From the 1930s to 1940s, the books came under the scrutiny of psychoanalytic literary critics. Freudians believed that the events in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" reflected the personality and desires of the author, because the stories which it was based on had been told spontaneously. In 1933, Anthony Goldschmidt introduced "the modern idea of Carroll as a repressed sexual deviant", theorizing that Alice served as Carroll's representation in the novel; Goldschmidt's influential work, however, may have been meant as a hoax. Regardless, Freudian analysis found in the books symbols of "classic Freudian tropes": "a vaginal rabbit hole and a phallic Alice, an amniotic pool of tears, hysterical mother figures and impotent father figures, threats of decapitation , swift identity changes".