122	personality of the preschool child
The associations might be translated: The mother is in bed be-
cause the baby is cooked in her womb, baked in the furnace. But
there is one contradiction here that is significant of the thinking of
the child, namely: "[The mother] is in bed. She's . . . peekin'
out of the window." The thinking of children is a symbolic think-
ing. The word "symbol," from the Greek symballem (literally, to
throw together), means: elements thrown together, forming an
object, animate or inanimate, standing for or calling up something
intellectual. Children's associations are not reproductions of real
facts, but different real facts are thrown together to form a certain
concept. Whether these different facts fit together in reality is of
no concern to the child; we may say the child thinks, speaks, and
expresses himself in the form of a rebus.* The contradiction that
the mother "is in bed" and at the same time "peekin* out of the
window" can be explained in such a way. On the wall of the house
with the window out of which the mother is peeking, two little babies
are climbing upwards till, as we might easily realize, they will enter
through the window and come to the mother. The idea that children
come through the window, fall from the sky, or are brought by the
stork is very familiar to children.
The picture thus represents the three phases of birth, just as
early medieval art shows different phases of a happening in one
picture. The three phases are: the baking of the child, the child
entering through the window, and the child forcing the mother into
bed.	- .: f/^l^l
According to children's concepts, babies come not only through
the window, but also through the chimney. They are brought as
presents by Santa Glaus, who comes down the chimney. When the
observer asked our child on another day: "Will you draw a picture
for me? Of your family?" the child answered (Fig. 35) :
No, Fm gonna draw a picture of someone else, someone you don't know.
^be will look awful. No, she will look beautiful. But first I'm gonna draw a
picture of a Saata Clans. [Does so,] Now I'll draw a picture of a lovely queen.
She will look beautiful. First her eyes and her nose, those are her nostrils, and
l*er month and her crown.
child had used the same expression before: "She will look
iwftfl, &o, she will look beautiful" with reference to her mother*
Ezieydopedic Dictionary (Chicago, 1941) explains: A rebus is a set of
yafe w&ttm by figures or pictures of objects whose names resemble in sound those
or fbe syiyfales of which t&ey are composed; thus **I can see you" might be
jiW^ &5T %roes «$i m e#e» a can, the sea, and a ewe; hence a kind of puzzle made
©t anfilt figures ^ j&fees.