ABSTRACT
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the close relationship between childhood and primitivism has been discussed in ethnological, psychological and anthropological studies, such as Sigmund Freud’s Totem und Tabu [Totem and Taboo] (1913), notably the chapter on “animism, magic, and almightiness of mind,” and James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890).1 While Freud, who refers to Frazer’s study, claims that children and primitive peoples should be situated on the same psychic level regarding their abilities to be absorbed by play and hallucinations and their relationship to magic and animistic worldviews, Frazer alludes to the close connection between childhood and poetry, thus raising Romantic topics.
