itself against the force of gravity, one of the phenomena of erection,
leads to symbolic representations by _balloons_, _aeroplanes_, and more
recently, _Zeppelins_. The dream has another far more expressive way of
symbolizing erection. It makes the sex organ the essential part of the
whole person and pictures the person himself as _flying_. Do not feel
disturbed because the dreams of flying, often so beautiful, and which we
all have had, must be interpreted as dreams of general sexual
excitement, as erection dreams. P. Federn, among the psychoanalytical
students, has confirmed this interpretation beyond any doubt, and even
Mourly Vold, much praised for his sobriety, who carried on his dream
experiments with artificial positions of the arms and legs, and who was
really opposed to psychoanalysis--perhaps knew nothing about
psychoanalysis--has come to the same conclusion as a result of his
research. It is no objection to this conclusion that women may have the
same dreams of flying. Remember that our dreams act as wish-fulfillments,
and that the wish to be a man is often present in women, consciously or
unconsciously. And the fact that it is possible for a woman to realize
this wish by the same sensation as a man does, will not mislead anyone
acquainted with anatomy. There is a small organ in the genitals of a
woman similar to that of the male, and this small organ, the clitoris,
even in childhood, and in the years before sexual intercourse, plays
the same role as does the large organ of the male.
To the less comprehensible male sex-symbols belong certain _reptiles_
and _fish_, notably the famous symbol of the _snake_. Why _hats_ and
_cloaks_ should have been turned to the same use is certainly difficult
to discover, but their symbolic meaning leaves no room for doubt. And
finally the question may be raised whether possibly the substitution of
some other member as a representation for the male organ may not be
regarded as symbolic. I believe that one is forced to this conclusion by
the context and by the female counterparts.
The female genital is symbolically represented by all those objects
which share its peculiarity of enclosing a space capable of being filled
by something--viz., by _pits_, _caves_, and _hollows_, by _pitchers_ and
_bottles_, by _boxes_ and _trunks_, _jars_, _cases_, _pockets_, etc. The
_ship_, too, belongs in this category. Many symbols represent the womb
of the mother rather than the female genital, as _wardrobes_, _stoves_,
and primarily a _room_. The room-symbolism is related to the
house-symbol, _doors_ and _entrances_ again become symbolic of the
genital opening. But materials, too, are symbols of the woman--_wood_,
_paper_, and objects that are made of these materials, such as _tables_
and _books_. Of animals, at least the _snail_ and _mussel_ are
unmistakably recognizable as symbols for the female; of parts of the
body the _mouth_ takes the place of the genital opening, while
_churches_ and _chapels_ are structural symbolisms. As you see, all of
these symbols are not equally comprehensible.
The breasts must be included in the genitals, and like the larger
hemispheres of the female body are represented by _apples_, _peaches_
and _fruits_ in general. The pubic hair growth of both sexes appears in
the dream as _woods_ and _bushes_. The complicated topography of the
female genitals accounts for the fact that they are often represented as
scenes with _cliffs_, _woods_ and _water_, while the imposing mechanism
of the male sex apparatus leads to the use of all manner of very
complicated _machinery_, difficult to describe.
A noteworthy symbol of the female genital is also the _jewel-casket_;
_jewels_ and _treasure_ are also representatives of the beloved person
in the dream; _sweets_ frequently occur as representatives of sexual
delights. The satisfaction in one's own genital is suggested by all
types of _play_, in which may be included _piano-playing_. Exquisite
symbolic representations of _onanism_ are _sliding_ and _coasting_ as
well as _tearing off a branch_. A particularly remarkable dream symbol
is that of having _one's_ _teeth fall out_, or _having them pulled_.
Certainly its most immediate interpretation is castration as a
punishment for onanism. Special representations for the relations of the
sexes are less numerous in the dream than we might have expected from
the foregoing. Rhythmic activities, such as _dancing_, _riding_ and
_climbing_ may be mentioned, also harrowing experiences, such as _being
run over_. One may include certain _manual activities_, and, of course,
_being threatened with weapons_.
