I V P, S J \ . F 9 A .L FORNIA, SAN DIEGO 3 1822017065541 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. SAN DIEGO 3 1822017065541 Central University Library University of California, San Diego Please Note: This item is subject to recall. Date Due FE8 o /, 1994 r-r-ri -i 1 1ftO7 FEB 1 3 1997 1o/v Z IVi 1 Excerpts from the Professional Press on the work of DR. WM. STEKEL We have lacked thus far a systematic clinical application of Freudian analysis. Stekel's work fills this need. Jung, in MKDIZ. KLINIK. ... A standard work ; a milestone in the psychiatric and psycho- therapeutic literature. Gen. Sanitatsrat Dr, Oerster, in DIE NEUE GENERATION. It would be regrettable if the work did not attract fully the atten- tion of the scientific world ; its deep sobriety and the fulness of its details render it a treasury of information, primarily for the physician, but, in large measure, of interest also to the educationist, the minister, the teacher and, not least, to the student of criminology. . . . Horch, in ARCHIV p. KKIMINALOGIE. These case histories will be read with great interest by everyone, including those who are inclined to maintain a sceptical attitude towards psychoanalysis. Eulenburg, in HEDIZINISCHE ELINIK. Stekel's work teaches practitioners a great many things they did not know before, particularly about the si|?nificance of psychology and sexual science in the practice of medicine. Eitschmann, in INTEKNAT. ZEITSCHHIFT F. PSYCHOANALYSE. It is Stekel's extraordinary merit that he compels us to take into account a pressing mass of data which he brings to light with a scien- tific zeal which is unfortunately still rare, facts and observations so penetrating, so true to life that these often render unnecessary any formal statement of the obvious deductions which flow from them. DIE NEUE GENERATION. The most modern problems are considered, new viewpoints are brought out, while the excesses in the technique and interpretation of the earlier stages of psychoanalysis are avoided. Kermauner, in WIENER KLINISCHE WOCHENSCHRIFT. All in all, Stekel's is a work for which I bespeak the widest inter- est not only among physicians, but also among jurists, educationists, sociologists and ministers. Only an understanding of the mental life of the individual will yield a proper view of our social life. Liepmann, in ZEITSCHRIFT F. SEXUALWISSENSCH. The work is a treasury for all who have occasion to probe the depths of human life and should be a source of considerable information and stimulus to every jurist who takes in earnest his professional duties. Geh. Justizrat Dr. Horch, in ARCHIV F. KKIMINALOGIE. It does not matter from what angle the work of Stekel is ap- proached. Any consideration of it reveals rich material. Stekel is a writer who handles his subjects in a lavish manner ; lavish, but with that restraint which bends all to the urgency of his themes. He evi- dently approaches his clinical work with the same exuberant interest. There he reaps through psychoanalysis a rich harvest of results. He has collected these results and presented them for the dissemination of such knowledge of the sexual disturbances as he thus obtained. Facts are there in great number. They cannot be gainsaid. Stekel's own evaluation of such facts and his earnest plea for their consideration, both by the medi- cal profession and by the society of men and women where these facts exist, can speak only for themselves to the truly conscientious reader. There is not much in these books that the psychotherapeutist can afford to pass over. NEW YORK MEDICAL JOURNAL. SEX AND DREAMS THE LANGUAGE OF DREAMS BY DR. WILLIAM STEKEL (VIENNA) Authorized translation by JAMES S. VAN TESLAAR, M.D. (For sale only to Members of the Medical Profession) BOSTON RICHARD G. BADGER THE OORHAM PRESS COPYEIGHT, 1922, BY RlCHAHD G. BADGER All Rights Reserved Made in the United States of America Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company, New York, U. S. A. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE Dr. Wm. StekePs Language of Dreams, of which the first portion is herewith presented to the English reading professional ranks, is intended as a guide to the interpretation of the Unconscious for those who are concerned professionally with nervous dis- orders. The balance of the work will appear as soon as the demand for it will make itself felt. The interpretation of dreams has become an in- dispensable aid. Without the information it yields regarding the operations of man's Unconscious, the rational management of nervous ills is well-nigh in- conceivable. The art of dream interpretation has a wider field of application and elsewhere Dr. Stekel himself has applied the revelations of dream analy- sis to other fields of scientific inquiry. But the present work, The Language of Dreams, is devoted almost entirely to correlating the subjects' dreams with the neurotic character traits which confront the psychotherapeutist, the general practitioner and the specialist alike, and which often baffle their best efforts in the absence of the kind of knowledge re- vealed through this very art of dream interpretation. As one of the pioneers in this great work Dr. 5 6 Translator's Preface Stekel, of course, is well versed in the theoretical im- plications and in the theories which form the foun- dation of dream analysis. Nevertheless in his Lan- guage of Dreams he has kept strictly to the practi- cal task of showing "how the analysis is done." The principles of dream interpretation are not discussed abstractly. They are revealed and outlined briefly in connection with typical illustrative dreams. Throughout the work the emphasis is upon practice. Abstract speculation is reduced to a minimum. Moreover, in preparing this volume, the author appreciated that it must be made serviceable to many practitioners who have had little or no pre- vious training in this kind of work. The contents are carefully graded, the interpretations proceeding from the simpler dream elements to the more com- plex, and from the superficial to the deeper layers of symbolization. At the same time the author him- self warns us that the whole art of dream analysis is but a recent scientific procedure. Numerous de- tails remain to be worked out. The accepted gener- alizations, he points out, should be regarded in the light of working hypotheses rather than as final principles, and the consulting psychologist should test them out for himself. The interpretation of dreams is far from being as easy a task as appears at first glance. There are numerous pitfalls for the unwary. Dream analy- sis is a task that calls for unusual candor and pa- Translator's Preface 7 tience. To do the work successfully presupposes an immense amount of general knowledge and a broad cultural background. It is an art that involves qualifications of the highest order. Above all, one must be willing to go through a rigorous mental dis- cipline in order to approach the task of dream in- terpretation without any preconceived bias and without the handicap of subtle emotional resistances. But after one has schooled himself to the task the results are most gratifying. Properly carried out the analysis of dreams reveals depths of the human soul hitherto unsuspected. It fortifies our profes- sional endeavours with knowledge of the highest or- der. To adopt the latest scientific methods thus in- creasing our professional efficiency and enlarging our capacity for serving our fellow-men is a grati- fying achievement. The psychology and technique of dream interpre- tation, so skilfully presented by Dr. Stekel in the work of which the present volume is the first portion, constitutes a most important method for getting at the vital facts underlying our mental functions dur- ing health and disease. The time has come for the English reading pro- fessional ranks to profit by Dr. StekePs expert ap- plication of psychoanalytic principles. Those who desire to penetrate the riddle of dreams as a means towards increasing their knowledge of human nature as it portrays itself reflected in nervous ills should 8 Translator's Preface find the present work an invaluable aid. The prepa- ration of the English version has been undertaken with that end in view. VAN TESLAAE August 10, 1922, Brookline, Mass. CONTENTS CHAPTBB PAGE I The meaning of symbolism What is a symbol? The dream about the slain woman Lovesick hu- manity Dream of the jealous father Dream and myth 15 II The analysis of a simple dream The dream about the telephone The ballad of the poor eagle What Mrs. A. thinks of the act of telephoning 55 III Superficial aspects of dream interpretation The moon and the earth The "Rathaus" dream Representation of unbridled life 73 IV Symbolism of the sinking tree Representation of Mother Earth The fear of self 93 V Dream masks Pursuit dreams The political dream about Bismarck The wonderful villa The dream about the baker Contrary meaning of aboriginal words The psychology of the Don Juan type Savings bankbook and love Evil thoughts of childhood The skillful fencerThe dark man, a symbol for death 107 VI Dream masks, Cont. Transposition from below, upwards, and from the front, backwards Scorn under the mask of gentility A dream which must be interpreted in reverse sense The second symbolic equation The symbolization of scorn- ful love Why the child calls "Papa!" A bio- graphic dream 139 9 10 Contents CHAPTER FAGS VII Dream masks Displacement and fusion The brave servant Criminal (asocial) instincts . . 161 VIII The splitting of personality in the dream The dream of a judge : villa and prison The museum dream 175 IX Transformations and bisexuality The meaning of five fingers An old dream in a new light Bi- sexual symbols All dreams are bisexual How the dreamer seeks the male in the woman . . 187 X Symbolism of left and right in dreams The cousin as substitute for incest The father must leave Symbolism of the spiral Dream about diplo- matic behavior 213 XI The dreams of a doubter The dream about sweets The dream about stolen books The sec- ond version 237 XII The symbolism of life and death in the dream The long sharp sword in the dream Masturba- tion represented by pocket The matricide idea Blood for spermatic fluid 251 XIII Speech in dreams The symbolism of conversation Color symbolism of Mr. S 271 XIV Representation of the emotions in the dream The dream of "getting ready" A clergyman's dream The root of foot fetichism Triumph over the father Dream thoughts and compulsive images Infantile roots of the fear of contact Why the dreamer "wonders" 281 Index of Subjects 315 Index of Names 318 Index of Symbols 319 AUTHOR'S PREFACE Every mental activity is dominated by the law of "bipolarity" : to every instinct there corresponds a counter-instinct; to every virtue, a vice; to every manifestation of strength, some weakness. One can never understand the nature of man so long as one fails to take into consideration this fact. My work treats of the secrets of the human soul. It would be unfair to appraise humanity on the basis of the results of these investigations. For this work deals specifically with the evil in human na- ture, and only with the evil. But we must not for- get that there is also another side. Perhaps I can make myself clear best through an example: A stranger comes into some town unfamiliar to him; he looks over very thoroughly and with great enthusiasm its monuments of art; he is charmed by the beautiful sights which culture has provided. He then departs believing he has become thoroughly acquainted with the town. Another traveller says to himself, after having gone through the program suggested by the usual travel- ler's guide : Now I want to look into the reverse side 11 12 Author's Preface of the life of this place! He knows that the pom- pous formal life has its seamy side, and he discovers once more that only he is able truly to appraise the light side of the picture who has familiarized him- self also with its shadows. My investigations are concerned with the founda- tions of the human soul. They are not intended for inexperienced lay persons whose minds may be con- fused rather than enlightened by these investiga- tions. Physicians, jurists, mental hygienists, edu- cators and psychologists will undoubtedly find herein a certain amount of inspiration and their mental horizon will be enlarged. It is high time that we devote greater attention to the facts of our dream life. This field opens to us the opportunity of acquiring insight into the very depths of the human soul and thus enables us, for the first time, to penetrate the true character of human nature. In the conception of this book, the result of many years of diligent labour, I have been guided pri- marily by practical requirements. The theoretical aspects and the past literature concerning dreams have been covered so well by Freud that I must re- fer all those interested to that author's fundamental and highly instructive work. My work should not be merely read, it must be tested out. I welcome every criticism so long as it is not dictated by blind prejudice, for the person Author's Preface 13 unfamiliar with the problem of dream interpreta- tion will be inclined to look upon some of the state- ments in the book as somewhat forced and perhaps artificial. This was my own experience, when I first began to devote myself to the subject of dreams. Con- viction cannot arise through reading alone; it fol- lows only after personally testing out the prin- ciples. I may point out, additionally, one fact : the inter- pretation of dreams is a science in the process of formation. Everything about it is in a state of flux, everything is in the process of becoming formulated. This book is but a rung in the ladder. Who can at this time measure the majestic heights even- tually to be attained by the structure to which the present work is but a stepping stone? STEKEL. THE MEANING OP THE SYMBOLISM WHAT IS A SYMBOL? THE DREAM ABOUT THE SLAIN WOMAN LOVESICK HUMANITY DREAM OF THE JEALOUS FATHER DREAM AND MYTH Wahrlich, wdren die Menschen sinniger, die feinen Winken der Natur zu beobachten und zu deuten, dieses Traumleben miisste sie aufmerksam machen. Sie mils st en finden, dass von dem gross en Rats el, nach dessen Losung sie durst en, die Natur uns hier schon die erste Sible eingeflustert hat. [Truly, if men were more sensitive to observe and interpret nature's delicate hints, they would be roused by their dream life. They would find that here nature has already disclosed the first hint of the great riddle which man is so thirsty to solve.] Kiirnburger SEX AND DREAMS The art of dream interpretation is a most an- cient one. Some of the oldest documents relate to dream interpretations. The dream was considered an intermediary between the higher forces of nature and mankind. Usually it was the voice of divinity that was speaking through the medium of dreams. But demons and evil powers, too, were capable of coming into contact with man through the dream life. That was a period which we, belonging to a sophisticated age, can hardly visualize. "The lights and shadows and the coloring, at any rate, have changed," says Nietzsche. "We no longer under- stand precisely how ancient mankind felt about the most ordinary and common facts of life about day- light and about waking up; for instance: because the ancients believed m dreams, their wdki/ng life had another coloring. 9 ' Contrary to the learned men, the simple folk have never looked upon dreams as "foam." Within their soul there persisted a belief in the reality of this 15 16 Sex and Dreams psychic experience. But the belief rested stub- bornly on what might be termed the "historic" background: the people wanted to interpret the future through the dream. The dream was looked upon as the infallible prophet. Whoever could in- terpret dreams possessed the gift to solve the rid- dle of the future. A derivation of this belief is the application of the dream to mercenary ends. The transposition of the dream pictures into figures is diligently practiced to this day and plays a great role among the people. 1 The "cultured" classes re- gard it as their duty superiority to smile at such practices. They look upon the dream as a mean- ingless play of the phantasy uncontrolled by con- sciousness. Even so, ordinary reflection should have suggested the thought that here was raw material of great psychic value, though in a distorted form. We ought to see what we can make out of it. Here and there an investigator occasionally tried to pene- trate the riddle of dreams. But these promising beginnings only led to far-fetched theories. 2 1 1 want to take this opportunity to state that I have not disdained to look over the various Egyptian and Persian dream books. I wanted to find out whether our knowledge derived through the modern analysis of dreams is in any way corrob- orated in the old writings. That is but rarely the case. The dream books, so-called, which circulate among the people, im- press me as being deliberate artefacts. The transposition of dream pictures into numbers is clearly traceable to the lottery game which is only a few centuries old. 1 The extensive literature on dreams has been adequately con- sidered by Freud to whose work the interested reader is referred. Meaning of Dreams 17 Anatole France is justified when he states : "I am firmly convinced that the power of dreams is greater than that of reality." The dream is the bridge be- tween the real and the supersensory world. The an- cient peoples knew this better than we. They be- lieved in dreams and through the dream they felt themselves nearer their divinity. Divinity is the projection of our ideal into in- finity. What we demand of our ideal self appears to us as God's command. All appearances of self are continually referred to an ideal that stands su- preme. Hence the first conception about the origins of dreams, that the dream is a gift sent down by the gods. The divine voice commands and warns, it annunciates and praises through the dream. The dream interpreter of former ages claimed the gift of understanding that secret language and to be able thereby to foretell the future. But not only is the ideal self projected into in- finity. The evil self is also refracted outwardly and it reflects back as temptation or as the influence of demonic powers. The naive conception of the mid- dle ages was that the dream represents a struggle between heaven and hell, a contest between God and Satan. That combat has always fascinated man's fancy. From Job and Jesus down to Faust and Parsifal, what a wealth of poetic creations ! It is the eternal warfare between instinct and re- pression, between man, in his primordial character, 18 Sex and Dreams and himself, under the tinsel of culture, which breaks forth in this wonderful symbolic picture. Our cul- ture requires the continual repression of our crav- ings. The higher man ascends upon the cultural scale the stricter are the laws which impose the ethical strictures of the society in which he finds himself. Culture means smooth-working inhibition. The greater the social freedom, i.e., the stronger the social rights of the individual, the smaller becomes the span of his individual freedom ; the stricter also the limitations which the individual must impose upon himself for the benefit of all. Social progress is based on the annihilation of individualism. The dream represents an indulgence in fancies without the intervention of consciousness or under a limited control by the latter. The dream is a hal- lucination. Consciousness is the bearer of inhibi- tions. The ethical self first assumes control of con- sciousness and then it attempts to penetrate into the depths of the unconscious. Hence the cleft which arises between the pictures of the waking self and the hallucinations of the dream. Conscience is the sum of all inhibitions of a religious and ethical character. The term conscience in itself shows that it pertains to a knowledge of good and evil. The primitive man has so such knowledge. He is famil- iar only with the promptings of his cravings; with unpleasure, which arises out of the non-fulfillment of wishes and with the pleasure which accompanies and The Wish-Fulfillment Theory 19 follows their gratification. The primordial man in us lives again in the dream. But the tremendous gap which exists between the requisites of our cultural and those of our elemental self leads eventually to a strange state of affairs. The cultural self knows not, or assumes not to know, the primordial self. It fails to recognize the lan- guage of the dream and thus carries out more com- pletely its attitude of "innocent" ignorance. For that reason, too, the dream portrays its images in a secret symbolic language. Its language is the lan- guage of the primordial man. For man's aborigi- nal ancestor also expressed himself in symbolic form. The earliest written documents are symbolic writings. A sword signifies fight, a tree nature, lightning divinity, etc. The art of dream interpre- tation consists of transposing this symbolic lan- guage into everyday .terms. What is the function of the dream? We pass over the old conception according to which the dream was merely a senseless play of mental ele- ments ; we disregard likewise the ancient hypotheses which were based on the premise of an intervention of evil powers. We turn directly to the theory of Freud, who regards the dream as a wish fulfillment. "Our relations to the world," states Freud in his latest writing on dreams, 1 "is from the outset such *Vorlesungen uber Psychoanalyse (Wien, 1920). 20 Sex and Dreams that we cannot endure it without a break. There- fore we withdraw from time to time into the prim- ordial state, that state which is characteristic of our intra-uterine existence. At least we create for ourselves an environment very close to it: warmth, darkness, and absence of stimuli. Some of us curl up and actually assume during sleep a position very close to that which is characteristic of the in- fant when resting within the mother-body. It looks as if the world does not possess us wholly as adults, it can lay claim only to two thirds of us: for one third of our existence we are as if we were yet un- born. Every rising in the morning is thus like a new birth." Hebbel has expressed the same thought more fittingly without recourse to the dubious notion of a sinking back into the intra-uterine state: "Sleep is a sinking into one's self." I have ex- pressed the same idea in my monograph, The Will to Sleep, as follows: "Sleep means reexperiencing one's past, forgetting one's present, and pre-feeling one's future." This one example from Freud's latest work is enough to show the one-sided character of his con- ception of dreams. The dream is and remains for him a wish fulfillment. Into this procrustean bed of wish he wedges in every dream. Thus he neg- lects altogether the telepathic dreams which do not happen to fit in with his theory. He does not be- lieve in telepathic dreams. But he brushes aside also The Wish-Fulfilment Theory 21 all other dreams, which we must recognize as denot- ing warning or anxiety as well as the dreams which we may call "instructive." Anxiety is always for him the sign of a repressed wish. But knowing that the dream portrays the eternal warfare between craving and inhibition, the struggle of man with himself under his dual aspect as the heir of primordial in- stincts and as the representative of culture, we must look upon the dream as a picture of both sides of the combat, a dramatization in which the cravings as well as the inhibitions find pictorial representa- tion, and in which even foreign thoughts may crop out through telepathic means. If one sees only the cravings, one may be easily led to the erroneous con- ception which I myself have held for a time, that the dream is merely a wish fulfillment. For back of every wish there always stands some craving: the sexual instinct, the nutritional instinct, the craving for power, for self-aggrandizement, etc. But if we investigate the inhibitions we find back of them also the influences of culture: warnings, preparation for the future, foreshawdoings, religiosity and moral restrictions of every kind. Perhaps my conception will be more clear if I con- trast it with Freud's in connection with a concrete illustration. In the work mentioned above Freud relates a peculiar dream and adds his interpreta- tion. He states: 22 Sex and Dreams "One of my patients had lost her father during the treatment. Since then she takes every oppor- tunity to find him again in her dreams. In one of her dreams the father appears in a certain connection . . . and says: 'It is a quarter past eleven, half past eleven, it is a quarter of twelve.' Towards the solution of this strange dream feature the patient recalls merely that the father always wanted to see the children gather for their meals on time. That undoubtedly had something to do with the dream element in question but this association yields no light on its meaning. On account of cer- tain considerations which arose in the course of the treatment the suspicion seemed justified at the time that a carefully repressed, critical revulsion against the beloved and honored father had its share in this dream. Continuing further her associations, ap- parently in a direction remote from the dream proper, the subject relates that she had listened the day before to a lengthy psychologic discussion when a relative said : 'The primordial man lives in each of us !' We now think we understand her. That gave her an excellent chance to conjure into life once more her deceased father. She made him in the dream the primordial man, by having him call out the quarter hours for the noon meal. (Urmensch- Uhrmensch, a play on words!)" Any one finding this play of words between Uhr- mensch, clock man, and Urmensch, primordial man, rather forced, will be informed by the genial master that the dream is capable of punning and wit. The dreamer wishes to see her father, and the obliging The WisJir-Fulfttment Theory 23 dream fulfills her wish. Therefore, a typical clear wish fulfillment, according to Freud. I would have conceived this dream as a warning. The death of her father had strongly influenced the patient and caused her thoughts to shift from worldly to super- mundane themes. She is interested in the question of life after death. This earthly life must be but a preparation for the life eternal. It is as if the father cried out to her: "Life is short! Use your days well! Soon twelve bells will strike (the ghost hour). Soon your day will be over!" The flight of time is very ingeniously indicated by the progressive admonition: "a quarter past eleven, half past eleven, a quarter of twelve." Since the neurosis expresses the struggle between craving and repression under the form of an ailment, we may appreciate the patient's trouble. A power draws her towards indulgence and enjoyment and another pulls her in the direction of renunciation and self- control. The father appears as the representative of authority (also of the divine) and admonishes her: "Renounce all earthly joys and prepare thy- self for God's judgment, for the life eternal. The day of judgment is near." But is this dream a wish fulfillment? If the father appeared in response to her wish, conjured up (hallucinatorily) by her yearning to see him again, would he have found no other words, no kindlier attitude, with which to approach his child? 