unceremoniously neglected; the word "No" does not seem to exist for the dream. Antitheses are with peculiar preference reduced to unity or represented as one. The dream also takes the liberty of representing any element whatever by its desired opposite, so that it is at first impossible to tell about any element capable of having an opposite, whether it is to be taken negatively or positively, in the dream thoughts.[1] In one of the last-mentioned dreams, whose introductory portion we have already interpreted ("because my parentage is such"), the dreamer descends over a balustrade and holds a blossoming twig in her hands. Since this picture suggests to her the angel in paintings of the Annunciation (her own name is Mary) carrying a lily stem in his hand, and the white-robed girls marching in the procession on Corpus Christi Day when the streets are decorated with green bows, the blossoming twig in the dream is very certainly an allusion to sexual innocence. But the twig is thickly studded with red blossoms, each one of which resembles a camelia. At the end of her walk, so the dream continues, the blossoms have already fallen considerably apart; then unmistakable allusions to menstruation follow. But this very twig which is carried like a lily and as though by an innocent girl, is also an allusion to Camille, who, as is known, always wore a white camelia, but a red one at the time of her menstruation. The same blossoming twig ("the flower of maidenhood" in the songs about the miller's daughter by Goethe) represents at once sexual innocence and its opposite. The same dream, also, which expresses the dreamer's joy at having succeeded in passing through life unsullied, hints in several places (as at the falling-off of the blossom), at the opposite train of thought—namely, that she had been guilty of various sins against sexual purity (that is in her childhood). In the analysis of
- ↑ From a work of K. Abel, Der Gegensinn der Urworte, 1884 (see my review of it in the Bleuler-Freud Jahrbuch, II., 1910), I learned with surprise a fact which is confirmed by other philologists, that the oldest languages behaved in this regard quite like the dream. They originally had only one word for both extremes in a series of qualities or activities (strong—weak, old—young, far—near, to tie—to separate), and formed separate designations for the two extremes only secondarily through slight modifications of the common primitive word. Abel demonstrated these relationships with rare exceptions in the old Egyptian, and he was able to show distinct remnants of the same development in the Semitic and Indo-Germanic languages.