You must not imagine that either the use or the translation of these
symbols is entirely simple. All manner of unexpected things are
continually happening. For example, it seems hardly believable that in
these symbolic representations the sex differences are not always
sharply distinguished. Many symbols represent a genital in general,
regardless of whether male or female, e.g., the _little child_, the
_small son_ or _daughter_. It sometimes occurs that a predominantly male
symbol is used for a female genital, or vice versa. This is not
understood until one has acquired an insight into the development of the
sexual representations of mankind. In many instances this double meaning
of symbols may be only apparent; the most striking of the symbols, such
as _weapons_, _pockets_ and _boxes_ are excluded from this bisexual
usage.
I should now like to give a summary, from the point of view of the
symbols rather than of the thing represented, of the field out of which
the sex symbols are for the most part taken, and then to make a few
remarks about the symbols which have points in common that are not
understood. An obscure symbol of this type is the _hat_, perhaps
headdress on the whole, and is usually employed as a male
representation, though at times as a female. In the same way the _cloak_
represents a man, perhaps not always the genital aspect. You are at
liberty to ask, why? The _cravat_, which is suspended and is not worn by
women, is an unmistakable male symbol. _White laundry_, all _linen_, in
fact, is female. _Dresses_, _uniforms_ are, as we have already seen,
substitutes for nakedness, for body-formation; the _shoe_ or _slipper_
is a female genital. _Tables_ and _wood_ have already been mentioned as
puzzling but undoubtedly female symbols. _Ladders_, _ascents_, _steps_
in relation to their mounting, are certainly symbols of sexual
intercourse. On closer consideration we see that they have the rhythm of
walking as a common characteristic; perhaps, too, the heightening of
excitement and the shortening of the breath, the higher one mounts.
We have already spoken of _natural scenery_ as a representation of the
female genitals. _Mountains_ and _cliffs_ are symbols of the male organ;
the _garden_ a frequent symbol of the female genitals. _Fruit_ does not
stand for the child, but for the breasts. _Wild animals_ signify
sensually aroused persons, or further, base impulses, passions.
_Blossoms_ and _flowers_ represent the female genitals, or more
particularly, virginity. Do not forget that the blossoms are really the
genitals of the plants.
We already know the _room_ as a symbol. The representation may be
extended in that the windows, entrances and exits of the room take on
the meaning of the body openings. Whether the room is _open_ or _closed_
is a part of this symbolism, and the _key_ that opens it is an
unmistakable male symbol.
This is the material of dream symbolism. It is not complete and might be
deepened as well as extended. But I am of the opinion it will seem more
than enough to you, perhaps will make you reluctant. You will ask, "Do I
really live in the midst of sex symbols? Are all the objects that
surround me, all the clothes I put on, all the things that I touch,
always sex symbols, and nothing else?" There really are sufficient
grounds for such questions, and the first is, "Where, in fact, are we to
find the meaning of these dream symbols if the dreamer himself can give
no information concerning them, or at best can give only incomplete
information?"
My answer is: "From many widely different sources, from fairy tales and
myths, jokes and farces, from folklore, that is, the knowledge of the
customs, usages, sayings and songs of peoples, from the poetic and
vulgar language. Everywhere we find the same symbolism and in many of
these instances we understand them without further information. If we
follow up each of these sources separately we shall find so many
parallels to the dream symbolism that we must believe in the correctness
of our interpretations."
The human body, we have said, is, according to Scherner, frequently
symbolized in the dream by the house. Continuing this representation,
the windows, doors and entrances are the entrances into the body
cavities, the facades are smooth or provided with balconies and
projections to which to hold. The same symbolism is to be found in our
daily speech when we greet a good friend as "_old house_" or when we say
of someone, "We'll hit him in the _belfry_," or maintain of another that
he's not quite right in the _upper story_. In anatomy the body openings
are sometimes called the _body-portals_.