24 Sex and Dreams I see in this dream merely the power of conscience. I sense the torturing anxiety, I note the racking re- gret over a life misspent or lost, I hear an anguish- ing outcry which fills me with compassion. This dream is a warning and it foreshadows at the same time the subject's future. She will continue to wander on the path of asceticism and self-denial. Letters of flame proclaim in the subject's dream the approach of that end which overtakes every one. And, what about the character of the dream? It is wish or a warning, according to the power (craving or inhibition) which pervades it. The dream seeks solutions for unsolvable problems. It is an apposition of past and present and a fore- shadowing of the future. Its realm is inexhaustible and it is not to be encased within the narrow limits of a formula. The dream is in fact as inexhaustible as the riddle of man and yet as transparent as man, provided one does not start out with any precon- ceived notions. Are the thoughts of a person in the waking state reducible to a single formula? Do we think merely in terms of wish fulfillment? This question is rendered superfluous when we take into consideration the factor of conscience alone. The dream is the stream of our mental life as it flows out of the unexplored depths through the filter of conscience and up to the level of awareness. Every falling asleep is a dying for the day. Every waking up is a rebirth. The thought of death re- Death m Dreams 25 veals itself in curious pictures in the dreams. Though we forget the fact of death during the day, and though the bustle of daily existence may stifle the voice of conscience, the dream brings back to our mind the eternal "memento mori !" Each one of us hears the admonishing voice: "It is a quarter of twelve!" And we hear it in the midst of our en- tangling wishes, we hear the swan song in the midst of all the frivolous cravings. And thus we die many times, and we pass again and again through the last accounting, thus we look over our past critically, appraisingly, amidst fears and regrets. Every night provides a cleansing purgatory for our world of thoughts. Within ;us lies heaven and earth, within us judge and defendant alike. It is as if the ideal which we have shifted to infinity at night finds the path back to us again, as if we are trying every night to overcome once more the de- mons which incite us from one indulgence to an- other and which fill our childish heart with envy and with feelings of revenge, with treacherous self- seeking and forbidden cravings. And every dream dramatizes plastically this bitter combat, every dream is a proof that humanity strives to grow out of itself and up towards unsuspected heights. In Grillparzer's * wonderful drama, Traum ein Leben, *Vid. Analysis of this drama in my: Poetry and Neurosis, Contributions to the Psychology of the Artist and of Creative Activity. English version by Dr. James S. Van Teslaar. 26 Sex and Dreams we find a wonderful expression of this function of the dream as a warning, as a picture of the struggle between craving and inhibition. The artist has furnished us in this poetic drama the key to the un- derstanding of dreams. But we must be grateful to Freud for having shown us the path leading into the realm of dreams and for having been the first to penetrate with the pioneer's keen eye the veil which has kept the dream a secret. To-day the interpretation of dreams has become an indispensable aid in the practice of psy- chotherapy. Any one intending to be helpful as a psychotherapeutist must familiarize himself with the art of dream interpretation. It is not an easy art to acquire. It requires spe- cial training and a great deal of patience. It in- volves careful testing for one's self of the results thus far gained until one acquires the requisite knowledge and conviction through personal observa- tion and experience. The proper schooling for the interpretation of dreams involves an appropriate new conception of language, the keen tracing of double meanings and familiarity with symbolisms and with the processes of dream distortion. The role of symbolism in human life is not yet sufficiently appreciated. "All art is symbolism," states Feuchtersleben. "The most important task of my career," states Hebbel, speaking as an artist, Symbolism 27 "I regard the symbolization of my inner life.'* Sym- bolism pervades all our existence. Language, cus- toms, beliefs and thoughts are more or less cryptic symbolisms. Without knowledge of symbolism the interpreta- tion of dreams is an impossible task. The proper training for dream interpretation consists of learning to read aright its language, of tracing the double meanings and of becoming famil- iar with the symbolisms and processes of dream distortion. The significance of symbolism in human life is still but insufficiently recognized. "All art is but symbolism," states Feuchtersleben. "The most im- portant task of my life," declares Hebbel, "I re- gard the symbolization of my inner life." Symbolism pervades all our life. Language, customs, peculiari- ties, thought, all are more or less hidden symbol- isms. To Rudolf Kleinpaul belongs the credit of having shown up the tremendous significance of sym- bolism, through his various works, particularly, his Sprache ohne Worte (Language without Words) and his more elaborate work entitled, Das Leben der Sprache (Leipzig, Wm. Friedrich, 1888). What is truly a symbol? Riklin states : 3 * Schrift en zur angewandten Seclenkunde, II Franz Deutike (Wien u. Leipzig, 1909). 28 Sex cmd Dreams "A symbol is a sign, an abbreviation for some- thing more elaborate. When I look over a railroad time table and find a 'postal sign* in the form of the familiar horn mark, against the name of a sta- tion, it enables me to know that the station has postal connections with places not on that line. "But the symbol stands for more than that. Why does not some other sign stand for postal connec- tions in the railroad time guide? The postal horn is something that originally belonged to the postal service. Although no longer an essential part of that service it was formerly one of its most con- spicuous signs, impressive both to the eye and to the ear. Thus we find here two additional features which belong to the symbol. The sign chosen for a symbol stands in associative inner, as well as outer, relationship to the thing it signifies and is meaningful. It is particularly fitting as a symbol on account of its history and development in con- nection with the thing it signifies, although its im- portance in that connection is not without its fluc- tuations. At the present time we no longer have the long-distance drivers lustily blowing their horn. But the horn persists as a sign in the railroad time guides, in military service denoting the field postal station, and in various other connections. "Usually the concept symbol embodies also something mystical (or mysterious). Symbols are frequently used as signs of recognition among mem- bers of secret organizations, as for instance, the signs among the Freemasons. The 'mysterious' fea- ture consists of the fact that only the initiated is familiar with the meaning of the sign. That was the case, for instance, with the Runic Characters, Symbolism 29 which only certain persons could read; that, too, is what lends churchly ceremonials their power of im- pressing the human sensitive mind. Developmental history and the changes in meaning incidental thereto are enough to obscure the true meaning of the symbol to all but the initiated. "Because the symbol is only a sign, only a part of the original thing which it stands for, in the course of its developmental history it may gradually as- sume varied significance and stand for a number of things: the postal horn may be variously taken, in a psychologic sense, and may mean any one of a number of things according to the locality, or cir- cumstances : it may mean 'junction' when placed against the station name in a railroad time guide, or 'postal connection* when found in a circular. In a distant mountain village it means one thing, on a uniform sleeve it stands for something else. "This indication of possible meanings shows that the sign or symbol stands for a summation or fu- sion of all the possible associations. It is character- istic of the dream symbol, for instance, that it takes in thousands of association paths. This leads to many-sidedness and the 'shadowy sense* of the sym- bol lends itself, for that reason, to a number of plausible interpretations. Any one who is not ex- perienced and does not know the symbol in all its possible applications, may interpret it falsely or only in a sense with which he happens to be famil- iar. The Bible, for instance, has the advantage and disadvantage at the same time, of containing numerous symbols which may be interpreted in any one of various ways." (Wunscherfilttung wnd Sym- bolik im Marchen.) 30 Sex and Dreams Without a knowledge of symbolism the interpre- tation of dreams is impossible. The great fault of modern dream interpreters was precisely the fact that they knew nothing about symbolism. The an- cients were further advanced in that respect. How impressive is the symbolism of dreams set forth in the Bible ! And how completely rounded out appears the symbolism of Artemidoros of Daldis, whose book entitled The Symbolism of Dreams is worthy of the modern psychoanalyses attention. 4 Before beginning to describe the art of dream interpretation proper let us turn our attention briefly to the Bible dreams and to the Greek art of interpretation. I know no more fitting examples for introducing the subject of dream symbolism. The best known is the dream interpretation of Joseph, found in the first book of Moses. Joseph owed his high position entirely to his extraordinary ability to interpret properly his master's dreams. The first dream which he told his brothers, was: (1) We tied sheafs on the field and my sheaf stood upright; and your sheafs bowed before my sheaf. The brothers at once interpreted the dream to mean that Joseph will surpass them: "Shalt thou be our king and rule over us?" Even we children of this age could not interpret the dream otherwise. 4 There is an excellent German translation of this work by Friedr. 8. Krauss (Hartleben, Vienna, 1881). Unfortunately, the most significant portion, The Symbolism of the Sexual Processes, has been omitted. Symbolism 31 Only we are able to conclude from it that it is the dream of an ambitious person. And since am- bition carries one far, especially when one is en- dowed with the necessary wisdom and with indefati- gable energy, we are justified to surmise favorable augury regarding the future of any one whose youth is filled with such dreams. 5 The second of Joseph's dreams also denotes sim- ilar ambition: (2) I thought the sun and the moon and the eleven stars bowed before me. This dream led to his supposed perdition and was the beginning of his miraculous good luck. Equally remarkable are Joseph's further interpre- tations of dreams: (3) The seven ugly starved cows, which eat up the seven fat cows he genially interpreted as seven years of famine which were to follow seven years of abundance. These interpretations exhibit a remarkable grasp of dream symbolism. The art of dream interpretation was similarly developed among the Greeks, and I quote two ex- amples from Artemidoros (loc. cit., p. 236) : (4) Some one dreamed of being tied with a chain In modern dreams "ambition" is symbolized by modern means: the ambitious person flies high above the heads of all others in a balloon, aeroplane, or according to the good old fashion, as an angel. Sometimes the flight through air is car- ried on without wings, merely by swaying the limbs or the body. 32 Sex a/nd Dreams to the post of Poseidon. He became a priest of Poseidon ; for in that position he could not get away from the holy place. This glimpse into the future is as clever as the next prophecy of Artemidoros which I shall pres- ently relate. No one becomes a priest who did not first wish it, unless he were coerced. . . . The second dream from the work of Artemidoros shows a symbolism to which we will have occasion frequently to revert. In that dream picture the sexual is represented as flesh: the sensuous in man, through the flesh of an animal. (5) Some one dreamed of seducing and sacrificing his own wife, of bartering with and offering her flesh for sale, and that he earned a great sum thereby. Thereupon he dreamed that he was very joyful over it and he attempted to hide the money lie had gained, on account of the jealousy of those around. "That man eventually sold his own wife and made money out of the shameful deed. That source of income proved very profitable but he found it neces- sary to keep the matter from any one's knowledge." In the case of that man, too, wish was father to the thought, and that, long before the deed. He first dreamed what he lacked the courage of carry- ing out. As he could look upon the dream as an order from the Gods, that dream led to a course of action which he might have adopted even in the ab- sence of the dream. Possibly only in a short time. Impatience 33 The dream is a dream of impatience. The dreamer can hardly wait to sell his wife and acquire the gain. From the art of dream interpretation of the East one might also draw some excellent examples. I limit myself to one account of a jest of Buadem (lit- erally "that man"), a name which, according to Dr. Miillendorf, is only a pseudonym devised by Mehemed Tewfik, the publisher, for the well known Jester- Poet, Nassr-ed-dm. This Turkish Eulenspiegel is supposed to have "flourished" during the fourteenth century. Buadem was not quite five or six years of age, when he related the following dream to his father: (6) "Father, last night I have seen fancy cakes in my dream" "My son, that has a good meaning." (Jokingly:) "Give me ten paras (the smallest monetary unit cur- rent m Constantinople) and I will interpret the dream for you" "If I had ten paras* I would not be dreaming of cakes." 6 Let us now take a long jump all the way into the sixteenth century and turn our attention to a dream of the famous physician, philosopher and mathematician, Cardanus, author of a book, De Somniis, and whose faith in the prophetic truth of Die Schwanke des Nastr-ed-din und Buadem. Reklam Bib- liothek, 2735. 34 Sex and Dreams his dreams was so unshakable that he chose his wife, the daughter of a highway robber, after a resem- blance with a face he had seen in dreams ; the dream had prophesied for him the awakening of his passion, previously dormant, in that particular woman's company. He had been impotent up to his thirty- fourth year. That an impotent man should crave entrance into the "garden of love" any one may easily understand. Here is how Cardanus relates the story: (7) One night I found myself In a beautiful gar- den of flowers and fruit. A soft air pervaded every- thing so that no painter, no poet, no human thought could have conjured up anything more charming. I was at the entrance to that garden. The gate was open and I saw a girl clad in white. I embraced and kissed her; but at the very first kiss the gardener bolted the gate close. I begged him most fervently to leave the gate open. It seemed to me that I felt sad about it and I was still clinging to the girl when I was locked out. What is a man of rich imagery likely to dream about when the garden of love closes on him? This beautiful example shows us the day wish in a sym- bolism but partly covered up. But the symbolism is not always so obvious and plain as in this ex- ample. Often the whole dream is devoted to a sym- bolic dramatization. I want to avoid for the pres- Garden of Love 35 ent the more complicated problems which we shall have to consider later. I shall merely quote an ex- ample from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams show- ing how the dream expresses colloquialisms through pictures. A lady dreams: (8) A servant girl climbs on the ladder, as if pre- paring for window cleaning and carries a chimpan- zee and a gorilla cat (later corrected to angora cat) with her. She throws the animals at the dreamer; the chimpanzee clings to the latter, who finds this "very disagreeable. "This dream has achieved its end through the sim- plest of means, namely, by taking a colloquialism literally and representing the picture to which it gives rise. 'Monkey,' like almost any animal name, is a derogatory term, and the dream situation merely depicts the colloquialism f mit Schimpfworten um sich werfen,' 'hurling insult'." (Freud, Interpretation of Dreams, translated by Brill.) Occasionally we are compelled thus to reduce the situations and pictures of a dream back to Redewend- ungen, "colloquialisms." The dream takes words in a literal sense; we must conceive the processes pic- torially. That requires a special art and particular practice. Both must be acquired. In order to illustrate what I have just stated I record now a brief dream with a very significant 36 Sex and Dreams content. Beta, 7 a man suffering of anxiety has the following dream: (9) I see before me a large wooden picture of the Christ. I take a chip out of it. This dream is also to be understood in a sym- bolic sense. The dreamer is still a believer at heart, even strongly so, though outwardly a fanatic free thinker. The day before the dream he had read a book, entitled La Folie de Jesus (The Insanity of Jesus). 8 Suddenly he had to give up the reading. He is unable to state why. It was a compulsive- like act. Like a commandment: Now, quit reading! The deeper reasons for this compulsion-like act are revealed in this dream. Er hat sich etwas gegen seine Gottheit herausgenommen (a German col- loquialism not unlike our "chip on the shoulder" expression). The further significance of this dream and the relationship between anxiety and wish need not be taken up at this time. For the present I have merely attempted to indicate in a few general lines the foundations of dream symbolism. The under- standing of symbolism forms the basis of dream in- terpretation. We have had even before Freud some 1 For the subjects whose dreams are repeatedly quoted I have adopted substitutive designations in the form of Greek letters. The names of all persons are changed so as to make their recognition impossible. That is a strong disadvantage in a work of this character. But it cannot be done otherwise. Discretion is the first duty of the psychotherapeutist. Dr. Binet-SangU, La, Folie de Jesus (Paris, Maloine, 1908). Language Symbols 37 intimation of the role of symbolism in human life. Schubert and Kle'mpaul, for instance, have dwelt on the symbolic conception of life as a whole. These investigators have also boldly pointed out the sexual symbolism. Is it not remarkable that our language (the author here refers, naturally, to the German) distinguishes words according to their gender? When we take up the dream analysis we are im- pressed with the far-reaching extent of our symbolic thinking and particularly of sexual symbolism. In the dream anything oblong may represent the penis and anything round many stand for the vagina. But is that the case only in dreams? One should consult what Klempaid has to say on the subject in his work entitled Das Leben der Sprache, already mentioned, particularly in the chapter on Die Psy- chopathia Sexualis des Volkes (loc. cit., vol ii, p. 490). He points out that language as a whole is sexualized and symbolized. Language is full of sexual symbols. "Indeed, the human race is love-mad," say paul. "Whichever way we turn we meet perpetually her phantasy, half morbidly, half foolishly cen- tered on the sexual sphere. The race seems to have lost its reason! It cannot put the male and female out of its mind, it cannot see an elevation or a hole without thinking of sex and if it is a tower in which prisoners are languishing away, it is called il maschio di Volterra. "The iris is called f das M'ddchen des Auges,' lit- 38 Sex a/nd Dreams erally, the 'girl of the eye,' not because of any re- semblance to a girl. The iris itself is a girl. Be- cause it has a hole in the middle no anatomy is needed for that the black mid-spot in the middle of the eye looks like a hole. Hole, trypa, Tpvira , trou, in all languages is the name for woman, so also in Genesis (i. 27) ; and because the eye is small, it was regarded as a little girl. "Reflection or thought assumes this erotic bent particularly when something fits into a hole, like the foot into the shoe, or the knife into the sheath, when things come in pairs and one sticks into the other. All such 'paired' things evoke the 'great luck* of sexual beings, sexual union, that which is called lingam in the Ganges region. " 'Qual Buco, tal Cavicchio,' is an Italian pro- verb, or, as Fischart once remarked, l es war eben em Zapf fiir diese Flasche, denn faule Eier und stin- kende Butter gehbren zusammen,' 'the right stop- per for the bottle, for bad eggs and rancid butter be- long together*;. a popular German saying expresses the same thought: 'Auf jedes Topfchen geho'rt sein Deckelchen,' 'every vessel has its cover.* Es ist eben recht dahmterher," continues Kleinpaul, "and numberless technical expressions can be explained only through their reverberation of the old Adam and Eve theme. The numerous mothers, matrices, etc., in the various technical industries have the same origin. "Mutter, Nonne, Weib and Schnecke, mother, nun, female, screw; on the other side Voter, Monch and Mann, father, monk and male, represent here only the important parts. There is deep significance in such terms: monk and nun. Often it happens the Language Symbols 39 male half bears also a particularly significant name, like stamp, or spmdle, while the typically female parts are poetically cohered up. The screw seems to imply a marital relationship (spindle and fe- male)." Truly, KleinpauTs statement is correct: Lan- guage is full of sexual symbols. In fact, it is enough to perceive the true spirit of the language in order to interpret quite a number of dreams. A young boy, sixteen years of age, whose father is a famous artist and a very popular Don Juan much admired by the ladies, tells me the fol- lowing dream: (10) Father finds various holes in the rooms. I am worried because he alone wants to stop them up. When I ask him why it worried him, he answered, "Because father took all that trouble alone. I could help him. That is not a suitable task for so great an artist." He rationalizes his dream to use the fitting expression of Jones. But we prefer to take the dream literally. The young man is an Alexan- der who is worried because Philip leaves him nothing to conquer. All the women in the house worship the father: the mother, the aunt, the French teacher, the secretary. He suspects the father of relations grossly sexual perhaps justifiedly. The holes in the walls are to be taken in KleinpauTs lit- eral sense. We began with the general neutral symbolisms 40 Sex and Dreams the sheafs in the field 9 and already we find ourselves in the midst of erotic symbolism. That is inevitable in the case of dream interpretation. Whoever takes up the subject must be prepared to meet the issue. I may mention here another forerunner of Freud's, the well-known investigator of dreams, Scherner, 10 who has conceived the hypothesis that all dreams are generated by bodily sensations. That theory has proven altogether untenable. Neverthe- less its founder formulated a fairly correct view of sexual symbolism. Some details may appear ridic- ulous. But facts lose none of their significance merely because they seem ridiculous. Regarding sexual symbolism Schemer writes : "Sexual excitation is symbolized by representa- tions of the erect organ itself or by pictures and phantasy actions which aroused desire for sexual gratification. But here, too, we meet the masked formulations as preserved by the plastic art of the phantasy. For instance, one finds on the street while on the way to a particular spot, the stem of a clarinet, near by, the similar portion of a pipe, a penny whistle, or a piece of fur. (The stem of clarinet or whistle represents unmistakably the form of the male organ, the stem-like configuration of the found object corresponding to the similar form of Joseph's dream may also lend itself to another, an erotic interpretation. Dreams of "greatness" and the wish for ex- traordinary potence often go hand in hand. Paranoiacs with delusions of grandeur often claim they have a thousand wives, a thousand sons, etc. 10 Das Leben des Traumes (Berlin, Heinrich Schindler, 1861). Sex Symbolism 41 the external male sexual organ; but the found ob- jects are always double, on account of the character of the excitation of the double organ of vision, which is primarily involved in the act of finding the re- spective objects. Finally the fur piece in question stands for the pubic hairs, just as the brush stands for eyebrows and eyelashes, instead of the sym- bolically more fitting bush; finding the three pic- tures together means the conjunction of the objects represented through them.) Or as the result of bladder stimuli one finds a curiously crumpled up short stem or cigarette holder which portrays the collapse of the whole male external apparatus. More clearly delineated appears to be the symbol- ism denoting states of sexual tension, such as usually follow urinary stimuli, the clearer symbolic expression corresponding to the sharper degree of stimulation. For instance, one sees through a clump of trees under which one is standing a near-by tower of great height, and one wonders that the highest peak of the familiar tower (an object known in reality) is crumpled up, and observing the round cupola below, the impression is gained that a second peak (nothing corresponding to reality) must have flattened out down there; while thus watching at- tentively, the dreamer sees himself standing under women, or he sees them step over him. The high tower represents the tension of the active organ, its peak seems crumpled or flattened, corresponding to the uppermost portion of the sexual apparatus; phantasy seeks forcefully to find two towers where only one exists in reality, in order thus to express the parity of the lower organ ; it suggests the vision of a high tower through the undergrowth, because 42 Sex and Dreams the active organ in erection stands forth in the midst of the surrounding pubic hair (underbrush). Tower, peak, double ball, cupola, underbrush, to- gether express a composite thought, because phan- tasy fuses all pictures in one. . . . (Das Leben des Traumes, p. 197.) The next dream is that of an unmarried thirty- year-old