What gives a child a sense of inferiority? He sees grownups do
things that he cannot do or that he is not permitted to do.

The phallus has much to do with inferiority. Small boys are
often ashamed of the size of their phallus, girls often feel in-
ferior because they lack a phallus. I am inclined to think that
the importance of the phallus as a power symbol is mainly due
to the mystery and taboo associated with it by moral education.
Repressed thoughts about the phallus come out as fantasies.
The mysterious thing that is guarded so carefully by mother
and nurse takes on an exaggerated importance. We see this in
stories of the wonderful power of the phallus. Aladdin rubs his
lamp--masturbation--and all the pleasures of the world come
to him. Similarly, children have fantasies which make excre-
ment a matter of great importance.

A fantasy is always egoistic. It is a dream with the dreamer
as hero or heroine. It is a story of the world as it ought to be. The
world we adults enter through a whisky glass or through the
pages of a novel or through the doors of a movie is the world
that the child enters through the door of fantasy. Fantasy is al-
ways an escape from reality--a world of wish-fulfillment, a
world with no boundaries. The lunatic goes there on a jaunt.
But fantasies are also quite usual in the normal child. The
world of fantasy is a more attractive world than the dream
world. In dreams we have nightmares; but in fantasy, we have
a certain control; and we fantasy only that which pleases the
ego.

When I taught school in Germany, I had a ten-year-old
Jewish girl as a pupil. The child had many fears. She was

-133-