The fact that we meet our parents in the dream as imperial or royal
persons is at first surprising. But it has its parallel in the fairy
tale. Doesn't it begin to dawn upon us that the many fairy tales which
begin "Once upon a time there was a _king_ and a _queen_" intend nothing
else than, "Once there was a _father_ and a _mother_?" In our families
we refer to our children as _princes_, the eldest as the _crown-prince_.
The king usually calls himself the _father of the country_. We playfully
designate little children as _worms_, and say, sympathetically, "_poor
little worm_."
Let us return to the symbolism of the house. When we use the projections
of the house to hold ourselves on to in the dream, are we not reminded
of the familiar colloquialism about persons with well-developed breasts:
"She has something to _hold onto_"? The folk express this in still
another way when it says, "there's lots of _wood in front of her
house_"; as though it wished to come to the aid of our interpretation
that wood is a feminine, maternal symbol.
In addition to wood there are others. We might not understand how this
material has come to be a substitute for the maternal, the feminine.
Here our comparison of languages may be helpful. The German word _Holz_
(wood) is said to be from the same stem as the Greek word, nle,
which means stuff, raw material. This is an example of the case, not
entirely unusual, where a general word for material finally is
exclusively used for some special material. There is an island in the
ocean, known by the name of Madeira. The Portuguese gave it this name at
the time of its discovery because it was at that time entirely covered
with forests, for in the language of the Portuguese, Madeira means
_wood_. You will recognize, however, that Madeira, is nothing else than
the slightly changed Latin word _materia_ which again has the general
meaning of _material_ Material is derived from _mater_, mother. The
material out of which something is made, is at the same time its
mother-part. In the symbolic use of wood for woman, mother, this ancient
conception still lives.
Birth is regularly expressed in dreams by some connection with water;
one plunges into the water, or comes out of the water, which means one
gives birth to, or is born. Now let us not forget that this symbol may
refer in two ways to the truths of evolutionary history. Not alone have
all land-mammals, including the ancestors of man, developed out of water
animals--this is the ultimate fact--but every single mammal, every human
being, lived the first part of his existence in the water--namely, lived
in the body of his mother as an embryo in the amniotic fluid and came
out of the water at the time of his birth. I do not wish to maintain
that the dreamer knows this, on the contrary I hold that he does not
have to know. The dreamer very likely knows some things because of the
fact that he was told about them in his childhood, and for that very
reason I maintain that this knowledge has played no part in the
construction of his symbols. He was told in childhood that the stork
brought him--but where did it get him? Out of a lake, out of the
well--again, out of the water. One of my patients to whom such
information had been given, a little count, disappeared for a whole
afternoon. Finally he was discovered lying at the edge of the palace
lake, his little face bent above the water and earnestly peering into it
to see if he could not see the little children at the bottom.
In the myths of the birth of the hero, which O. Rank submitted to
comparative examination,--the oldest is that of King Sargon of Agade,
about 2800 B.C.--exposure in the water and rescue from water play a
predominating role. Rank has recognized that these are representations
of birth, analogous to those customary in dreams. When a person in his
dream rescues another from the water, the latter becomes his mother, or
just plainly mother; in the myth a person who rescues a child out of the
water professes herself as the real mother of the child. In a well-known
joke the intelligent Jewish boy is asked who was the mother of Moses. He
answered without hesitation, the Princess. But no, he is told, she only
took him out of the water. "That's what _she says_," is his reply, and
thereby he shows that he has found the correct interpretation of the
myth.
Leaving on a trip represents death in the dream. Likewise it is the
custom in the nursery when a child asks where someone who has died, and
whom he misses, may be, to say to him that the absent one has taken a
trip. Again I should like to deny the truth of the belief that the dream
symbol originates in this evasion used for the benefit of children. The
poet makes use of the same symbol when he speaks of the Hereafter as
"that undiscovered bourne from which no _traveler_ returns." Even in
everyday speech it is customary to refer to the last journey. Every
person acquainted with ancient rite knows how seriously, for example,
the Egyptians considered the portrayal of a journey to the land of the
dead. There still exist many copies of the "death book" which was given
to the mummy for this journey as a sort of Baedeker. Since the burial
places have been separated from the living quarters, the last journey of
the dead person has become a reality.