woman : (11) Papa goes around cutting off all the leaf ends to all the plastic figures in the room. I am\ angry at that and want to prevent it. I am think- ing: has he turned crazy? The girl tells us that her father was always ter~ ribly jealous. He did not allow her so much as to shake hands with a strange man. Young men never called at the house. She could not attend a dance. That is how she remained unmarried. This dream we may also take in a literal sense. The father removes all ends, he thus prevents her from having an opportunity to become familiar with a phallus. In the dream she finds courage to tell him what she, unfortunately, has never dared say to him in actual life. She was the obedient type of daughter. There comes to her mind a figure pro- tected in front with the usual fig leaf. We note the circumlocution so characteristic of dream thoughts. Why that covering? What was the fig leaf for, if the ends are clipped off? She notes how senseless Sex Symbolism 43 her father's conduct seemed to be. She is struck by the peculiar (crazy) feature of his conduct. We thus perceive in connection with two different dreams the meaning of "hole'* and of "end'* or peak. The language of dreams makes use of the cryptio forces which have created our everyday language. That symbolism holds true not only of dreams. It is equally valid in connection with stories, myths, folklore and wit. The symbolism of fairy stories is particularly clear. Dream and story! What wonderful association! What the children experience, the adults dream about. New principles are being evolved. We transpose the old truths and now declare: the ob- verse is true: what the adults experience, the chil- dren dream about. That is not a mere play on words. Freud has furnished us the key to the meaning of dreams. Dr. Franz Riklin tries to apply that key to the investigation of the charming realm of fairy stories. And lo ! the attempt proves successful. It turns out that the fairy stories of children bear an intimate inner relationship to the dreams of adults, that they are pervaded through and through with a cryptic sexual symbolism the significance of which presents no particular difficulty. The Wunscherful- lung und Symbolik im Mdrchen (Wish Fulfilment 44 Sex and Dreams and Symbolism of the Fairy Story) by Riklin, proves that the fairy story has a cryptic sexual meaning. The fairy story, too, represents a "wish fulfillment" in Freud's sense, like the dream. The simple fairy stories represent relatively sim- ple folk wishes. RikUn brings a number of excellent illustrations. Who is not familiar with the charm- ing Marlem in Bechstein's famous collection of fairy stories? A mother weeps three days and three nights over her most deeply beloved child. At night the door opens softly and the deceased child ap- pears in its nightgown carrying the little tear ves- sel in which all the mother's tears are gathered up. A few more tears and the little vessel is filled to over- flowing and the child attains peace and quiet. "Therefore, weep no more, for thy child is well taken care of and little angels are its playmates !" The child disappears. The mother avoids shedding more tears. The child must not be disturbed in its heavenly peace ! RiJclm very properly observes that the story could equally well be an actual dream of some particular person. But it happens not to be an account of a particular experience; this curative means (consolation) has become a generalized, psy- chically purposive belief, namely, that excessive tears disturb the peace of those who have passed away ! That is not a notion helpful to the dead but it is helpful to the living. The same motive is played up in numerous variants: in the Japanese story Wish-fulfillment 45 about the "Nwn of the Temple of Armida"; in an- other German version by Grimm as "Todterihemd- chen"; in the "New Islandic Folktales"; edited by Ritterhatis. Everywhere the wish of the adults to be rid of their worry sooner reveals itself as the cryptic motive of the weaver of the fairy story. The sexual symbolism reveals to us the character of the story even more penetratingly than the prin- ciple of wish fulfillment. Here we first learn that the adults tell the child chiefly what they themselves prefer to hear. Naturally they do so in symbolic, that is, masked, form. We underrate the significance of symbolic acts and of symbolic representations in our everyday life. As a matter of fact, existence is inconceivable without symbols. Riklin states: "Is not almost every word a symbol? The writing signs are sym- bols, the words are symbols, our mimicry, our ges- tures are in great part symbolic. A geographic chart is a symbol. Noteworthy are the meaningful abstract symbols: God's eye, the scales (as, of justice, for instance), the cross; the color symbols: black, red; the symbolism of uniforms, etc." What tremendous power belongs in the first place to the sexual symbol. It pervades our whole life. There is no object, which under certain circum- stances may not represent a sexual symbol. A par- ticular intonation, a deliberate gesture, a wink of 46 Sex and Dreams the eye accompanying an innocent remark may give the latter a "double meaning." Sexual symbolism is the key which unravels for us the various myths of the different races. Also the religious formulations. A striking example of the latter we have in the concept of the snake, which plays also a great role in folklore. A snake seduced Eve in paradise. The snake appears to young girls (Odd and the Snake, Bechstein), and when the lat- ter overcome their revulsion and take the cold snake into their bed . . . the snake suddenly changes into a wonderful prince who had been bewitched. The slippery, cold, ugly snake is a sexual symbol, like the ugly toad, which climbs into the bed of the king's daughter (Der Froschkonig and Der Arme Heinrich, of Grimm). Here, too, the overcoming of disgust is rewarded with the presence of a wonderful prince. Further illustrations of this type may be found in Riklm's work already mentioned. What the fairy stories mean to the individual, that the folk story or myth represents in its rela- tions to the folk mind. The myth is a folk dream and contains in a cryptic symbolic language and ex- pression of the unconscious wish-excitations and ful- fillment-hallucinations of the folk mind. The myth, too, contains a more or less cryptic, sometimes fairly overt and rather obvious, sexual symbolism which is remarkably like the similar dream symbolism, a Symbolism of Fairy and Myth 47 fact convincingly brought out by Abraham in his interesting study in folk psychology entitled Trawm und Mythus (Dream and Myth). The study of these myths has long been assidu- ously cultivated by the folk-psychologists who justi- fiedly expected to find through them a path towards a better understanding of the mental life of the va- rious people. Just as dreams disclose the secret thoughts of the individual man, so myths must dis- close in unmistakable manner the ideals and wishes of the people. It turns out that a number of myths which have appeared at different times among the most varied nations on earth show a remarkable sim- ilarity between them so that some investigators were led to conclude that the formation of myths depends on mental processes common to all mankind. On the other hand, many other investigators held that the similarity of myths is due to transference, a borrowing or transferring of the same myth ma- terial. What was lacking until recently in the in- vestigation of the problem of myths was an appre- ciation of the parables between the process of myth formation and the mental life of the individual. The bridging over of the two realms of inquiry, the world of individual dreams and the sphere of folk dreams as represented in myths, represents a gigantic step forward. It is pleasing to record that the connecting links 48 Sex and Dreams between the social and the individual activities of the psyche have been successfully revealed at least in one limited field, namely, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, in a study under that title, by Otto Rank, to whom we were already indebted for an- other excellent study, The Artist (Der Kunstler, Wien und Leipzig, 1907). Rank points out very convincingly the similarities between the phantasies of individuals and the folk phantasies as revealed in a series of birth myths. We want to lay stress on the mere fact of this parallelism: for dreams and myths, fairy and tradi- tional stories present the same kind of psychic struc- ture. One may contend that the myths about heroes were conceived originally by poets, while fairy stories are creations of the poetic genius of the whole people. Such a contention may be met best with HebbeVs fitting words : m den Dichtem trdumt die Menschhdt, whole humanity dreams through its poets. An almost inexhaustible fund of material for sym- bolism is to be found in the collections gathered by the well-known folklorist F. S. Krauss and his co- workers, and published under the title Anthropo- phyteia (Leipzig, Deutsche Verlagsaktiengesell- schaft). The tremendous material gathered therein awaits systematic elaboration in the light of dream symbolism. Occasionally I shall refer to the similari- ties between folk language and the symbolism of Sexual Symbolism 49 dreams. The formations of wit, too, reveal to us the operations of the unconscious. 11 I have thus far indicated only a few simple ex- amples illustrating the significance of sexual sym- bolism. It is not possible to give an account of a dream analysis without touching on eroticism. There is, in fact, no anerotic dream. The power of the sexual instinct is so tremen- dous that it probably never leaves us out of its grip even for a few seconds of time. We shall see later, when we consider the subject of half dreaming, of hypnagogic pictures (dream pictures before falling asleep, or just before fully waking up, during the so-called "twilight" states) that the sexual instinct is momentarily ready to take possession of man's psyche. The symbolism of dreams is chiefly sexual. Though the erotic plays a predominating role in the pages which follow it is not my fault. I cannot do otherwise than present the material as it re- veals itself. There is another factor which plays a tremen- dous role in the dream life: the criminal tendency. The cryptic criminal withw us reveals itself in our dream. But the criminal tendency stands nearly always in the service of the sexual. Perhaps every criminal is a sexual criminal possibly. I expect 11 Cf. Freud, Wit and Its Relation to th* Unconscious (Trans- lation by Brill, Moffat, Yard & Co.). 50 Sex and Dreams to prove in the following chapters of this work that the investigator is not responsible for the presence of the erotic features. We do not lay stress on it deliberately. It is there. Whoever is endowed with unencumbered eyes cannot fail to see that sym- bolism plays the most important role in our mental life. Why do persons make free use of symbolism in witticisms and why do they usually display such a keen appreciation of the symbolic shadings of mean- ing employed by the flirt? Hitschmann rightfully observes 12 that, "in the cynical gathering of male festivities, or cabarets, or when reading the hu- morous papers the same persons suddenly display sufficient insight into sexual symbolism!" What would be the sense of avoiding these facts of life simply because we do not like them? This book is a record of facts. . . . The ancient, eternal struggle between instinct and society, between mine and thine (Otto Gross) does not cease in the dream. The wish fulfillment, postu- lated by Freud, may also be a wish fulfillment of the moral self. But there are many dreams which do not fit within the range of wish fulfillment, even though we conceive the "conscience dreams" as wishes of the moral self. There are, above all, the telepathic " Hitschmann, FrewPs Theories of the Neuroses (translated by Charles R. Payne, Moffat, Yard & Co.). Wish-fulfillment 51 dreams: no objective investigator can doubt any longer their existence or validity. Enforced with a knowledge of these facts, we now turn our attention to the analysis of a more com- plex dream. II THE ANALYSIS OF A SIMPLE DREAM THE DREAM ABOUT THE TELEPHONE THE BALLAD OP THE POOR EAGLE WHAT MRS. A. THINKS OF THE ACT OF TELEPHONING II Hebbel in his diaries remarks: "A man making up his mind to record faithfully and with regularity all his dreams, without choice or scruples, and adding thereto a commentary to include everything from his life or reading bearing on the explanation of his dreams would render a great service to humanity. But as humanity stands to-day, it is not likely that any one will undertake to do it ; still it would be worth while for some one to try it as a matter of personal choice." I have seen such diaries. They are not very use- ful because we are unacquainted with the dreamer's cryptic symbolism. The great advance of the Freudian dream inter- pretation consists precisely in the fact that it has added a novel aid to the art of interpreting the dreams: the dreamer's thought reactions. The dream material which evoked the dream comes back to the dreamer's mind through free associations. But the thoughts sometimes do not come up freely. It repeatedly happens that on account of inner re- sistances the dream parts evoke no associations in the dreamer's mind. A knowledge of the dream 55 56 Sex and Dreams language and symbolisms helps us over such "dead" points. The simpler the mental life of a person the simpler also are that person's dreams. A great many dreams do fit to Hebbel's plan. If we know the dreamer's life, we know also what the dreams por- tray. There are also dreams which betray their meaning even before we have become acquainted with the dreamer's life history. Here is where my investigations' deviate from Freud. Freud places the greatest emphasis on the material found back of the manifest dream content. I have endeavored to prove that the manifest dream material itself displays the most important content, the latent dream thoughts. With this conception I have achieved surprising results. I have discov- ered relationships (for instance, the symbolism of death) which I would have never unearthed through the dreamer's thought associations. That is not the case with every dream. For as already stated : The dreams are variously constructed. Simple folk have different dreams than sophisticated peo- ple. The dream consists of separate dream parts which group themselves into a whole, into a single dream picture. The analysis of a dream must pro- ceed from the separate dream parts. But how is the dream element to be interpreted? What is its meaning? What its relationship to wish fulfillment? "Usually, in the case of a dream element, it is Sense of Dream Elements 57 a question," states Freud, "whether it should be taken : "(#) in a positive or negative sense (antithetical relationship) ; "(6) in a historic sense (as reminiscence) ; "(c) symbolically; or whether "(d) the meaning should be traced to the word sounds." In spite of this manifold possibility of interpreta- tion, it must be observed that the unraveling of the dream work, which does not aim to be understood, presents no greater difficulties to the translator than the old hieroglyphic writings, for instance, raise for their readers." (The Interpretation of Dreams, authorized translation by A. Brill.) The dreams are various. Some are shadowy and intricate and require long and persistent scrutiny. The dream may be reduced to its component parts only with the aid of the greatest finesse. As a light educational example let us analyze a phantasy dream, which reduces itself, in fact, to a single sym- bolization. There are also dreams which may be cleared up with a single key. When, for instance, (1%) A woman goes to the butcher shop, to make some purchases, finds the meat stall exposed, chooses a big, hard piece of meat, shaped as a sausage 58 Sex and Dreams (Wurst), shoves it m her pocket, where it hardly fits, as it melts in the warmth of the pocket, every detail of the dream is obvious when we know that it relates to fteischliche Geluste, lusts of the flesh, and to purchases in the love mart. I want to record here a dream of this character, in which the telephone has an erotic meaning. It is a long and spectacular dream, containing numerous details which, naturally, are also significant for the analysis but which I must overlook for the present. This dream is also noteworthy because it ends with a poetic production. Poetry is not uncommon in dreams. Occasional verses are produced in dreams and sometimes they are rather well done. I must forego for the present the temptation of taking up the subject of poetic productions in dreams. Poetry and dreams are alike products of the uncon- scious * and naturally show inner relationship. The pleasant dream of Mrs. Alpha, which ends in a ballad, reads : 2 (13) I visit my sister and find only my brother-in- law at home. The telephone rings. Astonished, I wonder since when the instrument had 'been intro- duced mto the house. My brother-in-law throws *Cf. my Study entitled Poetry and Neurosis (authorised English Version by James S. Van Teslaar). I take this opportunity to remark that all dreams are re- corded exactly as the dreamers have written them down for me. The most trivial colloquialism, an error in spelling, some peculiarity of punctuation may have great significance for the analysis. Telephone Dream 59 a deprecating glance at me and asks whether I do not read the daily papers. I answer, saying thphone, I ask whether I couW not have the Opera Tenor assigned to me. Tenors have voices that are much more pleasant to hear. Again a man appears, stout, beardless, with red cheeks, introduces himself as the Imperial Opera tenor, and inquires about the telephone. 1 declare at once that his organ pleases me better than the other man's, and that I am very desirous to exchange the gentlemen. This man is accompanied by a woman whom he introduces to me as his sister, an actress. He looks up my brother- in-law and the bass singer to negotiate the exchange with the latter. The bass singer does it with ob- vious HI grace and presently, after an exchange of some angry words, the meaning of which I do not perceive, I see the bass singer muttering insults as he leaves. My misfortune is over, and overflowing Telephone Dream 61 with happiness, I now ask the lady and gentlemcm to be seated. I try to be courteous and, mindful of brother-in-law's advice, I extend my invitation for supper, which is eagerly accepted. "What happy evenings we shall have," I think to myself, charmed. The actress holds out the promise of reciting occa- sionally and my joy is boundless. "In fact, if you wish to hear me, I will gladly recite you something right now," says the charmmg creature and begins. It is an unknown poem by Baumbach, called Der Arme Igel, The Poor Eagle, and I listen to its re- cital with the greatest interest. Then I wake up and I note down the poem. 3 This dream, apparently so happy and filled with humor embodies the tragedy of a life. The ballad of the poor eagle is the story of her marriage. She is unhappily married. She dislikes her husband; she cannot endure his tendernesses. When he at- tempts coitus, she begins to cry out in the middle of the act and pushes him away from her. She is afraid of her own libido. If she could give herself without libidinous excitation she would do so. But because she does not want to be roused by him she repulses her husband during the sexual embrace. She has thought out all sorts of excuses to keep him at a distance. One day she has migraine, an- other day influenza, a third day she is perhaps just *The original of the poem is reproduced at the end of the chapter. 62 Sex and Dreams beginning to menstruate and this keeps up for weeks in her case, which of course cannot be true. Finally the fear of her husband's embrace became an obsessive thought-feeling with her and she fled into a severe neurosis, which made it possible for her to live an abstinent existence. That her prudery is directed only towards her husband, for whom "fear has repressed love" as the poem expresses it, is shown by the analysis of the telephone dream and of her other dreams. One of her earlier dreams which she brought to me, dealt with a very sig- nificant situation. The man whom she truly loved but did not marry was in her bed and acted as her ardent and tireless lover. I step in but the loving pair are not disturbed and thereupon I quote the verse : Zur Liebe ist es nie zu spat, Wie man es jetzt yesehen hat. The lover retorts at that : Heil! Heil! Heil! Schon ist ihr Hinterteil* Her sexual aversion, therefore, is directed only against her poor husband, whom she consciously dis- likes. In the sad ballad she even has him become insane and die off in three days. That has a deep meaning. The man, in fact, is The lady subject who relates this dream has the habit and the ready knack of improvising verses, and can speak in rhymes for days. The composition of the ballad in the dream is there- fore natural in her case. Interpretation 63 not normal and suffers of a mild progressive paral- ysis. Their family physician states that he may last possibly another three years. Her first love was a tenor. That explains the contrast between bass and tenor in that long dream picture. Her husband has a deep sonorous bass voice, which sounds painful in her ears and seems disgusting to her. She has accustomed herself to disregard his voice entirely. She simply does not hear when he speaks. That explains the telephone dream. The sexual symbolism of the telephone was well known for a time in Vienna and actually current. In one of the popular amusement places devoted to the lighter Muse a well-known soubrette sang for a year or more a telephone song full of pointed hints. It was, in fact, a plain description of the sexual act, in which the various technical terms of telephony were employed with remarkable pointedness. A young man wishes to learn the art of telephony. The girl who has the apparatus in charge gives him the "receiver" in hand, he calls up, central answers ; he wants another "number," and telephones so ex- citedly that he nearly wrecks the apparatus, etc. The same sexual symbolism gives the key for the understanding of this dream. The dream begins with incest thoughts about the brother-in-law who is very happy in his married life. She finds him alone in the house and the telephone 64 Sex and Dreams rings at once, that is, her sexual longings are roused. The brother-in-law, heretofore a solid, conservative Catholic, opposed to all reform movements likely to weaken Catholic rigor of the marriage ties, that same brother-in-law who refuses to read the daily papers devoted to progress, that confirmed clerical- minded fellow, now tells her that the sexual life of humanity is being placed on another, modern basis. This refers to the oft-mentioned theme of free love. Men of good standing, cultured men (what a con- trast to her husband) are volunteering to give tele- phone service and hourly take their turns at it. We note this to be a sort of male service, the man weak- ened by telephoning being at once replaced by an- other. There are thus no fears and no hardships any more, as with her husband, whose potence ap- pears terribly ill adjusted to his appetite. The act of "telephoning" is no longer indecent. On the contrary, there is no decent family in the whole city of Vienna without its own telephone. The guilt is smaller in any individual instance, the larger the number of sinners (the number of sub- scribers is tremendous; therefore the cost is corre- spondingly lowered). She, too, pays one hundred kronen for a Sprachrohr (literally, a speaking tube.) B That was theretofore the price of an auto- 5 The Sprachrohr, literally "speaking tube," of course, is a symbol for the penis. We note in this connection the tendency of the dream to express all sexual dreams as bisexual, a Interpretation 65 matic telephone (that is, masturbation automat- ically used sexuality auto-erotism). My last bill, too, amounted to one hundred kronen, showing that the brother-in-law of the dream is a fusion of my- self and the brother-in-law. This process whereby two or more persons or incidents are fused in one picture will be referred to repeatedly in our work. Noteworthy also is the pocket, "usually empty," which means, the empty vagina, which would secure for itself a respectable sympathetic male through purchase. The brother-in-law negotiates the sub- scription to the telephone. First there appears her own husband; she was put in his charge the brother-in-law had witnessed her engagement (my telephone number was put in his charge). The ad- vice to invite him to evening meals shows the con- nections between eating and sexuality. 6 Evening meals here means night's lodgings. But she pre- fers to give up her telephone. That really corre- sponds to the actual facts in the case, as we have suspected from the first. She is dissatisfied, she wants her money back (meaning here the dowry, which has been meanwhile squandered away), she wants a separation, a step which her Catholic brother-in-law has thus far used his whole influence to prevent. tendency which we shall have repeatedly occasion to point out. The telephone has a transmitter and a receiver. "Frequently, in German, "einen zum Abendbrot einladen," used in same sense. 66 Sex and Dreams The pleasing tenor, so willing to accept the in- vitation to supper, who appears next, she finds very agreeable. She would like to exchange her husband for him. The man whom she likes so well is un- fortunately married. (He is accompanied always by a lady.) In the dream she turns the antago- nistic woman into a very loving sister, in accordance with her wish. The "actress" is a reproach against the tenor's wife and means: she is a comedian and makes a fool of you! The bass singer disappears at last, muttering harsh words ; she is very courte- ous and invites the gentleman to supper. She thus has a man and a woman at her disposal. The pic- ture very clearly hints at the patient's homosexual inclinations. Both erotic components, her homo- and her heterosexuality are coming into play. We now understand her enthusiastic feeling: "Nein! Werden das genussreiche Abende sein. My! what pleasurable evenings we shall have" The actress will also recite, an act which, clearly bears the same cryptic meaning as "tele- phoning." That charming creature now recites the poem im- plying scorn for her husband and culminating in the thought that an eagle belongs only to an eagle. Further analysis shows that she herself is that charming creature. She had been often so called, Interpretation 67 as a girl. She identifies herself with the wife of the beloved man. 7 Finally the act of "telephoning," has also an- other meaning which is well known to her. In con- gresu the constrictor cunnei was excited into action at first and the husband responded with a corre- sponding muscular motion. During the first part of her married life she was happy and . . . "tele- phoned." Soon afterwards the libido disappeared during the act, being replaced by a dread of the libido. The "telephoning" ceased. 