Acute dread of going to school occurs in children with strong castration anxiety, great masturbation guilt, and repressed aggressive

impulses toward a parent on whom they are greatly dependent. These children are fixated at the oedipal or pre-oedipal level. An increase of tension in the school reactivates a regressive dread of the primitive punitive parent, projected on to the teacher and school, which frightens the child away from the school. An increase in sexual longing, fear or guilt toward the parents, reactivates the oedipal or pre-oedipal fear of sexual injury of the mother, injury to the mother by a projected aspect of the child's oral-sadistic impulse, or desertion by the mother: these anxieties draw the child to the mother. School failure becomes tied to masturbation guilt and fear of loss of love; shame about school failure reactivates a paranoid shame at inability to control one's sexual impulse.