from: Melanie Klein, Contributions to Psychoanalysis

When I showed him the toys I had put ready, he looked at them without the faintest interest. I took a big train and put it beside a smaller one and called him ‘Daddy-Train’ and ‘Dick-Train’. Thereupon he picked up the train I called ‘Dick’ and made it roll to the window and said, ‘station’. I explained, ‘The station is mummy, Dick is going into mummy.’

He left the train, ran into the space between the outer and inner doors of the room, shutting himself in, saying ‘dark’, and ran out again directly. He went through this performance several times. I explained to him, ‘It is dark inside mummy. Dick is inside dark mummy.’

Meantime he picked up the train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors. While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said twice in a questioning way, ‘Nurse?’........

As his analysis progressed Dick had also discovered the washbasin as symbolising the mother’s body, and he displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted with water.