8 Naturally the dream reveals many other associa- tions. But it is not necessary for us to dwell longer on this dream and instead we turn our attention to other analyses. One further remark I may offer with regard to the character of the dream. I have called it a phantasy dream. It means that this dream clearly represents the transposition of a day- dream into a slightly veiled form of dream lan- guage. This type of dream is very frequently found among hystericals. The dreams of this type do not tax at all the interpreter's ingenuity. T Here we see a proof of her strong self-love, the so-called narcissism, which was indicated also in connection with the "automatic telephone." The telephone symbolism links up through associations with receiver, in technical sense. In vol. VI of Anthropophyteia, Dr. Aigremont has published a very instructive essay on Muschel und Schnecke ah Symbole der Vulva ehemals und jetzt. The Schnecke, moreover, is a bisexual symbol and as Schneck stands for the penis. 68 Sex and Dreams DER ARME IGEL (Ballade) Em Igel fand gef alien Ernst an der Jungfer Maus, Der putzigsten von alien Im kinderreichen Haus Bern, gut en Feldmausvater, Dem Wirt: "Zum schwarzen Kater.' Da hielt, wie sich gebuhret, Um Mausi Igel an, Der Voter ward geruhret, Gab seinen Segen dann. Und selig fiihrt die liebe MOILS Der Igel in sei/n Igelhaus. Im Rausch des Glilcks versunken, Voll Zartlichkeit den Sinn, Naht er sich Liebestrunken Der siissen Mauselin. Sem Herz schlug vor Verlangen Sie liebend zu empfangen. Kaum hat er sie vmf asset Mit treuem, starkem Arm, Voll Schreck er von ihr lasset, Sie piepst, das Gott erbarm. Doch wird's dabei dem Ehmann klar, Dass er als Igel stachlig war. The Poor Eagle 69 Trotz alter Liebesgluten Blieb Igels Gliick beschrdnJct; Es hat bei Maus, der guten, Die Furcht die Lieb' verdrangt Und nimmer durft, o wehe Der Mails er in die Ndhe Dem Igel stieg zu Kopfe Der Stachelungliickswahn, Er ward zum irren Tropfe Und Tcrdnkelnd starb er dran; Man hat nach dreien Tagen Zu Grabe ihn getragen. Moral: Drum Igel frei in klugem Si/rm Stets nur urn erne Igelm. in SUPERFICIAL ASPECTS OF DREAM INTERPRETATION THE MOON AND THE EARTH THE "RATHAUs" DREAM REPRESENTATION OF UNBRIDLED LIFE Suche in das Irmere jedes Menschen ewzudringen; aber gestatte aiich jedem anderen in devne Seele einzugehen. HI [Endeavor to penetrate into every one's inner self; but allow also the others to look into your soul.] Marcus Aurelius. Let us endeavor once more to bring into relief the superficial aspects of dream life through the anal- ysis of a fe,w examples. We turn our attention again to a dream which portrays but a simple symbolism. The following is a dream of Miss Gamma: (14) A laundry bag in my hand. I have emptied it. It "was futt of dirty, gray linen. A pillow case, gray dirty, sanitary napkins (way below), a whole pack of them everything disgusting. I had to empty everything. A symbolic representation of her psychoanalytic treatment. She washes her dirty linen before me. During the last consultation hour she told me about her menstruation difficulties ; the pillow case refers to certain intimate doings which took place in bed. She has a great disgust for such things. But she has the feeling that she must tell everything (empty entirely the laundry bag) so as to get over her trou- bles once for all. All her thoughts center on the 73 74 Sex and Dreams notions of "clean" and "unclean." She is at pres- ent taking care of a sort of Mohrenwasche. Es grant ihr davor, she abhors it. (Here, a play on the double meaning of grau, gray, and grauen, aver- sion, horror; a reference to the dirty linen as well as to her horror and disgust.) The whole dream is a typical symbolic transposition of her waking thoughts. But that interpretation corresponds only to the most superficial layer of the dream. It embodies some of the recent occurrences. But every dream derives its stimuli from various layers before it be- comes a more or less loosely knit unit. It is over- determined (uberdeterminiert, Freud) and yields additional meaning. It contains also an infantile root. The earlier layers of the dreamer's associations relate to her sensations during her first menstrua- tion. She thought she was unclean. (Among some people the menstruating woman is considered unclean and is taboo for a time.) Further associations lead to her youth, when she remembers having searched the parents* bed linen for such spots. Finally there come to surface infantile reminiscences which show that her disgust of dirt was preceded by a period of intensive mysophilia. Further associations to laundry sack lead to a sack of a different kind the scrotum. Two serious traumas reveal themselves to her mind's eye. An uncle gave her to hold his phallus. The recall of Associations 75 the ejaculation (I had to empty out everything) is associated with a strong reaction of disgust. An earlier reminiscence relates to a similar incident in which her younger brother figured. Noticeable once more is the bisexual use of laundry sack, which as symbol is associated with the practice of masturbation. We shall not tarry but instead will proceed to some other "superficial" analyses. For the most part we shall limit ourselves to the uppermost layers of associations. We have spoken of the simple process of wish ful- fillment in fairy stories. A child appears to the mother begging her to weep no more. Her tears disturbs the child's peace in the grave. I want to relate now a similar "consolation" dream. An elderly woman who has lost her husband two years previously dreams : (15) Our dog, old and useless 1 see lying on the sofa and breathing his last. My son-in-law suddenly comes home bringing along a little, lovely brown dog. I asTc him, "Consoling yourself as soon as that?" He raises his shoulders saying: "Why not? What is the use to keep on mourning. One must learn to accept the inevitable." The woman had this dream on the anniversary of her husband's death. For two years the widow had worn mourning and permitted herself no dis- traction. In the dream her son-in-law represents 76 Sex and Dreams her own sober judgment: Don't mourn any longer! What comes of this everlasting mourning? Do the way wise folks are doing. The objectification of one's own thoughts through another person is extremely common. Other thoughts, too, suggest themselves through the dream. The old (dog, as sign of scorn) is dead, take another. Further, the fearsome thought, the son-in-law could easily console himself, if his wife (her young, brunette daughter) was to pass away. . . . But for the present we still limit ourselves to the superficial meaning disclosed by the simplest asso- ciations. A very fine, artistically-inclined girl tells me that she has had during the previous night a "wonder- fully beautiful poetic dream," which has made a last- ing impression upon her. She tells me the dream and also writes it out at my request: (16) It seems I had already been with a couple of girls in a train, namely at the open door, and there was a vague feeling that I was in some har- monic relationship with one J. K., and there was also something between H. (the other girl) and myself. Am sittvng later m a large third class compart" ment, near the window, far forward (in the direction of the train) and to the left, back to back with the two. Moreover, it seems there is no one else in the compartment. Poetic Dream 77 / stand up and through the window I look upon the moon hovering in the shape of a gigantic egg yolk, somewhat double her customary size. To the left of it a lummous ring fitting it, much like the Saturn rings. I make some remark about how strange it is that the moon should hover so close to the railroad track, and H. answered saying that it was but an optical illusion. "Is that so," I say. "I am going to find out," and I lean forward to catch the moon with both hands and draw it into the compartment. The ring around it I disregarded, it moved along. But under my hands the moon was elastic and wavered around. It, felt like the pretty yolk swim- ming in a plateful of soup when one tries to squeeze it with the spoon and the egg yolk cannot be broken and it resumes its shape every time. I gave it up and fell back on my seat exhausted, thinking how presumptuous it would be for me to draw the moon inside and rob the earth of its moon, and I don't know whether I actually said so, but H., at any rate, seemed to say to me: daring it would not be. Only you're inexperienced and don't under- stand as yet the relations of things. She referred distinctly to physiologic relations. Everything is intertwined with endless threads into everything else and reverts back to itself again. I seated myself again, keeping silent, but think- ing: how strange and comical. 78 Sex and Dreams This * innocent dream of a virgin" enables one to depict the state of her mind. One finds that she already dimly perceives a great deal and she holds herself back from certain knowledge. The fitting of one thing into another is perceived as "psycholog- ical" and the organic aspect is suppressed. One also notes that she perceives these excitations as sinful and she envies her friend H., the simple sweet girl, who has a lover, on account of the latter's ex- periences. The dream does not expose a riddle: it depicts merely a simple, romantically disposed un- gratified person. I state anticipatively that the picture of the moon was soon found to be a sym- bolism for penis and testicles. The ring is the engagement ring. She neglects the ring later. She is, therefore, prepared to con- sider extramarital coitus, like her friend H. The statement, "You don't understand that. Every- thing is intertwined with endless threads (spermal threads) into everything else and reverts back to itself," is particularly striking. It is noteworthy also that her compartment is a Durchgangscoupe, a " passage" compartment. The vulgar term for tes- ticles comes to surface in the "Eidotter," the egg yolk. Miss Gamma relates an almost identical dream: (17 ) I saw floating in the air a great globe, sur- rounded with a rmg of blue glass, like a wheel. The meaning is the same. Her mother's mar- Sexual Symbolism 79 riage ring has a wonderful blue stone. The ring on the finger is a symbol of sexual union. The min- ister puts the ring on the bride's finger ; that is, she may now become acquainted with the marital act. In both dreams we find the bisexual symbol: the globe and the ring, in a word the lingam. Another genital symbolism is revealed by the dream of J. N., a widow : (18) I am in the market shopping. Folks going home. Lights are being put out. We went to the checking room. My umbrella is not there is miss- ing, another one is there with a broken handle. The handle is like a Polish Jew with a great cork- screw nose. I take it in hand to try it out and to* see whether I could lean on it and think to myself: the umbrella is not so bad as it appears to be. The umbrella is a common phallic symbol. Open- ing it up corresponds to erection. The poor wom- an had lost her husband (light going out). She has no umbrella any more (my umbrella is not there). Her best friend is a Jew. (The "broken handle" and the "cut" handle are play words on circumcision.) The meaning of the dream is: "In case of need the devil eats flies. Try the Jew; he is your only consolation in your misery. Perhaps he turns out better than you think." Somewhat more complicated is the next dream, related to me by X. Z., a philosopher: (19 ) I dream of a triangle supposed to symbolize 80 Sex and Dreams some philosophic principle and which serves me, per- haps others also, as a sort of support. The trian- gle grows gradually smaller and more angular finally it is but a spear and therefore it is no longer fit to serve as a support and I am about to fall into a terrible abyss. I awake with a terrible loud outcry and all my body is shaking. He lives with a married couple. The man is his best friend. He maintains a triangular relation- ship. The friend is the basis of that relationship. That basis disappears, that is, the friend dies. He unites himself with the woman. The death is sup- posed to have been deliberately induced. He has murderous thoughts (spear, Spiess SpiessgeseUe), and the fall into the abyss is the terrific crime of which his most secret self is dreaming. The lingam after the death of the husband explains the riddle of a unit growing out of a triangle. Associations lead here upon the path of religious scruples (trin- ity). The philosophic thoughts are masked erotic wishes. Deeper layers reveal the relationship of the child to the parents. Mr. Dalton dreams: (W) I have two different shoes: a yellow one on the left foot, on the right, a black one. He loves two women: one is blond, the other is dark. More significant yet the meaning: schwarz- gelb, yellowish-black. He is an Austrian and wears on his feet the colors of his emperor (father). He Sexual Symbolism 81 is a typical skeptic. He vacillates continuously be- tween man (the dark father) and woman (the blond mother). His desire is to satisfy both. . . . His psychic hermaphroditism (Adler) is wonderfully well expressed in this picture. Also his most powerful passions: jealousy (yellow) and his dark thought of revenge (black). Sometimes a dream brings to light unusual wish fulfillments. It mediates transposing sinful wishes into respectable realities. A prudish woman, much devoted to her husband, is interested in a young writer. She would like to meet him. The dream conjures up the desired opportunity. She dreams: (21) I am confined to bed after a serious internal operation. My husband stands at the head of the bed, looking at me sympathetically and kindly, his hand on my shoulder. Bending over me and looking me straight in the eye is the young poet. I am com- ing out of narcosis or out of a deep slumber. Seeing my husband and the poet, I feel in the dream that the blood is rushing to my cheeks and I say to the poet: "You here!" He gazes lovingly at me and exclaims: "Thank God! She is saved" "And you, how do you happen to be here, now?" I ask* "I am a physician, madam," he says, "I have as- sisted at the operation." My cheeks redden, I turn my head sideways and hide in the pillows and shut my eyes. All wishes are gratified. She has a wonderful 82 Sex and Dreams white body. The poet is physician and has seen her naked. He has operated on her, he has saved her (both symbolic expressions for sexual congress). Everything occurred in respectable fashion. Her husband was present. Her bashfulness was not vio- lated at all. Everything occurred during narcosis. 1 One of the following dreams (24) brings up a similar situation under neurotic distortion. We turn our attention now to the analysis of a beautiful, so-called political dream. The dream is a very lively one and permits a clear insight into the most common forms of dream symbolism. The dream of the (Rathaus) Assembly House: (22) Great uproar in the Assembly House. The Emperor is also present. Thousands of people be- low, awaiting the Emperor's departure. It is eve- ning and the Assembly House square is feerically il- lumined for the occasion. Three figures stand watch in front of the main entrance. In the middle stands a gigantic figure dressed as the iron man, a blinding white light emanating from him. At the right and at the left each a figure similarly clad in golden attire. These two are very quiet, almost motionless, but the iron man is nervous, he is im- patient for the moment to arrive when he should 1 1 have known for a long time that the post-narcotic neuroses and psychoses are traceable back to such unconscious phanta- sies involving violence. Cf. similar example in my Nervost Angstzustiinde,, p. 96. Assembly House Dream 83 cry out to the assembled populace, the Emperor is coming! The people have been waitmg for hours. I and a -few others, were lucky enough to be ad- mitted within. We shall see the Emperor at close range, the thought causes my heart to beat fast. I become very nervous and I run breathlessly up and down the steps. I am a prey of undescribable ex- citement; suddenly I hear a tremendous noise rising outside, like the roar of an oceantide breaking against the wonderful building and echoing within. Scared, I ask the servant what happened. He says: "The three at the door got tired waiting and left their post swearing at the Assembly House, the peo- ple became more impatient than ever at that, hence their outcries" At that moment the haU doors are thrown open, an ocean of light assaults my eyes. I see the burgomaster (mayor) with the great golden chain and the red colored order ribbons hurrying down the steps; he passes very close to me, so that I can almost feel his breath; he draws me along, I run after him, the great door of the hall springs ajar, as if opened by magic hands. The burgomas- ter calls excitedly: "Where is the Emperor?" He is told the Emperor had left the Assembly House through a side door and was being carried along the Burg theater (Municipal Theater Building). I see very clearly the carriage disappearing in the midst of the crowd. But no sound is now heard . . . then I awake. 84 Sex and Dreams The dream of a poet, full of dramatic incidents, of plastic imageries, and apparently dealing with political conditions. It was dreamed by a young man who expects to marry a poor girl. His parents are against it. His father (the Emperor) is now helpless and dependent upon him for support. On the evening before the dream he kept reflecting for a long time how he might extricate himself from the unpleasant situation. The dream has shown him a solution. In the girPs house wo er sich gut beraten wahnt (Rathaus) where he considers himself well counseled, a great reception is being held. The analysis brings up by association a dance, a mar- riage ceremony. He is getting married (Emp- fangniss, reception). But the father (Emperor) must first leave (abfahren, sterben, die) then the stumblingblock will be out of the way. A death wish against the father. The tremendous mass of people, the contrary circumstances. Three guard- ians are watching before at the Assembly House. The iron man is again the father (uberlebensgrosse, unnaturally big) who in spite of his vigor earns noth- ing. Hence the vigor. The blinding white light which emanates from him is a scornful reference to his bald pate and his limited, homely, philistine in- tellect. The quiet figure in golden accouterments is his precious, dear mother (also doubled) who does not reproach him; the iron man (iron constitution) is nervous and always plays the role of the house Assembly House Dream 85 tyrant: the Emperor is coming! This remarkable dream structure carries out further the feelings in the breast of the young man; the father must give the deciding word, the circumstances speak loudly their unfavorable tone. The father has lost his po- sition as employee (the watchmen at the gate aban- don their post), that is why the circumstances have become unbearable. Now comes the wish fulfillment in glorious form. An ocean of light blinds his eyes. The burgomaster (mayor) is his sweetheart, the mistress of his heart, the golden chain, the marriage tie, and the red order insignia these, analysis finds to stand for blood. How does he describe the power of attraction which the btloved exercises over him? "I almost feel his (her) breath, he (she) drags me along, I follow him (her), all obstacles are over- come, the gate door of the great house springs ajar as if opened by magic hands." The Emperor is carried across the Municipal Theater. On that square he saw a few days ago a great funeral pro- cession. The Municipal Theater as symbol for the parental home is now conquered region. Emperor and Burg theater, both are overcome. He was tremendously excited in the dream. But in ordinary life Emperor and Burgomaster do not affect him. Only because here they are symbols, because the Emperor represents his greatest obstacle and the burgomaster symbolizes his most cherished ideal, his beloved, are these dream thoughts linked 86 Sex and Dreams to such tremendous affects. Very interesting is the observation: The burgomaster calls out excitedly: where is the Emperor? That is the very climax of the little drama which is portrayed before us, the great scene between the father and the beloved. Naturally she is the one who comes out victorious. But any one who thinks this analysis is at all exhaustive is badly mistaken. The dream shows us the problem of his love affair. He has carried out an identification of his mother with the beloved. The Assembly House stands for the mother as well as for the bride; it signifies the beloved mother, or the beloved, who shall be the mother of his children. The mother receives the father (Emperor) nat- urally evening. The mass of people signify the re- bellious wishes, the numberless evil thoughts, and for that reason, naturally, by way of contrast, a se- cret. The three figures on guard, symbolize, like most trinities, the penis and pair of testicles. Here the penis is the "iron man" with the lance; the tes- ticles (egg-yellow) are characterized by golden gar- ments. 2 One on the right, the other, on the left. It is an old dream symbolism that the father means also the generating one, that is, the penis. The tes- ticles are naturally immovable, quiet, only the penis is impatient for the "arrival." 7 and a few others we are lucky to be allowed "The "golden balls" as testicles: Anthropophyteia, vol. II., p. 142. Assembly House Dream 87 to get in. 3 Naturally, he was within the maternal body. The past becomes the present. (This theme, maternal body phantasies will preoccupy us at different times in the course of our present study.) The wishes become progressively more pressing. Another's three become his trinity. 4 The Em- peror leaves through a side door (that is, he dies, his carriage disappears in the crowd). The situa- tion resembles more closely the act of coitus (up and down the steps) and the dreamer wakes up. The birth phantasy naturally commingles with the defloration phantasy. He does not want to wait so long. The iron man is impatient. Another picture: The Dream of the Unbridled Life: (23) I am in a street car which is bound for the Franz-Joseph Station. One horse is harnessed with a bridle of thin rope. The rope breaks. This dream I dreamed in the fall after the return of my wife through the Franz-Joseph Station from a Summer vacation. A clear wish fulfillment, to con- tinue the care-free existence of a "grass" widower There are three children in the family. 4 Interesting material on symbolism is found in the work en- titled, Ancient, Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas Jnman, M.D. (2d ed., New York, Peter Ecker, Pub- lisher). According to this author the cross represents the union of 4 phalli, it is of Phoenician origin and has nothing to do with the essence of Christianity. In the beginning the cross represented the fusion of trinity and unity. It is a symbol commonly met in Egyptian art. 88 Sex cmd Dreams (expressed in one of the slang popular songs of a few years ago, in the sentiment : "My wife has gone to the Country, hurrah, hurrah!") obviously the welling up of an unconscious thought. In reality I was happy for my wife to take again the house- hold affairs in hand so that I could live once more under orderly conditions. I had not taken advan- tage of my supposed state of freedom. But the se- cret wish must have been there, nevertheless. Of course, I am the draft horse. That is a com- mon symbol for the husband, in contrast with the woman who is represented preferably as the guard- ian. The ties which bind me to carriage are rep- resented in this dream as being very weak. The rope breaks (double meaning: the horse, that is, the flighty-minded fellow breaks away). The death wish also shows itself in the dream thoughts. The Farces cut the thread of life. 5 The thread of life breaks off. The infantile layer is represented through the Franz- Joseph Station idea (Emperor Franz Joseph father). I return again to the realm of youth, I return to mother and . . . leave my wife. The "life thread" in the folk thought represents also the penis: Anthropophyteia, vol. II, p. 112. The guilty conscience on account of shortening one's life thread or span of existence through masturbation (drawing off the life thread) is also a latent dream thought. Self-reproaches on account of infantile onanism play a great r61e in the neuroses and, like death thoughts, are found in most dreams in caricatured forms diffi- cult to unravel. Infantile Substratum 89 We have seen that the dream fulfills our secret wishes or ... reveals our secret fears. Fears and wishes are sisters. There is no fear represented in dreams which was not once a wish. In my work, Nervose Angst zustdnde, I have proven in connection with a large number of anxiety dreams, that the cryptic wish of neurotics appears in dream as fear or anxiety. I want to close this chapter with a short but in- structive dream which illustrates in very clear man- ner the bearing on anxiety. A man, about thirty years of age, suffers of a seri- ous perversion. He craves contact only with chil- dren below ten years of age. He has fought against this weakness with energy and successfully. He knew how to control the beast in himself. One of his favorite fancies was to think up situations in which indulgence in his particular perversion would not seem a sinful act. For instance, suppose a highwayman should force him to it . . . He would not be responsible and would stand exculpated be- fore human and divine law alike on the score of vis major (coercion). This man dreams: (24) I am followed in the open field by a tramp, a very powerful fellow. He has with him a small girl. I was afraid he might force me to have sexual intercourse with the girl, but I thought to myself: I should not really let that weigh very heavily on my 90 Sex and Dreams conscience this time. I ran off and came across some people so that I was saved. The dreamer, thus, is ready to carry out a sinful act under circumstances which would absolve him from responsibility. He looks for the force majeure of fate, in the form of a Pulcher (Viennese expres- sion for "Strolch"). But even this old wish has now turned into fear on account of inhibitions. 