me late and went to bed while he was
feigning sleep. He soon heard panting and other noises that appeared
strange to him, and he could also make out the position of his parents
in bed. His further associations showed that he had established an
analogy between this relation between his parents and his own relation
toward his younger brother. He subsumed what occurred between his
parents under the conception "violence and wrestling," and thus reached
a sadistic conception of the coitus act, as often happens among
children. The fact that he often noticed blood on his mother's bed
corroborated his conception.

That the sexual intercourse of adults appears strange to children who
observe it, and arouses fear in them, I dare say is a fact of daily
experience. I have explained this fear by the fact that sexual
excitement is not mastered by their understanding, and is probably also
inacceptable to them because their parents are involved in it. For the
same son this excitement is converted into fear. At a still earlier
period of life sexual emotion directed toward the parent of opposite sex
does not meet with repression but finds free expression, as we have seen
before.

For the night terrors with hallucinations (_pavor nocturnus_) frequently
found in children, I would unhesitatingly give the same explanation.
Here, too, we are certainly dealing with the incomprehensible and
rejected sexual feelings, which, if noted, would probably show a
temporal periodicity, for an enhancement of the sexual _libido_ may
just as well be produced accidentally through emotional impressions as
through the spontaneous and gradual processes of development.

I lack the necessary material to sustain these explanations from
observation. On the other hand, the pediatrists seem to lack the point
of view which alone makes comprehensible the whole series of phenomena,
on the somatic as well as on the psychic side. To illustrate by a
comical example how one wearing the blinders of medical mythology may
miss the understanding of such cases I will relate a case which I found
in a thesis on _pavor nocturnus_ by _Debacker_, 1881. A
thirteen-year-old boy of delicate health began to become anxious and
dreamy; his sleep became restless, and about once a week it was
interrupted by an acute attack of anxiety with hallucinations. The
memory of these dreams was invariably very distinct. Thus, he related
that the _devil_ shouted at him: "Now we have you, now we have