male or only the female signification is known. To use long, firm objects and weapons as symbols of the female genitals, or hollow objects (chests, boxes, pouches, &c.), as symbols of the male genitals, is indeed not allowed by the fancy.
It is true that the tendency of the dream and the unconscious fancy to utilise the sexual symbol bisexually betrays an archaic trend, for in childhood a difference in the genitals is unknown, and the same genitals are attributed to both sexes.
These very incomplete suggestions may suffice to stimulate others to make a more careful collection.[1]
I shall now add a few examples of the application of such symbolisms in dreams, which will serve to show how impossible it becomes to interpret a dream without taking into account the symbolism of dreams, and how imperatively it obtrudes itself in many cases.
1. The hat as a symbol of the man (of the male genital):[2] (a fragment from the dream of a young woman who suffered from agoraphobia on account of a fear of temptation).
"I am walking in the street in summer, I wear a straw hat of peculiar shape, the middle piece of which is bent upwards and the side pieces of which hang downwards (the description became here obstructed), and in such a fashion that one is lower than the other. I am cheerful and in a confidential mood, and as I pass a troop of young officers I think to myself: None of you can have any designs upon me."
As she could produce no associations to the hat, I said to her: "The hat is really a male genital, with its raised middle piece and the two downward hanging side pieces." I intentionally refrained from interpreting those details concerning the unequal downward hanging of the two side pieces, although just such individualities in the determinations lead the way to the interpretation. I continued by saying that if she only had a man with such a virile genital she would not have to fear the
- ↑ In spite of all the differences between Scherner's conception of dream symbolism and the one developed here, I must still assert that Scherner68 should be recognised as the true discoverer of symbolism in dreams, and that the experience of psychoanalysis has brought his book into honourable repute after it had been considered fantastic for about fifty years.
- ↑ From "Nachträge zur Traumdeutung," Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse, I., No. 5 and 6, 1911.