In the same manner the genital symbolism is just as little peculiar to
the dream alone. Every one of you has perhaps at some time or other been
so unkind as to call some woman an "_old casket_" without perhaps being
aware that he was using a genital symbol. In the New Testament one may
read "Woman is a weak _vessel_." The Holy Scriptures of the Jews, so
nearly poetic in their style, are filled with sex-symbolic expressions
which have not always been correctly understood, and the true
construction of which, in the _Song of Songs_, for example, has led to
many misunderstandings. In the later Hebraic literature the
representation of woman as a house, the door taking the place of the sex
opening, is very widespread. The man complains, for instance, when he
discovers a lack of virginity, that he has found _the door open_. The
symbol of the table for woman is also known to this literature. The
woman says of her husband, "I set the table for him, _but he upset it_."
Lame children are supposed to result from the fact that the man has
_overturned the table_. I take these examples from a work by L. Levy of
Bruenn, _The Sexual Symbolism of the Bible and the Talmud_.
That ships, too, represent women in dreams is a belief derived from the
etymologists, who maintain "ship" was originally the name of an earthen
vessel and is the same word as _Schaff_ (to create). The Greek myth of
Periander of Corinth and his wife Melissa is proof that the stove or
oven is a woman, and a womb. When, according to Herodotus, the tyrant
entreated the shade of his beloved wife, whom, however, he had murdered
in a fit of jealousy, for some sign of its identity, the deceased
identified herself by the reminder that he, _Periander_, _had thrust his
bread into a cold oven_, as a disguise for an occurrence that could have
been known to no other person. In the _Anthropophyteia_ published by F.
S. Krauss, an indispensable source book for everything that has to do
with the sex life of nations, we read that in a certain German region it
is commonly said of a woman who has just been delivered of a child,
"_Her oven has caved in_." The making of a fire and everything connected
therewith is filled through and through with sex symbolism. The flame is
always the male genital, the fireplace, the hearth, is the womb of the
woman.
If you have often wondered why it is that landscapes are so often used
to represent the female genitals in the dream, then let the mythologist
teach you the role Mother Earth has played in the symbolisms and cults
of ancient times. You may be tempted to say that a room represents a
woman in the dream because of the German colloquialism which uses the
term _Frauenzimmer_ instead of _Frau_, in other words, it substitutes
for the human person the idea of that room that is set aside for her
exclusive use. In like manner we speak of the _Sublime Porte_, and mean
the Sultan and his government; furthermore, the name of the ancient
Egyptian ruler, Pharaoh, means nothing other than "great court room."
(In the ancient Orient the court yards between the double gates of the
town were the gathering places of the people, in the same manner as the
market place was in the classical world.) What I mean is, this
derivation is far too superficial. It seems more probable to me that the
room, as the space surrounding man, came to be the symbol of woman. We
have seen that the house is used in such a representation; from
mythology and poetry we may take the _city_, _fortress_, _palace_,
_citadel_, as further symbols of woman. The question may easily be
decided by the dreams of those persons who do not speak German and do
not understand it. In the last few years my patients have been
predominantly foreign-language speaking, and I think I can recall that
in their dreams as well the room represents woman, even where they had
no analogous usages in their languages. There are still other signs
which show that the symbolization is not limited by the bounds of
language, a fact that even the old dream investigator, Schubert (1862)
maintained. Since none of my dreamers were totally ignorant of German I
must leave this differentiation to those psychoanalysts who can gather
examples in other lands where the people speak but one language.
