The house, et cetera, that lives in our imagination was much larger than the real one before us. The same kind of discrepancy may exist between the mental image of persons who were known in childhood and their present looks. An elderly patient of mine is struck by the smallness of the town-hall of her native town when she revisits it after a number of years, and she remembers her mother—who is still alive—to have been “a tall, broad-shouldered, powerful woman”—a picture which does not in the least correspond to reality.

This peculiarity is easy to explain if, on the one hand, the relative smallness of the child is taken into account and if, on the other hand, the well-proved fact is accepted that even in primitive living beings the perception of relations, e.g., of size, of brightness, of color, is primary. The adults, surrounding the newborn babe, are about three times larger than he and, at the end of the first year, the proportion is 1,5 to 1: the small child remains aware of this relation and revives it whenever opportunity arises in later life (6). The nearer the body of the adult the more the small child must feel its own relative smallness. Therefore, it is in the first line the mother who may be considered a giantess, the house, the home, the town-hall are symbols of the mother.

Thus for the unconscious the mother is very often a giantess. The endless winding canals of dreams may be interpreted as the figurements of the giant mother. It is she about whom Beaudelaire wrote in his poem La géante: