Page:Freud - The interpretation of dreams.djvu/266

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
248
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

significance. Children also in the dream often signify the genitals, as men and women are in the habit of fondly referring to their genital organ as their "little one." As a very recent symbol of the male genital may be mentioned the flying machine, utilisation of which is justified by its relation to flying as well as occasionally by its form. To play with a little child or to beat a little one is often the dream's representation of onanism. A number of other symbols, in part not sufficiently verified, are given by Stekel,114 who illustrates them with examples. Right and left, according to him, are to be conceived in the dream in an ethical sense. "The right way always signifies the road to righteousness, the left the one to crime. Thus the left may signify homosexuality, incest, and perversion, while the right signifies marriage, relations with a prostitute, &c. The meaning is always determined by the individual moral view-point of the dreamer" (l.c., p. 466). Relatives in the dream generally play the rôle of genitals (p. 473). Not to be able to catch up with a wagon is interpreted by Stekel as regret not to be able to come up to a difference in age (p. 479). Baggage with which one travels is the burden of sin by which one is oppressed (ibid.). Also numbers, which frequently occur in the dream, are assigned by Stekel a fixed symbolical meaning, but these interpretations seem neither sufficiently verified nor of general validity, although the interpretation in individual cases can generally be recognised as probable. In a recently published book by W. Stekel, Die Sprache des Traumes, which I was unable to utilise, there is a list (p. 72) of the most common sexual symbols, the object of which is to prove that all sexual symbols can be bisexually used. He states: "Is there a symbol which (if in any way permitted by the phantasy) may not be used simultaneously in the masculine and the feminine sense!" To be sure the clause in parentheses takes away much of the absoluteness of this assertion, for this is not at all permitted by the phantasy. I do not, however, think it superfluous to state that in my experience Stekel's general statement has to give way to the recognition of a greater manifoldness. Besides those symbols, which are just as frequent for the male as for the female genitals, there are others which preponderately, or almost exclusively, designate one of the sexes, and there are still others of which only the