Among the symbol-representations of the male genital there is scarcely
one that does not recur in jokes or in vulgar or poetical usage,
especially among the old classical poets. Not alone do those symbols
commonly met with in dreams appeal here, but also new ones, e.g., the
working materials of various performances, foremost of which is the
incantation. Furthermore, we approach in the symbolic representation of
the male a very extended and much discussed province, which we shall
avoid for economic reasons. I should like to make a few remarks,
however, about one of the unclassified symbols--the figure 3. Whether or
not this figure derives its holiness from its symbolic meaning may
remain undecided. But it appears certain that many objects which occur
in nature as three-part things derive their use as coats-of-arms and
emblems from such symbolic meaning, e.g., the clover, likewise the
three-part French lily, (fleur-de-lys), and the extraordinary
coats-of-arms of two such widely separated islands as Sicily and the
Isle of Man, where the Triskeles (three partly bended knees, emerging
from a central point) are merely said to be the portrayal in a different
form of the male genitals. Copies of the male member were used in
antiquity as the most powerful charms (_Apotropaea_) against evil
influences, and this is connected with the fact that the lucky amulets
of our own time may one and all be recognized as genital or sex-symbols.
Let us study such a collection, worn in the form of little silver
pendants: the four-leaf clover, a pig, a mushroom, a horse-shoe, a
ladder, a chimney-sweep. The four-leaf clover, it seems, has usurped the
place of the three-leaf clover, which is really more suitable as a
symbol; the pig is an ancient symbol of fertility; the mushroom is an
unquestionable penis symbol--there are mushrooms that derive their
systematic names from their unmistakable similarity to the male member
(Phallus impudicus); the horseshoe recalls the contour of the female
genital opening; and the chimney sweep who carries a ladder belongs in
this company because he carries on that trade with which the
sex-intercourse is vulgarly compared (_cf._ the _Anthropophyteia_). We
have already become acquainted with his ladder as a sex symbol in the
dream; the German usage is helpful here, it shows us how the verb "to
mount"[30] is made use of in an exquisite sexual sense. We use the
expressions "_to run after women_," which literally translated would be
"_to climb after women_," and "_an old climber_."[31] In French, where
"_step_" is "_la marche_" we find that the analogous expression for a
man about town is "_un vieux marcheur_." It is apparently not unknown in
this connection that the sexual intercourse of many of the larger
animals requires a mounting, _a climbing upon_ the female.
The tearing off of a branch as the symbolic representation of onanism is
not alone in keeping with the vulgar representation of the fact of
onanism, but has far-reaching mythological parallels. Especially
noteworthy, however, is the representation of onanism, or rather the
punishment therefor, castration, by the falling out or pulling out of
teeth, because there is a parallel in folk-lore which is probably known
to the fewest dreamers. It does not seem at all questionable to me that
the practice of circumcision common among so many peoples is an
equivalent and a substitute for castration. And now we are informed that
in Australia certain primitive tribes practice circumcision as a rite of
puberty (the ceremony in honor of the boy's coming of age), while
others, living quite near, have substituted for this act the striking
out of a tooth.
I end my exposition with these examples. They are only examples. We know
more about these matters, and you may well imagine how much richer and
how much more interesting such a collection would appear if made, not by
amateurs like ourselves, but by real experts in mythology, anthropology,
philology and folk-lore. We are compelled to draw a few conclusions
which cannot be exhaustive, but which give us much food for thought.
In the first place, we are faced by the fact that the dreamer has at his
disposal a symbolic means of expression of which he is unconscious
while awake, and does not recognize when he sees. That is as remarkable
as if you should make the discovery that your chambermaid understands
Sanskrit, although you know she was born in a Bohemian village and never
learned the language. It is not easy to harmonize this fact with our
psychological views. We can only say that the dreamer's knowledge of
symbolism is unconscious, that it is a part of his unconscious mental
life. We make no progress with this assumption. Until now it was only
necessary to admit of unconscious impulses, those about which one knew
nothing, either for a period of time or at all times. But now we deal
with something more; indeed, with unknown knowledge, with thought
relationships, comparisons between unlike objects which lead to this,
that one constant may be substituted for another. These comparisons are
not made anew each time, but they lie ready, they are complete for all
time. That is to be concluded from the fact of their agreement in
different persons, agreement despite differences in language.
But whence comes the knowledge of these symbol-relationships? The usages
of language cover only a small part of them. The dreamer is for the most
part unacquainted with the numerous parallels from other sources; we
ourselves must first laboriously gather them together.