ABSTRACT
S. Freud assumes that the infantile danger-situation can be reduced ultimately to the loss of the beloved person. In girls, he thinks, the loss of the object is the danger-situation which operates most powerfully; in boys it is castration. At the beginning of his review the writer mentions that all the things on the stage are made very large, in order to emphasize the smallness of the child. But the child's anxiety makes things and people seem gigantic to him—far beyond the actual difference in size. In ontogenetic development sadism is overcome when the subject advances to the genital level. The more powerfully this phase sets in, the more capable does the child become of object-love, and the more able is he to conquer his sadism by means of pity and sympathy.