6 This dream shows the transference of a waking phantasy to the dream life. It illustrates a strange borderland wherein wish and fear commingle in a single affect. Cf. the case of a Rabbi in, Nervose Angstzustdnde, p. 165. IV SYMBOLISM OF THE SINKING TREE REPRESENTATION OF MOTHER EARTH THE FEAR OF SELF Turchterlich tief leuchtet der Traum vn den in IMS gebauten Epikurs und Augiasstall hmein, und wir sehen in der Nacht aUe die wilden Grabtiere und Abendwolfe ledig wmherstrevfen, die am, Tage die Vernunft auf die Kette hielt. [The dream penetrates to gruesome depths mto our Epicurean nature, it lights up the Augean stable within us and at night we see, freely prowling around, the wild beasts, the ferocious wolves which reason keeps enchained during the day.] Jean Paul IV The examples chosen from the Bible and from Artemidoros as well as various other dreams have shown us that symbolism furnishes the key to dream interpretation. One would think therefore that an accurate knowledge of dream symbols is all that is necessary to enable one to clear up the meaning of any dream. But the matter is not so simple. Now and then it may be possible to recognize the content of a dream merely by a superficial survey of its imagery. But only now and then. Generally it cannot be done. And even if a certain meaning has been recognized what is its value? Every dream has multiple meanings. The dream is distorted through various mechanisms, with some of which we have already become familiar, while others we will learn to know later. According to Freud we must distinguish two categories of data: the manifest dream content and the latent dream content. In many cases the latent content cannot be recognized without the aid of the dreamer. For the symbols have only conditionally a fixed meaning. And any- thing may serve as a symbol. Also, the symbolism varies with different persons. A violin player uses 93 94 Sex and Dreams a different symbolic language than a grocer. Every one draws his symbolisms from his own sphere of knowledge. In dream, the father, for instance, is always represented as an authority, and so most persons think of him as the Kaiser, the chorus singer in the opera as the conductor, the perpetual student as the teacher, the politician as the chair- man, the peasant as the government official, the tramp as the officer, the Viennese "Spieser" as the Mayor, the "religious gentleman" as the Pope, al- though others, too, may represent the father through the Pope (papa). I have anticipatively made this point so as to guard against a one sided overvaluation of the dream symbols. Now we turn to an apparently easy, simple analysis of a dream: Mrs. Delta dreams : (25) I was in an open quadrangular space (it was not an enclosure) a garden? or a Court? A tree at one end, slowly disappeared before our eyes, as if gradually sinking into water. I was clever enough to notice that tree and Court alike also underwent a shaking motion: "Here we see how the changes upon the earth surface are brought about" This dream was followed by another, forgotten dream picture, which ended with a light anxiety feeling. We see that the dream represents in fact, the occurrence of an earthquake. Recollections of the Earthquake Dream 95 terrible catastrophe of Messina have had something to do with the excitation of the dream picture (re- cent factor uppermost dream layer). On that occasion a village disappeared almost completely during the earthquake, in places the coast lines were altered. The dreamer had also read a few days before a novel by Ganghofer, entitled "Der Lauf- ende Berg" (The Moving Mountain), which de- scribed how a hut sank deeper and deeper into the ground. We thus have, apparently, a simple re- production of a newspaper account and of a scene described in a story and the fear might express the fear of earthquakes which so many persons showed when the Messina and San Francisco disasters were in the public eye. If we could prove, with Swoboda, 1 that the woman had read the novel twenty-eight days pre- viously, or that some multiple of twenty-eight days passed since she read about the earthquake in the newspapers, we might quietly maintain that the dream was merely a periodic repetition of a strong impression received some time before. Admitting that this might be the case what have we gained thereby towards the understanding of the dream? We must really try to penetrate more deeply into the symbolism of the dream. The woman recalls that during an earthquake an island once made its 1 Studien zur Orundlegung der Psychologic. A very interest- ing work in which the proof is brought forth that certain im- pressions are periodically given expression in the dream. 96 Sex and Dreams appearance in midocean, in other words, the earth- quake gave birth to it. We suspect at once that the theme of the dream revolves around the bipolar contrast, birth and death, such contrasts being fre- quently represented in dreams through the same symbols. Let us look into that. Another associa- tion of ideas bring to the dreamer's mind the last Vienna earthquake. On that occasion a satirical wit played a joke and sent to the daily paper a scientific sounding but confusing account of the occurrence as coming from a specialist and ended his conglomeration with the remark: Meine Frau verspiirte auch einige Stosse, literally, "My wife, too, felt some 'shakings,' " but the newspaper editor, of course, changed that to "shakes." We are now coming a little closer to the meaning of the dream. A big tree which disappears, shakings, shakes, birth. What does it all mean? The answer is not difficult. The whole dream assumes a different aspect. It represents an infantile scene from the earliest child- hood, when the woman dreamer had observed the act of coitus between the parents. She had but heard the rhythmic motions of the bed. The quad- rilateral space was the bedroom of her parents and the marital bed, which is also quadrilateral. 2 The * In this sense of "vier-eckig," quadrangular, four-cornered, table stands for bed. Note the expression: . . . "having left . . . bed and board"; in German, literally, "table and bed" (Trennung von Tisch und Belt). Birth Symbolism 97 further addition, "it was not a closed space gar- den or Court?" serves partly as dream distortion, partly as over determination, a means of fusing room and bed. Just as two negatives result in an affirma- tive, the emphasis here (it was not closed) must be looked upon as an affirmation. Freud very properly states: "There is no negation in dream." If a dream raises the positive contention : "My wife was not there" the statement means the exact opposite, namely that the presence of the wife was painful and has to be covered up as much as possible. We have here, then, the representation of a shak- ing motion of the bed (or a room). What has that to do with a tree sinking into water? The well- known dream symbolism comes to our aid at this point. Water always stands for a reference to birth. 3 Children come from the water, that is the first infantile theory of sex. Infants before birth float in water, we adults learn. And the tree? Whati does it signify other than the life-bestowing principle, the penis? Birth and death, both are represented through the penis. The mother is here represented as the earth, as mother earth. Changes in the "earth surface" is a symbolic reference to pregnancy (swelling of the abdomen). Here we encounter a strange problem: the prob- A subsequent chapter will be devoted to a systematic ac- count of birth dreams. 98 Sex and Dreams lem of life and death in the dream. Is it not re- markable that contraries should carry the same meaning? For a further analysis of the dream re- veals that it is a symbolization of death. We shall revert to that later. Here I want merely to point out that a German scientist has studied this relationship long ago. In the peculiar, somewhat flowery language character- istic of his day, Schubert states : * "What we find in the language of dreams, every tone of irony, every peculiar association of ideas and the spirit of prophecy, all that we find pre- eminently also in the original of the dream world, in nature. In fact, nature appears to be in concord- ance with our cryptic poet and to ridicule with him our pathetic joys and our joyful pathos, as when she mocks us in our graves at one time, wails in our ear when we are in the marital bed at another time, thus pairing in wonderful fashion pleasure and pain, joy and sadness, like that nature voice, the air music of Ceylon which sings wonderfully joy- ful menuets in tones of harrowing, heartbreaking sadness. It is love time and joy time when the night- ingale's wailing song is at its best, lamenting the rose over the grave, according to a poetic expres- sion, and when all joyful notes in Nature have a wailing quality and reversely, a certain ephemeral bird is said always to celebrate its marriage on the grave, on the day of its death. Death and marriage, marriage and death, lie so closely associated in na- Symbolism of Dreams, Leipzig, F. A. Brockhaus, 1840. SymboUzation of Opposites 99 ture, as in dreams, often the one seems to signify the other, to conjure up or to imply the presence of the other; in nature's language they usually appear as ideas of equal weight, either of which may, on occa- sion, replace the other. As already observed else- where, the creation and the last dissolution of our bodies are processes everywhere in nature inti- mately related and identical with reference to the sub- stances and changes involved; phosphorus is morn- ing and evening star ? alike, marriage and death candle at the same time, and while a portion of the continuously revolving cycle of metabolic processes is engaged in building up, another portion is en- gaged in tearing down. Pain and pleasure, pleasure and pain, are similarly related; the child of joy is born in pain; with the highest degree of sensory dysphoria and torture, even in the midst of fainting and apparent death, comes the supreme pleasure; reversely, too, sensory pleasure is a messenger of pain. "That strange association seems not to have es- caped the attention of the prehistoric race which has raised the phallus, or its colossal symbol, the pyramid, to mark the grave, and has celebrated the death divinity with ceremonials around the phallus ; as if every act of a sensuous character contained also the raw indication of a deeper understanding. In the midst of the death ceremonials and mourning wails of the ancient mysteries there resounded also, as in some Shakespearian tragedy, the laughter over Baubo and Jacchus; back of the largely comical and joyful festivities there was often discernible a very earnest and tragic note" (Loc. cit., p. 38). 100 Sex and Dreams We must look in our dream, too, for a deeper meaning. We discover a further sense to it: the dream is a death phantasy. She lies in the grave. A planted tree, such as she has seen in cemeteries, here sinks gradually into the earth. The four-cor- nered place in which she lies is the grave. 5 As the earth spirit announces in Faust: Geburt und Grab, Em ewiges Meer, Ein wechselnd Weben, Em gluhend Leben. She thus lies in the closed grave, in the cemetery, where flowers bloom (garden) and memorial trees are planted eventually to disappear. On the great judgment day the graves open up and the dead awaken. Woe! How has she spent her life? Was it not a chain of sinful thoughts? Here we see the deep feeling of guilt, which must break forth at the end of the dream in the form of anxiety. That does not yet exhaust the meaning of the dream. The most important feature is yet to be revealed. The fear at the end (anxiety) shows sup- S "A woman dreams of going to visit a lady of her acquain- tance who was really on her death bed at the time, following a prolonged illness; upon her arrival she is not a little sur- prised to find the woman in childbirth, a thing she cannot understand considering the sick woman's advanced age and her grown up son who was standing nearby. Here the incident of lying bedridden furnishes the associative link between child- birth and dying." (Das Leben des Traumes, by Karl Albert Scherner, Berlin. Verl. Heinr. Schindler, 1861, p. 147.) Fear 101 pressed sexuality; it reveals wishes which being un- reachable, unfulfillable, and unsocial turn into anxiety. We discover that her husband, fearing the care and responsibility of children, has practiced for years coitus interruptus. That fear of preg- nancy shows itself also in the dream picture. Also the fear that her husband, who is in fact a healthy and powerful man, may die suddenly, or prove un- true, etc. 6 Here an association of ideas leads to the most im- portant of the dream thoughts. She has a single child, a son, who is to marry during the next few months. On the evening before the dream her future daughter-in-law came to her and they planned the necessary bridal outfit. They inspected various waist models and the girl favored a shirt which buttons in front, saying: "That is very convenient. If I should have to nurse, I could use just that kind of a waist." She was surprised at the freedom with which the modern girl speaks of such things. As a girl she was entirely different. . . . She felt a mo- mentary wave of aversion for the glowing, young, healthy girl who had robbed her of her son's heart. Now we understand the third significance of the dream. The tree disappearing in the ground is The fear the man may die expresses her cryptic wish. The man is a prisoner and must not leave her for a moment alone. We can understand the motive: he must not go from her, that is, die. 102 Sex and Dreams her son. 7 She sees him during the bridal night (in her spirit), she sees anticipatively her daughter-in- law's pregnancy. She is jealous and that jealousy causes her keen suffering. The little son, whose nurse she had been, in the dream is often repre- sented as the penis. Here he symbolizes both. The dream means, therefore: I foresee the end of my love! My son will marry soon. He will gradually wean himself away from me. I mean less and less to him. He is becoming entirely absorbed in his love (the sinking tree). He will render his wife pregnant, he will be a father. That is how times bring on changes. It would be very interesting to find out what the continuation of the dream indicates. How she frees herself of these difficulties. That, of course, is the chief theme of the dream and therefore it is com- pletely hidden from view. But from analogy with similar previous dreams of this patient we are dealing with such a one we may infer that the missing part deals with the death of the young rival. Such a rival once died off that was four years ago and because of the reproaches which she felt unconsciously over it, her neurosis developed. Now her phantasies play with the same thought and the feeling of guilt reacts with the expatiation of anxiety. 'She "planted" it, raised it, took care of it. The tree, l.e., son, must be her support. Fear of Self 103 The anxiety in the last analysis is fear of self. 6 The most important thought, in this connection, is the one most deeply hidden. It is the thought of death. Rather than not begrudge her own beloved son to her future daughter-in-law, she would see him dead. He should die, he should be out of the way. A grave is dug and a body is laid in. That is for her the most important change in the earth surface. Such evil thoughts encounter inhibition and be- come expressed as anxiety. For she truly loves her son. She does not want to lose him. In every dream the thought of death is also woven in. There is no dream which does not contain an adumbration of death. Our woman patient lives only with the dead. She is rich in spirits (play of words, a pun on: geist- reich, spiritual). Further associations of this dream lead to thoughts of masturbation (shaking motions) and bisexuality. 9 But it might confuse the reader to go on. The dream has already become complicated. But there are no simple dreams. ' Cf. the words of Richard III about the terrible dream be- fore the battle. The so-called "maternal body phantasy," i.e., the illusion of being within the body (coffin) of the mother and of watching the details of marital experience, too, comes here to surface. She is afraid of "being buried alive." DREAM MASKS PUESUIT DREAMS THE POLITICAL DREAM ABOUT BISMARCK THE WONDERFUL VILLA THE DREAM ABOUT THE BAKER CON- TRARY MEANING OF ABORIGINAL WORDS THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE DON JUAN TYPE SAVINGS BANKBOOK AND LOVE EVIL THOUGHTS OF CHILDHOOD THE SKILLFUL FENCER THE DARK MAN, A SYMBOL FOR DEATH Glaubt mir, des Menschen wahrster Wahn Wird ihm im Trawme aufgetan. [Believe me, man sees his wildest fancy come true, in his dreams.] Richard Wagner Numerous examples have shown us that the dream speaks a symbolic language and that the unraveling of the symbols yields a partial explanation of the dream. I must underscore again, a partial explana- tion only, because in addition to the symbolism va- rious processes involved in the dream distortion play a role to which I must next call attention. One of the most important forms of dream dis- tortion is the transposition into the antithetical. The oldest dream interpreters were already aware of that process and the popular mind has also per- ceived the truth. If one dreamed of death, the Egyptian dream book explained it as meaning birth ; if one met great misfortune in dreams the ancient interpreters took that to mean the presaging of good luck. These popular attempts at interpreta- tion have been treated with ridicule by some of our scientists ; but it appears, as Freud rightly remarks, that the folk mind was nearer the truth in these matters than the learned scientist. Many dreams may be interpreted as signifying an antithetical transposition of material. "Excrement means gold. Gold and excrement are antithetical, that is why the 107 108 Sex and Dreams devil's gold turns into excrement. But is it a peculi- arity of dreams to represent objects by their con- traries. Thus, it means illness when one is in full dress, quarrel when one makes love, and keen sensu- ous pleasure in dreams not infrequently is a fore- runner of actual pain : vae tibi ridenti, quia mox post gaudia flebis." (Kleinpaid, Sprache ohne Worte.) I record now the most instructive example that has come to my attention. A woman said to me: "Dreams are nonsense !" For the fourth time I have had the following ridiculous dream: (27 ) A little, old, ugly woman chases me around the table; I am afraid and wake up with fear. The meaning is very simple. If we translate the little old ugly woman into the opposite we find that in the dream she is being pursued around the table by a big, attractive young man, an experience which corresponds to a wish on the part of this attractive woman who is married to a very weak, delicate man, and a wish which through repression (on account of its "forbidden" character) is turned into a fear. The continuation of the dream is re- called by the woman only after my interpretation and corroborates the interpretation. The alleged old woman in the dream tears off the subject's blouse and wants to stick her hand between the breasts a procedure wholly illogical on the part of an old woman but perfectly intelligible on the part of a young man in the same situation, which really Dream Distortion 109 depicts a rape phantasy. On the other hand, it is also conceivable that the picture represents a re- verse act, that she struggles with a wish to run after a big man; but the end seems to make that illogical. Why should she want to tear open the man's waist- coat? Here we learn another dream process, the so-called transposition from below. In many dreams what takes place below is represented above and reversely. That is an extraordinarily common form of dream distortion, a process which, more- over, plays also a tremendous role in the symptomat- ology of the neuroses. Applying the principle of transposition from below above we arrive at the wish to act aggressively and tear apart a man's trousers. Both interpretations, the aggressive and the defensive, fit into one another very well; for there is no sadist who is not also a masochist, no exhibitionist who is not a voyeur at the same time. "All instincts appear in pairs." 1 Thus nature her- self upholds the law of opposites. The dream must bear a meaning also in a positive sense. She fears the mother. She has homosexual leanings and wishes the assault which, moreover, signifies a ques- tion about her motherhood. 1 Alfred Adler, Der Aggressionstrieb im Leben und in der Neurose, Fortschritte der Medi/in, 1908, No. 19: "In the healthy, the perverse, and the neurotics, alike, the motive power is generated by two originally disparate instincts which are later drawn together and, as a consequence, the sadistic-masochistic manifestation corresponds, alike, to two instincts, the sexual instinct and the instinct of aggression (Aggressionstrieb)" 110 Sex and Dreams For the woman is sterile. She will never have milk in her breast. And now we arrive at the most signifi- cant meaning. She wishes to be again with the mjother and lie at the nurse's breast. The grip on the breasts is the first pleasurable contact of infancy. The dream thus plays upon various motives. More than that! The old -woman who seizes her at the heart is the symbol of death. An ancient sym- bol. Every fear is also a fear of death. In fact, in roundabout ways, always the fear of death! Thus we see an interplay of the yearning for life and the fear of death, the fear of living and the yearning after death, commingled. Moreover, these forms of dream distortion are supported by linguistic characteristics. Linguists have pointed out that in man's abo- riginal language many words had double meaning, signifying one concept and at the same time the exact opposite. This feature of language was known already to Schubert, who in his Symbolik des Traumes (Sym- bolism of Dream) maintains: "Recent, more penetrating linguistic investiga- tions has proven everywhere the prevalence of inter- changeable terms in the articulated language and the kinship of words. First we frequently find that words having contrary meanings originate from the same root; as if, in expressing itself, the soul em- phasized the inner organic double sense, rather than Life and Death 111 some external particularized manifestation thereof. . . . Words designating warm and cold are not only similarly sounding in some modern languages: for instance, Italian caldo, English cold, and Ger- man kalt, meaning the opposite ; but within the realm of the same language we find words for warm and for cold derived from the same root (gelu, gelidus, cold; and caelo, calidus, warm); and the God of the tropical South has descended from the cold North. Just as frequently in myth and lan- guage the good divinity is fused with the evil one and reversely, the evil divinity is taken for good, so in Persian, although the corresponding myth makes a strong division between the two principles, the name of the evil Ahriman and that of the god of light, Orim-Asdes, both come from the same root; so also gpos (eros), love, and epis (eris, quarrel; and in various other languages the words for unity and union and enemy and division are the same. (Swe- denborg elaborated a theory that sensuous love gen- erates in heaven the crassest hatred.) Light, too, the symbol of truth, and falsehood, or lying, in some languages are derived from the same root, be- cause light (the beautiful morning star, as it is called somewhere, after flaring up in a scorching flame, becomes the rapacious wolf, the evil Loghe, who elsewhere appears also as dog and bitch, in unpleasant connotations. That double quality (scorching and lighting) of light is played upon in the jargon of myth everywhere. Blood, too, appears in double sense, as poison, anger, raging madness, and as expatiation, appeasement, peace. Rage and meekness, darkness and light, the heavy metal and the light bird, air and iron, the generating of joy 112 Sex and Dreams and sadness, low and high, sensuality and impo- tence, and many other concepts of similar anti- thetical character are traceable likewise to the same roots ; the lamb as well as the beast, which are often met as symbols of the creative logos first appear as ram expressing the generative principle, then as representing the grossest sensualism (here, too, lamb and flame, from same root) ; or as snake either in a beneficial or in a fearfully evil sense." Not infrequently we are in a position to trace in a remarkable manner precisely how words came to be used in a sense exactly contrary to their original meaning. A few examples will suffice. The kinship of knowing and generating has been traced already in a very remarkable manner by Franz Baeder: "In language and myth, dove, too, which as the holy spirit puts in motion the water of life as well as man's cognitive spirit, is identical with the bird phoenix and with the palm (tree or leaf). The palm, also the flower of night at the fountain of life, or, in other versions of myth, the acorn, vine, or fig tree becomes the tree of knowledge, which is at the same time also the tree of contention. Finally the tree of knowledge becomes the lingam, the ap- paratus and symbol of sensuous delights. In the same manner the seeing eye, the fountain of light, the Word, becomes on the one side the building, creating hand, on the other, with the hand itself, signifies the organ of physical generation. The Contrary Meanings 113 vitalizing eye becomes at the same time the evil (killing) eye, the truth-generating, oath-yielding hand, the organ of falsehood, lying, waste. Thus, that young prudish virgin who in the myth was never touched by the breath of a sensuous wish be- comes the sophisticated goddess of the most unre- strained and wildest sensuality; the creative, spir- itually cognitive, word undergoes a terrible change under the picture of the horrible ram Mendes, whose cult includes all the shameful deeds relating to the most bestial animal lust; the fish and the snake of sensuous indulgence generate also that terrible poison, which has corrupted the world and life. The word of love, the holy name, the law become punish- ment, anger, revenge. Just as linguistic catastro- phes change good into evil, light into darkness, so the same mechanisms effect the reverse transforma- tions, evil turning into good; and many examples in myth and language, show evil and poison trans- formed into lovely figures or beneficial agencies." Freud, in the second volume of the Jahrbuch fur psycTioanalytische und psychopathologische Forsch- ungen, called our attention to a pamphlet by Karl Abel, entitled Ueber den Gegensinn der Urworte (On the Contrary Meaning of Aboriginal Words, pub- lished in 1889). In that work Abel points out: "In the Egyptian language . . . that unique relic of a primitive world, there are a fairly large 114* Sex and Dreams number of words with double meaning, each the exact contrary of the other. Consider the apparent nonsense of having to bear in mind that the word strong, for instance, in our language, means strong and "weak at the same time; that the noun light means light as well as darkness; etc., and there we have a concrete picture of what the Egyptians were accustomed to meet in their daily language. Who can be blamed for an inclination to shake one's head incredulously? . . . "Considering this and many similar instances of antithetical meaning, there can be no doubt that there was at least one language containing