THE BLACK CAT
853
mockery of all, returns to haunt her terrified child in the very
sim–
ilitude of utmost affection, by sharing his nights for, during the day,
"the creature left me no moment alone," and, in the night
"I
started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to find the hot
breath of
the thing
upon my face, and its vast weight-an incarnate
Night Mare that
I
had no power to shake off-incumbent eternally
upon my
heart!"
......
Thus, in this form of neurotic anxiety, unconscious memories of times
spent as a child, in his mother's bed, were to return to the repressed,
the impotent Poe. These voluptuous sensations of body-heat and nur–
turing protection with others, more openly erotic, communicated by
contact with the loved body necessarily reappear, as a result of the
subsequent repression, in the form of morbid anxiety.
I
am reminded here of what
I
was once told by myoId nurse, a
Corsican both devoted and primitive. One must never, she said, leave
a baby alone in a room with a cat, for the cat will always seek the
warmth of the baby's chest and the babe will be stifled. Again, on
the backs of baptismal certificates, we find, among other things,
im–
portant to note, generally pious in intent, the following notice:
"The Church, which watches not only over the eternal salvation of
its little ones, but also seeks to prolong their days, strictly prohibits
mothers and nurses from allowing infants in their care to sleep in the
same bed, owing to the many unfortunate accidents which often result
from such imprudence.
mo
The first of these warnings, that of my good nurse, must be but
another form of the second, that of the Church, in which we see
the mother, in the totem guise of the cat, animistically conceived by
her primitive Corsican mind. That the word
nightmare
should, by
derivation, be "a female spirit or monster supposed to beset people by
night,"ll associated with those suffocating feelings characteristic of
anxiety dreams, may again derive from a similar phantasy based on
unconscious reminiscences of early contacts, in bed, with the warmth
and softness and, at the same time, overpowering bulk of the
mother's body. Be that as it may, the criminal in our tale feels
that "beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble rem–
nant of the good within me succumbed." Evil thoughts torment him
and his moodiness increases "to hatred of all things and of all man-
