…Each researcher can check this himself by accompanying a child, who knows such verses, on a playground, and then unobserved pays attention what happens, if the child starts to exchange his verses with other children. The reaction is always the same: the other children try to silence him, because one doesn’t sing such things in earshot of the adults. With repeated head turning (to see whether the adult doesn’t have really "anything noticed") the group departs then and unites, mostly with the back to the adults (that is: to the playground benches), in the most distant part of the place again. Now the children are quietly singing or declaiming. Laughter is suppressed immediately. They behave like a group of adults who feels in the minority and gives the impression of conspiracy, even if this group conspires against nothing and nobody. Thereby always the "best protected" middle-class children will be the most ardent ones. The more carefully the middle-class adult tries to keep away his child from erotic experiences and their precipitation in the "vulgar" child verse, even more keen the child is to learn with such meetings and to emit ostentatiously his knowledge. Only the children who grow up in widely enlightened parental homes are indifferent in such verses…
… Here is the secret of the fascination of certain verses. Here is also the reason of their longevity. Here, finally, is the proof that it isn’t a matter of parroted experiences of the adults, in spite of the non-childish origin of the raw material. Completely certain sentences, completely certain reminiscences, completely certain word pictures - and only these - are taken over from certain children at certain times of their development, are processed, changed unconsciously and passed on with tough perseverance. What are now these word pictures? These are – at least in the small-middle-class and medium middle-class of the German-speaking towns from which all these verses originate – the verbal precipitation of the taboos and prohibitions which are imposed on the children by their parents, their teachers, their neighbours and the whole middle-class establishment. These prohibitions are worked up not directly, not literally, but show with the smaller children indirectly via oral, anal and oedipal linguistic pictures, with bigger via phallic and in general genitale word pictures…
…Not the adult is the parent of the child, but the child is the parent of the adult. Each adult was originally child, and all what he thinks, feels and does as an adult, goes back on thinking, feeling and doing in his childhood. Thus the sex life of the child may be never defined as misunderstood imitation of the sex life of the adult. In truth it is the sex life of the adult, which is a misunderstood imitation of the childish sex life. Instead of regarding the child verses as a distorted form of the adult verses, we must recognize the adult verses as adistorted form of the child verse…
…The middle-class society educates its children from birth to the seizure of power. The son should become like the father, the daughter as well as the mother, so that they can continue what the parents have built up. As a result of this education the civil child stops very early developing and realizes instead of this the ambitions of the parents. Also the opposition of the civil child, the always new repeated attempt to get selfrespect by doing the opposite of that what the adult citizen wants from him, represents only another facet of that class structure in which the civil child, even if he protests, only reacts against the status quo, but doesn’nt postulate an alternative order. Rests of this alternative order exist - they exist even in the middle class -, but they exist in secrecy, as it were in the childish underground: in those creative activities of the civil child which he hides systematically from his parents and educators. Only there the civil child stops satisfying the adult citizen. Only there the civil child is generally a child and not a miniature adult…
…Each particle of this creative strength has been bought with lifelong suffering, because the misery, which speaks from these verses, doesn’t stop with the end of the childhood. It stamps the adult life of these children and makes them to what they are: Human beings, who conquer the outer space, send probes to other galaxies but who cannot live in peace with their neighbours, with their husbands, with their own children. The sexual merit of these verses is not the expression of grown sexual desires, but a desperate indemnification, the bleeding stigma of the prohibitions with which the childhood in the middle-class society is restricted and destroyed…
…What the adult feels as "humor" in these verses is the product of intensive suffering, because I accept Freud's theory of the joke as a product of a conflict. Therefore, I believe that a child and a youth verse reveals deeper conflicts, the more “wittily" it sounds in our ears. The building of the "creative", the "imaginative" and "witty" child verse is a mausoleum in which the lost, the sacrificed luck of the childhood lies laid out. The more concisely a children rhyme sounds, the more immensely must have been the displacement forces which have transformed the conflict into a pithy terseness…
Ernest Borneman
from: "Die Ur-Szene (Das prägende Kindheitserlebnis und seine Folgen)", S.172-238, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag Frankfurt am Main