a multi- tude of words signifying one thing and at the same time the exact opposite. Strange as it may seem the fact is plain and we must take it into considera- tion. "Among all the eccentricities of the Egyptian lexicon the most extraordinary perhaps is the fact that, in addition to words which cover opposite meanings, the language contains also compound words, formed of a couple of syllables of contrary meaning, but standing as a unit the meaning of which disregards entirely the sense of one of the com- ponent parts. In that remarkable language there are, thus, not merely words which signify strong as well as weak, commanding as well obeying; there are also composite terms such as old-young, distant- near, uniting-dividing, outside-inside, which in spite of their double and antithetical source, signify, re- spectively, old, distant, uniting, outside. . . . These compound words deliberately bring together con- trary meanings, not for the purpose of forming a new meaning, as is done occasionally in the Chinese Contrary Meanings 115 language, but merely in order to use the composite term in the sense of one of its antithetical compo- nents, when the latter would have carried the same meaning, if taken by itself. . . ." But the riddle is more easily solved than may appear on the surface. Our concepts arise through contrasts. "If it were always light," states Freud, in his interpretative abstract of Abel's essay mentioned above, "we should not distinguish between light and darkness, and consequently we would have neither the concept nor the word light. ... It is clear, everything on this planet is relative and has independent existence only insofar as it stands in relation to, and differs from, other objects. . . . Since every concept is thus the twin of its opposite, how could it be perceived, how could it be communi- cated at all to another trying to acquire it, except through comparison or contrast with its opposite?" In dreams this contrast or antithesis plays a great role. The most wonderful peculiarity of human nature, man's bipolarity, expresses itself through this extremely interesting psychic phenomenon. There is no "negative" in dreams, as Freud aptly re- marks. But in that sense there is also no "yes." The dream divinity is the arch-type of the doubter. In some dreams this contrariness is deliberately expressed, and specifically through doubt, as in the following dream of an artist suffering of a profes- sional neurosis: 116 Sex and Dreams (28) I am running away from some one, or else I am pursuing somebody through water, over steps, into the room. It occurs to him that there was some one else in the dream; we try to inform ourselves who that could be, and he replies it was a colleague, a piano player like himself, who tried to enter the tech- nical school; he was not accepted and that worried him very much. The person he pursued he does not recall, but we know from previous analyses that it can be only his own mother, and in fact it was his habit as a child to run off over the steps and into the room when she threatened to punish him. He remembers such scenes, he recalls also that during the previous year he and his mother bathed together in a river. The men's dressing cabins were on one side, the women's on the other. In spite of the great distance he swam nearly one half hour to his mother, whom he reached in a state of exhaustion. We see that both incidents are fixed in the dream. As a child he ran from his mother, as an adult he swam across the river to her side. What is the meaning of this dream? He is a great Don Juan, mostly in his phantasy; but if he followed his inclination, he would become the kind of character called in Vienna a Steiger (literally, a "stepper"). Hence the mean- ing of Stiege (steps, or stairway). The rooms, as usual in dreams, signify women (in German, Zim- mer-Frauenzimmer, rooms women) ; to climb after Colloquial Expressions 117 Frauenzimmer (women) that is, indeed, his chief preoccupation. He runs after all women, one after another, and cannot be true to any one. But why does he run after all women without being true to one? Because he is running away from one woman who cannot be a wife to him his mother. This brief dream discloses the psychology of the Don Juan. Because of his perpetual fidelity Don Juan is untrue. He is eternally true to his infan- tile ideal, the mother, and because he looks every- where for this ideal, and never finds her, every woman rouses him and promptly disappoints him. What interests him in the end is the woman's re- sistance and, sure of disappointment, he concen- trates his whole attention on the task of overcom- ing the resistance and of making the conquest. The two opposite tendencies, the running off, which im- plies pursuit, or, if we prefer, the pursuit, which similarly designates a running away are strikingly well expressed in this dream. Dreams of water are usually birth dreams and it was not an accident, therefore, that in this case the dream evoked the recollection of the dreamer's swimming to his mother. But who is the colleague who was not ac- cepted? His younger brother. He wishes to be the only child in his mother's "technical school." That the master is the father, even the tyro in analysis will have surmised. Mr. X. is also the father (con- densation) who thus appears excluded from the 118 Sex and Dreams school, like the brother. Piano playing is a common symbol for "sexual intercourse" or for "masturba- tion," like all other acts involving the notion of "playing." I continue this series of dreams by giving next a very interesting dream in which transposition plays a great role. This is a so-called political dream. Indeed, dream life conceives nothing as holy. The greatest and loftiest personages of the world of high politics are utilized by the dream as symbols for commonplace homely thoughts. But let us not anticipate the interpretation but relate first the dream, which on first perusal gives the im- pression of something logical, and that is seldom the case with dreams. My political dream is as fol- lows: (29) I am in the Hofburg and see Bismarck. With others I shout: Hoch! Some one starts the anthem. I join lustily. Several fall on their knees. ... 7 see Bismarck again. We speak about the incident, also about the books which he carries. I tell him that our library shows a striking gap when- ever we take out a few books on a journey. He thinks he never had that feelmg, and I explain that by the fact that in his tremendously large library a few books more or less makes no difference. We have here a political dream, in which some German nationalists persistently acclaim Bismarck; they become noisy and partly as reaction call forth Word Associations 119 the answer of all good patriots, the people's hymn. And yet! Like most political dreams this dream, too, has nothing to do with politics. I had the dream in P., a beautiful rural place at the sea. We had our summer place there. But un- fortunately my vacation was disturbed. One week before the projected removal to the place I received disquieting news from F., where my aged mother lives. A telegram called me to her. I found her in a serious condition which required my constant pres- ence near her. Under such circumstances vacation- ing at P. was out of question. I determined quickly to remove my family from P. to Abbazia, where I could see also my mother daily. I also thought that the presence of my family would bring joy to the bedridden patient and aid her recovery. (That actually was the case. There is no physician like joy.) I remained for a few days at F., until her condition improved somewhat, and then went to P., which I was sorry to have to leave. On the sec- ond night of my sojourn there I had my "political" dream. And now the analysis. / am in the Hofburg. My summer residence pleased me immensely. It was a villa with a long veranda permitting a beautiful view across Maria- Worth. Everything was so pleasant and comfort- able, that my little one said: "The Kaiser could not have it any nicer!" Hofburg, then, means the best 120 Sex and Dreams summer residence. A further association is the name of the owner. His name is Schweinburg. He is the architect who has built the Burg theater at Vienna, which some one called jestingly the Schwein- burg theater. The Hofburg of my dream, then, is my villa, and the beginning of the dream signifies: I am at P., in my fine, beautifully situated summer residence. And I see Bismarck. What has Bismarck to do with P.? That is also easy to understand. The Bismarck of the dream was a strikingly tall, thin man with yellowish-muddy complexion and white mustache. The dream here carries out the wit- ticism so common in dreams, of covering up the con- tent by transposition into the opposite. The big, lean man with white mustache and yellowish com- plexion is a small, heavy, florid appearing man with a dark mustache, my friend Dr. M., whose summer residence in P. so pleased me the year before that I chose one in the same place. Dr. M. had an un- pleasant controversy with a society to which we both belonged and he adjusted it with such diplomatic skill that I assured him at the time: Bismarck him- self could not have done better! Moreover, another colleague told me of Dr. M. that he was very clever and experienced, a second Bismarck in his vocation. The dream represents the wish that he should now act as skillfully as a Bismarck and help me Associations 121 get released of the contract for the summer resi- dence without too great a loss, so that I may be able to return quickly to mother. With the others I shouted: Hoch! We are a group all praising P. We love the beautiful place at the sea, the clean roads. Whither one walks one has the impression of moving in a great garden; there are interesting excursion spots ; we praise the bathing, the charming position of the establish- ment, etc. Some one begins the people's anthem. Mr. S., a man of the people, now well-to-do, thought the place was very expensive. He has spent a lot of money in a few weeks. / join lustily. That is a fact. The absence of a moderate priced inn might interfere with my stay at P. Several persons fall on their knees: refers to the ridiculous deference of some persons towards the proprietor of the establishment. Then I see Bismarck again, we speak of the inci- dent. Incident is an important word. Ein Wechsel der den Zug auf andere Geleise bringt: a change which makes for a different turn. It is the illness which causes painful experience to a being most dear to me. But that will carry us into another channel of our dream thoughts. Let us beware of digressing and continue the interpretation on the 122 Sex and Dreams path on which we have already started. I spoke with Dr. M. about my difficulty and he promised me his assistance in canceling the contract. . . . Also about the books which he carries. I tell him that our library shows a marked gap when- ever we take out a few books on a journey. He< thinks he never had that feeling, and I explain that by the fact that, in his tremendous large library, a few books more or less make no difference. This is a reference to the savings bank account on which I drew before undertaking the journey. My wife, always the economical, thrifty influence in our household, thought that the summer expense I had at first intended to spend six weeks in the country would cause a marked gap in our modest resources. Dr. M., who was also to stay six weeks at the place, is well-to-do and can more easily afford the luxury. The dream plays upon this thought. In fact, I had spoken to Dr. M. about the vacation expenses. 2 We have interpreted the dream thus far. It con- tains to a certain extent regrets that I had chosen so expensive a summer resort. It is, as if I had said 1 Savings bank account here means also woman. In my mono- graph, Keuschheit und Gesundheit (Prudery and Health) I have stated: "There is no savings box for the spermatozoa." Dr. M. figures as an admirer of the fair sex. I accuse him of maintaining a harem, while I have but one wife. According to the "symbolic parallelism" of which we shall speak at length in the next chapter, "spermatic fluid" means also "money." (Consider also the expression "striking gap" and "tremendous large library," from that standpoint.) Associations 123 to Dr. M. in the dream: "Yes, you can afford to live at the Hofburg. What does it matter if you do make some inroads into your savings bank ac- count? I am a man of the people, for whom a sim- ple country place would be good enough. But let us investigate further. I have already mentioned that the word Vorfall, "incident," refers to the change leading in another direction. Let us now take up the other path.. . . . There are a number of dream symbols almost regularly permitting a particular translation. A symbol of that type is also the Emperor in the dream, who, as I have already said, usually represents the father. Applying that key, the Hofburg becomes my father's residence and Bismarck is my mother. That fits even better. A strikingly tall, thin man stands antithetically for a small, heavy woman, like my mother, whom father always called his Bismarck. Wisdom is her most striking characteristic. The yellowish complexion due to illness also corresponds. I found my mother very ill and I was distressed to see her face drawn and distorted with pain. Bis- marck, thus, represents two persons, a process called Verdichtung (condensation), by Freud. I join other persons shouting, Hoch! We wish her a speedy recovery. "Kopf hoch Miitterchen, keep up your courage, mother dear, you will get better," I told the dear aged patient when she began talking about a will and about dying. Some 124 Sex and Dreams one starts the anthem : It goes : Gott erhalte Gott beschiitze God keep, God protect" in this case, of course, mother ! Several persons fatt on their knees: that refers to an actual occurrence at the meeting. We speak of the occurrence: that reproduces a daily experience. . . . Also about the books he car- ries along, etc. : gives the solution to the dream. I confessed to mother that I made a great sacrifice with the journey (savings bank account). She spoke about the distribution of her jewelry which we cherish not for its monetary value but on account of its associations. But in my dream I see mother as an immensely wealthy woman possessing a tremendously large "library.'* The wish fulfillment is clear. We, her children, are the heirs. Instead of relics we receive tremendous sums of money, for she is as rich as a Princess (Bismarck). The dream reveals to me an ugly, unpleasant, painful thought, which I have never entertained in waking life, but which must have been slumbering in my breast. While mother was speaking about the distribution of her humble goods, I must have repressed an emotion which, ex- pressed in words, may sound approximately as fol- lows: "Why are you talking about your pitiful possessions, as if you were leaving behind, who knows what great and valuable inheritance! You won't even cover the expenses of my journey here,** Unbidden Thoughts 125 I need hardly emphasize that my waking con- sciousness is unaware of such a thought. I am any- thing but careful in money matters and I am ex- tremely sensitive. But such unconscious thoughts are linked with the most delicate feelings in good men, a fact which should make us more thoughtful about all those persons whom we are disposed to consider as "bad" without knowing more closely their circumstances. The analysis thus far has not shown the relation- ship of the dream to the infantile root. But the connection is there. It reminds me of one of the most unpleasant experiences of my childhood. I was a small boy and was standing in front of the library, which a brother's pride and mine had built up (the brother was six years older). Suddenly the thought came to me: "If your brother should die now, this library would be wholly yours!" I ran away shocked. I thought I was a terrible sinner, and the recollection of this occurrence has often caused my cheeks to flush with shame. (SuderTnawi relates a similar experience in his novel, Die Ge- schwister.) I believe that I also struggled at the time with the temptation of stealing some of the books and selling them to the second hand dealer, a thing I often did with my own books. The pretty political dream thus has also a deeper meaning-motivation. My mother is wealthy. But I am the only heir. My brother does not enter into 126 Sex and Dreams the situation. The boy's selfish wish has still re- tained the power of influencing the plastic pictures of the dream (library). Three weeks later in Abbazia I had a dream which was a continuation of the former. A proof that the dream thoughts play variants on the same theme. (30) I am in Neuwaldegg. One of the last houses is a wonderful villa belonging to my mother. I as- cend a marble stairway and come into a gigantic reception room exquisitely furnished in red and gold. "Oh," I say, "there is comfortable space for every- body here." The history of the preliminary circumstances of the dream is partly known. I rented a residence at Abbazia where we were in fact rather cramped for space. I also secured for mother a room which seemed to me not well enough furnished. In the dream I am again in Vienna. One cannot be more comfortable than traveling to Neuwaldegg, a suburb of Vienna, instead of traveling to distant Abbazia. My mother is a wealthy lady. In her reception room we are comfortable. Here the continuation of the dream comes to my mind: W. wants to give our servant a krone as a tip, but the latter scornfully disregards the gift. 3 1 Further determination reveals hidden thoughts, a longing for the return to the mother-body, where there is "comfortable room for all" (?). The tip or gratuity, in German, "Trink- geld," literally "drink-money," leads back to wet-nurse mem- ories. Interpretation 127 On the previous day I had lost a crown playing the game of Tarok with W. That very night even our servant refuses that sum as a gratuity. The dream speaks volumes. . . . This dream, like the other, lends itself, of course, to a deeper analysis. But I must forego the task. As it is, I have already disclosed about myself much of what most persons prefer to keep hidden. The Dream about the Confectioner: (31) I am on the street. A big no, a middle- sized, rather diminutive man, with a black mustache pointing downwards, hold me by the hand and does not want to let go. He wants to squeeze me. I say: let me off, or I'll call the policeman standing there, near my children. But he still squeezes me. I shout loudly: police, police. The officer does not hear my outcry. The man squeezes me harder. I struggle this way and that and I shake the hand so hard that the man's squeezing does not hurt me. Meanwhile I shout again: Police, police! The officer sees us and comes running in our direction. The man is arrested (f). Suddenly we f.nd ourselves in the Liliengasse (street). I and my two children in the room, and in the kitchen the dark man who now wears a big black beard. A small hallway between us. The man's name is PeUmann and his remark- able memory has made an impression in the Court. I cannot shut the doors. While he is outside I try to lock up. But he comes into my room from be- 128 Sex and Dreams hind. I say to him, laughingly: "Of course, I can't do anything with so good a gymnast." He looks like Socrates the "Sturmgesette." A strange, nonsensical dream. Let us penetrate into the gist of the dream thought and take apart the warp and woof of its structure. The dream is linked to two occurrences of the previous day. R. told me that he has looked up the Egyptian dream book because he has found therein many re- semblances to Pellmann's system of memory culture; at a restaurant I saw an illustration of Sudermann's ff Sokrates der Sturmgeselle"; also a satirical pic- ture: Sudermann takes up the warfare against critics. So much for the recent inciters. Now we begin the analysis. / am on the street. This brings to my mind the Landesgerichtsstrasse and the spot where the ac- tion takes place in the little park in front of the Czernin palace, where the Czernin gallery is situ- ated. The road leads from my house directly past there and to the Secession Building (an art gallery). In the Czernin gallery I learned to appreciate the art of painting. I recall particularly an incident with Professor E. We were standing in front of the painting of Paulus Puter, no, it should be Potter. My companion exclaimed: this picture has Luft, Luft, Luft, atmosphere! (literally, air!). A big no, a middle-sized, rather diminutive man, Associations 129 with a black mustache pointing downwards holds me by the hand and does not want to let go. This) brings to my mind, Mr. Rummel, confectioner in my old home town, whom I have seen only a few times, the last time some fifteen years ago. This fellow Rummel had once written a rather shallow feuilleton under the pseudonym Lemur (a transpo- sition of Rummel) which stirred me to an imitation of Lessing's verse: Wer wird nicht einen Lemur lesen Doch wird ihn jemand loben? Nein. Wir wollen weniger gelesen Und mehr belobet sein. io would not read a Lemur But will any one praise him? No. We would rather be less read And better liked.] What is the meaning of a big, no, a middle-sized, rather diminutive man? Clearly a person who fuses all these qualities, in the present case, I myself. Perhaps I imagine I am a big, no, a middle-sized investigator when in truth I am rather a small one. Now I understand the "confectioner." I put my "sugar wares" before my readers, like Mr. Rummel, feuilletonist and confectioner. In fact I was busy with my book on the evening before the dream. I feared it was not "deep" enough, only "Zucker- 130 Sex and Dreams werk," confectionery tidbits. I decided to cast off these sweets, these "bonbons," as a colleague once called them. And now the next passage: He does not want to let me go. He wants to squeeze me (i.e., keep down the level of my achieve- ments). The watchman who stands by my children is a watchwoman, namely my wife, who takes a keen interest in my work and is not easily satisfied. She must help me get that "Hummel" off my breast. The watchman does not hear my outcry. My wife in my opinion does not pay sufficient attention to my writings. I struggle this way and that way and 1 shake the hand so vigorously that the squeezing does not hurt me. I cover up my superficiality, I get along well that way, earn money ; Professor E. and Professor F. warmly shake my hand. I got along well. I know now something about oil paintings, I won't mistake a print for an oil painting. The man is arrested: That leads to an over- stressing of the dream picture, an overdetermina- tion and the analysis of this point would carry us too far afield. Very interesting is the recall error Puter instead of Potter. In the forgotten dialect of childhood "Puter" means being rid of, that is, free. This first part of the dream, then, portrays the desire to get rid of the petty confectionery tidbits with the aid of the wife and of Professors E. and F. Associations 131 Suddenly we find ourselves in Cz. The dream, like every dream, stretches its roots down into the infantile life. I and my two children in the room and in the kitchen the dark man who now wears a big black beard. I have now reached a step higher; for I seem myself in the dream. I am a Pellmann possessing a wonderful memory. For days I have been thinking over a plan to write on the subject of memory. His remarkable memory has made an impression before the Court. A roundabout self-praise. I think a great deal of my last appearance as expert at Court, where my testimony engaged the closest attention of those present. Now Pellmann is changed into Sudermann who takes up the cudgels against critics. I wish to get rid of my self-criti- cism. I am Socrates who is also "a drawer of water and hewer of wood" ; Socrates criticizes the latter. The criticism openly resented is felt in a round- about way. iSo skillful a gymnast can't be kept down: It brings to my mind the nursery room of K., in the watchtower, connected by a subterranean passage with the gymnasium room, so that the children should not catch cold during inclement weather. I am the gymnast and the dream reassures me that I shall free myself of all unpleasantnesses in life, that I will find my way out of all difficulties. Irrational dreams of greatness about my forthcoming book! 132 Sex and Dreams Infantile, vague sexual reminiscences! Unpleasant experiences of the last few years ! Doubts concern- ing my personal ability! Endless self -adulation ! Disregard of all criticism! All that condensed, fused in a single web! Here we see how richly the dream is determined. Not only two, or three or four strands, any number of them may be fused in the dream. Moreover, how well suited is the choice of Rummel, the feuilletonist, the confectioner! The analysis thus far does not include the most important features. Who holds me down to the affliction of my unconscious? Naturally my wife. I feel myself held down by the marriage tie. The wife and the two children are a stumblingblock against carrying out the polygamic instincts. I wish to be Socrates and at the same time to enjoy the adventurous "storm and stress" life. Another feature is noteworthy. Why does a big dark man play here a role? That brings to my mind a strikingly handsome colleague with whom I have practiced gymnastics. Clearly homosexual lean- ings are breaking through in the dream, leanings against which my wife must protect me, for they may land one in Court ! That is why he steals into my room from behind. In the dream all caution and all watchfulness proves useless. Here the anal complex links itself. That was to be suspected already with the recall of the associa- tion, Luft, Luft, Luftf atmosphere, that is, air! Associations 133 I have reached thus far without doubling on the trail of associations. Now it occurs to me that the pseudonym Lemur is the reverse of Rummel. That suggests a return to the great dark man. And, lo! Presently I am thinking of a little blonde girl, Bertha. My first love! On the very day when the Lemur feuilleton had appeared, I saw her standing in front of the confectioner's shop window, my hero of the day, and I suddenly fell in love with her. One can imagine the excitement of a high school boy who produces lyrics by the ream and who is finally lucky enough to have an unfortunate love affair a love unrequited. That first love truly was an un- happy one. I never spoke to the lady of my heart ! But she once turned around to tell me that she finds my everlasting dogging her steps foolish. . . . Nevertheless I remained faithful to her for years. Indeed, perhaps I have never outgrown that first love. There was a sweet sorrow to my passion. The squeezing did not hurt me in the dream, although she did not let go of my hand. Note the wish ful- fillment. She grabs me and does not let me off. She holds on to me. Now I understand the cryptic hatred