ABSTRACT
In two women whose obsessional fears were connected 3 with childlessness and in whose unconscious the regression from genital and parental to anal erotism proceeded as in an obsessional neurotic patient of Freud’s, 4 vermin and eggs play a quite peculiar part. Both (it is almost incredible how minutely neuroses often repeat themselves) suffered from childhood from the dread that they had lice in their hair. Extraordinary to relate, they occasionally actually do discover, to their great alarm, representatives of these vermin on their heads, which, however, is no wonder as they display an incomprehensible carelessness regarding the toilet of the hair—apparently in contradiction to their phobia of parasites. In reality both of them unconsciously 328endeavour to acquire such parasites as these offer them the most favourable opportunity of satisfying symbolically their deeply hidden wishes; the repressed longing for many, very many children (that actually develop as parasites of the mother), 1 as well as the sadism and anal erotism to which they had to regress after their sexual disillusionment (killing of the vermin, wallowing in dirt). To make the analogy of the two cases still more remarkable, they produced another fæcal and anal symbol that had hitherto been unknown to me as such, namely, an overweening interest in hens’ eggs. One of the patients, when at last she began to interest herself in her house, often told me what an inexplicable pleasure it afforded her to rummage about in a basket or fresh eggs, to arrange and count them; were she not ashamed, she would occupy herself in this way for hours. The other (a country woman) is almost incapable of work; the only place where she could be employed is the fowl-yard; there she is able to stuff geese for hours, and to watch the hens lay eggs; on these occasions she assists delivery by inserting her finger into the cloaca of the animal and fetching out the egg. The symbolic identity of the egg with fæces and child is even more transparent than that of vermin. One should not, however, forget the money value of eggs; we know, of course, that everywhere the price of eggs provides a standard of the cheapness or costliness of the means of living, and that eggs, particularly in the country, serve for money, as a standard of value. It seems that under some conditions of life the ontogenetic transformation of anal erotism comes to a standstill in certain anal character traits. At any rate this fondness for eggs approximates much more closely to primitive coprophilia than does the more abstract love of money. 2
