ABSTRACT
Every normal child from about the age of four years has a great desire to hear stories; many of these are invented on the spur of the moment by the mother or kindergarten teacher, but more are drawn from already existing sources, viz. from the storehouse of the familiar fairy-tales. The royal or supernatural personages in the fairy-tales are indeed nothing but the disguised embodiments of the child's own wishes. Children of lively temperament are not content with simply hearing pretty tales; they wish to create them themselves, and therefore begin to confabulate. Probably often enough they are first incited to this by the fairy-tales and stories they have heard, but also, there exists in the child at one period an irresistible craving to express in speech the ideas that come surging into his mind; and these confabulations show us in paradigmatic distinctness all the qualities of the connected links of early imagination.
