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XIII

INFANTILE MENTAL LIFE

TWO LIES TOLD BY CHILDREN¹

(1913)

IT is comprehensible that children should tell lies
when in doing so they mimic the lies of grown-up
people. But a number of the lies of well-brought-up
children have a peculiar significance, and should cause
their instructors to reflect rather than to be angry.
These lies proceed from the influence of an excessive
love motive, and become momentous if they lead to a
misunderstanding between the child and the person
whom it loves.

I

A girl of seven (in her second year at school) had
asked her father for money to buy colours for painting
Easter eggs. The father had refused, saying he had
no money. Shortly afterwards the girl again asked
for some money for a contribution towards a wreath
for the funeral of the late reigning princess. Each of
the school-children was to bring fifty pfennigs. The
father gave her ten marks; she paid her contribution,
put nine marks on her father’s writing-table, and with
the remaining fifty pfennigs bought paints, which she
hid in her toy-cupboard.

At dinner the father asked suspiciously what she
had done with the missing pfennigs, and whether she
had not bought the colours with them. She denied it;
but her brother, who was two years older, and together

¹ First published in Zeitschrift, Bd. I., 1913; reprinted in Sammlung,
Vierte Folge. [Translated by E. Colburn Mayne.]

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with whom she had planned to paint the eggs, betrayed
her; the colours were found in the cupboard. The
father, very angry, handed the culprit over to her
mother for punishment, which was severely adminis-
tered. Afterwards the mother herself was overwhelmed
when she saw the child’s extreme despair. She
caressed the little girl after punishing her, and took her
for a walk to console her. But the effects of this
experience, described by the patient herself as the
‘turning-point’ of her life, proved to be immitigable.
She had hitherto been a wild, self-confident child;
thenceforth she became timid and vacillating. During
her engagement she flew into a rage that was incom-
prehensible even to herself, when her mother was
buying furniture and trousseau-garments for her. She
had the feeling that after all it was her money, and no
one else ought to buy anything with it. As a young
wife she was shy of asking her husband for any expendi-
ture for her personal needs, and made an unnecessary
distinction between ‘her’ money and his. During
the course of her treatment it happened now and again
that her husband’s remittances to her were delayed,
so that she was resourceless in the foreign city. After
she had once told me this, I made her promise that if it
happened again she would borrow the small necessary
sum from me. She gave the promise, but on the next
occasion of embarrassment she did not keep it and
preferred to pawn her jewellery. She explained that
she could not take money from me.

The appropriation of the fifty pfennigs in her child-
hood had a significance which the father could not
divine. Some time before she began going to school,
she had played a singular little prank with money.
A neighbour with whom she was friendly had sent the
girl with a small sum of money, as companion for her
own still younger little boy, to make some purchase
in a shop. As the elder of the two, she was bringing the
change from the purchase back to the house. But
when she met the neighbour’s servant-maid in the

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street, she flung the money down on the pavement.
In the analysis of this action, even to herself inexplic-
able, the thought of Judas occurred to her, when he
flung away the silver pieces gained by him through the
betrayal of his Master. She declared that she was
certainly acquainted with the story of the Passion
before she went to school. But in what manner could
she have identified herself with Judas ?

At the age of three and a half she had a nursemaid
of whom she was extremely fond. This girl had a
love-affair with a doctor, and visited his surgery with
the child. It appears that the child was the witness
of various sexual proceedings. Whether she saw the
doctor give money to the nursemaid is not certainly
established; there is, however, no doubt that the girl
gave the child little presents of money to ensure her
silence, and that purchases (probably sweets) were
made with these on the way home. It is possible, too,
that the doctor himself occasionally gave money to
the child. Nevertheless the child betrayed the girl
to her mother out of jealousy. She played so osten-
tatiously with the pfennigs she had brought home that
the mother could not but ask: ‘Where did you get
that money ?’ The maid was dismissed.

