om Freud quoted above. Every
examination, every exercise is associated with early impressions of
parental commands and punishments. Later (in the treatment of the lion)
the wanderer will turn out to be the questioner, whereas now the elders
are the questioners. In the relation between parent and child questions
play a part that is important from a psychological point of view.
Amazingly early the curiosity of the child turns toward sexual matters.
His desire to know things is centered about the question as to where
babies come from. The uncommunicativeness of the parents causes a
temporary suppression of the great question, which does not, however,
cease to arouse his intense desire for explanation. The dodging of the
issue produces further a characteristic loss of trust on the part of the
child, an ironic questioning, or a feeling that he knows better. The
knowing better than the questioning father we see in the wanderer. The
tables are turned. Instead of the child desiring (sexual) explanation from
the parents, the father must learn from the child (fulfillment of the wish
to be himself the father, as above). The elders are acquainted only with
figurative language ("Similitudines," "Figmenta," etc.); but the wanderer
is well informed in practical life, in experience he is an adept. As a
fact, parents in their indefiniteness about the question, Where do babies
come from? give a figurative answer (however appropriate it may be as a
figure of speech) in saying that the stork brings them, while the child
expects clear information (from experience). On the propriety of the
picturesque information that the stork brings the babies out of the water
we may note incidentally the following observations of Kleinpaul. The
fountain is the mother's womb, and the red-legged stork that brings the
babies is none other than a humorous figure for the organ (phallus) with
the long neck like a goose or a stork, that actually gets the little
babies out of the mother's body. We understand also that the stork has
bitten Mamma in the "leg."

We have become acquainted above with the fear of impotence as one
significance of the anxiety about examinations. Psychosexual obstructions
cause impotence. The incest scruple is such an obstruction.

According to Laistner we can conceive the painful examination as a
question torture--a typical experience of the hero in countless myths.
Laistner, starting from this central motive, traces the majority of myth