as we shall hear : only the sensational material which they contain always comes from the same source.
It is necessary to conclude, from the material obtained in psychoanalysis, that these dreams repeat impressions from childhood—that is, that they refer to the movement games which have such extraordinary attractions for the child. What
she told me that she was afraid to have one of her roots pulled, though the crown was almost completely gone. She thought that the pulling out of eye teeth was especially painful and dangerous, although some acquaintance had told her that this was much easier when it was a tooth of the lower jaw. It was such a tooth in her case. The same acquaintance also told her that while under an anaesthetic one of her false teeth had been pulled—a statement which increased her fear of the necessary operation. She then asked me whether by eye teeth one was to understand molars or canines, and what was known about them. I then called her attention to the vein of superstitions in all these meanings, without however, emphasising the real significance of some of the popular views. She knew from her own experience, a very old and general popular belief, according to which if a pregnant woman has toothache she will give birth to a boy.
III. This saying interested me in its relation to the typical significance of dreams of dental irritation as a substitute for onanism as maintained by Freud in his Traumdeutung (2nd edition, p. 193), for the teeth and the male genital (Bub-boy) are brought in certain relations even in the popular saying. On the evening of the same day I therefore read the passage in question in the Traumdeutung, and found there among other things the statements which will be quoted in a moment, the influence of which on my dream is as plainly recognisable as the influence of the two above-mentioned experiences. Freud writes concerning dreams of dental irritation that 'in the case of men nothing else than cravings for masturbation from the time of puberty furnishes the motive power for these dreams,' p. 193. Further, 'I am of the opinion that the frequent modifications of the typical dream of dental irritation—that e.g. of another person drawing the tooth from the dreamer's mouth—are made intelligible by means of the same explanation. It may seem problematic, however, how "dental irritation" can arrive at this significance. I here call attention to the transference from below to above (in the dream in question from the lower to the upper jaw), which occurs so frequently, which is at the service of sexual repression, and by means of which all kinds of sensations and intentions occurring in hysteria which ought to be enacted in the genitals can be realised upon less objectionable parts of the body,' p. 194. 'But I must also refer to another connection contained in an idiomatic expression. In our country there is in use an indelicate designation for the act of masturbation, namely: To pull one out, or to pull one down,' p. 195, 2nd edition. This expression had been familiar to me in early youth as a designation for onanism, and from here on it will not be difficult for the experienced dream interpreter to get access to the infantile material which may lie at the basis of this dream. I only wish to add that the facility with which the tooth in the dream came out, and the fact that it became transformed after coming out into an upper incisor, recalls to me an experience of childhood when I myself easily and painlessly pulled out one of my wobbling front teeth. This episode, which I can still to this day distinctly remember with all its details, happened at the same early period in which my first conscious attempts at onanism began—(Concealing Memory).