which the dream discloses against my wife. I revenge myself on women for the scornful rejection I experienced on the occasion of my unforgettable first love affair. This process is illustrated also in the psychology of the Don Juan type (in addition to the features al- 134 Sex and Dreams ready mentioned). Only in that sense can I under- stand the contrast between my conscious and my unconscious attitude towards my wife. I say to my- self repeatedly: if you were now once more free to choose, you would again choose your wife. That, of course, is the highest compliment that can be paid to a woman. In the unconscious I see myself back) in the Liliengasse without her. There is where I lived when I fell so passionately in love. The watchman is by antithesis (of the imperative: watch out!) the command : sleep on, wife ! That seems to me to be very strongly indicated. For I am (without the wife) at home in Cz. with my two children, with my first love and with my mother. Truly a remarkable loyalty ("astonishing memory"). Pellmann re- minds me of a psychiatrist by that name, who wrote an interesting book and of Pekelmann, a boy- hood friend. He was a diminutive fellow an actor of medium ("middle-sized") quality and an excel- lent genial reciter. (Observe the association series: Stekel ekelhafter Mann Pekelmann Pell- mann.) My friend repeatedly recited a ballad by Meissner called The Jewess, and ending with the re- frain, "Her grave it waits." The dark man is death. When considering sys- tematically the subject of death symbolism I shall take the opportunity of speaking at greater length Interpretation 135 about the "black man." Death wants me. I refer him to my wife who, through association with Socrates, receives the uncomplimentary and unde- served appellation of a Xantippe. Death cannot harm me. I do not fear death and never feared it. I am Socrates, draining with philosophic calm the hemlock cup. Now it strikes me that the great Turner whose picture occurs in the dream was really Richter (Also it brings to my mind a gigantic and powerful school colleague, who is already dead.) The associations Landesgerichtsstrasse, Wachmann, Richter (Court Street, officer, Judge) lead into the criminal realm. The laughter at the end of the dream, too, is to be understood in reverse sense. It is a sad dream with depressing thoughts. Pellmann is the criminal against whom I shut the door to my heart. Now associations overwhelm me. The deepest layers of the dream are ready to break to surface. But we must abandon the analysis at this point. Let us emphasize first the fact that tjie dark man is a composite picture of a number of persons. They are : Rummel, Bertha, Richter, Pellmann, Pekelmann, death, and, finally, my own inferiority. All the per- sons of the dream are divisions of my selfhood and vitalized with my thoughts. The process of conden- sation depends on the capacity of the psyche of identifying itself with various persons. Further 136 Sex and Dreams illustrations of that process will be found in the fol- lowing chapters. Here I only want to point out that this dream, too, has a pronounced bisexual char- acter and is a proof of "psychic hermaphroditism" VI DREAM MASKS, CONT. TRANSPOSITION FROM BELOW, UPWARDS, AND FROM THE FRONT, BACK- WARDS SCORN UNDER THE MASK OF GENTILITY A DREAM WHICH MUST BE INTERPRETED IN REVERSE SENSE THE SECOND SYMBOLIC EQUA- TION THE SYMBOLIZATION OF SCORNFUL LOVE WHY THE CHILD CALLS "PAPA !" A BIOGRAPHIC DREAM Es ist mit dem Menschen wie mit dem Baum. Je mehr er m die Hbhe und Helle mil, um so starker streben seme Wurzeln erdwdrts, abwarts, ins dunkle, Tiefe, ins Base. [Man is like a tree; the more he strives upwards and towards the light, the stronger his roots drag him downwards, earthwards, mto darkness and the abyss, into the pit of evil.] Nietzsche VI The principle of "transposition into the op- posite" is carried out in various ways in the dream. A preferable means for the substitution is the dis- placement from below. Anything referring to the bodily region below the umbilicus, morally abhor- rent, may be transposed to the upper part. Thus, the mouth may represent the vagina. Here we en- counter the first symbolic parallel (Gleichung). These symbolic parallels are a great aid to any one who knows them, at times indispensable in the inter- pretation of dreams. The parallelism reads: Att bodily openings (in the dream) are equal to each other and may substitute one another. Thus, mouth, eyes, ears, nasal opening, anus, vagina, ure- thra and navel * may substitute each other. An example will illustrate this principle of sym- bolic parallelism. A girl dreams: (32) Mama has told me not to allow so much bor- ing m the nose, 1 Nabeln for coire; vid. Anthropophyteia, vol. VII, p. 13. For instance, anus is called the "Cyclopean eye": Ibid., p. 44. Also, Fr. "Cyclope"; the "one-eyed affair" das "ein-iiugige Oetchdft" means homosexuality: Anthropophyteia, vol. II, p. 428. The vagina is also called the "ear between the legs'' da* "Ohr zwischen den Beinen": Anthropophyteia, vol. I, p. 339. 139 140 Sex and Dreams and she wonders at the meaningless "allow." She had the ugly habit of boring her nose, which in most cases is a symbolic displacement from below. Here the introitus of the nose replaces the one below. Let us analyze another dream which shows even more plainly than the former one, this displacement from below. Mr. Theta dreams : (33) I am engaged in conversation with J. L. and I become aware of the fact that I have a flat fleshly growth at the back of my head and I reach my right hand back to it. I don't like its presence there and I reflect how to get rid of it. Now it has the appearance of a smooth soft swell- ing. I press on it with the left hand and at first there appears a little bloody drop and on pressing further a bloody fluid trickles forth and the swelling goes down. I look around for something to soak up the fluid; I \am using for the purpose perhaps a hand* kerchief in my right hand but what I want is a suffi- cent quantity of cotton. Mr. J. L. offers to go down and fetch some for me. There must be some in Dr. Stekel's office. Meanwhile I am busy with the swelling, cleaning it and throwing the soaking cotton into the chamber pot, which stands under the bed, filled with urine. But I have the feeling it wiU shock J. L.'s sense of Transposition 141 propriety when he returns and finds me thus making use of his chamber pot. I also believe now that he is present in the room. Our conversation room, was originally an office and has changed into a living room while I was busy cleansing my wound. THE PLAK or THE ROOM J. L. Bed Myself I Wash basin Room exit This dream represents chiefly a symbolic account of the treatment. The dreamer is conversing with J. L., who afterwards changes into Dr. Stekel. His head is not in order. He carries his neurosis like n boil. I must free him of that boil. I must clean away the filth (matter, blood, urine. I must show him another path, I must direct him (the room was originally a Direktionsgebaude) . Incidentally he wishes an intimate preoccupation with his various Sekreten ("secreta," and "secrets"). Here we en- counter the second symbolic parallelism. All 14*2 Sex and Dreams secreta and excreta are equal to one another. Mu- cous secretion (nasal, cerumen, etc.) blood, ether, urine, bowel excreta, spermatic fluid, milk, sweat and tears are equal. This symbolic parallelism witt be considered more fully later. We shall then take up the particular parallels. We return to our dream. The soaking up of the running matter rouses the suggestion that this rep- resents suckling at the nurse's breast (pus for milk). This dreamer has not yet forgotten his nurse. Nearly aU his dreams are concerned with the nurse (cp. in the chapter on Nurse Dreams the dream No. 249). Here the swelling is also the breast. Thus, toe have a transposition from below upwards and backwards. In this connection we become ac- quainted with a third symbolic parallelism: Breast, thumb, toe, arm, hand, foot, loin, and penis must be considered equal to one another. 2 The patient's mouth is his erogenous zone. He is a "taster" and "mincer," he likes eatables and has a refined palate. Now we proceed further with the analysis. / become aware of a flat fleshly growth at the back of my head and I reach my right hand back to it. Bearing in mind the displacement from below we find this to represent a touch on the posterior parts. 1 Testicles and ears should also be added. With the exception of the penis, all are paired organs. Displacement 143 This sort of contact plays an important role in the man's rude love life. Taking into consideration also the displacement behind (from the front), the swelling is his penis, which he has thus touched only too often. In spite of his 39 years of age he is still masturbating. / don't like its presence there and I reflect hoit) best to get rid of it. This part of the dream reveals the dreamer's "psychic hermaphroditism." He would prefer to have no penis. He would like to be a woman. Castrations phantasies have played an important role in his mental life. . . . The further course of the dream portrays a mas- turbatory act which was always a "milking" to him. He is the wet nurse who is being "milked." This betrays his fellatio phantasy. 3 Puellae publicae have repeatedly carried out fellatio on him. But the wish refers specificially to fellatio by a man (his friend J. L.). A further condensation is proven by the recall of a serious gonorrheal infection. For a long time squeezing the urethra brought forth suppuration and for a time, also blood. He used cotton at the time to avoid spotting the linen; the handkerchief, after masturbating (Selbstbefleckung). J. L.'s offering to go down is the critical point. He must go down (hinuntergehen) and replace the "Watta" (he called his father "Atta") with his *He plays both r61es: nurse and nursling. 144 Sex and Dreams hand and with his mouth. In this treatment I play the role of J. L. and the father. I am his friend and father. The continuation of the dream clearly discloses scatological phantasies. I am preoccu- pied with his filth. He wants to preoccupy himself with mine. The "chamber pot" of J. L. is the latter's wife. (Moltke's cynical expression: woman is a w. c. !). That is why he does not want to be seen in the act. Naturally the well-known infantile constellation of associations are roused at this point. The plan of the room is really that of his nursery. The first traumatic incidents take place in that room. (The preoccupation with the chamber pot and the cotton as sanitary napkin.) Here I discontinue the analysis. I merely wanted to illustrate the problem of displacement. Let us now analyze another example of a dis- placement upwards (from below). (34) I visited relatives. Although it was Sum- mer I wore a winter coat. I expected to find father there. As I stepped in I saw mother in the place. As she was the first one sitting nearest the door 1 greeted her. Then I saw father. I greeted him and kissed his hand. Thought the relatives will imagine J am doing it under compulsion only because I am in their presence. In fact I had to force myself to do it. I am struck with "father's red swollen hand which I find repulsive and unpleasant to kiss. Displacement 145 He enters the parental home (visit to relatives). He hates the father yet must show himself cordial towards him. He should be warm, instead of that he is freezing, that is the meaning of his wearing the winter coat in Summer time (scornful love). The mother is at the door. Transposition. He was first at the (mother's) door. That is why he greets her first and the father afterwards. He com- pels himself to feel affection. The red, swollen hand inspires him with disgust. That feeling of disgust rouses our suspicion. We now find out that he loves his father as much as he hates him. The red swollen hand is the red swollen (erect) penis (dis- placement from below). "Er soil den Penis kusseri" "he is kissing the penis," that is a reference to his suppressed perversion, to carry on fellatio with a man. In fact, this craving is shown in other dreams very plainly and without any masking. Here, as in the previous dream, we find a remark- able displacement. There the intimation was raised that Dr. Stekel may feel ashamed. Here another thought is ascribed to the relatives: "They may think I do this under coercion!" Both processes are displacements. In the first instance the feeling of shame because he has to tell me such things ("all such filth") is transferred upon me. In the latter instance the dreamer's own feeling of untruthfulness and insincerity is ascribed to the relatives. "They may think!" The displacement of the affect 146 Sex and Dreams (Affektverschiebivngen) and the transference of the affect (Affektubertragungen) are processes to which we will have frequently occasion to refer. A patient dreams : (35 ) A palace of the high tower and a park and a lodge of Baron Rosenfeld. In the park I find Rosenfeld, Jr. and speak with him. I fett in love with him. Analysis: The dream is vain worship and ad- miration of Baron Rosenfeld. Buti the Jewish name is enough to awaken our suspicion. The dreamer is sure this is a reference to Baroness Rosenfeld, an old nobility. But further associations prove his assurance false. Palais brings to his mind that the word is expressly pronounced Palaiss, "ein paar Laus" (a pair of lice) ; Park evokes the name of a Jewish horse dealer, Parcheles ("Parch" is a Jewish slurring expression for "Grindkopf," bald pate; "Zinshaus" suggests to his mind Zins, meaning here, Zmsen that is, usury. Auf der hohen Warte (the high watch tower) : the young Rosenfeld, who owns a villa auf der hohen Warte, too, is a "Parch" (bald pate) in his dream. Ich war ganz verliebt in ihm I was wholly smitten on him, expresses the deepest scorn and is intended to cover the feeling: "what a fresh, arrogant, unbearable Jewish boy!" The dream is a dream of revenge against his physician and the latter's son. The phantasies of revenge are due to unrequited love. He is, in fact, in love with Interpretation 147 the son (symbol for the penis, "the little one!"). He does not want to pay any more without com- pensation in the form of physical love. But the dream must also have a meaning in the positive sense. He loves Baron Rosenfeld. This path leads us to another symbolism: the palace, like every dwelling, i the symbol for the body. The park stands for the hairy growth around the gen- itals. The son is the phallic symbol, already well known to us. The hohe Warte, high tower, is therefore a reference to the act of erection. Speak- ing corresponds to the sexual act. And the Zins- haus, the lodge? Before discussing that more minutely we must refer again to the second symbolic parallelism (which we may call S. P. II). This parallelism requires restatement in broader terms, as follows: All secretions and excreta, also blood, urine, pus, water are equal to each other in the dream (and in the unconscious). They are also to be considered equivalent to the soul, air, (breath- flatus), speech, money and poison. Bethe (Die Dorische Knabenliebe, Rheinisches Museum, vol. LXII, 1902; cp. my extensive abstract in the Zentralblatt f. Psychoanalyse, 1910, vol. I. No. 1-2) brings up many examples proving that ac- cording to primitive conceptions man looked upon his various secretions and excreta as containing the soul. The vital power resided for him in the urine, 148 Sex and Dreams excrement, blood, or spermatic fluid. With the lat- ter the soul was introduced into the body. The language of the people also takes cognizance of such a relationship. Blood, for instance, stands for gold. 4 A usurer is a blood-sucker; one bleeds for another when becoming poor for his sake. To pump means to borrow money. A man is said to be "pumped out" (ausgepumpter Mensch), that is, spent, when he is impotent. The Gulden (monetary unit, therefore, money) is called Spiess or Speer also the penis. Similarly "gun" means money and phallus. 5 Every fluid assumes this equation: Milk, oil, pe- troleum, tears, etc. In the seven volumes of An- thropophyteia there are numerous examples of this S. P. II. Indeed, the penis is directly designated as money ( Anthropophyteia, vol. VI., p. 15) or oil is spermatic fluid (ibid., p. 9). Ejaculation means: the penis is vomiting (Anthropophyteia, vol. I., p. 146), or is spitting (ibid., vol. I., p. 74, 142, 143, 144). Elsewhere: the penis weeps (Anthropophy- teia, vol. I., p. 364) Einem Mddchen in die Miitze spucken, spit a girl in the v . . . , (literally bon- net, or cap), for coitus, etc. If we apply S. P. II here, Zins stands for sper- matic fluid. The act of speaking refers to the par- 4 In the fairy story about Little Meta blood drops turn into golden ducats. The analogy with the Ducatenscheisser and with the Golden Ass at once suggest themselves. The bride receives a gift. Symbolic Parallels 149 ticipation of the mouth, as an important erogenous zone, in the love act portrayed by the dream. He dreams of himself in the role of a loving girl. His hatred wakes in him the male energies (Adler). Love makes him a woman. The dream (like all dreams) is bisexual. I want to show here some other forms of trans- position (Umkehrung). First a dream of Mrs. Alpha. The Dream of the Suffocating Child (36) A strange child comes to me. It looks badly and gazes at me with sad eyes. I let it come to the table and give it food. The child devours an unbelievably large amount and seems to be getting satiated. One can see the eating does it good, its face livens up and rounds out and I am pleased over it. Suddenly the child begins to choke and I no- tice that a bite is sticking in its throat. It turns blue in the face, its eyes pop out and to my con- sternation I see the child in greatest danger of suf- focating. The child turns to me for help in its ter- rible distress. I know there is no one nearby on whom I can call. If only Dr. Stekel were here! What shall I do? Any minute the child may stran- gle to death. Determinedly I pry open the child's mouth, in spite of the child's struggles, and I see a great piece of meat sticking in its throat, but so far down that I do not think it possible to reach it with my fingers. There is a cooking spoon on the table; 150 Sex and Dreams I grab that quickly and ram it with courage down the child's throat, so as to at least push down the obstruction. On withdrawing the spoon I find it streaked with blood and I am not a little scared that I hurt the child. But the child regains its natural color, breathes quietly and does not seem in pain. I am glad but, still uneasy over the child's silence, I press it to say something, I want to know whether it is in pain. Then the child calls out twice in succession: Papa! and I wake up from my dream. Analysis: A wonderfully well carried out dis- placement from below. The "strange" child she would feed is her vagina ; 6 "sitting at the table," means lying in bed. The "starving child" at last gets "meat." Further, the phantasy is of a gigan- tic phallus which gets stuck. How nice it must be to be able to help! is a refer- ence to me. I must solve her sexual misery. These transparent phantasies are linked with rem- iniscences about masturbation, in which the "finger" cannot reach the "child" and various objects (cook- ing spoon) substitute the penis. Finally the dream reveals the transference. The child calls for papa! It wants a father, ( father, again in the sense of gen- erating father hast a virilis). But the true father, A common symbolism: the child or "the little one," (male or female) for the genital organ. Further details in the chapter on The Rdle of Relatives in Dreams. Symbolic Parallels 151 too, plays a great role in the neurosis as well as the phantasy of fellatio, in which the child repre- sents the mouth. The patient had quit eating meat for some months past. She has the fear (which naturally corre- sponds to a wish) that "the meat might stick in her throat." The onanistic manipulations ("I shove it in lively I push it in") are often accompanied by such re- actions of nausea. The masturbation is linked with various incest phantasies ("The child cried out 'papa !' twice") during two periods : before the tenth year, and after the onset of puberty. Once she in- jured herself during the act. Now "fear has re- pressed in her the love." (Cp. the dream of the telephone, No. 13.) Masturbation was always vig- orously indulged in and sometimes carried on until orgasm was attained twice ("The child cried out 'papa!' twice"). The "psychic hermaphroditism" is strikingly dis- played. She shows that she could behave energeti- cally, "like a man," if a strange woman entreated love. ("How nice it would be to help others, if I were a physician") She helped so energetically that she hurt the child. She is a "different kind of man" than her physician. She knows at once what the trouble was with the distressed child. She iden- tifies herself with her "papa" who is a well-known and skillful surgeon. 152 Sex and Dreams The displacement may go so far that there are dreams which should be read in a reverse sense. Freud once remarked at a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society that there are dreams which can be seen only in that sense. 7 I record here- with such a dream of Miss Etta, especially as it shows also other important features. (37 ) 1 I found myself in a gigantic, castle-like, theatrical building and dimly witnessed a represen- tation. 2 Then I climbed some gigantic stairway in that building and I perceived Mr. X. as he loomed into view a few times and wondered that he lived here. I greeted him cordially, he answered curtly and coolly and I thought to myself: "I must put an end to that, he doesn't do anything for me anyway." 3 Then I held in my right hand a crumpled up white paper, a white apple in my left hand and I en- tered a room. The folks there wanted to take the apple from, me and I fooled them with the ball- shaped paper. I talked haltingly and hysterically when I told the Rosen woman (an actress) about it and thought: "7 don't really do it well, it should go smoother, I don't put my whole self into the task" And further: "if I can't protect myself T Artemidoros states: "When interpreting the story of a dream one must look it over from beginning to end and again from the end backwards towards the beginning. For it may happen that the beginning clears up the vague and not easily penetrable end, or the reverse may be the case, etc." Reverse Sense 153 against those people, I'll simply strike my brow a blow and wake up." 4 Then I sat on a window sill, next to Dr. Stekel's grown up son and later next to himself. I held the son in tight embrace. "Aha," said Dr. Stekel laughing "again a bit of homosexuality." Then I let go of the young man. 5 And now I was at N's. A red-haired girl sat next to me and I thought she was Rudolph's relative and present lover. Her hair was deranged on one side and I thought he surely had kissed her there. Then she stepped out and I was impatient to be alone with Mrs. N. Her husband sat mutely at the table. I jumped at her, threw my arms around her and hissed between my clenched teeth: "/ am al- ways thinking of him kissing her and I cannot bear it. I won't stand for it! That red-haired scare- crow!" Next I had thrown myself, weeping and ex- hausted, on a divan. Rudolf was there, also the red-haired girl; Rudolf said to me: "/ love you stitt, though not as formerly." Horrified I jumped up so that he should not see my tears. 6 Next clad in white I walked through a garden feeling bitterly cold. Karl went a little ways along and I tried unostentatiously to snuggle up to him; that warmed me up at once but, I thought to my- self, it was not nice, and mother was also angry about it; so I walked on aU alone and my teeth clat- tered with the cold. 154 Sex and Dreams The dream gives an account of her life history and begins with a phantasy regarding the future; we must read it backwards in order to understand it. In her childhood she had a little erotic adven- ture with a young boy (Karl). She was twelve years of age and suffered terribly of chills ; a typical symptom of anxiety neurosis, and particularly of sexual expectancy. A boy lodger, who lived in their house, fourteen years of age, came for a number of weeks to her bed, kissed her (without doing anything more to her) until the mother caught him at it and ordered him out of the house. The episode about the white dress (innocence) and the freezing, refers to that experience. Six years previously she was en- gaged to a young man, a musician (Rudolph), who after a few weeks confessed to her that he did not know what to do, he was unhappy, he did not love her as formerly. She looked upon the red-haired girl who was more to him in the dream than she her- self as the cause of his cooling off. Events similar to those portrayed in the dream had actually oc- curred. The man who sits silently at the table and cannot help her, is her father who is dead and whom she loved with supreme devotion. She became seri- ously neurotic on account of going through these ex- periences and came to me for treatment. How she fancies the cure in this dream is portrayed in the fourth part of it: she holds in strong embrace my grown-up son (one I do not actually have). The Reverse Sense 155 son is naturally my erect phallus (the patient al- ways has the feeling that something ponderous is about to descend upon her, or that she is about to fill out something big; when she opens her eyes and gazes up to the sky, she regrets that her eyes are too small to take in the whole expanse of the sky). I was able to prove repeatedly her homosexual inclina- tions, among them also a certain inclination to- wards my wife. A form of transference, but little studied thus far, is the transference upon the physi- cian's family, which plays a tremendous role. Even my little dog thus became the object of a transfer- ence as the result of a displacement from the physi- cian to a member of the household. But the fact that in the dream I goad her about her homosexual- ity has a particular significance. I do not act like a man, I am a woman, for I give her no opportunity to clasp tightly my son. Consequently, now, after her recovery, she again thinks of marriage ; the third part of the dream refers to that. The crumpled up white paper in her right hand, which, as she after- wards recollects, many persons are trying to grab, is the marriage certificate. She does not yield to any one the white apple which she holds in her left hand later she thought the apple might have been red until the paper has been first accepted, i. e., she can be possessed only by way of the altar. She is not satisfied with herself, she has found as yet no suit- able substitute for her lost lover: sie legt sich nlcht 156 Sex and Dreams ordentlich Iwnein she does not put her whole self into it. 8 Naturally we find here also (Anspiel- wngen) references to masturbation, the latter bear ing a certain definite relationship to hysteria. The last statement in this portion of the dream reveals tragic thoughts ("if I can't protect myself against these people I'll simply strike my brow a blow and wake up"). She is firmly determined, should she give in to her overpowering cravings, i. e., in an extra- legal manner, without marriage certificate, promptly to shoot herself the next day. She will simply press the revolver against her forehead and never wake up again or, rather, wake up in heaven; i. e., then only will her real life begin, while the revolver phantasy represents also a phantasy of playing with the penis, the phantasy which introduces the fourth part of her dream. For she has become acquainted with new moral standards ; a friendly actress thought one could not become an opera singer with her antiquated views. She is a singer and expects to join the opera stage within a year. Finally she climbs up a certain height from which she is able to disregard some of the moral handicaps. She sees X., the agent, loom- She is a man. That is why she can "put herself in." Only in that sense does my accusing her of homosexuality become intelligible. She shows me in this dream wie sie sick "hinein~ legen" vriirde, if she were a man. The agent X., that brutal, cynical man, would count for a bashful fellow in contrast with her. (Psychic hermcvphroditism) . In the end she triumphs. She is above (Adler), Interpretation 157 ing up, a man who anyway does not seem to her energetic enough ; although she greets him cordially he acknowledges the greeting curtly and seems not to care for her. Her waking dream thoughts are preoccupied with an unmotivated fear of this man's raw conduct, a behavior on account of which he is distrusted by all actresses. Here in this dream he behaves with unusual decency. That much she has already accomplished with her exercises in climbing the gigantic stairway. And finally she accom- plishes her end, she is an actress, and has a dim vision of the unfettered life of an actress. Part I contains also a remarkable experience dat- ing back to her earliest years. The first activities of childhood take place mostly in a "Hoftheater" (Court Theater). The memory of it is unclear and contains a dim prophecy of the future: she is now an actress at the Court theater. . . . VII DREAM MASKS DISPLACEMENT AND FUSION THE BEAVE SERVANT CRIMINAL ( ASOCIAL ) INSTINCTS Wie im Auge ein Punkt ist, der nicht sieht, so ist in jeder Seele ein dunkler Punkt, der den Keim des innern Verderbens enthalt. [As the eye has its blind spot, so in the depths of every one's soul there is a dark spot which is the center of all inner corruption.