Preyer gives the sixth and seventh month as the date at which his boy began to cry at the sight of a strange face. In one set of notes sent me it was remarked that a child four months and a half old would cry on being nursed by a stranger. To be nursed by a stranger, however, is to have the whole baby world revolutionized: little wonder, then, that it should bring the feeling of strangeness and homelessness (unheimlichkeit).
Here, too, curious differences soon begin to disclose themselves, some children being decidedly more sociable toward strangers than others. It would be curious to compare the age at which children begin to take kindly to strangers. Preyer gives nineteen months as the date at which his boy surmounted his timidity; but it is probable that the transition occurs at very different dates in the case of different children.
I should like to add that the little boy to whom I referred just now displayed the same signs of uneasiness at seeing old friends after an interval, as at returning to old scenes. When eight months old "he moaned in a curious way when his nurse (of whom he was very fond) came home after a fortnight's holiday." Here, however, the signs of fear seem to be less pronounced than in the case of returning to the old room. It would be difficult to give the right name to this curious moan.
Partial alteration of the surroundings frequently brings about a measure of this same mental uneasiness. C's disturbance at the age of twelve weeks at finding his mother in a new dress is paralleled by the apprehensions of Preyer's boy when one year and five months old on seeing his mother in a black dress. The second observation, read in the light of the first, seems to suggest that a change from the customary rather than anything appalling looking in the black color itself was here the source of the boy's trouble.[1] This is borne out by another observation sent me. A child manifested between the ages of six or eight months and two years and a half the most marked repugnance to new clothes, so that the authorities found it very difficult to get them on. It is presumable that the donning of new apparel disturbed too rudely the child's sense of his proper self, and begot an uncanny feeling of another put in place of the old familiar child.
In certain cases the introduction of new natural objects of great extent and impressiveness will produce a similar effect of childish anxiety, as though they made too violent a change in the surroundings. One of the best illustrations of this obtainable from the life of an average well-to-do child is the impression produced by a first visit to the sea. Preyer's boy, at the age of
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 181. Compare the alarming effect of the father's putting on a big hat, p. 117.
