"At the age of not quite three, I realized that my recently born sister had grown in my mother’s uterus. I was not at all pleased about the new baby and suspected, gloomily, that my mother’s body might be harbouring yet more children. The wardrobe symbolized the maternal womb to me; I therefore demanded to see inside the cupboard, and to that end I applied to my big brother. As other material shows, an older brother can replace a father as a little boy’s rival. Apart from my well-founded suspicion that this brother was responsible for putting the absent nursemaid in prison, I also feared that he had somehow implanted the new-born child in my mother’s body. My sense of disappointment when the wardrobe proved empty arose from the superficial motivation of my childish demand, and was misplaced in relation to my deeper level of feeling. On the other hand, my great satisfaction at noting my mother’s slender figure on her return is fully comprehensible only on that deeper level."
Freud in The psychopathology of everyday life