} Feuchtersleben VII Displacement and fusion are among the means re- vealed by Freud as part of the process of dream distortion. Some dreams represent a murderer. The analysis discloses that the dreamer harbors thoughts of murder and revenge and that he is en- deavoring to repress these unpleasant tendencies. The dream ascribes these evil impulses to some other person. We note further that in the dream a per- son is the composite of a number of persons. This process is called "fusion" by Freud. We are introducing now a very instructive illus- tration. It is a so-called "first" dream ; that is, the first dream which a neurotic patient brought up when submitting to analysis. These first dreams are very important. Usually they have some bear- ing on the relations between the patient and the analyst and as a rule they portray the whole pic- ture of the neurosis. Mr. Theta's dream is as follows : (38) I placed on watch within my room, at the left of the door, a policeman who I knew had a re- volver. At the left, beyond his observation post, there was a box but that was not enough to cover 161 162 Sex and Dreams Mm from exposure to the outside. I had placed him there for protection against any one breaking in. I reflected: it would be unpleasant for me to be the first to get in there. I must send some one ahead. Then I thought: I could take along a serv- ant or some acquaintance if need be, otherwise I should have to go in. It occurred to me that he who would break in first might be shot by the watch- man. But the thought flashed through my mind only for a second. A second dream comes to the subject's mind in a supplementary way: (39) There was a great fire. I went to the wall. The wall was so low, I jumped on top of it. This dream portrays various emotions. First the fear of some one breaking in, obviously a dream spe- cifically "feminine." Secondly, the fear of the po- liceman. Thirdly, the dread of being the first "to get in" and fourthly, concern over what will happen to the servant. We allow the subject to give his associations to "policeman." In his childhood an officer stood for the personality requiring highest respect. When- ever he misbehaved he was threatened with "police- man." He still has an unpleasant feeling whenever he meets an officer, whether policeman or gen- darme, as if he were guilty of some wrong doing. But he also feels himself innocent. He has done nothing wrong. Fusion 163 This occurrence, this dread of officials and repre- sentatives of law, is fairly common among neurotics. It betrays an uneasy conscience to some extent. That is also the case with our subject. The high "policeman" here is the father whom he fears: er konnte ihm auf seine Streiche kommen, he might catch him at his pranks. All "watchful" persons may appear in the dream as "policemen." The hus- band (in the case of a woman) or the wife (in the case of a man), the strict governess, the tutor, the overseer, etc. At this point the subject is led by his association to the person claiming his highest esteem: the father. Formerly his father had watched him very rigorously. An episode dating back to his third year strangely comes to his mind. He was lying in his father's bed when he suddenly came in touch with the membrum in a high state of erection. He seized it to play with it. But his father woke up and called severely to him: "what are you doing?" These are also the words with which a policeman accosted him once when he started to pluck some roses surreptitiously in a garden. But, to return to his further associations. He was strongly under the influence of a certain woman, a friend of his father's whom they called "aunt." This "aunt" watched over him very carefully and saw to it that he always kept his hands in sight. She, too, called out to him: "what are you doing?" one morning when she caught him masturbating. 164 Sex and Dreams "Policeman" also reminds him that he was par- ticularly fond of an uncle, too, named Franz. The latter was a physician and died of syphilis. It oc- curs to him further that there was another Franz, a man who shot himself, and finally, a third Franz, his own brother. We thus note that the policeman in the dream is a composite figure consisting of a number of real per- sons fused together. Thus far we find that the fig- ure consists of: "policeman,'* as representative of the law, the father, the aunt, the brother and two uncles, of whom one was a physician. It is always safe to surmise that the first dream has some bear- ing on the subject's relation to the analyst. The policeman also stands for me. But this theme we shall take up later. The policeman seems to bear strongest resemblance to the brother. We are informed about the recent dream inciters. They are rather significant. While here he lives with his brother. He has been here two days. A sister of his brother's wife, a very pretty girl, a student at the Conservatory, also rooms there. She is preparing herself for the stage. She is rather a flirt. Now he discloses some of his phantasies. He expects to remain in Vienna several weeks. It occurred to him: "you could start something with the sister-in-law's sister!" But another thought made this unpleasant: "suppose your brother catches you at it!" Also: "suppose she is virgo Dream Thought 165 intacta?" That would make it most unpleasant for him; hence the dream thought: "I reflected, it would be unpleasant for me to be the first one to get in." He is extremely mistrusting. He is suspicious (in his unconscious) of all his relatives. He no- tices that his brother is very cordial towards his sister-in-law. Can it be that the latter maintains an affair with her? The sister-in-law is represented by the "box" in the dream. Box, trunk, chest, drawer, cabinet, furniture (old furniture,), table, also room, are often symbols for woman (German, Fraitenzimmer!). The box is at the brother's left. That designation has a certain meaning as we shall see later. It indicates the forbidden character of the relationship. The expression "not enough to cover him from exposure to the outside" refers to that fact; it means that he has been able to see through. There is no cover possible for that affair. The above expression, in the original, "durch den er aber nach aussen gegen Sicht nicht gedeckt war" includes the terms Sicht (sight) and DecJcung (cover), each carrying a double meaning. A draft at sight must be honored, i. e., covered at once. 1 Draft, German, Wechsel, literally, a change; his brother has drawn a Wechsel, i. e., carried out, or made a change from the wife to the sister-in-law. He, too, wants to love her, like his brother. 1 Cover, Decken, bedecken begatten, impregnating. 166 Sex and Dreams The brother is frequently a symbol for the penis. Particularly the younger brother. This is true here. Now we understand why he sets up aufsteUt the policeman twice and what that individual stands for. It is a scornful representation, a dis- placement. He turns the aggression into an act of protection. That is a common occurrence in dreams. The dreamer protects himself against in- truders and robbers with canes, umbrellas, or re- volvers, all symbols for the membrum. That is the manner in which homosexual acts are repre- sented. This dream is bisexual and so are all dreams, a fact which has been pointed out by Alfred Adler 2 in particular. It discloses sexual intentions with reference to the brother and the first intimation of a leaning towards me, or transference. The female in the dream seeks male ideals. The male symbolizes his heterosexual objective as "room** and as "box." In the dream he must send some one into the room : a servant. 3 This servant, again, is his penis. All the various designations for servant, Diener, Knecht, Dienstbote, Dienstmann, DienstmadcJien, or Stubenr madchen are symbols for the genitalia. In his Tagebuch (Diary) Goethe refers to his membrum virile as follows: * Vid. : Der psyctiische Hermaphroditismus im Leben und in der Neurose. Fortschritte der Medizin, 1910, No. 16. 'Servant for peniS, vid.: Anthropophyteia, vol. I, p. 41. Bisexuality 167 Und wie wir oft sodann im Raub genossen Nach Buhlenart des Ehftands heilige Rechte y Von reifer Saat umwogt, vom Rohr umschlossen, An manchem Unort, wo ich mich erfrechte, Wir waren augenbliclclich, unverdrossen Und wiederholt bedient vom braven Knechtel Verftuchter Knecht, wie unerwecklich liegst du! Und deinen Herrn urns schonste Gliick betriigst du. Symbolism can hardly express itself more plainly. Thus our Dienstmann, our servant, is also the penis. It is a clever dream distortion to ascribe the sin to some one else and to represent one's self as exposed to the danger. "Or some acquaintance, if need be," refers to the charming girl. He has no other op- portunity for coitus and hopes auch hier nicht un- gelegen zu Jcommen. The fear that the brother may be displeased is expressed in the phrase: "The first intruder Eindringling (to be taken literally) might be shot by the watchman!" A light fear of infection also enters into his reflections. One of the first persons that occurred to him associatively was the uncle who died of syphilis. The heat of passion is indicated by the notion of a great fire: "there was a great fire." He is burn- ing within. He hopes that the girl is in the same state. The difficulties are not great, there is lesser 168 Sex and Dreams resistance when the woman is also burning with de- sire. He jumps on top t of the low wall . . . 4 The dream-forming unconscious and conscious thoughts lead us thus far. But the dream permits a deeper insight into this subject's conflicts. Why the fear of the operation of law? Has he committed no crime? At this point various episodes from his life come to surface under a display of some resistance. On his account a girl once became pregnant and on his advice had a midwife bring on an abortion. He was worried to distraction over the result of the operation and very impatient. He wanted to go and make personal inquiries but was afraid of serious legal complications. Therefore he sent a messenger who did not know him while he stood trembling on a street corner waiting for the answer. That affair left him for a time somewhat nervous and with a certain dread of legal complications. But the affair is linked to various other episodes. He had once a liaison with a married woman (box on the left side) who, pressed by her husband, made a confession. On that occasion he feared that the jealous husband would shoot him. After that the husband watched his wife at every step. He also communicated with that woman through a messen- ger. She, too, sent a messenger to him to ex- 4 The walls also symbolize the protective defenses raised by the phobia against the criminal tendencies. Our dreamer is decidedly criminal in his trends. Dream Thought 169 plain away and cancel the effect of a letter which she had written bim at the command of her husband at the moment when she made her confession. Another episode about an abortion enters into the dream thoughts. Indeed, his fear of policemen and gendarmes was not unfounded. The affect was derived from events long since past. It arose from a guilty conscience. Now we know who the policeman is. The subject feels he must watch out for himself. It is an in- stance of so-called "split personality" ; we shall have opportunity to refer to a number of similar cases. He must look out sharply and guard himself. He must protect himself against his lower instincts, against his secret cravings. Indeed, he has another reason for watching him- self most carefully and for holding himself under control. During the last few years he has had to fight down within himself strong murder impulses against his chief (he is a post office clerk) because he has been twice denied promotion. His chief has a large bald pate. For some time he has been un- able to meet a bald pate without reflecting how con- venient it would be to knock it with a club. His father, too, has a large bald pate. Here is revealed his deepest conflict. His father and he once went after the same woman and his father, a vigorous widower with a better social position, came out the 170 Sex and Dreams victor. That is a conflict already set in during the infantile life of the neurotic. He was not at all willing to tell me these matters. I am the police officer to whom he wants to transmit a strange message, i. e., he proposes not to tell me the most important things. Thus we see that the dream employs the most extraordinary processes of fusion in order to bring about distortion at the be- hest of the censorship. The policeman is the father, the brother, the physician, his penis, he himself. The Dienstmann his penis, the true Dienstmann, he himself, and finally the Dienstmadchen, servant girl, bisdem er als der erste eingedrungen and who had to have an abortion in consequence. The po- liceman is also the aunt and his sister-in-law so that the dream leads to an ambisexual interpretation. The supplementary dream discloses also a homo- sexual phantasy. Every "wall" or smooth parti- tion has the meaning of man. (There is no door.) In short this dream discloses the whole extent of the subject's neurosis. The analysis acquires a new depth when we recall that "watchman" in the dream means death. That is true also of soldier, gendarme, knight, or officer. They stand for death which watches over us, never leaving us out of sight, as it were. The box symbolizes the grave and the coffin. He does not want to be the first to die off: "it would be unpleasant for me to be the first ..." He wants Interpretation 171 to send in some one else first, . e., send some one to his death. The wall is the cemetery wall. The great fire symbolizes life: the self-consuming flame. He accepts the stumbling block and jumps on the wall: he struggles with thoughts of suicide. He wants to shoot himself. That, indeed, is the most deepest and the most significant meaning of the dream. VIII THE SPLITTING OF PERSONALITY IN THE DREAM THE DREAM OF A JUDGE: VILuLA AND PRISON THE MUSEUM DREAM. Dass wir uns im Traume selbst sehen, kommt daher, dass wir uns oft im Spiegel sehen, ohne daran zu denkeTi, dass es em Spiegel ist. Es ist aber im Traume die VorsteUung lebhafter und das Bewusst- sein und Denken geringer. [That we see ourselves in the dream is not unlike seeing ourselves in the mirror without reflecting that it is a mirror. But in the dream the image is more while consciousness and thought are subdued.] Lichtenberg vm Splitting of the personality in the dream is a spe- cial form of displacement. The dreamer splits up into his good and his evil self. Literally writers have always made use of this device. 1 Freud, very properly, observes: "It is an experience to which I know no excep- tion, that every dream represents the dreamer him- self. Dreams are absolutely egoistic. When some other person than myself appears in the dream 1 must assume decidedly that my personality figures through identification with that person. I am rounding out my personality. At other times, when myself appears in the dream, the situation therein shows that some other person is hidden back of and identified with me. The dream warns me to trans- pose from that person to myself something belong- ing to that person, to look in the dream interpreta- tion for some masked common peculiarity. I am to ascribe to myself by means of this identification certain features hidden from plain view by the op- 1 Cp. in this connection my work, Poetry and Neurosis, trans- lated by James S. Van Teslaar. Among such pairs we have Mephisto and Faust, Zanga and Rustan, Franz and Karl Moor, Skule and Hakon, etc. 175 176 Sex and Dreams eration of the censorship. It is therefore possible for myself to appear variously in the dream, first directly, and again through identification with vari- ous other persons. Several identifications of this type permit the fusion of an unusually rich amount of data." 2 We now turn our attention to a dream portray- ing displacements; it is at the same time a fitting illustration of the splitting of the personality in the dream: A judge has the following dream: (40) I had a villa next to a prison and presently it appeared that a room of that villa became a sort of veranda which led to the roof of that prison m- stitution. Next I knew that an inmate had escaped from there and there was some talk about it. It seemed to be an uncomfortable situation, the escaped prisoner might break in on us. In fact, as I sat alone in the room looking out through the veranda I saw on the roof a miserable looking, thin emaciat- ed, pale-faced prisoner; his eyes were sunk, he was shaved, and I had at once the impression, dieser Strafling wird sich da hinausschwingen this pris* 'That is virtually an infantile reaction. At the question: "who did that?" the child always points to "another" person. The dream likewise shifts all evil thoughts unto some one else and attempts in that manner to purge the sense of guilt from consciousness. Similar mental processes are observed among the primitive and simple minded people. "The devil did it!" "It is the work of the evil spirit!" But even persons of higher cultural levels cannot resist always the temptation to project outwardly their inner sense of guilt. Splitting of Personality 177 oner will break away (literally: swing himself out!). Next I had the impression that the man attacked me unter Umstanden, I seized a knife lying on the table, went into a little room separated by a glass door from the first, locked myself up there and watched through the glass door. Great God! I thought to myself, he may perhaps break through the glass door and I should have to drive him off with the knife. This is a very characteristic dream for a judge. Of course the neurotic's feeling of guilt breaks through this dream with great energy. The dream- er has a number of things on his conscience, nat- urally of a sexual character; his standing fear is that his wife will find out about his erotic adven- tures and that would disturb their marital happi- ness. This would be particularly the case if one of his paramours became pregnant as the result of his adventures. Some of his escapades directly en- danger his social position. He could not express that more clearly in the dream than by conjuring up a prison next to his villa. We see in this dream the splitting of the personality to which I have al- ready referred (Faust, Mephisto, etc.) and the proc- ess is very beautifully illustrated. He is the man sitting comfortably in his villa, but he is also the prison inmate, the inconsiderate light-minded indi- vidual breaking in and disturbing the peace and hap- piness of his home. He would like to prevent the 178 Sex and Dreams intruder from breaking in. This leads to the image of closed door, a picture typically recurring when- ever persons are afraid of temptations ; the dream shows that they can always draw the latch so as not to allow the passions to break through. In such instances the passions are represented as wild beasts, horses or criminals. Moreover this dream carries also another mean- ing. In his office there is a woman, of rosy appear- ance, well-nourished, with red cheeks, with light Basedow-eyes and a rich growth of hair (compare the inversion in the dream: miserable looking, ema- ciated, pale-faced . . . eyes sunk, shaved, Schwin- gen (Hi/nausscTvwlngen) leads to schwangern, and to Umstanden; 3 both terms refer to pregnancy. At the office he is separated from the woman only by a glass door. Their relations at the time are merely platonic, a small partition still divides them but he proposes to attack that prisoner with his knife. Hence the expression in the dream : "Great God! he may perhaps break through the glass door . . . " That the defense really means an attack is indicated by the course of the wish fulfillment of the dream. The splitting of the personality in this dream becomes of particular importance because it enables the dreamer to retain his conscious self clear and free, although he is also the prisoner. The lat- 'The expression "unter Umstanden" refers to pregnancy. Cp. the colloquialism: "In andere Umstande kommen." Splitting of Personality 179 ter with his pale, deep-seated eyes is also the symbol of death. The bisexual character of tl 16 dream is note- worthy. The struggle with the prison inmate is a punishable homosexual deed; considered inversely it is an act of aggression (with his phallus) upon the woman in the office who rouses his passion. I may take this opportunity to point out a remarkable fact: judges, prosecuting officers, and attorneys be- tray very commonly a "criminal complex" in their dreams. Our judge is really a double personality, a fact very clearly expressed in the dream. Such dreams are a common occurrence. A woman dreams : (4-1) I see a great boggy field and Miss M. must cross it. I warn her saying: "One usually sinks down there!" Nevertheless she runs ahead, becomes covered with dirt but laughs over it and calls back to me: "Try it!" I know I should not sink and although it did not seem\ to me quite right, I went) fearlessly ahead. She struggles with temptation and personifies that trend of her inner self through Miss M. She warns herself against the large City "bog," but her un- conscious makes light of the dangers, it urges hei not to mind the dirt and to go ahead. Finally she does so, without injury to herself. She would like to experience and taste a great deal but she is afraid of the consequences. Her case is a very fitting illus- 180 Sex and Dreams tration of the cynical witticism: Morality is the fear that something will happen ! (Simplicissimus.) Following are two beautiful illustrations of the splitting of personality in the dream: (4%) I saf myself as in a vision which disap- peared rapidly. It was in the open. I saw myself much smaller but with the traits of a grown-up person hands and feet nailed on the cross. A cou- ple of men wanted also to drive some nails through my head. I said: "That is too much. It was only a crown of thorns" "In the dream it seemed to me that I was looking on thoughtfully leaning on my arm.'* She sees her- self nailed to the cross. She is still a child, so young, and she must already suffer so much! The neurotic cross in her case is a severe neuralgia in- volving the whole trigeminus and extending across the back.* The two men are her two sexual ideals, von denen sie eine Defloration wiinscht. The nails through the head are a transposition from below and signify congressus. The crown of thorns is the Jungfernkranz, the crown of virginity, and she would not be pained at its loss. The Jungfern- Jcranz was for her but a crown of thorns. The two souls in her breast, the strictly moral and the pas- sionate, are very fittingly expressed in this dream. 4 Or, as she expressed it: bis ins Kreuz (cross). Her severe neuralgia fortifies the phantasy of being nailed to the cross, which is fused with phantasies of defloration as a form of expatiation. Splitting of Personality 181 A great sin weighs upon her shoulders. She loves two men and is passionately yearning for them. 5 These sinful "yearnings" have burdened her with the cross of her neurosis. Here her sadistic masochistic trend comes also into play . . . These trends are expressed even more plainly in the following dream: (4$) I w as i n a museum (Panoptikum) standing before a glass box containing a very beautiful worn' an. She said: "You see such are the low depths to which we drift when we do not control ourselves. Now I must expose my misery and shame to public gaze!" I looked at her and she turned greenish, yellowish^ like a corpse or wax figure. I kept looking and her body was in two (an upper and a lower part) and there was a snake curling within. The snake grew and the split between the two parts (of the body) spread gradually larger. A man was standing near her he was much more horrible look- ing with terrible, great, blue glass eyes, yellow face. He said, that was nothing! When only the passions turn into crimes! I really do not belong to the Panoptikum, but m the torture chamber. I am a criminal, only I have carried out my misdeeds Of course fancies of being overpowered, so common among "virtuous" girls, also play a role. She wants to achieve gratification without guilt and without having to overcome her feeling oT shame. More than that: she wants two men at the same time. An obscene picture roused this phantasy of a congressus