[Sidenote: The literal interpretation of the womb and birth phantasies]
[Sidenote: Sexual significance of the phantasies]
All these interpretations are probably correct, so far as they go and as regards certain cases. Certainly the desire for the preservation or recovery of youth, the attainment of immortality, the ensuring of a good harvest or even the felt need of spiritual regeneration are sufficiently strong and recurrent motives of the human mind to justify their frequent appearance in symbolic form. Nevertheless, from what we know of the conditions governing the most deeply rooted and widespread human phantasies and from the general laws which underlie the use of symbolism[63], it would seem likely that in a considerable number of cases the meaning of the ideas of re-entering the womb and of re-birth is not exhausted by these interpretations. The frequency and relative uniformity of these womb and birth phantasies make it probable that, in one of their aspects at least, they are no mere symbols but represent things actually desired on their own account. The actual return to the womb does, as we have seen, represent the extreme expression of the tendency to escape from the troubles of the outer world to a condition in which there is complete immunity from effort, responsibility, difficulty and danger. Further, psychoanalytic investigation of the womb and birth phantasies as they occur in individuals seems to show that they often have a _sexual_ or quasi-sexual significance, being the expression of sexual tendencies and arousing sexual feeling[64]. Through the extreme intimacy which a child establishes with its mother by the processes of gestation and birth, it may find in imagination by means of these processes a not unsuitable method of gratifying the sexual inclinations which it feels towards its mother; and the phantasies of entering or emerging from the womb or of being carried in it may thus come to take on a directly sexual character, in the same way as any other of the numerous activities or processes associated with erotic feeling. It is probable too that in men and boys, the process of passing to or from the womb through the vagina is treated, on the principle of _totum pro parte_, as a substitute for the more directly sexual act appropriate to later life--the individual having enjoyed, on the occasion of his birth, the privilege of being in that place, whence his incestuous desires impel him to return. In this sense then, the womb and birth phantasies express the incestuous tendencies in a milder and less objectionable form[65].