The idea of birth or re-birth which we here meet with, plays of itself, as we have already indicated, a part of very great importance in the unconscious mental life of many individuals[53], a part indeed sometimes of even greater significance than that of the idea of returning to the mother's womb, with which it is so frequently associated. In its indirect (displaced) representation in consciousness, this idea of birth or re-birth will find expression as an emergence from any of the places which serve as symbols for the womb--an island, grave, room, church or other building, or again--and very typically--in the process of forcing one's way through a tunnel, narrow passage, staircase or other enclosed space, out into some relatively open locality. More especially, however, is the idea connected in one way or another with a passage through or out of water--a pond, river, canal, lake or the sea. It is thus for instance that it appears in a typical form of myth relating to the birth of some heroic personage (_e. g._ Moses, Kama, Perseus, Romulus, Siegfried, Lohengrin) in which the birth is symbolically represented by the child's floating on the water in a cradle, boat or basket[54].
Birth phantasies of this kind are frequently accompanied by the idea of difficulty or danger and by a corresponding emotion of fear. According to Freud[55], the connection between fear and the act of birth is a very intimate one; birth with its attendant profound changes of physiological and environmental conditions and its manifold dangers and discomforts, having become, as it were, the prototype of all situations of a threatening or disquieting character or in which life itself appears to be menaced. Our word Anxiety--like the French Angoisse, the German Angst, the Latin anxius, angere, angustus, the Greek [Greek: anchô], all of which appear to be connected with the Sanskrit anhus or anhas, signifying narrowness or constriction--bears witness to the fundamental association of fear with pressure and shortness of breath, which--the former owing to the passage through the narrow vagina, the latter to the interruption of the foetal circulation--constitute the most menacing and terrifying aspects of the birth process.