ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author attempts to resolve the new paradox, by trying to establish what the thought might mean such that an adult, but not a child, would express this meaning. She begins by documenting her claim that a child would not normally assert the thought. Although the thought may correspond to one's recovery in the real world of a familiar object, the thought is no mere exultation in this recovery in itself. The thought responds to some apparent uncertainty, generated on some basis, about the object's real existence. The thought expresses surprise that this object exists, and it is the object, and not its derivative features, whose existence is surprising. Based upon a scan both of earlier diary studies and of modern databases of children's speech, the author knows of no reported instances of Freud's thought or of any thought resembling it among children.
