We have now reached a point in our discussion at which Birth and womb phantasies we may perhaps profitably pause awhile to consider a group of phantasies, which, on account of their widespread occurrence and curious character, would seem to deserve some very special attention at the hands of the psychologist and anthropologist. The phantasies in question are those which psycho-analysts have found to cluster round the idea of returning to the mother\'s womb and of resuming there the intra-uterine life enjoyed by the child in the pre-natal stages of its existence,—an idea which is discoverable (usually of course in a symbolic form) in many myths, legends, dreams, reveries and symptomatic actions. It is very frequently associated with the further idea of birth or re-birth, and it is in this form that the phantasy was first described by Freud[46]. In consciousness this phantasy of returning Manifestations of the desire to return to the womb to the womb may clothe itself as an idea of being in an enclosed, dark, solitary or inaccessible place, safe from outside dangers or disturbances. Its influence can probably be traced in the pleasure that many persons find in the retirement to small islands, mountain tops or other places isolated from the rest of the world, in the "cosiness" of small rooms or closets or in the comfort which may be experienced in snuggling under the bed-clothes in the presence............