Geoscience Reference
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street” between experts and nonexperts. It is “fundamentally a citizen science
endeavor.” 30 Yet Internet-based questionnaires have radically constricted
such exchanges. Nineteenth-century observers were free to modify the terms
of a survey or replace it with a free-form letter. Today, data that do not it the
expected format never reach scientists at all.
Fear
In 1908, three days after Christmas, an earthquake and tsunami killed more
than eighty thousand people in southern Italy. Four weeks earlier, the Swiss
psychoanalyst Carl Jung had welcomed his second child into the world.
Jung's four-year-old daughter had been peppering her parents with ques-
tions about the baby, refusing to believe it had been brought by a stork.
Then she overheard the adults discussing the Italian disaster, and her curios-
ity took a new turn:
She repeatedly asked her grandmother to tell her how the earth shook, how
the houses fell in and many people lost their lives. After this she had noctur-
nal fears, she could not be alone, her mother had to go to her and stay with
her; otherwise she feared that an earthquake would happen, that the house
would fall and kill her. . . . Many means of calming her were tried, thus she
was told, for example, that earthquakes only occur where there are volcanoes.
But then she had to be satisfied that the mountains surrounding the city were
not volcanoes. This reasoning led the child by degrees to a desire for learning,
as strong as it was unnatural at her age, which showed itself in a demand that
all the geological atlases and text-books should be brought to her from her
father's library. For hours she rummaged through these works looking for
pictures of volcanoes and earthquakes, and asking questions continually.
At last, the girl was given a more plausible account of human reproduction
(this time with a botanical theme). With that, her fear of earthquakes “en-
tirely vanished.” Jung even tested her with illustrations of disaster scenes:
“Anna remained unaffected, she examined the pictures with indifference,
remarking, 'These people are dead; I have already seen that quite often.' The
picture of a volcanic eruption no longer had any attraction for her. Thus all
her scientific interest collapsed and vanished as suddenly as it came.” 31
Jung wrote the incident up as the case of “Little Anna,” and it figures
in the history of psychoanalysis as a counterpart to Freud's “Little Hans,”
revealing the neurotic effects of sublimation in children. Jung used it to
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