To take money from anyone had thus early come
to mean for her the yielding of the body, the erotic
relation. To take money from her father was equiva-
lent to a declaration of love. The phantasy that her
father was her lover was so seductive that the childish
desire for colours for the Easter eggs was easily, by
its aid, indulged in spite of the prohibition. But she
could not confess to the appropriation of the money;
she was obliged to disavow it, because the motive of
the deed, unknown to herself, could not be confessed.
The father’s chastisement was thus a refusal of the
tenderness offered him, a humiliation, and so it broke
her spirit. During the treatment a period of severe
depression ensued, the explanation of which led to her
remembering the events described, when I was once

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obliged to copy that humiliation by asking her not to
bring me any more flowers.

It will scarcely be necessary, for the psycho-analyst,
to insist upon the fact that in this child’s little experi
ence we are confronted with one of those extremely
common cases of persistence of early anal erotism in
the later erotic life. Even the desire to paint the eggs
with colours derives from the same source.

II

A woman, now very ill as the consequence of a dis-
appointment in life, was in earlier years a particularly
healthy, truth-loving, earnest and admirable girl, and
became a tender-natured woman. But still earlier, in
the first years of her life, she had been a wilful and dis-
contented child, and though she developed fairly early
into an excessively good and conscientious one, there
were occurrences in her schooldays which, when she
fell ill, caused her deep remorse and were regarded by
her as proofs of fundamental depravity. Memory told
her that she had frequently in those days bragged and
lied. Once, on the way home, a schoolfellow boasted :
‘Yesterday we had ice at dinner.’ She answered :
‘Oh, we have ice every day.’ In reality she did not
know what ice at dinner could mean ; she knew ice
only in the long blocks in which it is carted about,
but she perceived that there was something grand in
having it for dinner, and so she would not be excelled
by her schoolfellow.

When she was ten years old they were given in
their drawing-lesson the task of drawing a circle in
free-hand. But she made use of the compasses, thus
easily producing a perfect circle, and showed her
achievement triumphantly to her neighbour in class.
The teacher came up, heard her boasting, discovered
the marks of the compasses in the delineation of the
circle, and took the girl to task. But she stubbornly
denied it, would not be abashed by any proofs, and took

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refuge in sullen silence. The teacher conferred with
her father; both were influenced by the girl’s usual
good behaviour to decide against any further notice of
the occurrence.

This child’s two lies were instigated by the same
complex. As the eldest of five children, the little girl
early manifested an unusually strong attachment to
her father, which was destined in later years to wreck
her happiness in life. But she could not long escape
the discovery that her beloved father was not so great
a personage as she was inclined to think him. He
had to struggle against money-difficulties; he was not
so powerful nor so distinguished as she had imagined.
This departure from her ideal she could not put up
with. Since, as women do, she based all her ambition
upon the beloved man, it became a dominating idea
with her that she must support her father against the
world. So she boasted to her schoolfellows, in order
not to have to belittle her father. When, later on,
she learnt to translate ice for dinner by ‘glace’, the
path lay open for her remorse about this reminiscence
to take its course as a dread of pieces or splinters of
glass.

The father was an excellent draughtsman, and had
often enough called forth the delight and wonderment
of the children by exhibitions of his skill. In her
identification of herself with her father, she had in
school drawn that circle which she could produce
successfully only by underhand means. It was as
though she wanted to boast: ‘Look here—see what
my father can do’! The consciousness of guilt that
hung round her excessive fondness for her father found
its outlet in the attempted deception; a confession was
impossible for the same reason that was given in the
earlier observation—it could not but have been the
confession of the hidden incestuous love.

We should not think lightly of such episodes in
child-life. It would be a grave misconception to read
into such childish errors the prognosis of a developing

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immoral character. Nevertheless, they are intimately
connected with the most powerful motivations of the
childish soul, and are prophetic of tendencies which
will take shape either in the later destiny or in a future
neurosis.